Showing posts with label BOOKS.. Show all posts
Showing posts with label BOOKS.. Show all posts

Tuesday, August 04, 2015

Back to Back; Belly to Belly




To one of the charges he makes.…I must with shame plead guilty. He has caught me using the word "literally" where I did not really mean it, a vile journalistic cliché which he cannot reprobate more severely than I now do myself.
       
C.S Lewis



C.S Lewis never won a Hugo award, although he has been retrospectively nominated for two. He was offered a C.B.E. by Sir Winston Churchill but turned it down. His sermon, The Weight of Glory, engages in some fairly rarefied conjecture about the nature of heaven and the afterlife. He speculates that, in heaven, the feeling that the human race has had since the Fall of being alienated from the natural world may be overcome. Perhaps we won’t just admire the beauty of the sunset, but actually be a part of it? 

What is the point of such theorizing? Lewis draws a moving and edifying moral: 

It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship or else a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare.… There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal.… Next to the Blessed Sacrament itself, your neighbour is the holiest object presented to your senses…

J.C Wright’s essay on Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs is clearly influenced by Lewis’s sermon. He asks the vaguely interesting question "Why do the woodland animals help Snow White with her household chores?" and proposes the vaguely interesting answer "Because friendship between humans and animals evokes the innocence of the Garden of Eden." 

In the middle of the essay, he goes off on a tangent:

No doubt by now some readers are puzzled at my repeated use of the words "virgin"and "maiden", and if those readers went to public school instead of getting an education, they are not only puzzled but offended... Much as it appalls the brain dead zombies indoctrinated by public schools, innocence is better than the cynicism or shared guilt or victimology [1] taught by modern thought, and if we place faith in the account Moses told the Children of Israel about Eden, it was lack of innocence that drove the parents of mankind out of paradise. Even more appalling to the zombies, the perfect symbol and image of innocence is virginity…

C.S Lewis once told a child that the secret of good writing was to know exactly what you want to say, and to say exactly that. Don’t say infinite if you mean big or you’ll be stuck for a word when you want to talk about something infinite; don’t say sadism if you mean cruelty or you won’t have a word left when you want to talk about an actual sadist. I think that Lewis would have admitted that there could be such a thing as hyperbole and poetic exaggeration. When a schoolgirl says "My piano teacher is like literally a thousand years old" she knows perfectly well that her piano teacher is not literally a thousand years old. That’s what makes the remark funny. I read in the Guardian that Boris Johnson is popular in London because "London…is solely inhabited by millions of braying, espadrilled berks [2] who communicate exclusively in emojis". Obviously this isn’t literally true, but we get the joke. "People in London communicate exclusively in emojis" is a funny way of saying "Many Londoners spend far too much time on their mobile phones". 

It isn’t literally true that people who went to public-school [3] are brain-dead; a term we'd normally only use to describe someone in an inoperable coma; and it certainly isn’t literally true that they are corpses that have been animated by a voodoo priest. Brain-dead might simply be hyperbole for stupid. The Hugo-nominated Wright thinks that people who went to public school are uneducated, which is hyperbole for poorly educated;  but poorly educated and stupid are not at all the same thing. And in what sense are they poorly educated? Is the complaint that the teaching is rather inadequate — so not very much of what is taught is understood or remembered? Or is the problem that public school children are being taught the wrong things: that they are learning about political and economic geography when they should be learning about fairy tales and flogging (see The Voyage of the Dawn Treader)?

The allegation relevant to the subject at hand is that a public school education coarsens people, or is morally deficient. People who went to public school either literally don't know what a virgin is, or else they don't understand why someone might think that virginity was a Good Thing. But how you get from "they have a loose standard of sexual morality" to "they don’t have brains" and "they are like the walking dead" I have no idea.

In the UK sending a kid to a private school costs about £18k per child per year. The average worker earns £26k per year; the legal minimum wage is around £13k. (And if we obey the Pope, sorry, the magesterium, and only use natural birth control, we are going to have to find school fees for an awful lot of kids.) "People who went to public school instead of getting an education" essentially means poor people, where "poor" is defined as anyone whose parents are taking home less than, say, eighty grand. In other words, about 93% of the population. 

The right wing press depicts foreigners as an impersonal blob. Dark skinned people are always pouring and surging into our white and pleasant land in tides and floods and waves. It seems to me that the Hugo-nominated Wright thinks of the poor as an ever-expanding depersonalized hoard that will eventually overwhelm us; carriers of an infection which will eventually destroy us. 

And while we are at it: innocence. A child who doesn't know where babies come from is innocent in one sense; an adult who knows perfectly well but doesn’t believe in sex before marriage is innocent in a different sense. The innocence which is the opposite of cynicism is different again; and obviously all are different from the person who maintains their innocence in a court of law. It is simply wrong to say that "lack of innocence drove Adam and Eve from Eden". In the story, Satan tricks Eve into disobeying God; and God kicks them out as a punishment for disobeying him. It is true that, before they sinned, Adam and Eve are said to have been, like very small children, indifferent to nudity. But no-one proposes that because Snow White was innocent, she would have been just fine joining the dwarfs in the boys' showers after a hard day down the mine. Just the opposite: that kind of innocence implies exceptional modesty. (The Hugo-nominated Wright rightly mocks the idea in some 60s science fiction that future-humans will be naturists.) Isn’t the theological consensus that if Adam and Eve hadn’t sinned, they would still have had sex, and sex would still have been brilliant, but they would only have wanted as much of it as was necessary for making a sensible number of babies? Which, by an astonishing coincidence, is exactly how the Eldar function in Middle-earth. I digress. 

This kind of thing keeps happening. We are in the middle of a perfectly reasonable point, and suddenly shoot off at right angles into a massively bizarre piece of hate speech. And the more one pokes and scratches, the harder it is to work out what the Hugo-nominated Wright is actually trying to say. 

Two more examples will be more than enough. 

The Glory Game is a novel by the Hugo-nominated Keith Laumer about a military hero manfully avoiding being morally compromised by the political realities of war. (The writing style is "masculine, muscular, brief" apparently.) Hugo-nominated J.C Wright thinks that it illustrates Plato’s question about whether it is better to be good (even though everyone thinks you are wicked) or to be thought of as good (even though you are wicked in reality). Which I daresay it does. It is not to be confused with Hunter Davies’ book about Spurs football club. 

In the middle of the essay, we go off in the following random direction: 

In one glaringly anachronistic scene, a newsman actually asks him for the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, and reports it. That scene would be laugh out loud funny if someone tried to write it about newsmen of this day and age. Can you imagine a newsman actually being interested in the truth? It is like a whore being interested in chaste romance.

What? Where did that remark come from? 

There has been some bad stuff in England over the last few years about journalists spying on members of the public to get salacious stories. And lots of us are worried about billionaire newspaper owners encouraging their staff to spin stories to fit in with their own political beliefs. On the other hand, we’ve had campaigning journalists uncovering details of MPs dodgy financial dealings, the (ahem) Daily Mail doggedly pursuing the Steven Lawrence case; not to mention hundreds and hundreds of jobbing local reporters diligently reporting what the Mayor said about allotments on the Gloucester road and what the Magistrate said to the guy who exposed himself to a lady on the Downs. Some journalists are honest and some journalists are dishonest. The idea that anyone would find the idea of an honest journalist funny is laughable. 

And there are lots of stories about prostitutes who want chaste romance. Les Miserables for one. La Traviata for another. It's so common that "tart with a heart" is a byword for a literary cliche. No-one finds the idea particularly funny. Because, get this: a prostitute is not an alien life form with different kinds of feelings from everybody else. A prostitute is someone’s daughter and someone's sister and very probably someone's mother, a human being for whom Christ died, who at a particular point in her life (and very probably not at another) has decided to let men have sex with her in return for money. [4]


The Hugo-nominated writer doesn’t think a great deal of The Left — or indeed Marxists, Liberals, Post-Modernists and Feminists. He uses the terms pretty interchangeably. It’s all equally a lot of P.C nonsense, along with climate change and quantum physics. At one point he blurts out:

The demand made by these subhuman genetically defective control freaks is that you, the reader, stop liking the books and stories you like… and start liking the books and stories which these genetically defective control freaks demand you should like, in the name of the glorious cause of whatever the glorious cause is this week.

The control freak bit I get. He thinks that The Left are not really interested in the causes they espouse: the idea that they actually care is like the idea of a prostitute with human feelings, simply funny. According to him, The Left uses the idea of racial equality and women’s rights and environmentalism as a pretext to tell other people what to do. In a certain light, you can see what he has in mind. 

The subhuman part takes more work. I get that he doesn’t think that you can stop people from being racist by preventing them from saying the N-word and that you can't make men and women equal by making people say paramedic and firefighter instead of ambulanceman and fireman. I get that he thinks that the idea that you can amounts to a superstition. I even get, up to a point, that he thinks that those of us who prefer to use inclusive language have been bamboozled by commies. But how on earth do you get from gravely mistaken to subhuman?

Our mutual friend C.S. Lewis more or less defined humanity as "having a concept of right and wrong". His extended essay the Abolition of Man is a reductio ad absurdium against a school text book which apparently taught that all values whatsoever were subjective and should be debunked. Lewis imagines what would happen if that way of thinking won the day. He pictures a distant future in which mankind has evolved into a race of super-intelligent relativists: a species who believe that morality is purely a construct, and who are capable of constructing new moral values and instilling them into the next generation. He says that if that ever occurred, it would amount to the end of the humanity — the abolition of man. 

I think that this is what Wright has in mind. But where Lewis envisaged a master generation at some remote point in the future, Wright thinks that any liberal — anyone who believes in any kind of cultural relativism; anyone who is skeptical about any aspect of traditional morality; almost anyone whose opinions differ from J.C Wright and the Pope — has already stopped being human. Liberals, like prostitutes, are by definition an alien Other.

Asimov, who was a Liberal, had no understanding of what morality was or what it was for, so it never appears in his stories...

Which sounds very like nonsense.

But even if we accept that liberals and post-modernists have no concept of morality whatsoever, how do we get from sub-human to genetically defective? The Hugo-nominated Wright hasn’t argued for this. I don’t know what kind of genetic defect he envisages which might cause someone to think it’s okay for two guys to fall in love with each other or think that we ought to avoid words which demean people or believe that slightly higher taxes and fewer guns in private hands would be a good idea. But if liberal beliefs are the result of genetic defect, then I can only suppose that the Hugo-nominated Wright thinks that liberalism is part of one's essential nature; hard-coded into one's DNA. But isn't "I’m not a free moral agent, my genes made me do it" precisely the sort of thing that he would denounce as victimology if it were being taught to poor people in a public school?

Lewis’s theological speculations lead him to a renewed love of his fellow-man. Wright’s arguments lead him to a renewed hatred of…practically everybody. The political left are sub-human; prostitutes can never fall in love; news reporters can never tell the truth. It is true that Lewis thought that some human beings might, apart from the grace of God, become nightmarish creatures; and that certain bad philosophical ideas might, if extended out to infinity and beyond, cause the human race to lose its humanity. But for Wright, this has already happened. 

There is a parable in the New Testament about a farmer who found that he had planted wheat and thorns in the same field. There was nothing for it but to let the wheat and the thorns grow up together — but come harvest, the thorns could be separated from the wheat and burned. But thorns are thorns and wheat is wheat and a thorn can't become a wheat however much it wants to or tries. Some of the crop is predestined to be burned come harvest time. If the Hugo-nominated Wright didn’t proclaim his Catholicism on every page, I would suspect him of being a hyper-Calvinist.

continues....




1: Logos means word  or reason and -logy usually means the study of: sociology, the study of society; anthropology, the study of human beings; psychology, the study of the mind. For all I know, American state schools may teach victimology, the study of victims, which might be a very interesting subject. (How do courts in different jurisdictions treat victims of crime? How do victims deal with and recover from their experiences?) But I think that when he says that modern education teaches victimology the Hugo-nominated Wright means the modern education teaches children to be, or to think of themselves as, victims (rather than taking personal responsibility for their lives.) I wouldn’t be bothered by this sort of thing if the Hugo-nominated Wright wasn’t so pedantic about neologisms which aren’t to his personal taste.

2: Berk was originally cockney rhyming slang: Berkshire Hunt = cunt. But the word has acquired a much weaker and less obscene connotation — fool and specifically upper class fool. Language is like that sometimes. 

3: Public School in American English is equivalent to State School in British English — a free school paid for by taxation. It probably has connotations like the British Comprehensive School — "the most ordinary or generic kind of education". (c.f Tony Blair’s bog standard comp.). A Public School in British English is equivalent to a Private School in American English. Did I mention that language is sometimes like that? 

4: In the essay After Priggery, What? the aforementioned C.S. Lewis riffs on the idea that the social status of a dishonest journalist ought to be lower than that of a prostitute.("He gives his customers a baser pleasure; he infects them with more dangerous diseases.") I rather suspect that the Hugo-nominated Wright has this passage at the back of his mind, but hasn’t quire remembered what Lewis’s point was.





Sunday, August 02, 2015

What does Sean Connery eat when he goes on holiday to Cornwall?

On page 279 of the Hugo-nominated collection of essays Transhuman and Subhuman, John C. Wright writes the following:

Now, it must also be clear that men have free will, and can train themselves either to fulfill their nature or oppose their nature. Merely because we have a natural inclination toward something tells us nothing about whether we ought to do or avoid that impulse. I have an impulse to be kind to children with big eyes, which I think I should indulge, and I have an impulse to stab my rivals through the eye and into the brain pan with my sword cane, which is an impulse I think I should suppress, not the least because my blade is dull and I am past the age when one can face the gallows with dignity. 

As a matter of fact I agree with Hugo-nominee J.C Wright’s point. You can’t get from an “is” to an “ought”. You can’t make gut-feeling the arbiter of morality. You should sometimes suppress your urge to be kind to cute children, say, because this particular cute child is a Skrull agrent; or because giving that one more chocolate will make him sick and rot his teeth. 

But what a bizarre way this Hugo-nominated writer has of expressing himself! Why talk of stabbing someone with a sword-cane, when you are a citizen of the United States and could legally obtain a hand-gun if you wanted to? And why talk about “facing the gallows” when your home state carries out executions (by gas and lethal injection, not hanging) only about once a decade, and then only for the most grotesque and heinous multiple murders? Why not write “I have an impulse to shoot my rivals, which is an impulse I think I should suppress, because I’m a rotten shot and I shouldn’t think I would cope very well with jail?”

And anyway....is it really true that the main reasons for not murdering people are that you you don’t have an appropriate weapon and that you are afraid of the punishment? Isn’t the main reason that you think that a higher authority than your own gut-feelings — God or the Tao or natural law — says that murder is wrong? And doesn’t that same morality tell you that you should not only be kind to cute children, but ugly ones as well?

At the end of an essay about Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, the Hugo-nominated Wright muses that it is possible to imagine angels telling stories or writing poems, but not to imagine them telling fairy tales. Fairy tales speak to our sense that, since the Fall, we humans don’t quite belong in the natural world, so angels wouldn’t have any reason to make them up. This is a perfectly decent point. It’s a perfectly decent point derived from Tolkien’s Essay on Fairy Stories and C.S. Lewis's Weight of Glory, but none the worse for that. Good writers borrow; great writer’s steal, as the fellow said.

The Hugo-nominated essay concludes: 

Why should they daydream, and not do? No youth sighs over his beloved's picture when she is in the bridal bower and demurely shedding her veil.

In the bridal what? Demurely shedding her what? Why this sudden lapse into archaism? Wouldn’t “No young man drools over his girlfriend’s photo when she is already undressing in front of him” have made the point better? I should have been inclined to write “No-one surfs for porn while they’re having sex with an actual human being” but I probably go too far in my preference for plain speaking. 

Having said that, this Hugo-nominated author writes very well. Many of the essays in this volume are worth reading, even if they don’t exactly push the boat out in terms of radical or challenging subject matter. Why do science fiction stories so often imagine future wars being conducted with swords? Because swords evoke an older, more chivalrous, version of war. Who were the great writers of the Golden Age? Heinlein, Asimov and (unjustly neglected) Van Vogt. Is it better to be regarded as good, or to actually be good regardless of what anyone thinks of you? Better to be good. What characterized classic science fiction? Competent men solving problems by gumption, ingenuity and intelligence. What is the secret of great writing? Show, don't tell; tell the truth; fulfill your promises to your readers. Was Arthur C. Clarke's critique of religion a bit naive? Yes. Was the Desolation of Smaug very good? Er... No. His pen has a habit of running away with itself, but he has the knack of summing up a train of thought in a forceful paragraph.

Here he is on the fact that science fiction readers — as opposed to mundanes, or, as he amusingly calls them, muggles —  positively like to be confused or baffled by a setting. In return, the science fiction writer — like the traditional detective story writer — has an obligation to play fair. He has to understand how his world works, and he has to give the reader reasonable clues so he stands a chance of working it out for himself. But:

This willingness to be lost tends not to work across genre boundaries. The reason why a collective groan of disbelief rose up to heaven from the massed fans of Star Wars was because of one line in one scene from the Phantom Menace, when the Jedi say Jedi powers are based, not on a mystical energy field binding the galaxy together, but due to microscopic bodies in the bloodstream. The groan was because the genre boundary had been crossed. 

I couldn't have put it better myself, and indeed didn’t. Unless…maybe that crossing back and forth between genre was part of the point of Star Wars to begin with? Maybe a mystical energy field which is also a side effect of telepathic micro-organisms is very much the same thing as an old-fashioned sword which is also a high tech piece of hardware? But let's not press that point. He's dead right that making Obi-Wan "a crazy old wizard" is a different proposition from making him "a student of mind science" even if the super-powers are the same either way.

He thinks that science fiction is more about mythology than prediction, and defines mythology thus:

A mythology is an explanation by means of concrete images of the abstractions and passions of the age; myth speaks in a vocabulary of anthropomorphoized figures.


Very well put: that’s just what mythology is, and it would be worth running the definition past the kinds of people who think that the Bible (for example) is either the LITERAL HISTORICAL TRUTH or else a PACK OF LIES. In fact, he's rather good —  if a little verbose and shrill —  on the whole idea of science and religion being necessarily at odds: 

With apologies to my fundamentalist brethren in Christ, all that happened is that one small group in schism with the Roman Catholic Church, militant fundamentalist Christians who reject the authority of the Magisterium to interpret and teach scripture, has decided on a literal interpretation of Genesis, and insist on a six-day timeline of creation that does not fit geological, astronomical, or biological evidence......


Meanwhile, another small group in schism with the Roman Catholic Church, militant fundamentalist atheists who reject the authority of science to say what is and what is not science, has decided on a mystical, Shavian, Hegelian or Marxist misinterpretation of Darwin’s Origin of Species....


These two groups, neither of whom represents mainstream Christianity or mainstream scientific thinking, have decided that there is a war going on between science and Christianity....


I mean, it's a bit of a stretch to see fundamentalists as schismatic Catholics and a big stretch to see Dawkins' lot that way, but the idea that "religion vs science" is not a clash of two mighty ideologies by a quarrel between too tiny sub-groups is really very well played. 

And he’s pretty good even when he’s being deliberately contentious. He is very annoyed with Hell is the Absence of God, a satirical short story by three-times Hugo award winner Ted Chiang, because (he thinks) it sets up a straw-man version of Christianity instead of engaging with what Christians actually believe. The Hugo-nominated Wright claims to have been an atheist when he first read the book, and says that even then his reaction was “doesn’t Ted Chiang know any Christians?”

The major charge of honest atheists is that the claims of the Christian religion are false…. When asked politely if they can see the Wizard, the atheists are told that no one can see the Wizard, not nobody not no how. Small wonder the atheists are skeptical. You do not undercut this fairytale by saying that The Wizard is an evil bunny-killing tyrant and that the Wicked Witch of the West is merely a soulful and misunderstood victim of circumstance. 


This is a good analogy. I shall probably steal it at some point. It's the flip side Ford Prefect's "isn't it enough that the garden is beautiful without believing that there are fairies are the bottom of it?" Can't you say that you don't believe in fairies without lying about what the fairy tale is about? 

But in the same essay, the pen of Hugo-nominated J.C Wright demonstrates its tendency to run out of control: 

The major objection honest atheists must level is that religion is false; that even if true, it has no claim on our loyalty; that the reason of man, being reason, cannot be bound by dogma; and that the claims, true or false, are repellent to the dignity of free and rational beings. 


Well, no. Those are not arguments that an honest atheist must put forward. These are four different arguments that four different kinds of people might possibly have for rejecting religion. 

1: Religion is false

2: Religion has no claim on our loyalty

3: Humans can’t be bound by dogma

4: The claims of religion are repellent

I think what the Hugo-nominated writer is trying to get at here is that you might plain and simple not believe in God. On the other hand, you might be far from sure that God does not exist, but very sure indeed that there is no need to worship him even if he does. Or again, you might be agnostic about God's existence but still have a problem with the absolute claims of some churches. You might even say that religion is so horrible that you don't care whether or not it is true. It obviously isn't the case that an honest atheist must say that the claims of religion are repellent. Lots of honest atheists say "It's a lovely story. I can see why you want it to be true. But I don't believe it is." Perhaps the Hugo-nominated Wright means to say "an honest atheist must level one or more of the following claims against religion"? But that doesn't work either —  only the first claim is strictly atheistic, and there are many more than four reasons for rejecting religion.

The sentence is a muddle because one word, religion, is being pressed into service to mean

a: Theism, the belief in God

b: Religion, the practice and worship of a particular God

c: Catholicism, a particular version of a particular religion.

And a single word, atheism, is being treated as "the opposite of religion" so it covers “people who don’t think there is a God”; “people who don’t practice any religion” and “people who aren’t Catholics.” It doesn't help that dogma has a technical theological meaning and a popular, colloquial one and that it isn't clear in which sense it is being used.

The Hugo-nominated Wright likes to present himself as a bit of a donnish pedant, worrying about the proper meanings of words and distinguishing between Aritstotle's four different ways of answering a "why?" question. But he actually writes quite carelessly, particularly when he's affecting to be annoyed about something. And he has a habit of saying the same things over and over in different words. (He is also addicted to reiterating statements using various synonyms.)

*

There is a certain kind of modern art where the idea is more important than the object. It is quite funny to know that a Frenchman once put a toilet in an art gallery and labeled it “Fountain”; it’s not so necessary to go and see the actual loo in question.

Similarly, the idea of a book is sometimes more important than the book itself. It is quite funny to know that someone once translated Winnie the Pooh into Latin, or photographed every public lavatory in London, but once you know that they have done so, you do not necessarily need to read the books.

The Hugo-nominated Transhuman and Subhuman is best thought of as a conceptual book. All the talk about sword-canes and hangings and bridal bowers is a bit of literary cos-play. The book is an homage: a pastiche. It has a point  — an obnoxious point, but still a point — but it makes that point by existing, not by arguing any particularly compelling case. People who agree with the point will own a copy; and quite possibly vote for it in the 2015 Hugo Awards. But they will not necessarily read it; at any rate, not right to the end. (The last two extended essays defeated me, and I'm the sort of person who is good at struggling through difficult books.) 

This is a Hugo-nominated essay collection that is trying, very hard, to sound as if it comes from 1920s England, not 2015 California. The rhetoric, and many of the actual arguments, sound like something out of C.S. Lewis. It keeps lapsing into flowery archaic language, and sometimes pretends not to understand modern vocabulary. It doesn’t reference any philosopher more recent than Aristotle. Its science fiction reference-points are books that I was reading at school: A Princess of Mars, The Foundation Trilogy, Childhood’s End, the Lensman series, classic Star Trek, the original Star Wars. Not insignificantly, the author appears to deliberately dress like G.K. Chesterton.

The medium is the message. You don’t need to read any modern science fiction to know that it's all awful. You don’t need to read modern philosophy to know that it’s all codswallop. The Golden Age is past: schools no longer educate children; journalists no longer tell the truth; and science fiction has turned away from the one true way of John W. Campbell. 

So the thing to do is to huddle together writing very old fashioned essays on very old fashioned books in very old fashioned language, and wait for an intellectual savior in an old fashioned hat, and old fashioned frock coat, armed with an old fashioned sword cane to stab the dragons of modernity through the eye (and into the brain pan) on our behalf. 

.....continues


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Tuesday, July 07, 2015

Please Sir, Can I Have A Hugo Award?

What religion is the pope?

Put another way, what metaphysical creed does the pontiff subscribe to? What are the theological underpinnings of Jorge Mario Bergoglio's world view; what organized collection of beliefs and cultural systems does the Bishop of Rome use in order to relate humanity to a higher order of existence? What symbol-set does the Holy Father use to explain the origins and meaning of life?

Hold onto your hats, because I am about to say something that may shock you. 

The Pope is a Catholic. 

But obviously, you can't say that sort of thing nowadays. "The Pope is a Catholic." The self-appointed guardians of morality; the people who elected themselves to safeguard our ethical well-being — who like the President, want to repeal the Second Amendment and make marijuana compulsory — won't let you. The Pope is a Catholic. The Pope is a Catholic. When was the last time you heard someone come right out and say it? 

But when the message falls on your ears even for the very first time; if thou art truly a being of humanity and not a professor of humanities, thou wilt discern the truth in thy most very heart of hearts; like the joyous relief  thou feelest when thou divesteth thyself of thine diaphanous undergarments to facilitate thine all-too-human need to defecate: the Pope is Catholic. The Pope is Catholic. Oh! Oh! Oh! Oh mine dearest reader, how couldst it ever have been otherwise?

And what of caniform mammals of the genus ursidae? What do they do when they experience that all-too-human (or as I must eftsoons say, an all-too-ursoid) need to relieve themselves? Do they demurely turn the lock to "engaged" in a small "water closet" cubical; or trudge down the garden path to a neat, earthy outhouse; do they perchance call for the necessary women and squat coyly over a ceramic chamber-pot; have they mayhap been trained to use a strategically positioned tray replete with what shall here be referred to only as kitty-litter; or does weather permitting a human companion walk a step or two behind them gathering their stool with a pooper-scooper and placing it in a bin, thoughtfully provided by the post-modernistic anarchist socialist liberal marxist municipal authority (that fully supports the murder of countless thousands of helpless babies every week.)

No; nay; never; it shall not, nay, it will, and if I might be permitted to say so against the riding tide of relativism which denies the whole concept of truth, it cannot be so.

For most truly is it it said that bears shit in the woods. 





Saturday, October 11, 2014

The point of those articles was that someone said that they like a certain thing even though they thought it was terrible and I thought "I wonder what they mean by that."

Friday, October 10, 2014

Goldilocks Was a Hipster

work in progres

No Hipsters. Don't be coming in hear with your hairy faces, your vegan diets, your tiny hands and your sawdust bedding. No, wait. Hamsters. No Hamsters.

7

Wil Self wrote a piece in the Spectator entitled "Why I Hate Hipsters." I hope they commission another piece called simply "Why I Hate". And then one from a hipster entitled "Why I Hate Wil Self." 

I got as far as the bit where he complained about people who play loud music in coffee shops and got lost. I think he is mainly cross about the existence of cappuccino. He uses the words "frothy coffee" and "dickhead" interchangeably. A Daily Telegraph sub-editor asserted that hipsters were now the world's most derided sub-group; which must come as quite a relief for all the pedophiles. 

Some people hate hipsters. They hate them even more than they hate immigrants. One of the things that makes them really really cross is that they drink orange juice out of jam jars, which is to say, one of the coffee shops on Stokes Croft has jam jar shaped glasses. I find that sort of thing quite fun, but I can't imagine getting cross about it. I suppose it's a class thing. When people say that they hate hipsters with their beards and their Oxfam clothes and their orange juice what they mean is that they don't like the way in which all the boarded up shops have been taken over by coffee shops and bakeries and forced the crack dealers and whores out of business.

It's gentrification, innit? According to Wikipedia, I myself am 60% Hipster.

I think that one of the things which make "Hipsters" so derided is their affected sense of ironic detachment. The hipster goes to the Cube and the Arnolfini but only in order to strike a superior pose and complain that they've gone awfully mainstream recently; the hipster gets a ticket for the first night of a new play but doesn't appreciate it because he was so busy appreciating how clever and sophisticated he was for appreciating it. When I get accused of being a hipster (a thing which has hardly ever happened) it's never because I re-read Judge Dredd comic books or have Superman radio episodes on my IPod. It's always because I once heard a concert by a Senegali guitarist.

Oooo you hipster! You only went cos you wanted to feel clever!

The hat possibly doesn't help.

8

I don't think that the person who says that he knows the books he likes are terrible or says that her preferred genre is "trash" has a low opinion of the things which they love. I think that they are simply signaling that they want to suspend criticism. They would rather you stopped thinking, please. They don't want to have, for the seventeenth time, the debate about whether one of the character's was a bit racist and whether there were enough female characters. (He was and there weren't but shut up about it already.) He thinks that if he lies on his back with his tale between his legs, no-one will start a fight with him.

And I was kind of expecting (and so were you) this lecture to end up with me saying "Silly people! Asking me to switch my brain off!  Telling me that I can only see Guardians of the Galaxy is I leave my critical faculties at the door! Saying that some things are immune from criticism! If I can write a long Freudian Essay about King Lear I can damn well write a long Freudian essay about Superman Brought To You By The Makers Of Kellogs Pep (the Super-delicious breakfast cereal.)

But instead I am going to wonder out loud: why does anyone think that this kind of thing is worth saying in the first place?

Isn't it because the hipsters and the critics and the fan fiction writers and the subversives and the social justice vigilantes and the people who should really have grown out of this nonsense years ago are always trying to erect a veil between you and the thing you are watching or reading. Who want to prevent you from, in Lewis's sense, ever receiving any work of art ever again. Who want your primary experience of Guardians of the Galaxy to be that it didn't have any major female characters in it. (Groot knows, the lack of major females characters in Guardians of the Galaxy was as obvious as the fact that Geoff Tracey was a puppet.)

I think that "I like this, but it's rubbish" is trying to safeguard a few tiny drops of actual, primary, artistic experience. In a moment, I'm going to use the word authenticity and everyone will be forced to leave the room.

I think "I like this even though it is terrible" means "don't look at the strings".

I think "I like this even though it is terrible" means "I want to watch this, not through a veil of hipster pretension, but actually itself"

I think "I like this even though it is terrible" means "I like this uncomplicatedly despite the fact that we live in age of irony"

I think "I like this even though it is terrible" means "I like this."

I think "I like this even though it is terrible" means "This is good."

I like Clone Wars even though it is terrible; I like Superman on the wireless even though it is terrible; I like 60s Marvel even though it is terrible. 

But truthfully; truthfully truthfully truthfully, I think that Doctor Who and Star Wars and Macbeth and the Ring Cycle are terrible too.

Thursday, October 09, 2014

Goldilocks Was a Hipster

work in progress


6

I have a friend who makes a point of reading stories against the grain. If it's a comic book about a hero who catches thieves just like flies then he decides that the thieves are all heroic Jesse James types and the hero is a fascist oppressor. (OK: the idea that bankers and vigilantes are baddies may not be that much of a stretch.) If it's a story about heroic warriors fighting bug eyed monsters in space he recasts the bug-eyed monsters as oppressed colonial victims. I assume he thinks that Doctor Who is a racist: the Daleks are just misunderstood. Or possibly Doctor Who is just impossible to misread; which probably means it's not worth reading in the first place. 

I can see how this game might keep an intelligent brain occupied while it's owner was watching movies about Cowboys and Indians and Cops and Robbers. (Perhaps if you are bright and creative enough to rewrite the film in you shouldn't be watching the Lone Ranger in the first place.) I would guess that it renders (for example) Watchmen practically un-watchable. The text already undercuts itself so radically that it's hard to see what is gained by a clever reader willfully subverting it. "Let's read Watchmen as if Rorschache is the good guy." Well, yes, the text positively encourages you do that.  "Let's read it as if he's the bad guy." Yes, the text positively encourages you to do that as well.

On Lewis's terms, this sort of playful approach is the least "literary" imaginable. It is only interested in using the text as raw material for a game; anything that the actual author put onto the actual page is likely to disappear under the weight of subversion. Turning Star Wars (in your head) into a story in which Luke Skywalker is a religiously inspired terrorist is only one step up from school kids pretending there are dirty bits in Middlemarch. (Which is what they had do before the invention of the internet.) But can it really be that an active reading is worse than a passive one? Couldn't one equally make the case the kids comic annual that says "Look, space ships" and leaves the kid to do the actual imagining is one of the highest and most dynamic forms of literature. (It's also how good pornography works. So I'm told.)

If you are already taking the trouble to imagine that perfectly clean books are dirty ones; or of reading one novel and making up a different one in your head, then why not go the whole way, write your day-dream down on paper, and create completely new stories of your own? I suppose that's how Fanfic got started.

I don't think that a gay teenager, reading Legion of Superheroes and deciding that (I think it was) Bouncing Boy must be gay was consciously engaging in a subversive queer reading. I think that was a natural thing to do when there were no gay characters in comic books. The whole idea of Robin and Bucky was that you got to imagine that you were Captain America's or Batman's Very Special Friend. At one level, fan fiction writers are using popular fiction in the exact way it's always been used; in the exact way it's intended to be used. (Has any one ever read Harry Potter and not pretended that an Owl is about to drop a very important letter through their bedroom window? See also: Power Rings, Jaunting Belts, Light Sabers, Lenses...)

But it seems to be that when fan fiction becomes too much of a thing, the Legion and Harry Potter are basically reduced to a commodity: raw material to be chewed up and spat out and in new form, one where the baddie is the goodie and both of them are having kinky sex with each other. Which is fine. I mean, its fun, and its creative and its interactive and it doesn't do anyone any harm. I think it might be a pretty good working definition of the difference between a fan and a critic. A critic writes an essay about a book. A fan write three more chapters. (And then dresses up as the main character.)

But. There is Doctor Who fan fiction online before the closing credits of this weeks episode have been ruined by the continuity announcer. When Amazing Spider-Man 2 came to an end, I sat in the cinema for eight minutes to see if there was a post-cred. My fan-fic writing friends used those eight minutes to write a short story based on the premise that Aunt May was having an affair with Norman Osborne, and posted it to the internet before I left the cinema. They must literally sit through the actual movie thinking "What if this character were gay? What if I added a sex scene here? Could that background character be reimagined as the protagonist of the movie?" They have their reward. But this critic wonders if they can be said to have ever actually "seen" the movie they are writing about?


there's more

Wednesday, October 08, 2014

Goldilocks Was a Hipster

a work in progress

5

Some people would say that the writer who can write a 15 minute script which ends with the hero getting captured in such a way that millions of children literally can't wait to find out if he escapes or not is just as clever -- maybe cleverer -- than the one who can write 4,000 pages about the minutiae of his childhood in such a way that the broadsheet newspapers salivate over it. But I don't think they really believe it. People also say "You have to be just as good an actor to play Widow Twanky as you do to play Hamlet" but I don't think they really believe it either."

I think that what everyone really believes is that there is a sort of league table of genres with Superman at the bottom, Middlemarch is at the top, and Agatha Christie in the billiard room with the lead piping.

Which means we have been making very heavy weather of a very easy question. "I like this even though it is bad" means "I like this despite its low position in the the hierarchy of genres"

Emotionally, I am pretty sure that this is what I believe. Middlemarch is "better" than Superman. One is about a whole community and a whole nation and asks us to redefine our whole definition of psychology and narrative, where the other sold breakfast cereal to American kids. I definitely feel that Middlemarch is better than "some text that some copy writer wrote on the back of a box of Kellogs Pep" although I also accept that advertising copy writing is a hard job and neither me nor Mary Evans could have done it. 

But I am not sure that I could rationally defend these feelings. What does "better" even mean?  I could just as well argue: 

Superman — Poked fun at the Klu Klux Klan when it was dangerous to do so; encouraged literally millions of kids to practice tolerance and clean living

Middlemarch — Approved of by F.R Leavis

Superman — Millions of kids ran home to school to listen to it 

Middlemarch — Literally no-one would read it if someone hadn't decided that an English Literature GCSE was needed to get certain kinds of job. 

Superman - Figure who literally everyone on earth has heard of; genuine 20th century myth. 

Dorothea Brooke - Who she?

6:

Mr C.S. Lewis proved that what defined a "good" book was that the reader had a "good" literary experience. One of the markers that a "good" literary experience was taking place was that once the reader had finished the book, he might go back and read it for a second or third time. The person consuming a romantic story in Woman's Realm (intending to throw it away once he's finished it) is doing a different kind of thing to the person sitting down to read Barnaby Rudge for the fourth time. 

I have never read Barnaby Rudge. I have no idea why that was the example which occurred to me.

I don't know if would be prepared to argue (except in order to annoy my Mother) that Doctor Who is "better" than Coronation Street in some objective way. I don't think that it necessarily has better actors, better writers, better directors or cleverer plots. I suppose I could say that it's cleverer to create an alien planet that people believe in than to create a Manchester kitchen that people believe in but on the other hand we've spent 50 years apologizing for the sheer unbelievableness of many of Doctor Who's planets. And some of his kitchens.

But there is no question that we Doctor Who fans do go back and watch our favourite episodes over and over again; but the the idea of anyone going back and listening to old episodes of the Archers is obviously silly. I think I am correct in saying that soap fans, if they miss a few installments, don't try to "catch up" by watching the parts that they missed: they simply start watching again from this weeks episode and take it for granted that the characters themselves will bring them up to speed on what has been happening while they've been away. A bit like real life. There are DVD collections of Inspector Morse, Grange Hill, and the Banana Splits but none of EastEnders or Coronation Street.

On Lewis's view, a "good" reading is one which "receives" the book — that looks at what is there, and only what is there, which appreciates what the writer is doing and tries to have the emotional reaction that the writer wanted you to have. A "bad" reading is one that "uses" the book: which takes some descriptions of sails billowing in the wind and jolly rogers being run up flagpoles as a jumping off point for a day dream that has nothing very much to do with what the author wrote. It's the difference between the person who listens to the classical concert in silence (because he wants to hear every single note down to the last triangle) and the person who is glad that the brass band has started playing because it gives him the excuse to sing along terribly loudly. On Lewis's terms, virtually all pop music is bad. The whole point of pop music is that you "use" it: you dance to it; you use it create ambiance for your party. If you go to a live concert you scream down the band. 

Well, yes. But a dance band is there to provide music for people to dance to; and it might do that well or badly. It might take just as much skill to get everyone in the disco bopping as to win a standing ovation from the cognoscenti in the Albert Hall. Lewis is right that sitting and listening carefully is different to singing along; but I am not sure where he gets "listening carefully to music is better than dancing to it" or "music that you listen carefully to is better than music that you dance to" from. Morally? Psychologically? Theologically?



continues....

Tuesday, October 07, 2014

Goldilocks Was a Hipster

a work in progress



3

When someone claims to like bad books or bad movies, they are not using "bad" as a description of quality. They are using it as a label for the kind of book that they like. 

At some point in the past "soap opera" was simply a cuss word meaning "bad drama". "Space opera" was what clever science fiction fans called the stuff that they didn't read. We'd now happily say that Iain M Banks was writing "space opera" without even the slightest implication that he really ought to have been trying harder. "Pulp" used to be a literary slur directed at stuff written quickly and printed on cheap paper: it's now a perfectly neutral way of describing stories about detectives and barbarians and pirates. 

("What a shame we are no longer allowed to go out into the garden and admire all the homosexual flowers and listen to a homosexual tune on the wireless!")

People who like "bad" books might perfectly well draw a distinction between good "bad" books and bad "bad" books. And we could point to any number of bad "good" books. The possibility of bad good "bad" books and good bad "bad" books is left as an exercise for the reader.

Some people think that a long literary novel with a forty page digression about the smell of the protagonist's granny's nightie is basically a pulp novel done badly. "Silly man" they say "He understood so little about pacing that he honestly thought we wanted endless pages about a Russian psychopath wondering the streets thinking about predestination and existentialism when he obviously should have cut straight to the actual murder." (This condition, known as "subtext blindness", is more common than you'd think.) And some people think that a pulp adventure novel is what you are left with when someone tries and fails to write a serious literary psychological doorstep. "Why didn't the writer focus on the effect of shell-shock and PTSD rather than wasting our time with endless descriptions of medieval cavalry charging down orcs with lances?" they ask.

The blessed Germain Greer thought that the Spider-Man movie took a wrong turn when Peter Parker decided to use his powers to fight crime. Surely it should have been about the Kafkesque alienation of an insect person? (She also felt that Master and Commander was too focused on boats.) Paul Merton claimed that Lord of the Rings was the worst book he'd ever read because it didn't contain any laughs; which is a bit like John Cleese telling Malcolm Muggeridge that Chartres cathedral wasn't a very funny building.

Germain Greer didn't really say that the Aubrey-Maturin series was too much about boats. What she said was that setting a story in the Nelsonic navy is a choice: in this case, a choice to tell a story which is mainly about manly men being macho and hardly at all about womanly women being feminine. Only caricature feminists have ever said that Moby Dick, Hornblower and Master and Commander ought never to have been written or that they ought to have had alternate chapters about what the mostly female civilians were doing while the mostly male sailors were out annihilating aquatic mammals and flogging each other, or that they would have been improved by the addition of one of those folk song ladies who dressed up as a boy and went to sea. What feminists actually say is "There are great number of books of the first kind, and very few of the second kind. And only the first kind seem to get turned into movies. Why do you think that is?"

Fanny Price only gets to spend three chapters agonizing about what necklace to wear to a ball because there aren't any French people firing cannon balls at her head. 


4

My go-to example of loving and forgiving something which I believe to be bad is, of course, my MP3 collection of the 1940-51 Superman wireless serials. There are about a thousand 15 minute episodes and I adore every one. (Well, maybe not the alien cook who speaks in rhyme.) I understand that it went out 5 evenings a week, to be listened to by American kids when they got home from school. Episodes are simultaneously breathlessly fast paced and excruciatingly padded. The kids have got to be engaged; but the story has got to be drawn out for as long as possible. Copy boys run to Perry White's office with urgent messages; but it can take a whole episode for anyone to actually get around to reading them. "Message you say, can't you see that I'm too busy to read a fool message?" "Gee, chief, but there might be something important in it, we haven't heard from Lois for three days" "I can't nursemaid every girl reporter on my newspaper! And don't call me chief!" "What about the message?" GET ON WITH IT!

In this kind of format, it's essential that you can tell which character is which the minute they open their mouths. So practically everyone is a stereotype. Henchmen speak in that "de spring is sprung de grass is riz" Brooklyn accent. Policemen begin sentences with "to be sure, to be sure". Cab drivers sound like de black fella. Butler's are English cockneys. Jimmy Olsen says "swell" a lot. On one occassion the villain leaves a white rose at the scene of the crime and Clark Kent questions the florist. Sure enough, he sounds English and effeminate.

This tendency to very broadly drawn characters is part of the show's texture; part of the aesthetic; part of why I adore it. It wouldn't be improved by telling me about the florist's background; or by casting against type and making him a big tough guy with tattoos. But the line between broadly drawn characters; stereotypes; and out-and-out racism can be quite a wiggly one. There's a 1942 episode in which Clark switches two prisoners and remarks. "All Japs look much the same, after all." My attitude to the series might be rather different if most of the wartime episodes were not lost to posterity.  

But then again. In a pulp war story, all the enemy have to pretty uncomplicatedly baddies. That's part of what makes it a pulp war story. If you stop the action to wonder who the Jerry you just shot was, and where he came from; and if he was really evil of heart; or what lies or threats had led him on the long march from his home, and if he would really rather have stayed there in peace, well, you might possibly have a better story, but you'd have a much worse pulp war story. 

So perhaps the person who says "I like this even though it is rubbish" is not talking about aesthetics or genre. Perhaps he is admitting that his pulp books are bad because they are, or sometimes are racist -- or sexist, or morally simplistic. He's not talking about literary quality, but morals. He is much more like someone saying  "I must admit that I enjoy looking at pornography, even though I know I ought not to" than someone saying "I must admit that I like this painting, even though the lady's head is out of proportion and her leg twists round in a direction it couldn't actually go."

continues in this vein for pages

Monday, October 06, 2014

Goldilocks Was a Hipster

A work in progress



dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix, angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night,
1


Do you remember Thunderbirds? 

That is a rhetorical question. Of course you remember Thunderbirds. 

Did you like Thunderbirds?

That is also a rhetorical question. Of course you liked Thunderbirds. 

Did you like Thunderbirds even though you could see the strings? 

Did you like Thunderbirds because you could  see the strings? 

Are you pretty sure that most of the time you couldn't actually see the strings?

Or did you just wish everyone would shut up about the bloody strings?

I mean, it would be perfectly reasonable to regard the strings as an insuperable barrier to enjoying Gerry Anderson. This is an action adventure series where the characters are obviously dolls and where no-one has gone to much trouble to conceal the fact that they are dolls, so remind me, why is anyone watching this thing to start with? 

It would be also be perfectly reasonable to watch it "ironically": to watch it because you can see the strings, because it is funny that you can see the strings, to endlessly replay sequences where the strings are see-able, and to pat yourself on the back for being so much cleverer than those silly people in the 1970s who couldn't have spotted a string if it had leapt out and bit them on the nose. 

And it would be understandable if a Gerry Anderson fan got all defensive and said that actually you can't see the strings most of the time and televisions were much smaller in those days and lots of people were watching in black and white and they were meant for children who just accept this sort of thing for what it is and just shut up about the strings, okay? 

It's a while since I last watched Thunderbirds. If I recall correctly, for the first ten minutes the strings are intrusive, but you rapidly slip into a state of mind where you are perfectly aware that what you are watching are puppets but somehow you bracket off the puppetyness and accept it as an exciting science fictiony James Bondy disaster movie. At which point the one with the aliens in the pyramids is quite claustrophobic and the one on the bridge is quite tense and Lady Penelope is always a hoot. 

Yes: of course they are puppets. Any fool can see that. Why did you think it was even worth mentioning? 

See also: Clone Wars.

2


People sometimes say that they like a particular book or movie or television programme "even though it is terrible". 

Sometimes they sat it in a self deprecating way. "Ha-ha silly me I love trashy horror novels!" 

Sometimes they put it in a defensive way "I love the Twilight series and yes I know it's rubbish." 

And sometimes they are positively aggressive: "What I like BEST is to find some RUBBISH to read and the BIGGER LOAD OF RUBBISH it is the BETTER I'll like it." 

Can you like something and consider it bad? I would have thought that "Works of art I like" and "Works of art I think are good" are pretty much synonymous. Wasn't it Plato who said that no-one considers themselves to be evil, apart from Galactus?

Everyone agrees that Moby Dick is the greatest novel ever written — certainly the greatest long American novel about whale hunting. Everyone also agrees that it is is long, uneven, repetitive, digressive, pretentious and repetitive. But no-one can quite agree what the editor should have done to improve it. The minute you say "Well, he could have ditched the 40 page sermon about Jonah for a start" someone else well say "But that's my favorite chapter."

Moby Dick is seriously flawed. But then, everything is seriously flawed. (I think Theodore Sturgeon said that.) If you are only going to read flawless books, your reading list is going to be quite short.

See also: Cerebus.

Some people do seem to read with their eyes ever vigilante for the chink in the armour that will reveal that this is not the Perfect Book and therefore does not need to be read. "Well, I started reading this book, but on on page 3 the elephant hunter used a rifle that didn't go into production until 1898 even though the book is set in 1897 so naturally I didn't read any further." "On page 54, the writer used a word I didn't know so naturally I tossed the book to one side." I forget who it was who stopped reading Lord of the Rings after Elrond said "This is the doom we must deem".  

F.R. Leavis used this method to reduce his reading list to four English novelists. You have limited time on this earth; and most great novels require several readings, so why waste your time on any book except the great ones? 

C.S.Lewis, on the other hand, felt that the correct approach to a study of sixteenth century English literature (excluding drama) was to read every surviving scrap of literature from the sixteenth century plowing through pages and pages of "drab" writing in order to track down the occasional good bit. I don't suppose Lewis would have said that he liked 16th century literature "even though it's terrible". (He would probably have said that he was a scholar, and "liking" and "not liking" were neither here nor there.)

Jane Austen, George Eliot, Henry James and Joseph Conrad. Of the four dead white males two were female although one of them had a boy's name. When asked if there was anything special he wanted for his fiftieth birthday, Lewis replied "I suppose the head of F.R Leavis on a platter would be rather too expensive?" 

Continues indefinitely....

Wednesday, September 24, 2008

This really isn't complicated.

Spider-Man is a hero who fights baddies. He can carry on having adventures as long as the writers can think up baddies for him to fight. You might think that no-one ever wrote and drew Spider-Man as well as Ditko and Lee did (and frankly, if you don't think that, then I don't want to be your friend any more) but the idea of "Spider-Man stories by people other than Ditko and Lee" isn't intrinsically silly.


Similarly, once one person has had the idea of a sophisticated English assassin who hates Russians and likes martinis, it isn't intrinsically silly for a second person to invent new adventures for him.
It may be intrinsically stupid to suppose that he can continue to exist into the 21st century without getting any older, or suddenly turn into a black man, but that's not the question I'm worrying about at the moment.

And a clever modern detective story writer might conceivably be able to think up decent new mysteries for Sherlock Holmes
to solve, although it isn't quite clear why they would want to. If you've got an idea for a mystery that's worth solving, why not let your own detective solve it?

Going back to comics, were I in a magnanimous mood, I might concede that there have been one or two
episodes of the Fantastic Four since 1970 which haven't been a complete waste of space. Before everyone jumps up and down shouting "John Byrne, John Byrne", I will note that Mr. Byrne's cleverness was in being as close to Mr. Kirby and Mr. Lee as it is physically possible to be, making his comics arguably pastiches and arguably redundant, even if they are quite enjoyable redundant pastiches. But surely it was Jack Kirby's uniquely deranged concepts, embellished by Stan lee's uniquely overdone writing, that made the Fantastic Four the Fantastic Four and once you take away Mr Kirby's stories and pictures and Mr Lee's dialogue, what you are left with is four not particularly interesting adventures.

But things like The New Gods
(I'm looking at YOU Jim Starlin even though my fourteen year old self thought Warlock was profound) and The Eternals (you should be ashamed of yourself, Neil Gaiman, ashamed) derive all of their interest from being "a slice of what it feels like to be Jack Kirby in graphic form". Nothing that has been done with those characters by people other than Jack has had anything to do with the source material, and very little of it has had any merit on its own terms. (I believe that people who know about these things think that Darksied was once well-used as a villain in the Legion of Superheroes.)

But if you wanted to come up with the clearest possible example of a work of fiction whose whole interest comes from the original writer's cock-eyed way of looking at the world; whose whole interest is in being "the universe as seen through the eyes of..." then it would be The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. (If you wanted to come up with the second clearest possible example, it would be The Prisoner.) I am not saying that a story by A.N Other writer in which there happen to be characters called Ford, Arthur and Zaphod would be a travesty, or the equivalent of weeing on Douglas Adams grave or that they would somehow damage the original books.

The original books - and more importantly, the original 3-7 hours of radio footage - exist, and will always exist, as a snapshot of what 1970s earth looked like through the eyes of a particularly clever and silly man.

But still. A non-Adamsian sequel to Hitchhiker is a preposterously stupid idea.


Don't do it, guys. You'll regret it in the morning.

Tuesday, August 07, 2007

Harry Potter and the Qualified Recantation


For as a surfeit of the sweetest things
The deepest loathing to the stomach brings,
Or as the heresies that men do leave
Are hated most of those they did deceive,
So thou, my surfeit and my heresy,
Of all be hated, but the most of me.

When I was eight, Miss Beale, old and grumpy with white curly hair, taught me how to write stories, good and clear, which would earn me house points.

"Good stories," she articulated, slowly and clearly, "Must have lots of unusual, vivid describing words, including adjectives, which come before naming-words, and adverbs, which come after doing-words."

I wrote this down slowly, carefully and neatly on the plain, white pages of my square, red exercise book which was on top of my brown, wooden desk.

"Good stories," she accentuated, "Must be written in complete sentences. They should be made up of proper words. You must never use any slang expressions."

I looked out of the window. The sky was blue, the grass was green. At least a hundred children were playing quickly and happily on the elephant-free playing field.

"If there is direct speech," she opined, "You must use expressions like 'he asked', 'he explained', 'he shouted'."

Twenty years later, when I was a grown-up, tall and stout with brown hair, I read a number of books by people who made their living writing stories.

"Only use adjectives as a last resort", they said, "And don't use any adverbs at all. Use the kind of language that you would use in real life, even if it is not grammatically correct. Don't be afraid to say 'said' over and over again. Don't tell the reader how to feel. Don't say that a monster is 'frightening': describe it in such a way that the reader will think 'Gosh! How frightening.' The best rule that any writer can follow is 'show, don't tell.' "

I think that children like the Harry Potter books because they are written in the style in which bad teachers tell conformist children constitutes "good writing". Eight-year-olds read J.K Rowling and think "I could do that too." And they are very probably right.

*

"Harry led them all back into the kitchen where, laughing and chattering, they settled on chairs, sat themselves upon Aunt Petunia's gleaming work-surfaces or leaned up against her spotless appliances: Ron, long and lanky; Hermione, her bushy hair tied back in a long plait; Fred and George, grinning identically; Bill, badly scarred and long-haired; Mr Weasley, kind-faced, balding, his spectacles a little awry; Mad-Eye, battle worn, one legged, his bright blue magical eye whizzing in its socket; Tonks, whose short hair was her favourite shade of bright pink; Lupin, greyer and more lined; Fleur, slender and beautiful, with her long, silvery blonde hair; Kinglsey, bald, black, broad-shouldered; Hagrid, with his wild hair and beard, standing hunchbacked to avoid hitting his head on the ceiling; and Mundungus Fletcher, small, dirty and hang-dog with his droopy, basset hound's eyes and matted hair. Harry's heart seemed to expand and glow at the sight: he felt incredibly fond of all of them, even Mundungus, whom he had tried to strangle the last time they had met."

This may be the single worst paragraph ever committed to paper by a published author. The first sentence is far too long. It gets caught up in a monotonous and repetitive formula: "This character, with this attribute and this attribute, doing this thing: that character, with that attribute and that attribute, doing that thing." Children's books are often read out loud: you might think that the Best Loved Children's Author of All Time would road test her typing and find out if it is possible to get your tongue around her sentences. (I have been told by people with kids that there is no safe way of pronouncing "Harry-ron-and-hermione.")

Most of us see the world in terms of very specific tags and trade names. We don't see "a glass of bitter ale" but "a pint"; we don't use "the vacuum cleaner", we use "the hoover" or "the dyson". So why say "the appliances" rather than "the fridge" or "work surfaces" rather than "Formica top"?

To this vague language, Rowling applies teacher-pleasing describing-words like "gleaming" and "spotless". Is it physically possible to clean a "work-surface" so much that it gleams? Rowling is trying to tell us – as opposed to show us that far too many people have crowded into a small kitchen, and that they are disregarding Petunia Dursely's fussy cleanliness. A writer would have picked out some details which conveyed this comic situation: "The room smelt of pine and chlorine."; "Harry smiled when Hagrid plonked his big bum on the newly polished dining table." Rowling prefers to use the language of washing-powder adverts.

This tic runs right through the series: Dudley is taken to "burger bars" rather than to "McDonalds"; he has a "computer console" rather than a "Playstation 2". There are a certain number of arse jokes and toilet jokes, but Rowling is very reluctant to use the word arse (or even "bum") and imagines that children say "bath-room" (rather than "loo" or "bog") even when there are no adults present. In the movie, Ron is occasionally allowed to say "bloody", but in the books, the most he ever does is "use swearwords." In the latest volume, one of the adults gets to say "bastard" and "bitch" but the children limit themselves to "Merlin's underpants!" and "Merlin's baggy Y-fronts!" This is presumably an example of the series becoming darker and more adult as it progresses.

The kitchen paragraph re-introduces us to a short-list of eight potential casualties. If you have lovingly committed the first million words of the saga to memory, you already know who Mr. Weasley is. If you haven't, then a list of distinguishing features is not much use to you. I haven't really given Harry Potter much thought since I tossed Harry Potter and the Half-Baked Prince aside in disgust: so I freely admit that I had forgotten who "Fleur" was: it didn't help very much to be told that she was the slender, beautiful one. And for goodness sake – don't tell us that the girl is beautiful: describe her so that we think "How beautiful!" Possibly, Rowling thinks that we seeing the world through Harry's eyes, and it is he who is saying that Fleur is beautiful. But a 17-year-old wouldn't use that word about a girl: he'd be more likely to think that she was cute or fit or hot or horny or pretty or nice-looking.

When you are reunited with old friends, your heart does not "seem to expand and glow". I am not even sure what a glowwy expandy heart would feel like. A writer might have described actual human emotions based on her actual human experience: "Harry felt as if he had just finished some intense physical exercise". She might have shown us what Harry felt by showing us what he is doing: "He started to giggle uncontrollably at the weakest of jokes." Or she might have just told us how he felt in plain language: "Harry was very pleased to see them all again." Rowling simply mouths a boy-band lyric: a set of words which have no actual meaning behind them.

Ursula Le Guin's fantasy world is driven by language: everything has a True Name and a wizard must understand words before he can control the world. Tolkien's world is driven by music: it was sung into existence before time began, and historical events are less important than the songs in which they will be remembered. J.K Rowling's world is driven by hair-cuts. Before he regenerated into Daniel Radcliffe, Harry Potter's main personality trait was his untidy hair. The one thing that we have to know about each member of the Order of the Phoenix is whether they have bushy hair, long-hair, short-hair, long silvery blonde hair, wild hair or matted hair. Disappointingly, Rowling doesn't tell us the colour of their eyes, or how many Charisma Points they've got.

*

"But Andrew, these books are intended for children. It's not fair to judge them by the standards of an adult critic."

Here is a passage of writing from a book that was intended for children:

"I do not know what it rightly is to faint, but I do know that for the next little while the whole world swam away from before me in a whirling mist; Silver and the birds, and the tall Spy-glass hilltop, going round and round and topsy-turvy before my eyes, and all manner of bells ringing and distant voices shouting in my ear.

When I came again to myself the monster had pulled himself together, his crutch under his arm, his hat upon his head. Just before him Tom lay motionless upon the sward; but the murderer minded him not a whit, cleansing his blood-stained knife the while upon a wisp of grass."

Note the clarity of the viewpoint. There is no question that we are listening to a slightly older Jim Hawkins recollecting what happened the first time he saw John Silver kill a man. Notice that he is using the kind of language that a teenage lad might use. Note that the details are drawn from Stevenson's observation of the world, not theatrical conventions or stock phrases. Note the skill with which we are first told what it felt like to Jim; and then given a vivid picture of what Jim saw, based on a telling detail which shows us what kind of a man Silver is. The only adjectives are the ones which convey actual information: "tall hilltop", "motionless body".

Here is a passage from a book that was intended for quite young children:

"The wind had dropped, and the snow, tired of rushing round in circles trying to catch itself up, now fluttered gently down until it found a place on which to rest, and sometimes the place was Pooh's nose and sometimes it wasn't, and in a little while Piglet was wearing a white muffler round his neck and feeling more snowy behind the ears than he had ever felt before."

You may think that A.A Milne didn't really understand children, but he certainly understood words. He has taken the trouble to actually describe the snow-storm, not with clichés, adjectives or stock expressions but with a clever little metaphor that the kids are going to have to think about for a second or two. The whimsical personification of the snow cleverly tells us both what it looks like and what it feels like. Snow flakes do dart around unpredictably; you aren't sure when one of them is going to land on your face.

Finally, here is an excerpt from one of the key texts in the Western Canon. I don't know if it was intended for children, but I first read it when I was in Miss Beale's class:

"And a few minutes later, Peter Parker forgets the taunts of his classmates as he is transported to another worldthe fascinating world of atomic science!

But, as the experiment begins, no-one notices a tiny spider, descending from the ceiling on an almost invisible strand of web a spider whom fate has given a starring, if brief, role to play in the drama we call life!

Accidentally absorbing a fantastic amount of radioactivity, the dying insect, in sudden shock, bites the nearest living thing at the split second before life ebbs from its radioactive body!"

This is not nearly such good writing as Stevenson or Milne: it is functional, journalistic prose, intended (arguably redundantly) to describe the illustrations which accompany it! But it states clearly what is happening, without wasting any words! It is written in the kind of language an ordinary person might use! The slightly breathless, present tense sentences create a sense of urgency! It is somewhat over-written ("life ebbs from its body" rather than "it dies") but there are no stock phrases and few un-necessary adjectives! Like Rowling, Lee makes the mistake of telling us that science is fascinating, rather than showing us that Peter Parker is fascinated by it – but on the other hand, "fascinating" is a word that a science nerd might well use!

Miss Beale undoubtedly thought that reading books was intrinsically merit-worthy and reading comics was intrinsically wicked, so it's worth noting that Lee uses longer words than Rowling: I imagine the text of Spider-Man is of a higher reading age than that of Harry Potter! Comic books were printed on very cheap paper, and this meant that full-stops tended not to come out: so the letterers put exclamation marks at the end of sentences! And yes, I know that spiders aren't insects!

*

"But Andrew children love these books. Shouldn't you be applauding the fact that Rowling is getting children to read, rather than picking holes in her choice of words?"

Up to a point, Lord Voldemort.

Whatever you may have read in the Daily Mail, the yoof of today are not in any danger of becoming illiterate. They read text messages and My Space and blogs and e-mails. What they do not necessarily do is read many novels.

Does this matter? Miss Beale would probably have said that it was a Good Thing to read Good Books because they improve your grammar and expand your vocabulary – which is, being interpreted, they enabled you to fulfil your destiny as a useful little economic unit that doesn't make spelling mistakes in its CV. A spoonful of Quidditch makes the lexicon go down. Any long compendium of text would do the job just as well: The Times would be much more use than Treasure Island.

I do actually think that novels are more valuable, or at any rate, differently valuable, than newspapers or movies. But only on one condition: they have to be the kind of novels which have novel-like qualities. That means "psychologically believable characterisation, description which describes, and a plot which is more complex or subtle than fits into 90 minutes of cinema." If what you are reading really is "some work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour are conveyed to the world in the best chosen language" then you have probably gained something from reading it. If it isn't, then you haven't. Harry Potter isn't.

Some people think that it doesn't matter what the younglings are reading, provided they are developing the habit of picking up books. Give the kids a shot of Harry Potter (the first hit is free) and before long they'll be full blown James Joyce addicts. Transformers leads to The Seventh Seal and The Da Vinci Code leads to Documents of the Christian Church as surely as the Northern Line leads to High Barnet. Is there actually any evidence for this?

*

"You are missing the point here. Granted, for the sake of argument, that as a prose stylist. Jeffrey Archer and Dan Brown could both beat J.K Rowling in a 'write your way out of a wet paper bag' competition: kids still like the Harry Potter books because they are good stories. So it's as stories you should be judging them."

I'd better come right out and say it, then.

I enjoyed the first three Harry Potter books very much indeed. If I am exasperated with J.K Rowling, it's because she has drained all the fun out of the series in the later volumes.

I remember the first time I read Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone. I was on a train to Reading. It passed the time. I enjoyed the silly word play (Diagon Alley, spellotape, the Mirror of Erised). I liked the dotty details about the magical curriculum and the inventive descriptions of the actual lessons. I thought that Quidditch was an impressively bonkers idea. I thought that Draco Malfoy was an eminently dislikeable villain, and that Prof. Dumbledore – much zanier in the early books – was a splendid comic creation. ("What happened down in the dungeons is a complete secret. So naturally, the whole school knows.") I liked the idea of a world where the oil paintings talk back at you, where the chocolate frogs hop away before you can eat them, and where trains leave from non-existent stations.

I thought that Rowling had cleverly dusted off the old and slightly reactionary genre of the school story and given us permission to enjoy it again. I thought that it was a witty conceit to set such a story in a world which functions, like Alice in Wonderland, according to a kind of dream-like illogical logic. That's very much how the adult world can appear to a child. (That was Lewis Caroll's point as well, obviously.) Snape asks Harry questions that he knows perfectly well that Harry can't possibly answer. Harry is sometimes late for lessons because one of the staircases in the school moved while he wasn't looking. The Headmaster makes strict and sometimes rather arbitrary rules but is just as likely to praise Harry as punish him when he breaks them. That's how school feels to a child. "I don't know how this works, I can't avoid getting into trouble because I simply don't know what these irrational adult-things expect of me." When I was eight, it was obvious that the class bully was a member of a secret order bent on world domination and that Miss Beale was a wicked witch in disguise. At Hogwarts, that's actually true.

Hogwarts includes everything which is theoretically fun about boarding school, but excludes everything that can make it traumatic. Harry gets to be with his friends 24 hours a day; he stays in a big exciting house, with lots of grounds to explore. He has a considerable degree of independence: how many children have their own personal grown-up free territory like the Gryffindor common room? On the other hand, he has a reasonable amount of privacy: he shares a room with his best mate and sleeps in a four poster bed. (The only bathroom we actually see the inside of appears to be a full sized swimming pool: we rather pointedly aren't told what the first year's showers are like.) School dinners are delicious and you can eat as much as you like. There is very little bullying. The first time Harry is in trouble, he anachronistically wonders if he is going to get the cane, but in fact, detention turns out to mean "going on a thrilling adventure with Hagrid" or, at worst "doing some comically boring chores". Most of the time, if you are naughty you simply lose house points. There isn't any P.E: so far as I can tell, Quidditch – conceived as a combination of American football and Formula 1 racing – is only played by those kids who positively want to try out for the team. There is some kissing (sorry, snogging) in the later books but the problems of adolescence, let alone the logistics of a co-ed boarding school are omitted (or more accurately, repressed.) Harry can't, by definition, miss his parents, because he doesn't have any: by another piece of looking-glass logic, the only time he feels homesick is during the holidays.

All this is an awful lot of fun. The problem sets in around volume 4, when Rowling ceases to treat Hogwarts as a literary device and starts treating it as if it was a real educational establishment. The whimsical "Billy Bunter with a magic wand" adventures become subordinate to a painfully derivative fantasy quest story in which Harry is the Chosen One who can defeat the Dark Lord. This creates massive inconsistencies in tone. In the fifth volume, evil Blairite Dolores Umbridge starts to physically torture misbehaving pupils. Are we to read this as comic violence or react to it as a realistic depiction of quite serious child abuse? If the latter, are we entitled to ask whether there are social workers or schools inspectors in the wizarding world? If Harry is now the Hero With a Thousand Faces are we really supposed to care (or imagine that he cares) about his wizarding exams or who wins the Quidditch tournament?

Each of the seven Harry Potter books contains two different stories. One story typically concerns some dramatic event from the past. It's often something which will impact on Harry's life and call into question something he believes in: maybe his father wasn't quite the saint he thought him to be; or perhaps Dumbledore secretly fathered a love child with Mary Magdalene. The second story describes how Harry-ron-and-hermione collect a series of clues – fragments of old letters, anecdotes narrated by other characters, and un-convincing plot devices like Tom Riddle's sentient diary and the magic pot that contains the headmaster's memories. Eventually, they have enough MacGuffins to re-construct the back story, at which point Prof. Dumbledore pops up and shows them how it all fits together.

Now, in books 1 and 2, the focus was entirely on the front-story: that is "the adventure of a new-bug at a funny school". We only cared about the identity of the Heir of Slytherin and the location of the Philosopher's Stone in so far as they provided a pretext for Harry to leave the dorm after lights out, sneak into the girls' toilets (sorry, bathrooms) and generally have a thrilling but slightly naughty time. Even Lord Voldemort is primarily a plot device: a bit of doublethink which allows Harry to be excused and even sometimes rewarded for breaking the school rules. ("The dog ate my homework" and "I have a medical condition which means I have to eat chocolates during maths" don't work nearly so well as "I had to do it because otherwise the Dark Lord would have covered all the lands of Middle-Earth in a second darkness.")

In the third and best of the books, the front story and the back story were about equally important. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban is a thrilling school story about an escaped murderer possibly hiding out in the school grounds; but when Harry learns the convict's identity, he also discovers some genuinely interesting things about his parents and the origins of Lord Voldemort.

From volume 4 onwards, the focus increasingly shifts to the back-story. It feels as if the story which Rowling wants to tell is not the one about Harry-ron-and-hermione, but the one about Harry's parents and their contemporaries. Harry is simply the lens through which James Potter, Lilly Evans, Tom Riddle and the rest come into focus. In Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, the school story has atrophied completely. We learn about the childhood and early career of Prof. Dumbledore. We find out why he was content to remain a school-teacher instead of taking on some job that would have been more appropriate to his talents – Minister for Magic, emissary of the Valar or Anglican Deity. (This is not very interesting.) It is revealed (for the sixteenth or seventeenth time) whether Prof. Snape is a dark wizard pretending to be a good wizard; a good wizard pretending to be a dark wizard; or a dark wizard pretending to be a good wizard pretending to be a dark wizard pretending to be a good wizard. (This is actually rather well done.) Harry-ron-and-hermione's function in all this is to traipse around the countryside collecting two different sets of plot coupons – the "horocruxes" which contain parts of the Dark Lord's soul, and the interesting but largely irrelevant "deathly hallows". J.K is so wrapped up in herself that she can't see why we might think that "A Harry Potter book which is mostly not set at Hogwarts School" is a slightly odd notion.
So, instead of following any conventional narrative structure, the books are built like computer games. Deathly Hallows reads (seriously) like the novelization of a third person quest adventure. Characters decide which location to explore; they visit each room in that location in turn; they pick up clues or solve a puzzle; they sift out which clues are relevant to their quest, what is a red herring, and what is a pointer to some sub-plot or side-quest. When they meet another character, the main thing is to work out what question they need to ask it in order that it will recite the next section of the back story. Harry is linked telepathically to Voldemort; and the occasional flashes where he sees the world through the Dark Lord's eyes feel an awful lot like cut-scenes.

I wonder if this is the key to the books' popularity? Give children or thick adults Treasure Island or Tom Sawyer and they will say "Where are the missions? Where are the puzzles? Where is the underground trap-filled labyrinth? Who is the end of level boss?" Give them Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows and they will feel right at home. It's the only form of narrative structure these people understand.

At the beginning of chapter 10, Harry-ron-and-hermione are hiding out at Grimmauld Place (geddit?) former headquarters of the Order of the Phoenix. While the others are asleep, Harry decides to explore the place. First, he goes into his old room:

"The wardrobe door stood open, and the bedclothes had been ripped back. Harry remembered the over turned troll leg downstairs."

J.K helpfully explains that this is a Clue, and goes through its possible meanings:

"Somebody had searched the house since the Order had left. Snape? Or perhaps Mundungus."

Harry then goes to the room which Sirius Black, his godfather, had used as a boy. (Wizards have godfathers, celebrate Christmas, name hospitals after saints and put quotes from the Bible on their grave stones, but they don't have churches, vicars or Christenings and their weddings and funerals are secular affairs. But hey, it's only a kid's book, right?) It is described at some length: we are told what posters Sirius used to have on his bedroom wall; and then we are told what this implies about his personality. ("He seemed to have gone out of his way to annoy his parents".) Harry searches the room and, among many unimportant items, he finds this level's Important Clue: a single page of a letter which his mother wrote to Sirius shortly before she died. The fragment finishes with the words "it seems incredible that Dumbledore...". J.K helpfully points out that this is another Clue, but that some more information will be necessary in order to decode it:

"That Dumbledore what? But there were any number of things that would seem incredible about Dumbledore..."

In another vintage piece of comic over-writing, she tells us that a letter from his dead mother is of some importance to Harry:

"Harry's extremities seemed to have gone numb. He stood quite still holding the miraculous paper in his nerveless fingers while inside him a kind of quiet eruption sent joy and grief thundering in equal measure through his veins..."

Once he has calmed down, Harry searches the room again, and finds an old photo; this doesn't effect his extremities nearly so much because he already has pictures of his family. After discussing the new Clues with Ron-and-hermione, he decides to check the remaining unexplored room which has "Do not enter without the express permission of Regulus Arcturus Black" written on the door. They already have in their inventory an amulet with R.A.B on it, so they quickly spot that this is also a Clue; however, when they search the room, they can't find anything of any use. A few pages later, they encounter Kreacher (geddit?) the House Elf, and, by asking him the correct questions, get him to narrate a section of back story concerning Regulus Black.

Harry is not interacting with characters or the world: he is walking a around a pre-programmed "scene of the crime", being fed information and activating plot devices. If this was a classical detective story or indeed a halfway decent computer game, the significance of the clues would not be spelled out. We would be told that Sherlock Holmes had found an old letter, a photo, and an amulet and be implicitly challenged to work out the back-story for ourselves. What would happen, I wonder, if you went through the book and deleted all the passages in which J.K says: "Harry found a clue. Harry thought about the clue. Harry wondered what the clue meant. Harry went and asked Hermione about the clue. Ron said 'Blimey mate it's a clue'."? Do you think that you would end up with a much tighter, punchier, shorter book, like, for example, Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone?

This is why fans of the series are so obsessed with spoilers. No-one pretends that they are waiting for the new book for the sheer fun of reading about what hi-jinks Harry and the gang will get up to this term. The only reason for reading it is to discover which new pages from her notebook J.K Rowling is going to release into the public domain. Once you know that information, there's no actual need to read the book.

Any sense of tension or suspense you may experience – and I can't deny that I kept turning the pages over – is created by the publicity campaign, not by the book itself. Since Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, Rowling's publishers have performed an Equus style striptease act – coyly mentioning that if you read this volume will show you something that you've never seen before, and that you really ought to queue up outside Borders at midnight on Friday in order to be one of the first five or six million people to know what it is. The flyleaf to Order of the Phoenix described Prof. Dumbledore saying to Harry "Please sit down. I am going to tell you everything." So we plow our way through 765 pages because we are mildly interested to find out what the big revelation is going to be. (Nothing very interesting or surprising, and a good deal less than "everything".)

Before volumes 4, 5 and 6 we were warned that "A major character is going to be killed off", which made the books seem more like Big Brother than adventure stories: not "How will our hero escape..." but "Someone is going to be evicted from the series? Read the next 500 pages and you might find out who." This approach gave the final scenes of Deathly Hallows a quite spurious urgency. When Harry confronts Darth Vader, we couldn't help thinking that he was in genuine danger – not because Rowling was typing the scene in a particularly dramatic way, but because the publisher's hook for this volume was "Perhaps the person who gets killed off this time may be Harry Potter himself." The actual battle, by the way, is so convoluted that only a child could possibly understand it. Harry is not, in fact, required to defeat Voldemort neither naked nor clothed, neither riding nor on foot, wearing a hat which is not a hat, and eating a cheeseburger that is not a cheeseburger, but it would have been much simpler and more believable if he had.

I don't blame adults for reading this kind of thing. Adults use books to send themselves to sleep after a stressful day at the office. They don't expect them to make much sense. They probably don't pay much attention to them. If you paid attention to Jeffrey Archer or Dan Brown or Barbara Cartland your heart would probably glow and expand and all your extremities would drop off. Some of them may even want a fix of dragons and centaurs and magic swords and feel that they can get away with reading Harry Potter without Peter Bradshaw and John Humphrys calling their virility into question.

But something has gone very wrong with a world in which children would rather read about a school-shaped theme-park than Greyfriars or Linbury Court or Malory Towers or //please insert name of contemporary school story here//. It's a pity if their first meetings with dragons and unicorns are in this mushed-up watered-down baby-food form. Oh, maybe after finishing Harry Potter they'll go looking for more dragon-books and stumble on A Wizard of Earthsea or The Sword in the Stone. But isn't it equally likely that 1.3 million words of knock-off reproduction fantasy will leave them never wanting to see another dragon ever again? And is that why the Harry Potter series seems to be approved of by the kinds of grown-ups who openly sneer at Tolkien readers? Do they secretly hope that J.K Rowling is a kind of spiritual vaccination that will cure the kids of imagination for the rest of their lives?


Hi. I'm Andrew Rilstone. 

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