'Dark' Fiction

If I have to read and review another novel called 'dark' I shall cram it down the author's throat and shoot the publisher. Why is all this stuff getting published? It's depressing to read, no wonder the Romance genre is so popular.

Translated into my English anything branded as dark means I have to wade through a turgid story about some weak ineffectual Main Character who is deceitful, dishonest, indecisive and, generally speaking, a drip of a worm who eats junk, drinks too much, screws only married people and lives in self inflicted squalor thinking only of themselves and, usually, lustful sex!

Yuk!

I don't give a damn what the critics say, it's boring. Post modern is it? Not for me! Wishy washy, selfish, self indulgent crap. I am sick (pun intended) of reading about the MC's vomit, empty filthy 'fridge, ghastly food, and demolition decorated place of abode. I won't call it a home because it isn't. Is this truly how people live? Because the people I see around me don't live like that.

Most of us find life a challenge all right, a bloody mess and muddle, made more so by the majority of the human race. But do we have to drug, drink, fornicate and generally make more of a mess? No, we have a choice, and exercise it. I wish these boring Post Mods would do so and get themselves a life.

Tourists!

We have a delightful colony of Little Blue Penguins in our town. They are carefully protected and monitored, have a safe, fenced nesting area - dogs and cats can wreak havoc - and are a tourist attraction.

The main colony has a pleasant tourist area where people may, from a safe distance, watch the penguins arrive at dusk and cross the beach to their nests. There is an information centre, a spy hut where one can view what's happening in several nests, a delightful hot drinks kiosk and shop, an intelligent commentary as the penguins timidly make their way from the sea to their nests under the cliffs, and opportunities for photographs in a lighted area, camera flashes can damage penguins' eyes. Alas, like most tourist things it is expensive to visit. However the penguins are prospering and have spread out along the little peninsular so that there are several other nesting groups close by, one under the old railway sheds, another in the rock garden at the Port Side restaurant and a suicidal group who have to cross the road to reach their nests under a collection of old customs sheds.

The problem is that tourists who don't want to pay the fee to enter the official tourist site have heard via the internet that you can see and photograph the Little Blues just outside the official tourist site. Chaos now reigns. Despite the notices to keep a 10 metre distance, not to crowd, herd or frighten the penguins back into the sea, and one poor volunteer trying to keep people from chasing the birds and taking pictures with flashes right in the birds' faces this is happening.

What ails people that they must chase these little birds and flash their mobile ‘phone cameras in their eyes? No sooner has the volunteer rushed off to another group harassing the penguins than the first misbehaving group of wretched tourists are back blocking the birds from their nests, herding them into corners to take flashlight photos. No amount of sweet reason and sensible explanation works on these people. They want their photograph for their website and to hell with starving chicks and blinded parents.

The problem is growing each week. When tourists are stupid enough to go and poke sunbathing sealions and throw stones at basking fur seals, chase rare and protected Yellow Eyed Penguins and hound Little Blue Penguins one has to ask why New Zealand encourages overseas tourists. Maybe it’s time to stop assuming that anyone has the right to come to New Zealand as a tourist and start issuing permits to people who want to share our wildlife rarities with respect.

The 'new' historical novel

Maybe I'm just getting crotchety, but it seems that over the last few years the trend in new historical novels is to thrust as much nasty detail down the reader's throat as possible. Whether true or not readers must endure descriptions which encourage belief that:

1. All streets were waist high in shit, muck, filth and sewage, and stank.
2. All houses were poorly built, falling down, too low, to small and full of beetles, bugs and parasites.
3. All householders slung slops and muck from their windows every five minutes.
4. All people wore dirty clothes.
5. Most men, especially the wealthy, spent their time whoring in 'low' inns or fornicating with other men's wives, but never caught the pox or any other STD.
6. All woman at Court or Noblemen's wives were busy screwing anything male. They never became pregnant.
7. All the villains had bad breath and rotten browning teeth or few teeth.
8. All the men drank and vomited over people or furniture.
9. All the heros carried swords and were either magnificent or clumsy but cunning swordsmen.
10. All heroines rode well, sang, danced and were beautiful, intelligent and independent. 21stC women really!
11. Every inn had foul beer, fleas and chigs.
12. Wine in inns was always vinegary or sour and often drugged.

Sigh!

At the moment I am wading my way through a 600 page novel set in 1642. The hero is son and heir to a wealthy Lord. He is a 'bad' boy, screws anything in petticoats, preferably other men's wives, ran away the night before his arranged marriage to a suitable young woman he did not 'lurve', and spent 6 years abroad fighting for the Spaniards and not the Protestants. He ending up as a gambler who lived in a whorehouse. He does not have one STD, but is, of course, a misunderstood, troubled, honourable gentleman, a noble hearted man!
Oh yes?
And he drinks too much, vomits too much, and smokes hashish.

What I would like to know is: Did the author intend us to think her hero was just like wealthy modern young men who drink, screw and drug, or was it her modern arrogance, we are better than those filthy people? Or was it the agent and editors telling her sex sells and women readers like bad young men?

I have just reached the point where we meet the heroine. She is, of course, ultra intelligent, beautiful, rides as if moulded to her horse, is sexually promiscuous, and challenges the hero by refusing to sleep with him on their first meeting.

I could understand this if I were reading a genre romance. I know agents tell us that sex sells - when didn't it? - but this is meant to be a serious historical novel. Actually it's a bunch of clichés. I have to review the book so must read to the bitter end. I really don't want to. I couldn't care less about the ghastly 'hero' or the modern whore heroine.

'Bawdy and smart' is one of the blurb descriptions. Bawdy is used to describe the plays of Oliver Goldsmith and implies humour. There is nothing humourous about this book. It's a weighty tome about a plot to kill King Charles.

So who is choosing these wretched books and why do we have to wade in the filth? A little research shows that cities had bylaws even in 1642. More research shows that the price paid for dog shit, manure, ash, soot, sewage, urine, bone, compostable rubbish, burnable rubbish, old clothes, in fact just about anything we throw out these days, was high, because they were usable and people actually collected the stuff and made money from them.

So why the filth and the thoroughly unlikeable characters. Is it post-modernism brought to the historical novel? If so by whom and where can I find them? I have a strong desire to take this 600 + page novel and cram it down that guilty person's craw.

Blogs!

For some reason I have been unable to access my blog. No matter how I tried my password was rejected and I could not get help. I do hate technology! Today I have access!

Winter, the boys from NIWA assure us, has been the coldest for a long time but will now become milder as the la nina influence fades. Good. August brings calves and lambs to my part of the world and I hate it when the weather seems determined to wipe them all out.

The firewood pile - all 40 cubic metres of it - has shrunk more quickly than it should have but I have read a vast number of books, catching up on old favourites and discovering new authors.

Terry Pratchett has gone from good to great. I am not a great fan of the witch/wizard novels but have loved all the Ankh-Morpork, Sam Vimes novels, and 'Going Postal' and 'Making Money' made me laugh as I came across all those neat little jibes at things beloved by businesses, banks, and bureaucracies. Pratchett can take the micky out of so much of modern society and make you think.

Alexander McCall Smith gets better and better as he goes on writing about ordinary and mundane people and their lives, showing us that they are far from mundane, but in fact, unique, original and special. His is a very special talent.

I am glad I do not have a television. On a night like this with a full moon silvering the world and the Southern Cross gleaming I would far rather sit here with a book, reading by moonlight, and gazing out at the winter night.

A writer's life...

Ann Thwaite, author of children's fiction and biographer extraordinaire, visited my home town recently. Her talk about her New Zealand connections and her memories of Otago engaged the audience, who were delighted to swop bits of family history with her. At the tea after wards Ann Thwaite agreed to let me interview her for 'Writer's News' and we arranged time for a telephone interview. Our chat ranged over the writer's lot and she confessed that her advice to a young would-be writer today would be 'DON'T'.

I knew what she meant. I do not have a long and distinguished career as Ms Thwaite's has been, nor have I won prizes for my books, but to be a writer today means starvation. If one has an inheritance, or a partner who will support one, then writing full time is possible. Even a freelance writer today often cannot sell enough articles to pay the bills.

So working in snatches of stolen time, writing when tired and with half one's mind on the problems of that other life, one ends up with a novel one is sure would be much better if life did not get in the way. But with more sacrifice and effort it is dragged into publishable shape.

After all that, then facing the mountainous problem of finding an agent and publisher, a problem increasing in difficulty by the month, I am left wondering why anyone would want to be a writer, and why people persist in thinking it is a lucrative and glamorous job.

ANZAC Thoughts

Dawn came in Hollywood technicolour this ANZAC day and there was even a camera crew from the local T.V. to film the streaks of apricot and silver flaming across the sky, the towers of clouds, and the spreading pool of light. Dawn over a little granite cenotaph on a green grassy knoll in very rural New Zealand. It did looked splendid, nature turning on the technicolour to honour the occasion. And the piper - with his wee apprentice grandson for a shadow playing his tiny set of pipes - piping one of the Highland Laments, followed by a very shaky old bugler who did not wobble or miss one note, had me in tears.

After the wreath laying and prayers, a piped version of 'Amazing Grace' saw the dozen returned servicemen march off and people spoke about who they had come to remember. Brothers and fathers killed in Europe, Africa, and Burma. Grandfathers who fought the Japanese in the Pacific and died in the Singapore concentration camp, great and great-great grandfathers who died at Gallipoli or at Ypres or Flanders. Here was a group for whom 'Lest we forget' meant something special. The small crowd of parents, grandparents and grandchildren, the local school representatives with their wreath, those old enough to have lost brothers and fathers, and those who had never met grandparents, all came to remember that those men and women who died, whose names were inscribed on the cenotaph, had given their lives in the belief that they were protecting their families and friends back home.

It was dawn when those poor soldiers were landed at Gallipoli in a bungled attempt to prevent the war to end all wars. It was dawn when we bowed our heads in prayer and remembered our relatives who never came home. But when will it dawn on politicians that remembering the war dead is supposed to remind us that war should never happen again?

Of Pickle pots.

It’s autumn. A moist melancholy March with one bonus, something I’d forgotten about until now that I’m back on the land. Mushrooms, glorious field mushrooms and their enormous cousin, the horse mushroom. My small paddock and the top meadow have been covered in white lumps. Even my lawn took to sprouting mushroom fairy rings along with the usual fragile rainbow-coloured clusters of toadstools. We’ve had a generous four weeks of the delicacies instead of the ordinary two week season. Driving into town I can see that every farm shared in the harvest, there hasn’t been one field without a scattering of saucer sized horse mushrooms, or rings of field mushrooms.

What to do with the daily four pails of them. Dry them, soup them and I like to cheer bitter winter days - the ones where you think the sun will never shine again and every growing thing is dead - with a taste of the seasons yet to come. I love a spicy pickled mushroom stock to scent a winter soup or stew, make a sauce or gravy. This time I have my Japanese pickle pot with its ceramic weight to do the job of pressing the salted mushrooms to extract their liquid. I chuckle every time I use it. It’s Japanese pottery, expensive and beautifully simple. Standing on my kitchen table it draws my eye and I remember the stylish shop full of Japanese pottery, fabrics and clothing. My students and I went shopping there, practising English. How Sachiko teased me about buying such an expensive pickle pot when I could easily buy a cheap, made in China one in the local D2 or Cains superstore. Kaori and Kaworu didn’t believe I’d make pickles, not like the exquisite crisp Japanese ones they could make. But I think that Kaori understood when I said I wanted to take home something traditionally made and specially Japanese. So I use it and remember the smells and sights, and especially my friends in Japan.