Delicious (Historical) Death: The Devil in the White City

Another day, another book about historical crime. This time it's the turn of fact instead of fiction, and the Victorians instead of the Tudors: I'm reviewing The Devil in the White City by Erik Larson.

The Devil in the White City is set in Chicago, a place where I spent a lot of time as a child watching chicks get born in the Museum of Science and Industry. And that story is even vaguely relevant to today's review. The book's chosen moment is the 1893 Chicago World's Fair, which was very important for America and History and so on, and directly led to the Museum of Science and Industry being built, allowing me 100 years later to stand and watch chicks get born while my mother and grandmother failed to get me at all interested in any of the other exhibits.

It was also important for a man called H. H. Holmes. This charming human being decided that the World's Fair was the perfect opportunity for him to build a murder hotel and kill large numbers of young women, and so he did, while everyone around him totally failed to notice that anything shifty was going on.

And that, essentially, is the story told by this book. It's a gallop through two parallel stories, the creation of the World's Fair by visionary architect Daniel Burnham, and the criminal rise and fall of visionary murderer H. H. Holmes. The World's Fair happens (good!) and people get murdered (bad!). The end.


The Devil in the White City has at least a tenuous link to reality, in that all the things in it did actually happen, but at the same time it reads like particularly ridiculous and racy fiction written by someone who's got a strong sense of a good story but a very bad idea of how to put that story into words. It is the true-crime equivalent of really seductive but bad quality junk food: a double-chocolate whipped-cream Tesco Value cake in novel form.

My feelings on the subject of populist versus scholarly historical writing are sort of contradictory. While on the one hand I believe fervently that history is extremely interesting and should be written about like the crazy epic blockbuster it is, I also believe that bad writing - and bad research - makes the gods weep.

In this case, the research is there, but the writing's just not up to it. Larson can, at least, string a sentence together, but that's the least of his problems. Knowing that he is writing A FUN BOOK FOR NORMAL PEOPLE seems to have sent him off his head with self-importance, and The Devil in the White City is comically over-egged, filled with sparkling 'scene-setting' turds like

As [Holmes] moved through the station, the glances of young women fell around him like wind-blown petals

and

his eyes deposited a bright blue hope.

How I wish my eyes shed coloured emotion. Alas! All they do is allow me to see.

This is the moustache of a murderer

I admit, I do perversely enjoy this kind of thing. Bad writing can be delicious (there's my cake metaphor again), and as bad writing goes, this one's a winner. It's possible to ignore it and focus on the story, but if you do choose to be cruel (and I did) you're in for many hours of riotous amusement of the sort not at all intended by Larson.

On to the content. Larson obviously means Holmes to be the dark side of Burnham - Burnham's building the White City while Holmes is building the black; they both have blue eyes but one has the blue eyes OF A KILLER, etc, etc - but he's not really good enough to pull the comparison off, and so the book just ends up being about two very interesting and not particularly connected lives. And that's fine. History is amazing enough (and awful enough) to carry this one on its own. Fires, Ferris Wheels, belly dancers, Buffalo Bill, tornadoes and torture chambers all make starring appearances as everything that could go wrong for the Fair does, and everything that could go wrong for Holmes... doesn't, and the whole thing is rounded off with a nice cross-country manhunt for your reading pleasure.

There are also lots of fun Facts About the World's Fair to pick up for future use at boring parties. Did you know, for example, that it brought belly dancers to America for the first time, that Walt Disney's father worked on it and that it was the reason the Pledge of Allegience, the Ferris Wheel and that annoying snake charming music were invented? Well, now you do. See what this book has given you already!

I can't be a total snob about this. I can absolutely see why The Devil in the White City has sold all the copies it has - it's completely addictive reading, historically fascinating and presented in a way that's gloriously awful. It's cake! Delicious historical murder cake! And I ate it all. Oops.

Despite the best efforts of history, though, this gets 2.5 stars as a form of post-binge guilt, and also for that sentence about the petals.

Delicious Death: CJ Sansom

So there I was, at the Have I Got News For You filming last week, among equal numbers of Barbour-clad estate owners and nerds with backpacks. As we all sat and waited for the god-like advent of Ian Hislop, Feel Good Inc. began to play over the loudspeaker.

"Wow," I said to my friend Boadicea (everyone should have a friend called Boadicea), "this is a bit cool for Have I Got News For You, isn't it?"

"Robin," said Boadicea (honestly, this is her real name), "this song is from 2005."

And just like that, I realised my age was showing.

I know I'm still many years away from Spanx and anti-wrinkle cream, but the signs are all there. The younger siblings of my friends are showing startling tendancies to go to university and get jobs, my favourite children's authors are dying like flies and I don't know the name of a single member of One Direction. Also, I remember eating Opal Fruits. Damn kids, get off my lawn!

More distressingly, many of the books I used to read as a child - and even as a teenager - are beginning to go out of print. When I was just getting into crime fiction, way back when everyone wore leggings and Will Smith was cool (this could actually be a description of 2012, except that now everyone wears leggings and Will Smith's offspring are cool. I think. Are they still cool?), the go-to historical crime series was Ellis Peters' Brother Cadfael novels. Remember Brother Cadfael? Do you? Well, you must be getting old like me.

For the young among you, these books were about a medieval Welsh monk who solved crime and gardened, often at the same time. Bloodstained bodies constantly turned up, in piles of straw and blocks of ice and under hedgerows and so on, and Cadfael would potter about a bit, work out who done it, tell them off for being naughty and go back to pruning his apricots. It was all extremely nice, and very historically accurate, so you could pretend you were learning something while you waited for the next body to turn up.

It has taken me an extrememly long time to notice that people have moved beyond Cadfael. Apparently medieval monks are not the done thing any more. He no longer appears in bookshops, and if you mention him to crime junkies they look at you like they have no idea what you are talking about. The twelfth century is so not in right now. In fact, these days it's fashionable to make your historical detective a Tudor, so you still get to write about blackened teeth and privies, but with the added bonus of a monarch people actually know the name of.

I've been slightly resisting trying this codpiece crimewave out, for no better reason than that Change Is Bad, but then last week I saw the first CJ Sansom novel in our local library and I thought that I might as well give it a try. So I got Dissolution out, and I read it, and then I immediately went back to the library and exchanged it for Dark Fire. It turns out that change is actually pretty good - though since the first Sansom was originally published in 2003, most of you may have already found this out.

Sansom's chosen period is, as I've said, Tudor England, and his first book starts with (those who were paying attention in History, hands up now) the dissolution of the monastaries under Henry VIII. Yes, just like the Cadfael books, Dissolution is all about monks arguing with each other and then committing lots of lovely murders. The whole thing gives off more than a whiff of Ellis Peters, from its plot to its plethora of meticulous and yet still slightly dodgy-seeming historical detail. Like Peters, its content means that it ought to be grim, and yet you get an overwhelming sense of sweetness and calm. After all the blood has been cleared up, you know that everything is going to be very nice for the remaining characters. (Unless you are a monk at the end of Dissolution, in which case you are screwed.)

I can't say I know a huge amount about the period, apart from that Henry was a fat king who married lots of ladies, but I'm pretty sure Sansom's historical details are all present and correct. There's a great moment in Dark Fire, the second book, where someone gets sick because he's been drinking water, and the main character Matthew Shardlake hears about it and says something along the lines of "Jesu! Water! No wonder he's ill." Also there are lots of nasty bits with privies and pisspots and rotting meat, because as we all know, history is dirty and it smells. As far as the little things go, Sansom gets top marks.

But there are definitely bits that would have a Tudor scholar rocking back and forward in a corner. The first book is set during the shutting-down of the monastaries (which certainly did occur), but the second is all about Thomas Cromwell trying to find the long-lost formula for Greek Fire to keep himself in favour with King Henry (which did not happen even slightly at all). And things get even more ropey when you consider Shardlake himself. He appears to have sprung fully-formed from a checklist called 'How To Make People Like Your Historical Character (Even Though He Is White And Part Of The Patriarchy)'.

Debilitatingly disabled (he is a hunchback, something we are reminded of about every three pages), Shardlake has nonetheless striven through cruelty and adversity to succeed as a lawyer. He gives alms to the poor whenever asked, he is kind to his horse, he believes women can be intelligent and his best friend is a black man. (While all other characters express mild to severe confusion and distress at the sight of said black man - there are many, many scenes where someone turns to Shardlake and says, "I don't want to be rude, but have you noticed that that man is black?" - Shardlake is totally OK with it from the start, because he is cool like that.) Also, in the second book, he gets an assistant who is slightly Jewish, and he works pro bono to exonerate a falsely-accused woman because he believes everyone should have a fair trial. To all of this I say: come ON. I totally agree that racism, sexism and ableism are bad, and I understand how tempting it is to make your historical character sympathetic, but these traits together are too much for the sixteenth century. Most people in the twenty-first century aren't even this liberal. I wish they were, but the fact still stands that they are not.

I know, I'm whining. And before you take my complaints seriously, remember how fast I got through Dissolution and Dark Fire. Basically, ignore me. Flawed though they are, these books are, more importantly, extremely fun. Like Peters' Cadfael books, they're nice enough to be charming, nasty enough to be exciting and contain enough local colour in them to make you think you are learning worthy things about history. Actually, of course, you are reading about people throwing each other down wells and off tall buildings, which is even better.

So, in conclusion: I miss Cadfael, I like Shardlake, I'm glad someone is following in Ellis Peters' footsteps but at the same time I'm deeply disturbed that I remember Ellis Peters well enough to know that there are shoes Sansom is filling. In fact, I'm practically a historical artifact myself, and now I'm just waiting for the day when people start writing historical crime about the 1990s. THEN I'll be old.

The Shardlake series gets 3 stars.

Here Be Monsters: Two Leviathan-themed Reviews

Today's reviews come to you dressed up as a literary fight, because 'comparison' sounds boring, and because I think both of the writers concerned are appropriately ferocious and war-like. One of them actually was a sailor, and the other looks as though he ought to be a boxer, and so the idea of them settling their differences through fisticuffs is not entirely crazy. Except that one of them is dead, which might make things a little difficult.

NEVERTHELESS.

Melville wins on beard

In the red corner, we've got a writer who's been the bane of American teenagers for generations. He's a fearsome racist, a very dodgy scientist, a Bible obsessive and a man who really, really likes whales. Ladies and gentlemen, it's... HERMAN MELVILLE with MOBY DICK.

Facing off against him in blue is a man with a very different literary reputation. He's young, he's cool and in his time off from churning out amazing novels he teaches creative writing at my old university (he never taught me - I think I missed a trick there). Let me introduce you to the one, the only... CHINA MIEVILLE and his novel KRAKEN.

(Cue applause.)

But Mieville wins on sheer number of earrings

This is such a great pairing not only because I think Mieville's book is a response to Melville's, but because of who Mieville is. Melville spends a large part of his novel being patronising about a bald, tattooed, non-white man, and then one hundred years later a bald, tattooed, non-white man whose name differs from Melville's by only one letter (seriously, I'm getting confused just typing them out) takes Melville's concept and flips it into something totally different and totally awesome. The universe definitely has a sense of humour.

If a lot of people complain that Melville is much too popular, then Mieville suffers from the opposite problem. I've complained about this before: he's an absolutely excellent writer, but all the same he tends to be shoved onto the genre shelves and largely ignored by people who like Serious Books (who all, of course, will tell you that they love Melville). This is particularly ironic, because I think that what Melville and Mieville are doing is not at all dissimilar: both of their books are rip-roaring yarns with a twist; brainy, well-informed takes on a genre that's usually agressively masculine and aggressively brainless. That I enjoyed Mieville's book isn't surprising, but I'm still reeling from the fact that I didn't only like Melville's book, I completely adored it.

China Mieville is a writer whose brain seems to be constantly shooting out amazing plots in all directions like an overactive tumble drier, and the plot of Kraken is, as you might expect from him, both intense and intelligent. In an alternative London where the elusive giant squid has actually been captured, the Natural History Museum's prize specimen goes missing. The prime suspects are an underground religious group who worship the Kraken as a god, and who now believe it's about to be used to bring about the end of the world. Cue wild shenanigans as the squid's curator Billy discovers an extremely dark and dangerous alternative London where tattoos are alive, where statues talk and where there's even a crack anti-magic police unit.

I was sold Kraken on the basis that it was a reworking of a Western, and it's certainly got those influences going on, but after reading Moby Dick I realise that what it really is is a seafaring epic on dry land, and that what it's doing is taking literally a concept that runs through the heart of Moby Dick.

Now, everyone thinks they know what Moby Dick is about: some dude called Ahab chasing a white whale for 500 pages while nothing else happens. I am delighted to tell you, however, that this is not really the case. I was expecting a lot of angry masculine people yelling at each other in gale-force winds, and it isn't really that at all. Sure, Ahab slopes about, being moody (this is Melville's favourite descriptive word; the phrase 'moody Ahab' appears so many times that you might conclude it was Ahab's given name), shaking his fist at the sky and screaming 'DAMN THAT WHITE WHALE!' or words to that effect, but the revenge plot only takes up about a quarter of the text. Moby Dick really is, to use Melville's own term, a book of cetology, a very charming pre-Darwinian attempt to understand the nature of the whale. Is it a fish? (Melville delightfully concludes that it is, because only a stupid person could possibly suggest that mammals might live in the sea) What does it eat? What shape is its face? (This is honestly a chapter) How do you kill one, and when you have, how do you cut it up? What does it taste like? How long does it live? What is its history and mythology and what will be its future?

Melville's cetology can be pretty much summed up as an elaborate How To guide to worshipping the sperm whale. To most of the characters in Kraken, Moby Dick would be read not as a novel but a holy book, part of the huge underground library the Kraken worshippers have filled with books about their deep-sea god. I'm really not going out on a limb here at all - at one point, the text actually calls Moby Dick a god, and it's pretty clear that the men in Moby Dick are out there killing whales not only because it brings them money to do it, but because they believe in what they're doing. You could make a definite argument for whale-slaughter-as-ritual-sacrifice, and if there isn't a Moby Dick as Old Testament God thing going on I'll eat my Oxford World's Classics edition.

The sea appears in both novels as an almost human (or more than human) presence - in Kraken it even has its own house next to the Thames. Kraken's Billy, just like Moby Dick's Ishmael, teams up with a big bruiser with a harpoon and both pairs of men go adventuring together in pursuit of the big prize god, who may or may not (no spoilers here) be the death of them. As I've said, there's a lot of other stuff going on in Kraken too that comes from different literary traditions, but on one level it absolutely has to be a very sharp and well-considered response to Moby Dick.

And much as I liked Moby Dick, it definitely needs responding to. Ishmael is an absolutely infuriating narrator who spends his entire time making clanky puns and being willfully obtuse for humorous effect: he's the kind of man who, if he met someone called Miss Fine, would say something like "In fine, it's a fine day to meet someone so fine, I find!" (This is partly why he does not have a lady friend waiting for him at home like all of the other sailors; it also may have something to do with how much he likes cuddling in bed with his friend Queequeg.)

Also, and more disturbingly, Melville himself is quite obviously racist in a way that's not just unthinking but disgustingly deliberate. There's a horrible scene where a white character unleashes a torrent of verbal abuse on one of the ship's black servants just because he exists and the white character feels like it, and at another point a different black character is told that if he falls into the sea while they're in pursuit of a whale he won't be saved, because the whale is worth three times his price in Alabama. Even the broadest allowances for time and culture don't exuse it, and I was left wishing I could unleash not only China Mieville but Toni Morrison upon him. Nasty man.

Talking about the Great American Novel, by the way, I cannot understand how anyone not completely insane could ever think it was a good idea to set Moby Dick as high school reading. Large parts of the text are plotless meditations on whales, their history, biology and mythology, and the parts that are actually about moody Ahab and his Great White Whale nemesis are so heavy with intense Biblical references that the average page needs to be glossed five times. Your typical teenage reader is going to have jumped ship by page twenty. Moby Dick is the kind of book you need to come to on your own, and read it because you want to. If you do that, it's a delightful Victorian curiosity cabinet of a novel with some startlingly good writing hiding inside it. There's a scene where Melville's describing the ship setting light to excess bits of whale as it sails along in the dark: the ship is burning and it's making the sea burn and the whole thing looks like it just got thrown up from hell. It's an absolutely great description, and, like his hilarious cetology, totally unexpected.

In fact, I'd have to say that I think Melville is the better writer of the two. Mieville has a cracker of a plot, and an exceptionally vivid writing style, but at the same time it feels a bit chaotic and unchained, all his mad descriptions and ideas pinwheeling about with not much focus. Melville handles delicate and serious just as well as he does crazy and bold, and as a result Moby Dick is less of an exhausting adrenalin rush and more of a stunning piece of artistry.

Both Kraken and Moby Dick are exciting and extremely fun - unexpectedly so in the case of Moby Dick. I'd certainly recommend them both, and I definitely enjoyed reading them, but even though I'd far and away prefer to hang out with Mieville the person, I think Moby Dick might just have the edge on its opponent in terms of sheer textual excellence.

 IN SUMMATION

RED: 4 stars
BLUE: 3.5 stars

AND SO RED WINS IT. I know, I was shocked too.

Delicious Death: Boris Akunin edition

As you may have noticed, I love crime novels. The dissertation that I should currently be writing (but I'm not, because I'm writing this) is, in essence, an excuse for me to read a lot of awesome detective fiction. I can't quite believe that I've managed to trick my department into letting me have so much fun.

For the love of god, never read this book

Now, as far as British detective fiction (and my dissertation) is concerned, the Golden Age is where it is at. Most recent British writers seem to me to be either Trying Too Hard To Be Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayer,  or Trying Too Hard To Not Be Like Them At All, and it makes for awkward, slightly painful reading (see: James, P. D.; also Rendell, Ruth, a writer so dreadful that even remembering the book I read by her makes me feel ill). In my opinion, the best stuff being written today as opposed to seventy years ago is not only not coming from Britain, it's not orginally in English at all.

Now, I know you think that's the lead-up to me starting to go googly-eyed over Scandinavian crime, to which I say: hah. Tricked you. I read a Henning Mankell once, and the experience was enough to last me a lifetime. For 450 pages, Wallander slowly stared up at the birds in the sky and slowly thought about the slow inevitability of death. Slowly. By page 100 I was hoping someone would do him in.

In fact, apart from the works of Anne Holt I've come to the conclusion that I'm not a very pro-Scandinavian person at all, and my two favourite contemporary crime writers are not from Sweden or Norway at all. They're Fred Vargas (French) and Boris Akunin (Georgian/ Russian), and they're awesome.

One day I will give Vargas (don't be fooled into thinking she's male, like me she is just trying to trick you with her name) a proper write-up, but today I'm mainly blogging about Boris Akunin.

If Akunin isn't known much around these parts, he more than makes up for it in Mother Russia. Think about our attitude to J. K. Rowling, imagine her as a writer of adult crime novels (which won't take much doing after September, actually) and you've pretty much got the way Russians feel about Akunin. Over there he is a god of popular fiction, and his detective, Erast Fandorin, is a literary hero, like Poirot but sexier.

The Fandorin series is set in late nineteenth century Imperial Russia (think Tolstoy with stabbings), and it follows the life of State Councillor Fandorin (his official title changes a lot, and trying to remember it makes me bewildered, but the essential point is that he is The Business, beloved of kings, emperors and actresses alike). Each novel lets us drop in on Fandorin at a certain point during his life - the first, The Winter Queen, is set when he's twenty and not yet cool, and by the time we get to Special Assignments, the one I've just read, he's about thirty-five and owns a very large house and several demanding mistresses.

The series (apart from being about crime and nineteenth century Russia) has an overarching theme, which in my view makes it especially cool: Akunin has identified thirteen subgenres of detective fiction (locked room, espionage, consipracy, country house and so on) and has written a Fandorin title for each of them. It's a brilliant idea, and means that the formula of the novels never begins to feel boring. In one book, Fandorin is creeping through back alleys in search of a mysterious evil, and in the next he's galloping about during the Russo-Turkish war. He goes on boats, he goes on trains, he goes to Japan and learns fabulous fighting moves and then he presumably does a lot of other stuff, but in later books that I haven't got to yet.

To be fair, Akunin's more a charming writer than a great one, and I'm also forced to conclude that there's stuff going on with the character of Fandorin's Japanese servant Masa that, if it isn't overtly racist, is definitely teetering on the edge of it. But all the same, the books are an enormous amount of fun to read. Their scenes are interesting, their plots are clever and they're laid out in a sharp, engaging, fast-paced way that means you can read 100 pages of one without even noticing.

It also doesn't hurt that Fandorin himself is a top-notch detective creation. He's got just the right balance of endearing quirks (he stutters and is somewhat strange) to sexy mystery (he has a troubled past and a startling ability to win every game of chance he plays), making him familiar but essentially unknowable and therefore insanely cool. He's even got that essential Man of Mystery accessory, a lock of pure white in an otherwise black head of hair. Ooh, Erast, you saucy thing.

As I said, I've just read Special Assignments, and I've got The State Councillor sitting on my bookshelf waiting for me to finish Moby Dick (sharp-eyed readers may have noticed the new 'currently reading' widget in the top right corner. At the moment I am on page 212 and Cap'n Ahab is being a FEROCIOUS CRUSTY DEVIL, but so far the White Whale is just rumour and hearsay). I am having surprising amounts of fun with Moby Dick (more on that later, and don't be so dirty-minded), but all the same the thought of Erast Fandorin pursuing wrongdoers on a train is a lot more enticing than 300 pages more of salty sea dogs harpooning each other (at this stage, the jokes are writing themselves). What can I say? Crime novels are fun, and good crime novels are things of endless delight.

In conclusion, if you like Russia, history, mystery and dark-haired men (and who does not?) you should put down your Scandinavian crime and your P. D. Jameses and read these books. Agatha Christie would definitely approve.

The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Book Giver: World Book Night 2012

A few months ago, in a fit of random gung-ho enthusiasm, I signed up to be part of World Book Night 2012. It's a fairly new scheme (2012 is its second year) that aims to get more people reading by asking 20,000 givers to hand out 1,000,000 copies of 25 specially chosen and printed books (that works out as 24 books each - I assume they chose this number because trying to carry around any more would make your arms drop off).

This is a truly worthy and well-meaning scheme which, as you may be able to see, has extreme potential to go horribly wrong. Your average well-educated, internet-savvy book nut will tend to hang out with people who are also well-educated, internet-savvy book nuts, and who can probably afford to buy their own copies of All Quiet on the Western Front (one of last year's 25, and a very weird choice to my mind) without help from a free-book programme. This was demonstrated very clearly to me last year: I worked at an Oxford bookstore which was one of the pick-up points for givers, and most of the (posh, white) people who came in seemed to be treating World Book Night as a cheap way to get presents for their (posh, white) friends.

I think, though, that the people running the scheme have tightened up the concept second time around. Not only are the books on offer this time around much easier and more inviting reads (while still containing some damn good choices, like Good Omens, The Time Traveller's Wife and Room), but when you sign up you're asked to say what you're actually going to do with your allocated copies. Last year I didn't sign up because I knew I would just end up giving them away to my (bookish, if mostly not posh or white) friends, which I think would be CHEATING (I'm still mad about those lazy givers).

This year, though, I'm living in London, where public transport is great, literacy rates are badly low and where, when you try to hand out things to random passers-by, only some of them look at you like you've just asked them to get into your handy murder van. Also (and what tipped the scales for me) one of the titles on offer this year was Dodie '101 Dalmatians' Smith's I Capture The Castle. This is a book I've been crazy about ever since I first read it twelve years ago. The totally weird tale of the romantic misadventures of a teenage girl who lives in a castle because her father is mad, it's utterly brilliant and totally readable, and I would actually give my left kidney to have written it myself. I would then give my right kidney to know what happens after it finishes, and my liver to make Cassandra real so I could be friends with her. That is how much I love it. If I could make the entire world sit down and read I Capture The Castle I would, so the thought of being able to give away 24 copies of it was pleasing to me.

And that is the story of how I became a World Book Night 2012 giver.

When the time came, I dutifully collected my books from the appointed library (suitcase in tow - from bitter prior experience I know that 24 copies of a large text adds up to A Whole Lot Of Book), came home, wrote my name and their unique tracking number in each copy - and then was suddenly faced with a towering pile of novels in the middle of my floor. It was terrifying. I started having feverish daydreams about what would happen if (or when) I failed to find anyone who wanted them. I was going to have to to spend the rest of my life living with an impromptu altar to Dodie Smith, constantly being shamed by the visual reminder of my inability to interact with other humans. My housemates were going to hate me. Worse, I was going to hate me! It was all made worse by the fact that I was going to be out of London on World Book Night itself, the 23rd. What if people stopped reading books before I could do my handout on the 24th?

As astute readers may be able to guess, none of these things actually came to pass. This morning I woke up, had breakfast, loaded my 24 copies of I Capture the Castle into two large bags and set out on my mission of literary mercy.

Free to a good home?

My plan of action involved getting on the tube at Elephant and Castle station, the very bottom of the Bakerloo line, and loading up the trains going north. I went dodging in and out of carriages at each station stop, trying to feel like a good fairy and not like a terrorist (it turns out that do not leave any items unattended is really strongly ingrained in my psyche), and also trying not to feel too guilty about abandoning lovely books to an uncertain fate. Good cause notwithstanding, it is hard to do a drive-by dump of a book when you have spent your life trying to collect as many of them as possible. But I did it, and if you or anyone you know found a copy of I Capture the Castle on the Bakerloo line with a post-it saying READ ME!, I would like to hear from you, preferably with accompanying pictures of it on your bookshelf. It would soothe my soul.

After that ordeal, I got off the tube at Charing Cross and went walking down the Strand, handing out copies to people who looked friendly. I got a few people who'd heard of I Capture the Castle before, and one very nice girl who was extremely excited about both it and World Book Night, but most of them hadn't, and each of those people made me realise what a good thing World Book Night can be. I gave away a copy to a cashier at Ryman's (I needed post-its, and also remembered how much I would have liked customers to give me things when I worked in retail) who said that she didn't really read but she might give it a try - which strikes me as exactly the point of the exercise. She's someone who'd probably never have come across I Capture the Castle otherwise, and now she's got the opportunity to read it and (maybe) enjoy it.

To me, books are a necessity (and one of my favourite things about living in England is that that's actually how they're classed, as VAT-exempt necessities, along with food and children's clothes), but to a lot of people they're pointless luxuries, and reading is a chore rather than a pleasure. I'm not sure World Book Night has quite worked out how to challenge that attitude yet, but it's getting there, and the basic idea behind it, to help show new groups of people that reading can be fun instead of stressful and alienating, is laudable. Does that basic idea always translate into the real world? No. Does the scheme reach the people that it's trying to? Not always. Could it be better directed? Definitely. But it's a start.

Even with the best of intentions, there's only so much a giver can do - the people who are most eager to take the books off you are exactly the ones who already have hundreds at home, and the people who would benefit from a free book most tend not to want to take one. But, that said, I think I'm glad I've been a part of the hand-out this year. If someone who took one of my copies ends up reading it and liking it, then I'll be happy, because (all worries about World Book Night aside) I have true love for I Capture The Castle and an unshakeable belief in its greatness. World Book Night 2012 has given me a wonderful excuse to make more people fall in love with what I love already.

London, I hope you enjoy it.

Two super-speedy reviews while I am supposed to be writing my essays

So, the essays are going well, as is the internship. I was let out on day release to go to the London Book Fair on Monday, at which I felt very junior and unimportant (who knew there were so many men in publishing? Where do they hide for the rest of the year?), but I did wander past the Hachette booth, which, in honour of The Casual Vacancy, had a GIANT POSTER of J K Rowling's face staring down at passers-by like a benevolent dictator and/ or a mid-level deity.

This made me quite suspicious, probably because I just finished reading Wild Swans by Jung Chang and now I am seeing cults of the leader everywhere (including in North Korea, but that's not just me).

Wild Swans is one of the only non-fiction titles on the 1001 books list, a biography/autobiography combo about three generations of Chinese women who collectively lived through the Japanese occupation of Manchuria, World War II, the rise of Communism and the increasingly crazy machinations of Chairman Mao. Their historical CVs are amazing - Chang's grandmother was one of the last warlord concubines (a dubious honour), Chang's mother was one of the first Communist party sympathisers after World War II and her father was a high-up party official who governed a couple of provinces. As you do.

I have to say, Wild Swans isn't particularly well written - most of the time, it's perfectly functional, but sometimes she lapses into a badly-done contemplations of the beauty of the universe and the result is just tiresome. But it's a bestseller not because of the way it's written but because of what it's written about. It's an incredible (and totally terrifying) inside record of what went wrong with Chinese communism and why.

Before I read Wild Swans I had only vague background knowledge about recent Chinese history, so I sort of knew that the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution had happened, and were Bad Things. Well, now I know the details, and it turns out that Bad doesn't even begin to cover it. At one point, for example, Mao decided that China should make more steel, so he got everyone in the entire country (including children - as a six year old, Chang had to pick up scrap metal on the way to school) to stop what they were doing and obsessively make steel, with the result that the crops failed and millions of people just died of starvation. And everyone had been so indoctrinated by Mao that they honestly believed it was all for the best.

The number of people who are tortured and killed in this book is staggering, as is the number who just committed suicide out of sheer shame and horror at what was going on. At times I actually felt like I was reading a dystopian sci fi novel - the mind control, the street gangs, kids beating up their teachers, families forced to live separately and so on. It's almost unbelievable to me that what she's writing is - or very recently was - all true. (On that note, the writer part of me thinks that if you are considering publishing your own dystopian novel, Wild Swans is a must-read background text. You don't even have to make this stuff up.)

My only warning is that if you want to be at all surprised by the fate of Chang's family DO NOT FLIP TO THE PICTURES in the middle of the book, because you will be horribly spoiled by captions like 'The last picture of Blah Blah, who died unexpectedly in 1949'. I did, and I was, and I was cross.

Long as it is (and I admit, it is somewhat over-long), it's absolutely worth a read. Mind-blowing and extremely eye-opening, both from a historical and a human-nature point of view, it's everything you never knew about Communist China and didn't think to ask because it didn't occur to you that human beings could possibly do those kinds of thing to each other in the real world.

3 stars.

After all that heartbreaking suicide, I wanted some more light-hearted death (I typed that sentence and realised what an awful person I am, but there's no other way to say it), and so I moved on to P D James's The Murder Room.

I'm always on the fence about James as a writer. On the one hand, she's a good mystery writer, she makes up interesting cases and her detective is, you know, a perfectly fine individual - but on the other, she is the most gloomy person in the world. I grew up on Agatha Christie and Ngaio Marsh, so I have a baseline assumption that written murder should be jolly, a nice minty after-dinner puzzle with body parts for effect. It's a point of view I think crime writers are coming back to more and more these days, but there was obviously a time in the 70s and 80s, when James was forming herself as an author, when everyone was reacting against silliness and trying to show how very serious the business of death really is, etc etc.

As a result, everyone in a P D James book runs around tiresomely contemplating THE YAWNING HOLE AT THE CENTRE OF THE UNIVERSE and their INABILITY TO BE HAPPY. It gives me a stress headache. Yes, yes, the world is very terrible, but it's also quite funny and stupid, and there's no acknowledgement of that in a James mystery. Every single one of her characters feels alienated and unfulfilled and has family who are awful and they hate. One or two such people might be understandable, but an entire book full of them leads me to believe that something Freudian is going on. I'm willing to bet the James family is not a barrel of laughs at Christmas time.

Because of all this, I never end up enjoying a P D James as much as I really should, given the ingredients involved. The Murder Room is all about someone copycatting 1930s murders (James, like me, is clearly the most enormous historical murders geek), it takes place in a museum and a girls' school, and it's a murder mystery. All my favourite things! And yet, at its heart it's joyless and a bit functional. The most interesting bits for me were (unsurprisingly) the descriptions of the original '30s murders. They made me want to ring James up and talk to her about my dissertation, which happens to be about real Victorian murders and their influence on 1930s crime novels. I think we'd get on better through the medium of fact than we do with fiction - no coincidence that my favourite James book is her true-crime recreation of the Ratcliff Highway Murders, The Maul and the Pear Tree.

But anyway, The Murder Room was fine. Acceptable. Functional. It passed the time. And it made me crave a nice bit of Agatha Christie. Now there's a woman who knows what to do with murder.

2.5 stars.

Review - Lud-in-the-Mist

How has it taken me so long to write this post? I don't know. I could probably blame essay madness: currently the entire rational part of my brain is busy trying to prove that the cure for vampirism in ladies is marriage and a good bit of pregnancy (you think I'm joking, don't you? I'm not joking), and I need to use all of the rest of my mental powers just to perform basic tasks like eating and watching 4OD.

Also, in the last week I've resigned my Litro internship (leaving behind me a blog about endings, a blog about recreational drugs and a blog about my lizard Watson) and started one at the British Museum Press, which is extremely interesting but also quite time consuming.

But anyway - no excuses, really. Life happened, I read Lud-in-the-Mist by Hope Mirrlees, and then it refused to magically write a review about itself. I think that was very unfair of it. I'm going to have to dock it half a star for being so lazy and just write my own.

First impressions first: I violently hate my edition's cover. I hate it so much. By some trick of the mind, whenever I look at it from far away, or upside down, or just without paying much attention, all I can see is a squashed sad panda, decorated with ribbons. I don't know who commissioned that excrescence of a drawing, but they should take mandatory retirement, effective immediately. Luckily, I didn't choose the book because of its cover, otherwise I'd never have read it.

Actually, I have to thank Neil Gaiman for leading me to this book. It featured on a list he made of his top ten books of all time (which now, of course, I can't find). I was attracted by the title (Lud-in-the-Mist. What is it? Who is it? Why does it sound so interesting?), but mainly by Neil Gaiman, who not only can do no wrong as far as books are concerned (I'll leave the life choices out of it), but also used to hang around with Diana Wynne Jones, who is my Number One Top Writer Person Ever. So I had to give Lud-in-the-Mist a try.

Now, don't worry if you don't know who Hope Mirrlees is. I'd never heard of her either - until I saw the Gaiman list, after which point she began to turn up everywhere. She was born in 1887, went to Cambridge, became friends with a lot of modernist writers (she actually appears fleetingly in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas as well as, more recently, The Children's Book) and wrote three books in the 1920s, the most famous of which was Lud-in-the-Mist.

So that's Hope Mirrlees.

On to Lud-in-the-Mist itself. It's all about a town of 'ordinary' people who live on the borders of Fairyland, but never visit because they're too afraid of what they might find - until one guy decides to go. Sound familiar? If you've ever read Neil Gaiman's Stardust, you'll know what I'm talking about. The two books share not just a basic scenario but a tone - sort of old-world-with-a-wink, slightly naughty and very clever. I'm not suggesting that Gaiman's stealing at all, just that he's obviously hugely indebted to Mirrlees. Now that I've read Lud-in-the-Mist I realise that Stardust is essentially a loving homage to a book that's influenced his imagination enormously.

As well as getting backwards influence from Gaiman, Lud-in-the-Mist reminded me enormously of Lord of the Rings - or at least the parts of it that are set in the Shire. If I had to describe Lud-in-the-Mist in four words, those words would be 'Hobbity, with a bite'. It's all very charming and mannered - the inhabitants of Lud-in-the-Mist (it's the name of the town as well as the book) go gallivanting about hunting moths and eating cheese like happy little hobbits, but underneath they're all a bit mean and spiteful and bad. I'm not sure there was a character that I actually liked - which is unusual, since I liked the book itself very much. It has a strong flavour of what would happen if Tolkien had a love child with Christina Rossetti: fairy-tale jollity but with a strong spike of nastiness behind it. At times it's actually down-and-out creepy, all the more so because of how simply the creep presented. People just turn around and casually say things like 'Excuse me, sir, you're going to die soon', or 'Do the dead bleed?' and then you get heart palpitations and have to take a reading break.

We must not look at goblin men,

We must not buy their fruits:

Who knows upon what soil they fed

Their hungry thirsty roots?

Unusually for me, because I think that a lot of influence doesn't much matter, I'd say that if you haven't read Rossetti's Goblin Market you're really going to miss a lot of what Mirrlees is doing. (Side note: if you haven't read Goblin Market, you've got to. That's an order. It's an amazing poem and basically a top-notch fantasy story in and of itself).

The plot of Lud-in-the-Mist revolves around the illegal import of fairy fruit into Lud - if you know your Rossetti, you'll understand what a bad thing that's considered to be. The fruit, like Rossetti's goblin fruit, makes its human eater go mad with longing for Fairyland - which is against the law, since, after a revolution against Fairy, the inhabitants of Lud are supposed to be keeping things strictly anti-magical temptation.

As in all the best fantasy, Mirrlees is intensely logical when it comes to the details of her made-up world, and the result is that you're absolutely sold on the factuality of the fiction she's created. She's given Lud a history, economy and mythology so close - and yet so far - from turn-of-the-century rural England that it's like reading a particularly clever spot-the-difference picture. As a physical place, Lud feels entirely comfortable and relatable - and then Mirrlees pulls the rug out from under your feet with a single detail that makes you realise how utterly alien Lud is to your own experience. At one point, for example, she has a character look out over the countryside and see its old oak trees, thick hedgerows, gentle rivers and blue cows.

Yes, blue cows. Because Lud is next to Fairyland, and in Fairyland all the cows are blue, and over hundreds and hundreds of years there's been quite a lot of interbreeding of livestock - the result being blue cows in Lud. Even though everything from Fairyland is taboo in modern Lud, fairy influences have crept into its everyday life- people swear with fairy swearwords, for example, and sing fairy folksongs, without really being aware of what they're doing. It's all so brilliantly imagined and beautifully described (it looked absolutely lovely in my head) that the world of Lud jumps into life right off the page at you and hangs around in your head long after you've finished reading.

I do think the real virtue of Lud-in-the-Mist is Mirrlees's imagination. It's got a sweet but slightly inconsequential plot that's somewhat oddly resolved, and it does sometimes suffer from over-quaintness of metaphor. But her idea is so bloody great that I forgive her all of her small failures of execution. It's absolutely outstanding fantasy, and it deserves to be on top ten lists everywhere.

You know I liked a book if I recommend it to people, and so far I've told five friends about Lud-in-the-Mist and successfully lent it to one. Which I'm now regretting, because I want it back. It's that rare mix of incredibly comfortable and oddly upsetting, and I think I need to read it again.

Or maybe twice more.

4 stars.