'Could you marry me, Stephen?': Why Everyone Should Shut Up And Legalise Gay Marriage

Ugly cake toppers for all!

Today I'm going to take time out of my busy reviewing schedule to discuss something that I care a whole heap of a lot about: gay marriage.

Gay rights (and the fight for gay marriage) is very important to me. That's not just because some of my favourite friends and housemates happen to be gay and I want to go get drunk at their weddings, but because it seems so obvious to me that the combination of genitals possessed by a person and their partner can have no possible bearing on that person's goodness, decency and right not to get spat on in the street.

It beggars belief, to my mind, that anyone can honestly believe - as some people honestly do - that gay people either do not fall in love, or, if they do, that they do not deserve to be allowed to commit to that person and live peacefully and happily with them for as long as they both choose. The failure of empathy and imagination on the part of opponents of gay marriage is staggering. How can anyone who has ever had feelings for another human being not consider how they would feel if they were denied the ability to have a full and public relationship?

But, of course, these people don't, because as soon as the word 'gay' is mentioned all they can imagine is a ravening horde of rampant sex perverts, coming to infect all the heterosexuals in the world with a wicked gay virus. The fact that this has about as much likelihood of happening as we have of all flying to the moon on rainbow-coloured otters does not at all seem to strike them. Some people, let's face it, are idiots.

It's also important to remember, though, that some of the people who don't believe in gay marriage are not idiots. Despite all the goodwill they might have, most members of my mother's generation and above have to combat an enormous indoctrinated understanding that being gay is just plain bad. My mother tries so hard, and is technically extremely pro-gay rights, but all the same her default setting when faced with something gay is a sense of nervousness and slight embarrassment. I find it difficult to blame her. The belief system you grew up with will, to some extent, never leave you. (My father, almost a generation older, once greeted me on my return home with the news that he had just been 'massaged by a Turkoman'. What he meant was that a Turkish man had visited him for a physio session, but, er, it didn't quite come out that way, and I could not make him understand why his description of events might be slightly more problematic.)

Let's not listen to him

My point is that only one of these kinds of objections to gay rights ever has a chance of truly going away. There will always be idiots, but it's up to us to make sure that there don't have to be people who were brought up believing that being gay is wrong - and the only way to really ensure that is to give gay people exactly the same fundamental rights in law as their straight counterparts. We can't change all minds, for ever, but we can make sure that those minds that don't get changed are put on the wrong side of the law, where they belong.

Sure, you personally may not want to get gay married. If you are not gay, this is not a problem. Nor is it a problem if you are gay. No one forces straight people up the aisle, so gay people should likewise be free to stay single. But to make that choice, you have to have a choice to make. It's the same basic argument as for abortion: just because it's legal doesn't mean you have to have it. I personally wouldn't, but all the same I furiously defend other women's right to decide that they need to get one.

But why does all this matter? What's wrong with the way things are now? Gay couples have most of the same rights as straight couples, don't they, so what's the problem with just being different but equal?

Well, as soon as you consider the historical precident for 'differently equal' you'll see that it doesn't have the best track record. Yes, I'm being hyperbolic here, but my point is that picking out one group of people as negatively 'special' is a really, really bad idea. It sends subtle signals to the rest of the herd that those ones are weird. They're not like us normal people - and after that, the jump from 'not like us' to 'not as good as us' is actually barely a shuffle.

And, as is perfectly clear to me just from living my life that gay people bloody well are normal people. Some are fans of marmite, some are not. Some are good cooks and some are awful ones. Some crochet and some go to all night raves. There's no such thing as the gay 'type', there are just people who happen to be gay, and denying a person the ability to be who they are is just plain wrong.

Bringing the discussion round to literature (because I can't stay away from it for long), this week's reading for my Turn of the Century Representations of Sexuality module was, aptly enough, The Well of Loneliness by Radclyffe Hall, and reading it brought home to me, for about the thousandth time, how neverendingly important gay rights really is.

First published in 1928, The Well of Loneliness got tried and banned for being Too Lesbian - not entirely surprising, since it's astonishingly open and unapologetic about lesbianism, both in general and in particular.

Granted, I have some ideological problems with it - my own argument that there is no 'gay type' makes me disagree with a lot of the things it says. Hall was so desperate to prove that lesbianism was a natural state of being and not a choice that she used inversion theory, which basically says that lesbians are men trapped in women's bodies. It's an odd and vaguely offensive idea that's a sly pop at any woman who dares not to be ideally feminine: by the inversion theory, I, as a tall, awkward, clever girl who fences and likes to wear trousers, should be a pronounced and irredeemable lesbian. The fact that I'm not shows its very great flaws.

Today we'd be more likely to think that Hall's heroine, Stephen (yes, she's even got a man's name, it's not at all subtle) was probably transgendered, but - all that cranky stuff aside - the reason why The Well is still being read today despite its flaws is because it's astonishingly powerful on the subject of what happens when gay people are denied the chance to make a public committment to the person they love.

Don't get too close

Today we're more used to reading lesbian love stories with happy endings, but it takes a tragedy (and The Well of Loneliness ends very badly for all concerned) to really bring home how terrible it is to be a lesbian in a world without gay rights. Sarah Waters (who you should all read, by the way, she's great) writes historical romances where the lesbians miraculously find ways to be together, and she's not entirely wrong - there were plenty of lesbians who had long and happy partnerships. Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas, for example, spent most of their lives living together as a couple in Paris - but it's important to remember two things about stories like theirs. First, neither of them actually were French - they were in Paris partly because they couldn't be together in their native country - and second, no matter how much Gertrude treated Alice like her wife (ie, kind of badly, I'm no great fan of Gertrude Stein's relationship style), she could never actually make her Mrs Stein. They had to keep their relationship a secret from the rest of the world for their entire lives - and the pressure of that secrecy, as The Well of Loneliness shows, was something that could absolutely destroy even the most loving relationship.

Stephen comes from a wealthy English family, and she's (female) heir to an enormous country estate, Morton. Because of this, her concept of love is particularly public - what she's looking for, consciously or unconsciously, is a Lady of the Manor to manage her home by her side. But of course, Stephen is a woman herself, and that means that her chances of being able to install any beloved of hers at Morton is absolutely nil. Actually, because she's a lesbian, she can't even live there at all - her mother kicks her out and she has to go into exile in (you guessed it) Paris. Stephen's sexuality means that she just can't ever hope to have the kind of relationship she needs, and so every love that she ever has ends up running into an impassible wall.

The Well of Loneliness reminded me how important publicity really is to a successful relationship. A huge part of being in a relationship is speaking about it. It's not just the landed gentry who want to show off their partners. I love my boyfriend because I think he is a marvellous human being. If I could I would stick a flashing sign over his head that said LOOK AT THIS PERSON. HE IS AMAZING. AND HE IS MY BOYFRIEND. HA HA. The thought of not being able to tell people that he is my boyfriend, and to talk about how proud I am of him, is completely terrible - but that's exactly the situation Stephen and the other lesbian characters in The Well of Loneliness have to live with.

The consequences of this kind of enforced secrecy are brought home again and again. Fairly early in the novel, Stephen falls in love with a woman who's already married. Stephen begs her to leave her husband, who she doesn't love and who's an utter pig. "But could you marry me, Stephen?" asks the woman - and obviously, with the best will in the world, the answer is no. Stephen's got nothing to offer her in exchange for the security of her present relationship, and from that moment you realise their affair is doomed.

Later, in Paris, another character's lifelong companion dies, and the woman wants to be able to bury her body. But who are you? asks the nurse. Are you family? The woman has to say that she's not. Legally, she's no one. She has no status as her girlfriend's lover and therefore no right to have anything to do with her death.

It doesn't have quite the same ring to it

Even when Stephen has found the love of her life, Mary, she's constantly tormented by the fact that she'll never be able to offer Mary the life that either of them wants. She loves Mary as much as a man would, but the fact that she's a woman means that she's incapable of actually proving it officially. The unhappy ending, it's implied, isn't either inevitable or necessary - or, more importantly, it shouldn't have to be. To Hall, the problem is obvious, and the solution to all that heartbreak is just as simple. Lesbians need to be allowed to get married.

It's pretty terrible that, more than 80 years after she wrote The Well of Loneliness, we're still hesitating and nitpicking over the issue. To me, and to Radclyffe Hall, it's so bloody obvious. Either you leave a large and inevitably present group of people to live miserable lives, or you let them be unoffensively and unobtrusively happy. End of discussion.

So, to conclude, please would you all fill out this Home Office survey about attitudes to the proposed gay marriage law, and also - and perhaps more importantly, in a holistic sort of way - please would you support gay marriage.

Better late than never.

Review - There But For The

Last November, in a flush of A. S. Byatt-induced excitement, I recommended my grandmother Angels and Insects. This was well-intentioned but (I realise now) a grave and awful error, because now whenever I communicate with her she asks me to tell her about something else just as amazing and I have nothing to say. Sad but true: it's been over four months since I've read any new fiction that I thought was really exceptional. All the good stuff has been required reading for my course (which proves that an English Literature MA has some use after all).

But - at long, long last- I think I've finally found something that approaches (even if it doesn't entirely reach) real excellence.

Just in time, because I was beginning to lose hope.

There But For The (no, I haven't missed a word, that's really the title) is the newest novel by Ali Smith, a writer who has previous form for being pretty great. My favourite thing by her is a novella she did for the Canongate Myths series called Boy Meets Girl, a retelling of the story from Ovid's Metamorphoses about a girl who problematically falls in love with another girl and then gets turned into a man by the gods so that they can get married. If that sounds like something the Republicans might approve of, don't worry. Ali Smith's version definitely isn't.

The basic premise of There But For The, in as far as it has one and isn't just a tenuously connected group of short stories (which I think is what it really is) is as follows. A man is invited to dinner at the house of people he doesn't know. The people turn out to be objectionable asses. The man goes upstairs and locks himself into their spare room and refuses to come out ever again.

Beginning of story.

Don't worry, you'll never find out why the man, Miles, does this. What you will hear about are all the people whose lives - indirectly or directly - have been made subtly better by Miles's existance both before and during his voluntary-imprisonment episode. It's all extremely tangential, and you've got to be sharp to pick up the threads that link each part together. Honestly, there are some hints I didn't get, and they're still bugging me now (is the first short story actually real, and if so how? What happened to May's daughter? Is Mark actually being haunted?) but I think that might be what Ali Smith is trying to do. Life (she's saying) is a bit weird and lumpy and nonsensical but all the same it's fascinating, and everything you find out just leaves you wanting to know more.

Granted, her portrayal isn't perfect. Smith has an annoying unwillingness to use speech marks like a normal (English language using) human being, and (more importantly) at times she gets far too wrapped up in a desire to be Relevant to Modern Life. Like most attempts, this just feels like somebody trying too hard to be serious and not managing it. At one point, for example, she has her characters talk about remote-controlled toy-sized drones that can kill you. Yes, yes, very horrifying, but the scene doesn't actually do anything as far as the novel is concerned. It's just there, being lazily right-on and making the reader feel smug about how much better they are than the idiot characters who think it's a good idea.

However, in the main I think Smith writes excellently, and it's the charm and drive of her writing style that carries There But For The along. She's got a flair for describing the weird in everyday life, and where I think Smith's particularly brilliant is the way she writes children. Her kids are alert, smart and casually bizarre in the way that actual children have. Children in books tend to be either tiny, unnerving adults or lisping poppets, whereas in real life they are like the little girl I saw on my way to Tesco's yesterday, who was running along shouting "CHEERS! CHEERS! CHEERS! GRAARGH!" to each of the lions on the underpass mural. Smith's children enjoy things like accessorising tiaras with combat trousers, hearing facts about medieval martyrdoms and standing on their hands while singing nonsense rhymes about the universe. In other words, they're normally abnormal, and it's incredibly refreshing.

As I've said, Ali Smith's more of a short story woman, and you can tell. There But For The's only real flaw in my eyes was its complete and utter lack of any kind of resolution. It began, stuff happened, more stuff happened and then it stopped. The situations she creates are so interesting, and her characters are so empathetic (the Bayoudes, especially, are wonderful), that for a while I seriously considered going over to Ali Smith's house, breaking in and rooting around under her bed to see if she'd left any more bits of story lying about.

What I'm trying to say is: I liked this book. After all the dodgy stuff I've been wading through lately, this one was delightful. It was charming, intriguing and a very smooth and engrossing read, and when I finished it I wished it had been twice as long. However, (just in case, in a mystical twist of the universe, Ali Smith happens to be reading this) a sequel would do just as well.

4 stars.

Review - Flaubert's Parrot

Oh readers, I am tired. As the wise man never said, but should have, if you fly to another country for 24 hours, and then immediately get on a train to the Midlands for another 24 hours, do not expect, when you finally get back to London, to be able to do anything more meaningful than sit and stare blankly at the wall. This week I had things to do and people to see, and I ended up just lying in a prone position and reading all 500 pages of Tipping the Velvet, because it was near me and I couldn't move and it turned out that my brain needed an enormous helping of delicious faux-Victorian literary comfort food to recover itself properly.

Whilst I was on my travels, though, I read something that (to continue the food metaphor) was not so much bountifully delicious as thin and sandy and requiring a lot of mental digestion. Flaubert's Parrot is by Julian 'Arthur and George' Barnes, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1984 and appears on the (accursed) 1001 Books list. It is a book with pedigree, and from the very first page you can tell that it is going to be Very Clever.

To be fair to it, I think it required the kind of attention and brain-power that, at that particular moment in time, I wasn't able to give, and so it merely left me feeling Very Confused Indeed.

I have to admit, I thought Flaubert's Parrot was actually going to be about a parrot. Obviously, I am not postmodern enough. Fool that I was, expecting a linear story with a single viewpoint to the narrative! Actually, it's a clipped up and deconstructed let-me-dazzle-you-with-my-playful-erudition quasi-biography of Gustave Flaubert, author of Madame Bovary and also other less famous books.

Every chapter is presented differently - one's Flaubert's key dates done three ways, for example, and another's his life from the perspective of his mistress. The title comes from the fact that Gustave not only enjoyed comparing himself to animals, but may or may not have owned (or borrowed) a parrot, which may or may not now be on display in a museum, and may, in fact, be more than one parrot, which may (or may not) be in itself an amusing story. Julian Barnes thinks it is. I'm not so sure.

I think I found this book so difficult to like because of an early and never remedied failure to care about either Flaubert or his parrot(s). I suspect that Flaubert's Parrot would have worked an awful lot better had I come to it knowing anything at all about Gustave Flaubert apart from the fact that he wrote Madame Bovary. The reader (I think) is meant to experience a delighted recognition - ah! Flaubert, that old rogue! I never knew he liked camels/ wrote about soup/ went to Egypt! How jolly! - whereas all I experienced was a low-level but persistant annoyance and a general sense that I was Missing Important Jokes.

Flaubert's Parrot is one of those books in which an academic makes snippy, sniping in-jokes about other academics. This tends to either work beautifully (see: Possession) or go horribly, horribly wrong (see: most other books with this plot device). In this case, I think it went the way of the latter option. True, there are some good digs at critics who are needless nitpickers (I've read far too many articles like the 'What Colour are Emma Bovary's Eyes?' one he takes the rip out of), but the general effect is both elitist and oddly stressful. There's a particularly mad chapter where the narrator frantically defends Flaubert's honour as a writer against the (theoretically) hostile reader - but since I don't know anything about Flaubert, I personally don't have any complaints to raise against him. So why (I wondered) am I being yelled at? The whole project, in fact, comes over (or at least it did to me) as being just a little too cranky to be fun, too much of some random dude riding his weird little hobby horse all over my brain.

Actually, the narrator's slightly more interesting than I just made him sound. Geoffrey Braithwaite - a Flaubert enthusiast/maniac, of course - starts off seeming like he's just going to be a Julian Barnes avatar, an older middle aged white man who's a bit lonely and pedantic. But, just like in Arthur and George, Barnes pulls a smart little identity trick, and who Geoffrey is, and why he's writing about Flaubert at all, turns out to be, to some extent, the point of the book. I admit, it's clever, and when I finally got it I looked back on what I'd just read in an entirely different way.

But all the same, my overall impression of Flaubert's Parrot was of something far too clever-clever for its own good. I came out of it feeling, not that I was friends with Flaubert, but that Geoffrey Braithwaite was, and that Geoffrey Braithwaite was slightly crazy.

Not one to read lightly.

2.5 stars.

Review - Pure

So! In the last few weeks:

- I went to see The Woman in Black. You probably... shouldn't. Just read the book.

- I wrote about how romance in fiction is exactly like stalking.

- I also read something that wasn't non fiction! Pure by Andrew Miller just won the Costa book of the year, and since it has been on my radar since mid-2011, when my ex-colleague-with-impeccable taste read the proof and told me it was good, I decided that now I really had to see what all the fuss was about. So I did.

And now I'm going to review it.

I've got to say, I've missed fiction. It's so loose, so free, so unconstrained by things like facts and reality. When you write fiction you can totally fill your book with mysterious violet-eyed miners and extraordinarily tall, good-hearted prostitutes who ply their trade in exchange for fancy copies of The Sorrows of Young Werther.

Or maybe that's just this particular novel. Yes, Pure contains both of the above characters, plus a mentally unhinged priest and an inexplicable elephant, and everyone (apart from the elephant) spends their time running around in a lavishly disgusting cemetary that is the literal representation of all that is rotten in the state of France in 1785. As far as plot goes, engineer Jean-Baptiste is called in to clean up Paris's Les Innocents graveyard, which is beginning to, er, overflow its contents into neighbouring houses and streets, spreading decay and disgustingness into everyday life - much, in fact, like a certain Ancien Regime I could mention. Yes, Jean-Baptiste (which is, meaningfully, French for John the Baptist) must clear away the old, stop the rot and sweep in a new age of purity. Do you see where this is going yet?

Just from the back cover, you can tell that Pure is going to be a novel with serious underlying concepts. The blurb (actually a quote from the book's final chapter) promises

A year of bones, of grave-dirt. Of mummified corpses and chanting priests. A year of rape, suicide, sudden death.

Setting aside the problems I have with the concept of a year of rape, do you see the THEMES that are emerging here? There's DECAY, there's DEATH and more DECAY and yet (as you discover when you read the book) in the midst of the DEATH and DECAY there's the possibility of finding PURITY. But only with an effort. A few chapters of Pure and I was seeing decay everywhere. I started to feel the kind of mental paranoia that I usually get from reading too much Freud, except instead of penises everything was rotting.

Pure's definitely not one for delicate stomachs. Actually, one of my favourite things about it is its complete commitment to the atmosphere it wants to produce. Things drip, things leak, there are yellow puddles, rotting teeth and cracking plaster, and everyone's clothing is covered in suspicious stains. It's firmly in the 'goitres, missing fingers and syphilitic children' sub-genre of historical fiction that's become so popular recently (the best example of which is the absolutely brilliant The Crimson Petal and the White by Michel Faber. You should all read it if you haven't already). Miller's got a clear, vivid writing style that's a (slightly gross) pleasure to read, and it lends itself well to his choice of subject.

But while the atmosphere's good, sometimes the content is a little more iffy. I ended up being unexpectedly bothered by Pure's presentation of women. Now, I'm not someone who demands that all female characters should be strong and consistently awesome. I've met just as many idiotic women as I have men. But what I do require is that female characters should behave with intent and agency and some sort of acknowledgement that they too are reasonable human beings. I believe it has been scientifically established by now that a the inside of a woman's brain cannot be compared to what would happen if a troop of vervets took over a spaceship.

And yet, when I think about Miller's female characters, I struggle to explain a single one of their actions in a way that's more meaningful than 'she did it because she is a woman'. I mean, one character actually goes mad at exactly the same time that she gets her first period. I really hope that's a coincidence, but I strongly suspect it's not. It's meant to mean something. Women in Pure are like sexy, insane pinball machines operated by rodents, as leaky and in need of fixing as the cemetary Jean-Baptiste works in. It's a worldview that I'm not impressed by, and I'm not sure why Miller thinks he can get away with it. It's not deal-breakingly bad, but it's there, and it bothered me. That's the problem with having THEMES - your readers become so very attuned to what you're doing that they may notice things you didn't entirely intend to show.

This is exacerbated by the fact that there's just not very much body to the story Miller's trying to tell. It's all drum-roll and no payoff, all heave and (to use a metaphor Miller would be thoroughly in favour of) no puke. We're meant to read Pure and immediately understand that this is 1785 and the French Revolution is looming up just around the historical corner, but, apart from characters discussing The Party of the Future and going to splash some slightly lame anti-monarchical graffiti near the Bastille, nothing particularly revolutionary actually happens. A guy gets asked to clear out a graveyard; he clears out the graveyard; end of story. True, Doctor Guillotin pops up to poke at the bones that get unearthed and the miners hired to help Jean-Baptiste are discontented (don't worry, though, they'll still be discontented 100 years later, in time for Zola to write Germinal about their plight), but it's all oddly coy. I suppose there's so much meaning crammed into Pure that there's not much room left for a plot.

Talking of Zola, Pure definitely gives off whiffs of his style. In Pure, people are feral and oddly shaped, and prone to having sex in public places. There are also strong flavours of Perfume, in that there's a definite sense that a murder may occur at any moment, and a smattering of the kind of weirdness you find in a good Jeanette Winterson novel. All of these are novelists I like, and I think on the whole I did like Pure, but it was so conscious of itself, so intent on what it was doing thematically, that sometimes it was difficult to just read the story without being bludgeoned over the head with meaning.

So, did I enjoy Pure? Broadly, yes I did. It's dark, dirty, fun and easy to read. But does it have a lot of flaws? Definitely. Does it deserve to be Costa Book of the Year? I'm not so sure about that. And could Tea Obreht and The Tiger's Wife wipe the floor with Andew Miller and Pure? Absolutely they could.

3.5 stars.

Review - Constance

The wives of great men are boring.

At least, that's the opinion of Gertrude Stein in her book The Autobiography of Alice B Toklas. Allegedly by her wife-in-all-but-name Alice and apparently the story of  'the wives of geniuses I have sat with', it's actually a biography written by Stein, and what it's really about is the geniuses themselves, because those are the people readers actually find interesting. So says Stein, anyway.

Stein's enormous ego aside, she does actually have something of a point. While she's in one room, hanging out with Picasso and Matisse and working out Cubism and Modernism (as you do), Alice is next door with Fernande Picasso, talking about... hats. Unfortunately, I know where I'd rather be a fly on the wall.

But at the same time, it's not only the geniuses who deserve to have their stories told. History isn't just big men in little rooms, and as both a historically-interested person and a woman I like hearing about women who took the bad historical hand they were dealt and made something of themselves despite the restrictions they had to operate under. So while, sometimes, I think the feminist reclamation initiative is reaching slightly (as in the case of Catherine Dickens - I've written about her in my blog for Litro), I do think it's an incredibly important project, and one that can yield some awesome results. And so it is for Constance Wilde, wife of the more famous Oscar.

The lady un-vanishes

The more I read of Constance, the new biography by Franny Moyle, the more I felt like I not only approved of Constance, but actually liked her. Constance, as a person, was great. She was smart (she put herself down on the 1871 and 1881 censuses as a 'scholar'), she was funny (her letters are masterpieces of sass), she committed herself to everything she could (including the 'healthy' dress movement, several cults and the beginning of women's lib) and all in all she was supremely uninterested in sitting on her behind and doing nothing.

In her own time, she was actually almost as famous (or notorious) as Oscar himself. If Hello! magazine had been around, she would have featured in it every week in a new and completely mad outfit. A slightly reluctant but very visible public figure, she was also - which I did not know - a fairly well-known children's writer. She published quite a few fairy-tale-style short stories, and there's even new speculation that she might be the real author of 'The Selfish Giant'.

Constance was maybe a little whacky (witness the cults and her obsession with Spiritualism), and somewhat obtuse when it came to her husband's extramarital relationships, but I can imagine meeting her and finding that we genuinely had a lot to say to each other. (Contrast this to my imaginary meeting with Catherine Dickens, which would involve me saying "My, what a lot of children you have! Your husband is an awful man," and then the two of us staring at each other awkwardly until it was time to leave.)

A few months ago I read Richard Ellmann's tome of a Wilde biography (aptly entitled Wilde), and, exhaustive as it was, I couldn't help but feel that it missed something crucial. Wilde was an outrageous exhibitionist, mad, bad and fond of turning up places looking like a cello or a sunflower. Ellmann's book, though, manages to make him, and the life he led, seem boring. After Ellmann, I wanted a book that'd tell me the story of Oscar Wilde with as much shock and gossip as possible, and that's exactly what Constance does. Moyle's got a chatty, scandalous style that'll drive you mad if you want serious scholarship, but if you're looking to have fun with history you'll be delighted by it.

I think Moyle gets a good balance between showing Constance as an individual and talking about the experiences she shared with her husband. Constance, in Constance, isn't just a presence in the background, but neither is Oscar - and neither, interestingly, are their two sons Cyril and Vyvyan. If Ellmann largely forgot the wife, he most certainly forgot the children - Cyril and Vyvyan are just walk-on blobs in Wilde. In Constance, though, we get to hear more of how they felt, and what, as children of such weird, brilliant parents, their lives were like, and the result is fascinating.

Not that Moyle doesn't have her faults. At times she's a fairly lazy writer - you get infuriating sentences like

It would be a cause that in the fullness of time Constance would espouse more fully and formally.

Where was her editor? Never mind that, where was her brain?

She certainly isn't a rigorous academic. I suspect that Constance herself could school her biographer on study skills. Moyle has a habit of randomly generalising for the sake of her plot, and even though it didn't bother me unduly I had occasional raised-eyebrow moments. But, as I said, this book is meant to be fun, a razzle-dazzle joyride through an interesting woman's interesting (and ultimately very sad) life, and it succeeds in being exactly that.

Moyle's close to being the perfect biographer for the Wildes. Naughty, funny and irreverent, she conveys their scandalous lives in delicious (if not exacting) style, and ultimately managed to convince me that Oscar and Constance really did, in their own strange ways, love each other. I know! I was surprised too. But that's the nice thing about Constance. It's telling you a story you know, but in an entirely different way, one that, as I've said before, definitely deserves to be told.

Wives of geniuses, despite what Gertrude Stein may think, can be very interesting indeed.

3 stars.

Review - The Man on Devil's Island

HOUSEKEEPING:

- The kind people at Writersdock have struck again, and this time they've done an interview with me. I'm immensely flattered, although I still think they may have gotten a little confused and actually meant me to interview them. Regardless, it's up on their site and you can read it here.

- I've done a review of the new NT production of She Stoops to Conquer over at Litro, and also blogged about why you ought to be able to bring up Terry Pratchett in a university seminar.

REVIEW:

I've been on a historical non-fiction kick recently, possibly because I want to read books that my English-lit-crit brain won't automatically start analysing for theme and word choice and Deeper Meaning, but also because I do love history. I once almost read History at university, before I realised that I was being influenced by my father coming into my room several times a day and saying YOU SHOULD READ HISTORY AT UNIVERSITY, whereas what I really enjoyed about history was that it was like literature, except with real people.

I've always loved stories, and the real stories that history spits out not only tend to be madder than most fiction but also give you opportunity to get fascinatingly intricate with the detail of what happened on the night of August the 7th. Obviously, my favourite sort of history is crime, but really, there's not much that doesn't interest me.

Certain bits of history, though, seem to come up again and again in my reading. One of those is the Dreyfus Affair. It just keeps on being mentioned in passing, as something very important, but not important enough to explain - there's a tiresome assumption with these sorts of things that the reader knows all about them already. So when I saw Ruth Harris's book, The Man on Devil's Island, I decided to lay my ignorance to rest and find out who Dreyfus was and what the hell happened to him.

Now, before we go any further, I'm going to explain as briefly as I can what did actually happen, not only because it's very interesting, but because even the Wikipedia article is horribly obtuse.

In 1894, the French government was about as paranoid as the American government is today. They'd begun their terrible run of losing every war they fought (one of the worst results of this was having to cede Alsace-Lorraine to the Germans in 1871), and they saw enemies lurking about everywhere, ready to take more of their land. So when they discovered a letter in the German embassy proving that someone was spying for Germany, they went slightly insane. They needed a culprit, and after an extremely short and completely rubbish investigation they more or less settled on a random man, artillery officer Alfred Dreyfus, because he was a bit stuck up and odd, and also (probably) because he was Jewish.

Dreyfus was swiftly convicted in military court on completely trumped-up and falsified evidence and packed off to a prison island, but while he was languishing people back home in France started noticing that he had been falsely charged, and a movement began to get him exonerated. About half of France (including Zola) were violently for Dreyfus, and the other half (including most of the military, who had been the big movers behind the original conviction) were violently against him. The whole thing brought up a lot of buried issues, like anti-semitism and national identity, and by the time the Dreyfusards managed to get a re-trial in 1899 it wasn't really about Alfred Dreyfus at all, but what he mystically represented.

Alfred was finally pardoned - although never actually exonerated, even though the actual culprit (a man called Esterhazy) was fairly open about having done it - in 1900. It was a fairly sad and inconclusive end, and no one (apart from Alfred) came out of it looking impressive at all.

And that's the very, very potted history of the Dreyfus Affair.

Annoyingly, in The Man on Devil's Island, Harris does seem to some extent to be afflicted by the assumption that her readers already know the story she's telling. Granted, what she's trying to do is less about explaining the linear story of events and more about tracing influences and movements among the people involved in the Affair, but I did still find myself wishing that she wouldn't jump about so much in the timeline. She'll start paragraphs by saying things like 'Although this was not relevant until the second trial...' when we hadn't TALKED about the second trial yet, and I had no idea there even WAS one - but despite this failing, she writes well, if in slightly dense prose, and she conveys the characters of the human beings involved in the drama with great (scholarly) panache.

And my goodness, were there a lot of human beings involved in the Affair. It seemed to me at times, bedazzled by the hail of names I was being subjected to, as though every person in France made some sort of contribution to proceedings. Not only did all the politicians, academics, writers, journalists, officers and lawyers get involved, but completely random people kept popping up to convey their thoughts and feelings on the matter. Over the course of the Affair, for example, Mrs Dreyfus got thousands and thousands of letters from total strangers who either hated her or were under the impression that they were already best friends because they'd read about her in the papers.

The Dreyfus Affair really did seem to have an extraordinary capacity for turning ordinary people into nutters, something that Harris conveys very well. When you hear about two factions arguing, you imagine something quite rarefied and mainly carried out in the correspondence pages of newspapers, but no - grown-up human beings from both sides got so angry about the Affair that they would actually go out into the streets and punch each other in the face. Literally. People got shot, they lost their jobs, they stopped talking to their families - if you want an English comparison, the nearest thing I can think of is the Civil War. It was that bad.

Not that many of the people in question weren't somewhat insane to begin with. The anti-Dreyfus crew boasted a man who wore mandrake root on a chain around his neck to ward off Jewish black magic, and the Dreyfusards had the scientist who first put forward (seriously, I might add) the existance of ectoplasm.

One of the best things about The Man on Devil's Island is how even-handed it manages to be. It's very easy - as Harris says - to think that Dreyfusard=liberal=GOOD, and anti-Dreyfusard=fascist=EVIL, but like all binaries it doesn't really bear looking into. Both sides had their share of anti-Semites, corrupt idiots and philanderers, and both sides did some pretty gross and shady things in the pursuit of what they thought was right.

Many people who joined the anti-Dreyfusard side just thought that it was the only way to protect their country and their society and to hold on to a unified French identity. They weren't really interested in the innocence or otherwise of a single insignificant man - and nor, before you think the other side was any better, were many of the Dreyfusards. They wanted a separation of Church and state and a reduction of the military's powers, and the Dreyfus Affair just turned into something  they hoped would help form a legal precident. When it began to look as though Dreyfus would lose his second trial, for example, his closest supporters seriously considered letting him die in custody, just to prove their point.

So everyone was an ass! That's the basic message of The Man on Devil's Island, anyway. Alfred Dreyfus got hung out to dry by his 'friends' as well as his enemies, and nothing much was accomplished apart from the airing of a lot of issues that keep coming back to bite the French, even to this day. Harris, interestingly, cites the recent ban on the wearing of headscarves as an example of a continuation of fears about the assimilation of different religions into French society that really began with Dreyfus.

It took me a long time to get through The Man on Devil's Island - as I said, it was dense (though I think, with the topic in question, it has to be) - but I'm glad I did. I'm still not convinced I entirely Get the Dreyfus Affair, but I understand a lot more about it, and about French society in general, than I did before, and that's always a good thing. Harris has a lot of interesting and well-argued thoughts about a very interesting case, and though I'm not sure if this is a good grounding in Dreyfus, it's certainly a good book.

3.5 stars.

Review - The Call of the Wild

Staring. Staring. STARING.

Today one of my seminar tutors was talking about war literature and said that Birdsong was a very bad book. I got so excited to discover a kindred spirit that I shouted "I KNOW, RIGHT?! I KNOW!" into his face. I think I alarmed him. It was worth it.

For the record, I watched the first 30 minutes of the BBC adaptation and then sunk under the sheer amount of fish-like gazing I was being subjected to. I will say it was better than its source material, but that's not difficult. (Yes, I am now firmly in the anti-Birdsong camp. It is a scourge upon this earth. Come at me.)

What was good, though - I think I may have mentioned this before - was the BBC's Sherlock. I've reviewed it - and talked about what makes a good adaptation - over at Litro, and I've also done a piece on why Culture should be for everyone (but Ulysses is very bad).

Now. I keep saying I won't review the books I read for my MA course. And then I read a set text and end up weeping covertly into an airplane window so the guy sitting next to me won't think I am mad or regretting my decision to commit an act of international terrorism (though considering this flight was going to Cork I'd have really been thinking outside the box, target-wise. Note: I am a law-abiding tender-hearted humanist. If any policemen are reading this, I'm joking, don't arrest me).

Anyway, my point is that some books are too good not to tell you about, and so it is with The Call of the Wild. 

The Call of the Wild is great in two very different ways. The first sixty pages (it's a tender morsel of a thing at just under 100 pages) make up one of the greatest wilderness novels I've ever read, simply because Jack London has realised something really crucial about wilderness novels: if your protagonist is a human man, it's never going to work out. Your guy can get busy hefting hacksaws and bringing down bison but ultimately he will feel the call of cooked food and toes that are not frostbitten, and he will go back to New York, or London, or wherever it is, and get hitched.

In fact, most wild men aren't really that wild at all. Robinson Crusoe looked at nature and saw a table, and from then on people in wilderness novels have approached the landscape in terms of the best setting for their new log cabin. But if at the centre of every man's heart is a large feather bed, in the heart of every dog lurks a wolf, ready to jump out and rip everything to shreds. Therefore, if you make your protagonist a large dog, and stick him in the middle of the snowy wastes, then shit, my friends, is going to go down and it's never going to stop.

The Call of the Wild is the story of Buck, a large dog (you see where I am going with this) who gets kidnapped from his cushy home in Southern California and shipped off to the Klondike goldrush to become a sled dog. Horribly mistreated and forced to fend for himself, his layers of good-doggishness get stripped away to reveal the neolithic badass wolf beneath. Buck goes wild, and then wilder, and it's all so incredibly hardcore that even reading it makes you feel awesome by association. By page 40 I  wanted to run straight up the nearest mountain and punch the sky in the face.

And then, just as I was powerfully psyched and ready to see Buck become king of the world, the novel changed pace and became one of the most beautiful human-dog relationships I've ever read. Buck is rescued from particularly wicked owners by the gentle woodsman John Thornton, and they fall instantly and madly in... love, I guess, that special sort of human-dog adoration that's almost better than anything you can get from another person.

This is something that has a huge capacity to affect me. I lost the canine love of my life two years ago and to a large degree I think I'm still in mourning for her. When she died it felt as though I'd lost a family member, and even now I have moments when I think of her and feel absolutely bereft, that I'm missing something I'll never get back again. So the bond between dog and human, if written well, has a great potential to make me cry. But I defy even you, dogless ones, not to feel a pang at the moment when John Thornton puts his entire life savings on the line over a bet that Buck can drag half a ton (because he thinks that Buck is the best dog there is and won't hear anyone say otherwise), and then Buck does it, on his own, out of sheer mad fidelity to his master.

Where it goes after that I won't say - but really, I just want to know where this book has been all my life. It's wonderful. Brutal and incredibly sweet by turns, it's got dogs, nature, Victorian adventure and most importantly DOGS, and I am absolutely writing my essay about it when the time comes.

And best of all, it's on the 1001 Books list.

4 stars.