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.

'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.