New Year's Excitements and Writing Resolutions: 2014

Hello and welcome to 2014! A lot has changed since I wrote out my year's goals in January 2013.

Did I achieve any of them? Well . . . 

2013: the year that I ended up here

- I got an agent for my crime novel. In fact, Murder Most Unladylike, the first in my middle-grade murder mystery series featuring Daisy Wells and Hazel Wong, will be coming out in the UK in May this year (it'll be out in the US in spring 2015). So, you know, I'd say I pretty much ticked that one off.

- I also finished that other book I was writing. It's not Hazel and Daisy at all, but I like it, and one day (in the far, far future) I'm hoping that you might get to like it too.

- I certainly did not get 25% of the 1001 Books project read last year. I feel a bit bad about that. But I did have a few other things going on.

- I don't think I wrote something every day. I certainly didn't write fiction every day. Raymond Chandler would be ashamed of me (sorry, Raymond Chandler). But I wrote quite a lot, and I'm proud of a fair to middling amount of it, and I think that's probably all most writers can ever truthfully say.

- I did begin to plan my books before I wrote them! Sort of, anyway. In 2013 I discovered spreadsheets, and now I love them. I also got much better at cutting the boring bits and getting to the action. When I was revising Murder Most Unladylike, I took to muttering INCREASE THE PERIL! as I typed, and that was very helpful. Everyone loves a bit of peril.

- I did not manage to cut out the dogs from my writing. Nor did I get rid of the murder element in my plots. I'm realising that both might just be inevitable. I did not write any short stories, or enter any competitions. And I did not get a pet lion. But I do still have a pet bearded dragon . . .

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And now, some new writing resolutions for 2014.

- I am going to finish Murder Most Unladylike 2, which at the moment is called Arsenic For Tea. I admit, this is less a resolution than a contractual obligation, but hey, whatever works. I am also going to make it a lot better than it is right now.

I shall mainly be channeling the work (though not the life) of this person

- When Arsenic for Tea has been finished, I am going to rework the Secret Project mentioned above, and see what happens to it.

- I am going to do school visits. And I am going to make them be awesome.

- I'm going to try again with that short story thing - I definitely want to write some, probably set in Hazel and Daisy's world.

- I'm going to try to keep reading as many different genres and types of book as possible. Now that I work with children's books as my day job, as well as being a children's writer, it can get difficult to step back and try new things, but I know that it's important. Plus, I love it.

- I also want to do more rereading. I need to remember that trying to read every book ever published is unachievable, and sometimes it is better to just pick up I Capture the Castle for the eleventh time.

- I want to help other writers achieve their goals. I'm part of the awesome Author Allsorts group, as well as SCBWI, and they're both fantastic support networks for UK children's and YA authors. But of course, they only work if writers do support each other, and work together - and that's what I want to do more of this year.

- And I want to champion children's and YA writing however I can. I want to celebrate the brilliant writers working today, and help spread the word about what fantastic children's books are out there.

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And finally, on to (some of the very, very many) upcoming 2014 titles I'm currently getting extremely excited about. 

- On January 14th, Hollow City, the sequel to Miss Peregrine's School for Peculiar Children, will finally be published. I have been raving about Miss Peregrine - a crazy, creepy fantasy illustrated with terrifying found photos - since I read it last year, and I am beyond excited for this.

- In February there's a new Helen Oyeyemi book called Boy, Snow, Bird. I absolutely love Helen Oyeyemi (she wrote Mr Fox, a gorgeous take on the gruesome Mr Fox fairytale), and I would quite like to be her friend. But since I can't, I'll make do with reading her books.

- In March, Non Pratt's debut YA novel Trouble will be out. I am lucky enough to know a huge number of incredibly talented people who are all releasing books this year, and I am excited about every single one of them (Liz de Jager's Banished! Emma Pass's The Fearless! Katy Cannon's Love, Lies and Lemon Pies! So many others that if I listed them all this list would stretch to forever and potentially break the Internet!), but I got to read Trouble at proof stage and was absolutely delighted by it. It's so funny and sweet, and it manages to make the beaten-to-death teenage pregnancy plot point seem fresh and interesting. It's going to be a hit.

- March is also the publication month for my most anticipated non-fiction title: Did She Kill Him? by Kate Colquhoun. I love Victorian murders, the Maybrick mystery is fascinating, and Kate's Mr Briggs' Hat (about the first railway murder) was great. I can't wait for this.

- Lauren Beukes's The Shining Girls amazed me and freaked me out in equal measure last year, so I'm very excited about her new book, Broken Monsters, which publishes in May. It sounds a bit like sci-fi crime-novel Frankenstein meets The Island of Doctor Moreau, so obviously I will be reading it as soon as it comes out.

- In June, Leigh Bardugo's Grisha trilogy concludes with Ruin and Rising. Once again, I am restraining myself from simply listing every single one of the fantastic books that Orion will be publishing this year (Tess Sharpe's heartbreaking thriller Far From You, the cosmically brilliant new 5-8 series Pets from Space, and many equally worthy others), but this is just SO EXCITING that I have to talk about it. Concluding a series is obscenely difficult to get right, but Leigh's absolutely done it. I can't wait for you all to go absolutely nuts about this.

- In July, Rainbow Rowell's next novel Landline is out. I love Rainbow Rowell. Have I said that enough? Every one of her books is nuanced, thoughtful and absolutely beautiful - and also an amazing love story. I'm bouncing off the walls about this one.

- In August, Ali Smith's got a new one out: How To Both. Ali Smith never bothers with things like nouns or verbs, and a lot of her books don't entirely make sense, but I like her writing a lot, and so I'm very excited for this.

- September can only be the month of a NEW SARAH WATERS NOVEL. Oh my GOD. It's called The Paying Guests, but for all I care it could be called The Very Boring Book of Nothing Happening. It's written by Sarah Waters, and that means that I'll be buying it anyway.

And one final date for your calendars - in May 2014, my very own book, Murder Most Unladylike, will be available to buy from all good UK bookstores. Isn't that exciting? And weird? And amazing? I'm hoping to be able to share the UK cover with you very soon (I've seen roughs, and it's going to be wonderful), and I'm also hoping to run a giveaway on this blog when the proof copies are in - which, again, should be very soon! So stick around.

All in all, I've got a really good feeling about this year.

Review battle: ladies of the night edition

The two books I'm reviewing today complimented each other in ways I didn't even fully realise they would until after I'd finished the second. The connection I was originally going for, ignorant of all but their blurbs, was prostitutes. The protagonist of the first, after all, is a very successful one, and the action of the second centres around a home for (supposedly) reformed ones. But while the wholly expected pleasure of the first is its unrepentant, unlikely, idiotic naughtiness, its absolute commitment to the propagation of the myth of the happy and gloriously rapacious prostitute, the unexpected joy of the second is how it takes that expectation and kicks it straight in the face.

So, step into the ring Fanny Hill and The Unpierced Heart.

Fanny Hill by John Cleland

This is a novel on my 1001 Books list, and one with a history as eventful as its contents. First published in 1748 while its author languished in debtor's prison, it's been in trouble with the censors ever since. It's got a long and proud tradition of being only available in underground, bootleg editions, and it wasn't until the 1970s that it was available to purchase in legal and unexpurgated form. Essentially, the courts decided that while it was obscene, they'd seen obscener, and that it's also a pretty well-written book whatever its content. And I'd have to agree.

Rest assured: this book is erotica. Of course it is. Approximately half of the words in it are descriptions of genitals, and most of the rest are lavish descriptions of how those genitals are used. But it's also a lot of really charming fun. Fanny herself is a lively, lovely heroine. She's sharp and determined, with a sexuality that's shown in a basically positive light, and her story is an engaging Bildungsroman with naughty bits. You want her to triumph over adversity and masculine wiles, and she does. Cleland's female protagonist isn't just languishing about like Clarissa (a character I hate so much that I swear to god I would set her on fire if I ever came across her in real life), she's getting up and taking control of her own fortunes. Yes, she's doing it by, er, having graphic sex with a lot of men, but this is a woman with ambitions and intelligence, who knows what she wants and gets it.

It's much clearer to me than it usually is why this book deserves a place on the 1001 list.  It's not just a good novel in and of itself, it's a foundational text for a genre which could be broadly defined as Books About Saucy Ladies of the Night, and which still sells today. The Crimson Petal and the White, Memoirs of a Geisha, Tipping the Velvet - they're all Fanny's progeny in one way or another.

Which brings me on to my next point. Yes, I enjoyed Fanny Hill. Yes, some bits of it are sexy. But others are much more problematic. A lot of episodes that are presented as happy fun sex times are, to put it baldly, rapes. Waking a woman up by having sex with her? That would be called rape. Grabbing a woman and forcing her to have sex with you? Yes, that's rape too. Sadly, many people in 2012 still struggle to understand what is rape and what is not (clue: rape is when you have sex with someone without their consent), so it's difficult not to conclude that Cleland, writing 250 years ago, was part of an anti-female culture so horrendous that he should get at least something of a pass. But acknowledging that doesn't make my discomfort with parts of Fanny Hill go away. A lot of this novel is sexploitation. Fanny and her female friends may be engaged in conning their johns out of some serious money, but they do it by allowing themselves to be abused and belittled in ways that are described for the express titillation of the reader.

So while reading Fanny Hill made me realise where a lot of the novels I love have come from, it also made me understand exactly what those more modern books are subverting. Tipping the Velvet, in particular, suddenly made about 100% more sense to me - while it essentially follows Fanny's main plot points (even down to some of the orgies), Waters makes her 'Fanny' a lesbian and gives her and the other characters back actual human emotions - like shame at being publically abused, or anger at being forced into prostitution. It was a huge aha! moment for me - I finally discovered what book Sarah Waters is mad at, and why she's justified in so being.

Actually, since Waters wrote an entire book pastiching Fanny Hill, I suspect she loves it even while she's being mad at it, which is pretty much how I feel myself. There's so much wrong with Fanny Hill's morality, and so many dumb contrivances in its plot, but all the same I also thought it was pretty great. And I'm not going to apologise for either emotion.

3.5 stars

The Unpierced Heart by Katy Darby

Katy, as well as being an author, happens to be my fellow Story Sunday editor over at Litro. When I first joined the team during my MA last year I told our boss Eric that I was writing an essay about Victorian women in public places and he said, "You should meet Katy. She's writing a book. It's about WHORES." "Horses?" I asked, bewildered. "WHORES!" said Eric. "WHOOOOORES."  And that was how I found out about Katy Darby.

Katy and I obviously have a lot of the same mind-furnishings. A pastiche sensation novel set in Victorian Oxford and written as a series of 'discovered' documents by linked narrators? It's like someone wrote the book I didn't know I wanted to read. After all, I grew up in the nerdy, donnish world of Oxford colleges (where the nineteenth century is still playing on repeat), and Wilkie Collins and friends were one of the best discoveries of my teenage years.

Sensation novels are so wonderfully plotted, so exciting (stuff happens! All the time!) and so much fun - but I've got to admit that most of their female characters are horrible. The blonde haired angel with the heart of a devil beating in her bosom, the mimsy little heroine so stupid she can barely spell her name and the smart lady too mannish to be loved are all tropes on constant repeat, and none of them (except maybe the smart woman) even vaguely resemble any real person I have ever met. But while there's nothing to be done with the output of long-dead authors, I'm damn sure (see above) that I want any modern takes on their genre to correct those errors. And Katy, I discovered to my joy about three quarters of the way through The Unpierced Heart, has answered my prayers.

Her anti-heroine Diana seems, at first meeting, to be a vapid, pornographic femme fatale through and through. She makes evil decisions for totally random reasons and ruins the lives of worthy men with callous abandon. First encountered by priggish frame narrator Edward Fraser when he is a Theology undergrad at Cambridge in the early 1880s, Diana's unfaithfulness has already destroyed two of her lovers. So when Fraser meets her again at Oxford, under a new name and with yet another one of his friends within her grasp, he determines to unmask her for the fiend she really is. Can he save his innocent friend, the pathologist Stephen Chapman, from falling prey to Diana's charms? Or will she triumph again?

That's the story that Darby is apparently telling. But, as the tale unfolds, it becomes clear that there's a whole lot more going on here. Without giving the (very satisfactory) twist away, it emerges that Diana has (gasp!) reasons for the things she does. She is actually... a human being! Thoughts go through her brain and emerge as ideas! It's a modern miracle.

Her settings and set-ups may be wholly sensation-novel conventional, but Darby has actually thought about what she's writing and the result is a very intelligent reimagining of all those thoughtless, worn-out sensation tropes. Fanny Hill temporarily seduced me into buying the myth of the willing prostitute, but The Unpierced Heart reminded me that, in reality, they inhabit a grim, dangerous and thankless world where a woman won't magically fall in love with the life she's been forced to lead. Diana comes to Oxford to run a halfway house for Jericho prostitutes (hence the title of the hardback edition of this book, The Whores' Asylum), and although most of said prostitutes are unrepentant, they are also wholly human. They're no better and no worse than the novel's men (and actually much better than its male villain), and that's as it should be. There are misunderstandings and stupid decisions on all sides, and the tricky plot rattles along under the steam of those confusions to produce a fast-paced and intriguing sensation narrative that's nevertheless a lot more emotionally real than the genre it's working from.

I honestly really liked this book. It's very clever, it's well written (with a good ear for the turns of phrase used by novelists from Darby's chosen period), it's set in one of my favourite eras and it's about one of my favourite places. Spot on, essentially. I may have liked Fanny Hill, but this descendant of hers is one that I both like and fully approve of.

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 - 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.