Jane Austen and the Missing War

When I was studying Jane Austen for ‘A’ Level, I remember reading some crass comment which criticised her for not reflecting any of the ‘big picture’ concerns of her time. From Austen’s novels, this person sniffily concluded, you would never have guessed that Britain was at war at the time.
Which seems to me pretty much like saying that Father Christmas doesn’t work on his tan enough.

Well, possibly ‘twas ever thus because you can look in vain for any mention of the current conflict in the Gulf in most novels published since we went to war in Iraq. Maybe, as with Jane Austen, authors fight shy of mentioning it because they don’t feel qualified to do so. Maybe it’s a case of 'out of sight out of mind', it’s a war that’s happening far away in another country, despite daily news updates on pretty much any medium you care to mention. It doesn’t actually impact much on us, here in Britain. In fact, it probably impacts less on us than the Napoleonic wars did on Jane Austen’s contemporaries. Think of her novels – half the men seem to be in the army and if there were no officers, who would all the silly women simper at?

Minette Walters’ recent novels have bucked this ignore-the-war trend. Both The Devil’s Feather and The Chameleon’s Shadow bring the effects of war right into lives lived here in England. And not just war in the Gulf. The Devil’s Feather concerns itself with current continental African conflicts as well as those in Iraq and the continuing effects of war on men who served in the Falklands comes up in the Chameleon’s Shadow. Chalky, a homeless Falklands veteran, provokes all sorts of unpleasant thoughts in the mind of the Chameleon’s main character, Charles Acland, recently invalided out of the army himself.

In both The Devil’s Feather and Tthe Chameleon’s Shadow, war both damages and attracts the damaged to it and the incursion of the brutality and damage of war into apparently ‘normal’ life back home is one of the fascinating things about the books.

The effects of the past – whether it be war or damaging family dynamics – is a theme which runs deep in all Walters’s books. And, when you know her back-catalogue it’s hard to read ‘The Chameleon’s Shadow’ and not feel a suspicion that Charles Acland will turn out to have been a very damaged personality before he was blown up by an Iraqui roadside bomb.

His anti-social personality – pre-existent or not - doesn’t necessarily mean he is a sociopath, or that he is responsible for a series of apparently homophobic murders. Or does it?
Walters teases us right to the end - is he guilty or isn’t he - asking us to search our souls and see if we would exonerate Charles of responsibility for his actions, given what has been done to him. Has his responsibility been diminished? If so, what diminished it, war or childhood? And would one provide more excuse for the commission of murder than the other?

Discuss.

Crime fiction - why don't I write it?

Just been to Blockbuster (Blockie to us and probably also to you) and come back with three thrillers. OK, I was in that kind of mood, but it is probably the genre we watch most, despite the Ultimate Frisbee Freak and his friends trying to educate us with all his A Level film studies stuff.

In terms of books, I suppose my taste is similar. They say you should write the kind of books you enjoy reading, in which case I should probably be writing crime fiction. A quick look along our bookshelves (and anywhere else books can be crammed in lest they have to be recycled via the local Oxfam bookshop) reveals that at least a third of both my and the Other Half’s reading matter involves murder and mayhem. Well, mostly murder to be honest.

So why have I never written a crime fiction novel?
Well the quick answer is ‘Give me time, I’ve only written four novels altogether!’ The slower answer is that my first attempt was a kind of crime novel, though it was based on theft, not murder. When I sent it to an agent, she was complimentary enough about it but said that she didn’t think that was where my heart was. Hmmm…

Maybe my writing self is a bit like one of my own characters (see yesterday’s blog) my rational, planning self can’t make it do what it doesn’t want to do.

I blogged recently about the like/admire split in my reading matter. Maybe that’s at the heart of all this. I don’t want just to write the kind of book I like, I want to produce something which, if I read it, I would admire as well as like. And, though I admire as well as like Minette Walters (hopefully getting her new book, the Chameleon's Shadow, for my birthday – in expensive hardback!!! – if the Ultimate Frisbee Freak and the Bassist have got their act together) I think my writing self is quite well aware that I’d never be able to produce anything as good as her books. I mean, have you read Disordered Minds? It’s a tour de force. A literary novel which also happens to have a strong narrative drive.

Want to know what’s on the Blockbuster list of cheapies from tonight? OK.
Amnesia – John Hannah and Jemma Redgrave
Secret Window – Johnny Depp (there doesn’t need to be anybody else, does there?)
Murder by Numbers – Sandra Bullock (ditto)

I’ll let you know whether they were like, admire, or both.

Nice author, nice book?

I’ve just left a comment over at the Mostly Books blog which made me stop and think about my reading habits.
I was responding to the lastest post about a visit to the shop by author Julie Hearn. I said:
She sounded so fab that I went straight to her website. Then, because she still sounded lovely and her books sounded very much like the sort of thing I love, I to went to my local bookshop and bought the only one they had 'The Merrybegot'. It's already been promoted to the top of the 'to be read' pile!
Which it has.

But would I have bought Ms Hearn’s book if I’d thought it sounded great but she, personally, did not come across as the sort of person I would like to find myself stuck on a desert island with? [Or as a friend of mine from the former Yugoslavia says, darkly ‘in a bunker with’…] Do I, in other words, only read/buy books by people I like?

After racking my brains and casting an eye over the bookshelf pile which contains all the most recently read books in the house, I think the answer has to be ‘yes’. If I hear or read an author interview and the subject comes across as pretentious or misogynistic or objectionable, I probably wouldn't buy their books. Not because I wouldn't want to contribute to their bank balance (although...) but because reading something written by somebody whose basic attitude to people was so different to my own would probably lead to me feeling out of sorts and at cross purposes with what I'm reading. And life's too short, and I read too slowly, to spend time on novels which make you feel like that.

But what if the book was in a genre I really liked and that particular book seemed fantastically interesting?
Hmmm. Would I give up reading Minette Walters’ books if I found out that she was anything other than lovely? Or Philippa Gregory’s? Or Tracy Chevalier’s, Joanne Harris’, Sue Gee’s…

I suppose the cop-out answer is that these authors could not write such humane and engrossing books if they were unpleasant, narrow-minded or mean-spirited.

So, do I like books because I intuit, somehow, that their writers are nice people? Or because they give me an insight into other lives, other worlds and take me on a journey of discovery?

Perhaps it's just that the way my favourite writers look at the lives of their subjects and the world in which they live chimes with something in me.

Do other people read and enjoy books by authors whom they know they would dislike intensely if they actually met them? Or am I alone in my strange reading prejudices?