Eurovision follow-up and ways of wasting time

Nope, sorry, I don't understand it either. Britain was robbed - not of a victory, perhaps, but of a place among the top ten, or at least somewhere mid-field. The Brits did everything they could this year - at least everything I would have recommended - and still ended up third last in the Eurovision Song Contest. I voted for them (and for Poland: yes, you can do that), but it didn't help much.

It's a pity, because a little pro-European spirit in the UK would have been welcome about now. As they say in Star Wars: I have a bad feeling about this. Um, maybe we could let them win at football, or something?

What of the winner, then? Well, I didn't see that one coming. There's nothing wrong with Ukrainian Jamala's voice, nor her sincerity, but worthiness aside, this is a song with a scream in it - albeit a well-modulated one. Not something you'll find yourself humming in the shower, then. But we've had worse winners (Hard Rock Hallelujah, anyone?) and for that matter worse songs with screams in them in this competition. What's more, I had no real hope Sweden would win this year - I'm not sure we could afford it, for one thing - and Germany didn't deserve to (I'm not complaining about that last place - cripes). So congratulations Ukraine, and good luck with the, er, diplomatic aftermath.

On the plus side, Swedish Frans did really well - better than I'd expected - and Poland and Austria were favourites with the televoters, which rescued them from the bottom of the list. Russian Sergey got most of the popular votes, which was only fair. The Swedes put on a great show, Petra Mede shone again, and the parody of a typical winning Eurovision song in the mid-act was particularly funny. The overall quality of the competing songs was high: I may even buy the CD. All in all, not a bad Eurovision year.

The Eurovision froth was welcome, as I'm not in the mood for straining any cultural muscles at the moment, either in my reading or in my television viewing. I've given up on two historical crime novels lately and settled instead for a rereading (Jude Morgan's Passion, which I haven't written about specifically but still feels like blog ground already covered - it's great, though) and Discworld novel number four (Mort, promising, especially as Death is one of my favourite Discworld characters). As for TV, I haven't really put my back into finding some new addictive TV series. Increasingly, I find other ways of wasting my time when off duty. Watching YouTube clips is a real time bandit: it's hard to resist intelligent if nerdy twentysomething males presenting well-argued theories on such subjects as Pixar films and Disney princesses (yes really). Not to mention Top Ten lists with a villain theme, where I continually make the mistake of taking a look at too general lists where not a single one of the baddies on offer is personally known to me. Perniciously, these clips tend to be 7-15 minutes long, so you don't really register how time passes. You think "just one more", and suddenly, there's a whole hour gone.

For more concentrated time-wasting, watching The Clone Wars  on Netflix is preferable. It has no artistic or educational value and does not improve your mind one jot. It's too dull for kids and should be way too silly for grown-ups. But each episode is only about twenty minutes long, and the feeling that you have spent twenty minutes being no earthly use to anyone is oddly uplifting. I was even moved to do a modest stint of housework after one Clone session, muttering "every tuft of dust must be destroyed" in General Grievous-like tones in an effort to make hoovering feel less of a drag. Sadly, it didn't work.

Bankable good reads

Oversized paperbacks, of the kind that's often published now instead of/at the same time as the hardback, are a bit useless. They are just as heavy and awkward to carry around as a hardback, but they don't have the hardback glamour, the kind that proclaims: "look at me, I'm a real book lover". And yet I've bought two of these oversized monsters lately: the already mentioned The Secret Life of William Shakespeare by Jude Morgan and, in spite of my firm intention of waiting for the (real, packable) paperback, Bring Up the Bodies  by Hilary Mantel.

So why do it? Lack of patience plays a part, of course, but another factor is the longing for a read you know will be good, a sure thing. Morgan is one of the surest things going. I know I've said earlier that I prefer his Regency Romances to his more serious based-on-a-true-story historical fiction, but I'm starting to change my mind. True, in the more serious stuff you sometimes come across a somewhat too deep-seeming passage or a bewildering metaphor, but most of the time the author is spot-on, and he has a convincing quality that makes you think "yes, I bet X (=historical personage) was just like that". I gobbled up Secret Life in no time and wished it had been longer, especially as the action ends a bit abruptly.

I normally approve of Morgan's endings - for instance, he humanely chose to end The Taste of Sorrow with Charlotte Brontë contentedly married to Arthur Bell Nicholls instead of with her death - but here, I would have preferred him to go on, even if it did mean that he had to end at a less harmonious time in his subjects' life. Morgan tells part of the story from Mrs Shakespeare's, Anne's, point of view, and you have a feeling that he has an earnest wish for the Shakespeares' marriage to work out (which might explain why his Will is more than usually uxorious, only playing away after his marriage has broken down, if not quite irretrievably). When the book ends, it looks like the couple will be able to solve their differences, which is sweet in a way, but I mean - Will wasn't even done writing yet! I can't help feeling that there are more important things than his getting on with the little woman, who in spite of Morgan's best efforts still comes across as a bit of a stick-in-the-mud. And what about Ben Jonson, another important character in the book? He's left high and dry after suffering a great personal loss. I can think of more uplifting places to leave off a story, though Morgan's Jonson is so unshakeably self-confident you assume he'll bounce back from anything.

I realise that I, as a reader, may be partly responsible for the fact that Secret Life ends when it does. Morgan is probably one of those authors on a one-book-a-year contract, which means he can't go on spinning a yarn forever. And who demands such a punishing schedule from our favourite authors? We readers, that's who. Still, he could solve the problem by writing a sequel or, if necessary, a trilogy, which is what Mantel is doing with her Cromwell novels.

After Secret Life, I tried a historical novel with a Dickens theme, that turned out to be so flat I gave up in despair after only 50 pages. Then, I tried a novel by Joanna Trollope, The Men and the Girls - this one was well written, but not what you want to curl up with after a stressful day at work. The last thing you want to read about, when trying to forget your mundane but annoying problems, is other peoples' mundande but annoying problems. Fine for the lunch hour, but not for the bedside table. Enter oversized paperback number two, Bring Up the Bodies.

Oh, the bliss of reading something you actively enjoy. So far, I like Bring Up the Bodies even more than Mantel's first Cromwell novel Wolf Hall. Maybe it's because there's less ground to cover - only Anne Boleyn's fall from grace and the period leading up to it. I do miss Wolsey - long dead, but still fondly remembered by Cromwell - but bitchy Anne is always good fun. I can't say, this far, that the novel is as much of a white-wash of Thomas Cromwell as has been claimed. Yes, it does make a good deal of his good points - model father, kind employer, oh, and he has a social conscience too - but you still sense the full extent of his ruthlessness. And on the subject of Wolsey: Cromwell carries a grudge against all sorts of luckless bit-players who had anything to do with the cardinal's disgrace, but in the end, who carries the largest part of the blame? King Henry himself. So where's the seething revenge plot meant to bring him down?

The sweetest character in Bring Up the Bodies is Cromwell's son Gregory, tender and a bit gullible (though not as much as people think). Hm, hard-nosed dad, softie son - is this a family curse or what?                

Life and works

After having enjoyed a spot of literary tourism during my holiday (one week still to go, thank Heaven) and having started on Jude Morgan’s latest – The Secret Life of William Shakespeare  – I have reason to ask myself: why are we (people in general, and bookish people in particular) so interested in the lives of famous authors? After all, they often lead pretty unremarkable lives. Shakespeare is a case in point. True, his existence in London must have been mildly interesting, what with belonging to a company of players, getting chummy with a reckless earl, creating a character (Falstaff) who is such a hit with the monarch that she actually requests a sequel (royally commanded fan fiction!) etc. But we know next to nothing about his personality, and for all what we know to the contrary, his plays and poems have nothing whatsoever to do with his “real life”. Jane Austen is another example: I’m sure she herself took the fact that she “never met her Mr Darcy” with equanimity (how do we even know that Austen would have fancied a Mr Darcy?), but the lack of romance in her own life does come as a bit of a disappointment to her devoted readers.  Even a flamboyant author like Dickens cannot hope to live a life that matches his novels in incident (or villain-intensity). So why do we insist on exploring our favourite authors’ lives – why can’t we be content with their works?

I think a lot can be explained by what I call the “passage to Narnia” factor. In the film Shadowlands, a small boy comes to visit C.S. Lewis (I believe it was a relative) and at once runs in search of the famous wardrobe. He finds it, but of course no passage to Narnia. Swallowing his disappointment, he reassures the author that he knew that it was just an ordinary wardrobe, really. This, of course, is perfectly true. But like the boy in the film, we can’t help hoping to find a gateway to the imaginary world of our famous authors, and we think getting closer to their lives will help us. After all, authors do sometimes use bits of their own life in their fiction, don’t they? Who’s to say that Viola, or Mr Darcy, or Uriah Heep never walked the Earth?

Because the primary interest is in the author’s creations, not him/herself, there is something melancholy about literary tourism, at least for my part. A chair that Dickens sat on can, sadly, never have the same apppeal for me as a chair belonging to James Carker, and I’ll never come across one of those because he never existed. And so I find myself having a great deal of sympathy with projects that try to link authors’ lives and works as much as possible. Flights of imagination in biodramas – such as making the foreman of the blacking factory in the TV series Dickens of London into an undeniably Heepian figure – are most welcome. But it can get out of hand. Remember the film Becoming Jane (one of the few Austen-related films I have not been able to sit through)? There, it was hinted that Jane Austen couldn’t possibly have written about love and sexual attraction without having experienced it first-hand. So whatever happened to the author’s imagination, then? As someone correctly and acidly pointed out, no-one presumes that Shakespeare had to murder someone in order to write The Scottish Play.

The greatest part of an author’s imaginary world will, I’m afraid, be available through their work only, and literary characters are for the most part figments of imagination. This doesn’t mean we shouldn’t indulge ourselves with a bit of Narnia-chasing (if Morgan doesn’t go to town on Golden Youth-Dark Lady speculations, I, for one, will think it a lost opportunity). Even if we don’t find the passage to a magic kingdom, finding the wardrobe is nice enough in its way.

Plot vs Character

One of the most damning things you can say about a novel is "I didn't care about the characters". It must be on the top ten list of phrases an author never wants to hear. And yet, it is possible to enjoy a novel without caring two straws about the main characters. I know, because it's happened to me twice recently. I'm currently reading - in tandem with Les Mis which I keep for my lunch hour - a historical novel set in Restoration England (and a bit in Louis XIV's France) called "Dark Angels". The author, Karleen Koen, certainly knows how to spin a yarn. Intrigues, drama and court gossip abound. I'm engrossed - but do I care about the book's heroine? Not really.

I do know a little about Restoration times, most of it learnt by reading Jude Morgan's "The King's Touch" (still the Restoration novel to beat). But I don't know enough to identify which of the book's protagonists, except from the royal families, assorted mistresses and the odd duke, are real and which are fictional. If the heroine Alice Verney, maid of honour to Queen Catherine and Princess Henriette and daughter of a wily courtier, actually existed she may very well have been an admirable person. The picture Koen paints of her is not very flattering, though: she has her good points, like loyalty to her long-suffering employers, and she doesn't like Castlemaine which is always a plus. But her ruling ambition is to marry an elderly duke just to cheat his nephew, her ex-fiancé, out of his inheritance, and she interferes in her best friend's romance because she thinks her friend could do better (although she is penniless). Spite works well for a villain but less well for a heroine, and as for scheming, it should ideally be done with a bit of panache. Unlike Becky Sharp, the queen of minxes, Alice isn't really enjoying herself. She's only hanging on, trying grimly to survive the (sometimes literally) poisonous court atmosphere.

Funnily enough, though, it doesn't matter that the main protagonist is hard to warm to. She isn't positively dislikeable either, and the plot makes up for her shortcomings. However, I have to admit that the plot isn't the only thing that intrigues me - the book is also livened up by the odd appearance of an ace villain in the pleasant shape of a smooth, friendly poisoner. I know I probably should draw the line at poisoners, but it's been ages since there was any fresh meat on the villain market, and I'm not about to be picky, especially not for moral reasons.

My other example of plot-driven rather than character-driven reading fun is "My Last Duchess" by Daisy Goodwin, the largest part of which I read on the plane to New York without feeling fidgety once. I think I saw an article by Goodwin once, back when the anti-romance debate was in full height, where she defended the romance genre. She needen't have felt nettled by the anti-Mills&Booners for her own sake, though. "My Last Duchess" is set in the High Society of England and America in the 1890s, the sets are sumptuous, and the plot is mainly about love and relationships. But on one level, it is not the least bit escapist. One of the main delights of the novel is that you truly don't know what will happen: whether the heroine Cora Cash's marriage to an English duke will work out fine or prove to be a disaster. No-one can accuse Goodwin of skating over the difficulties Cora faces in the shape of a kittenish but tough mother-in-law, a resentful ex-mistress and her husband's reticence. The very last thing I felt like doing after having finished this novel was to marry into the English nobility.

Yet, again, I didn't really care about Cora much. She is depicted as shallow and spoilt and never really overcomes the brash American heiress stereotype. I didn't like her maid Bertha either, though we are probably supposed to. Her loyalty towards her mistress is mixed with a good dose of resentment and seems to have more to do with habit than any kind of affection. No, the strongest points of "My Last Duchess" are plot-related, not character-related: you simply want to know what happens next. This in spite of the fact that there is no cute villain in sight.

Wilkie Collins and women

I have neglected the historical studies lately. The reason is that, after having finished reading the satisfactory Jude Morgan regency romance "A Little Folly" (he really is just as good as Heyer, if not better, though the Austenesque moral message grates a bit - less painful self-revelation for the heroine, please!) I started yet another Wilkie Collins novel. I've read quite a lot of them by now and am constantly surprised at how good they are, even the unknown ones. The only one who has really disappointed me is, strangely enough, "The Moonstone". Whenever I've had problems with some aspects of the other books - the time it takes for the author to set the scene for the really thrilling plot in "Armadale" (though the pre-history is dramatic, it reads a little like a summary of a serialised novel in a women's magazine: you almost expect it to end with the words "now read on"), the disappointing ending of "The Law and the Lady", the seriously irritating lawyer-hero Sir Patrick in "Man and Wife" - I've always ended up thinking: "come on, it's still good, and way better than 'The Moonstone'".

I may have a good moan about "The Moonstone" at a later date, but for now I'd like to dwell on one of the things Collins does really well, and that is female characters. The novel I'm reading right now is "Poor Miss Finch", and though the titular heroine Lucilla Finch is charming enough, though a little missish, the most likeable female in the book is the strong-minded, honest, opinionated, loyal and affectionate Madame Pratolungo, her companion, who is the novel's chief narrator.

Like so many of Collins's admirable women, Madame Pratolungo is a "doer". She engages herself wholeheartedly for the welfare of Lucilla and shows endless initiative. She doesn't mince words either. When Lucilla's love Oscar acts like a poor fish (which one can't help thinking that he is, even though Madame Pratolungo has reason to revise her bad opinion of him as the story unfolds) she gives him an earful. When Oscar's twin brother Nugent starts to get uppity, she gives him an earful. Not that these earfuls help a lot, because the brothers are both in their separate ways pig-headed, but you love Madame Pratolungo for trying. In a way, she is a good version of the impressive female baddie Mrs Lecount in "No Name": they are both resourceful French widows, often reduced to bullying the weak-willed menfolk around them, and they both love and revere their late husbands. Madame Pratolungo memorably remarks regarding the aversion Lucilla (who is blind) has to dark colours and complexions: "This singular prejudice of hers against dark people was a little annoying to me on personal grounds [...] Between ourselves, the late Doctor Pratolungo was of a fine mahogany brown all over."

It is strange that Collins, who created characters like Marian Halcombe in "The Woman in White", Lydia Gwilt in "Armadale", Valeria Woodville in "The Law and the Lady", the two aforementioned French widows and many other fine female characters often speaks so slightingly and patronisingly about women in general. Granted, it is his characters who speak and not he personally, but you have the feeling you are supposed to agree when, for instance, Sir Patrick muses on the female sex and its weaknesses. But I suppose, as a woman, you have to take the rough with the smooth.

The disability lobby must feel equally ambivalent about Wilkie Collins's outlook. On one side, he includes a large number of characters with one handicap or another in his novels and enters feelingly into their situation. On the other hand, these characters are no better or worse than the others, and their particular disability is shamelessly milked for dramatic effect. The novella "The Guilty River" is a case in point: the baddie in this story is deaf, and he is not able to become a better person until his deafness has been cured. At the same time, the story contains a harrowing account of how his condition separates him from his fellow men. I rather like this - horrible word - unsentimental approach. It must surely be a "right" worth having to be depicted as a flawed or downright villainous character in a novel - they are so much more interesting than butter-wouldn't-melt goodies. But then you're talking to the girl whose favourite fictional blind character is Pew in "Treasure Island".

Cyber Georgianas and Brontë villains

'Ere, what's all this then? When googling Georgiana to see if I could find a picture of her for my profile (well, that was the main reason), I discovered to my dismay that some other chick - it CAN'T be a guy - has registered "Georgiana Podsnap" as a user on Facebook. Is dismay an overreaction? Should I not be glad that somewhere out there, little Georgiana has another fan? Yes, probably. But honestly I can't be. If the other Georgiana should find this blog (not very likely at present because it seems to be in a Google blind spot) she will think I stole her alias and be not a little cheesed off. I can only say it's a feeling I wholeheartedly share.

I was not aware that Facebook was a playground for fictional characters as well as flesh-and-blood people but I suppose it was only to be expected: we book nerds are like that. At work, I try to use names of fictional and historical characters whenever I can as test users and in manuals. I once invented a test user called Edward Casaubon whose function it was to make all kinds of mistakes on a website where I was the webmaster, in order to check the error messages. I thought of using the name Nicholas Bulstrode, but decided he would not have made any errors even in a futuristic web environment. The company where I have my present assignment has, according to one of my manuals, contracts with Dombey and Son, Wickfield and Heep and the Captain Flint Corporation. In such circumstances, outsourcing may not seem such a brilliant idea after all.

Speaking of book nerdishness, I'm really enjoying "The Taste of Sorrow" now. The Brontë sisters are struggling on with their various teaching jobs and not liking it much, but it's still not a depressing read: the warm family feeling and the siblings' shared imaginary worlds lighten things up. I wish poor Charlotte would be less hard on herself and show more signs of the sense of humour you can see in her books, but I can't claim Jude Morgan doesn't have sympathy for her. According to him, Wilson of Cowan Bridge a.k.a. Brocklehurst deserved his bad press, and he certainly convinced me. It's one of the sneaky things about historical fiction: you're apt to believe that everything the author describes more or less happened just like that. It's hard to remember that Carus Wilson in "The Taste of Sorrow" is just as much a fictional character as Brocklehurst. But if the real Wilson really did publish a journal called "The Children's Friend" full of horrifying cautionary tales, well, there's not much you can say for him.

It would be ironic if one of the fictional Victorian villains who actually did exist in the real world would be Brocklehurst, who, as I've said earlier, is a dead loss villain-wise. The only cool thing about him is the name. I must say generally that Brontë villains aren't much to my taste. With Charlotte this doesn't matter because she has such intelligent, humourous and interestingly flawed heroes. Mr Rochester, of course; Paul Emmanuel - an acquired taste, I've been given to understand, but I like him; Robert Gerard Moore: with such men about, you don't really feel short-changed. I've not felt myself able to revisit Anne's "The Tenant of Wildfell Hall" or Emily's "Wuthering Heights" since my teens, though, largely because I find their main villains - Heathcliff and Arthur Huntingdon - so appalling. What makes it worse is you're meant to see their dangerous fascination and accordingly feel for the women who fall for them, but I cannot and do not. They represent two types of baddie I have little time for: The Dissipated Cad and The Savage Brute. You can say this much for Heathcliff, however, that everyone else in "Wuthering Heights" is almost equally loathsome: Catherine even manages to be even worse than he is, up to the point where you actually start to feel sorry for the poor caveman sap for being so crazy about her. As for the "Tenant", I should probably give it another chance, because I do like the hero Gilbert Markham, and it's a ripping yarn full of warring couples which makes for great drama. Plus there's a villain on the sidelines who was rather interesting as I remember, though why he should waste his time trying to seduce Helen, the novel's heroine, is a mystery to me. But then those who know the book better than I do claim I'm too hard on Helen, which is another reason to re-read the book. I did tend to be a bit too censorious as a teenager.

From Boris Johnson to the Brontës

No, I will not venture into politics. Well, not if I can help it, anyway. I'm going to write a bit about books that I'm reading or have lately read, just to show I don't spend all of my spare time glued to the TV screen, and one of those books happens to be a light-hearted thriller ("Seventy-Two Virgins") written by Boris Johnson, the Mayor of London.

In theory, I try to alternate my reading between more ambitious reading projects and books I read just for the fun of it. (In practice, I cheat quite a lot.) The problem is that it's easy to become disappointed with the pure self-indulgence books if they turn out to be not quite as self-indulgent as one thinks. On the other hand, I've often found myself enjoying the ambitious books far more than I'd expected. Johnson's thriller (let's see if I manage to call him "Johnson" rather than "Boris" throughout, to highlight that I'm talking about him as a writer, not as a politician - he seems to be "Boris" to everyone in politics, including his opponents)was intended as a self-indulgence book. It was written back in 2004 and concerns a terrorist attack on the American President which turns into a publicity stunt. Johnson writes extremely well and entertainingly, but I must confess I was depressed at first by all the bungled attempts to stop the amateurish terrorists. I don't like it when things go wrong, perhaps because I'm not one of those people who "cope well with stressful situations" to quote the job advertisements. Everything turns out well at the end, however, and there are enjoyable scenes where various establishment figures, after having got over the initial shock, start to bite back at the media-savvy terrorist leader and his gang. The President himself, up until then rather patronisingly described (this is Bush, remember, not Saint Obama), gets to make the point that the black-eyed virgins the would-be martyrs are hoping for might actually turn out to be raisins. "Kind of makes a difference, I would have thought".

Would non-Tory readers enjoy the book? I'm not sure - the author's distaste for what one could call champagne socialists is apparent. Not one, but two journalists from left-leaning papers make the mistake of messing up their subjects' lives for the sake of a morally edifying story. But then, doesn't everyone hate that kind of journalism? Even so, if you're seriously anti-American as well as left-wing you should probably give the book a miss.

I felt slightly guilty when I started Jude Morgan's "The Taste of Sorrow" after having finished Johnson's thriller. A novel about the Brontë sisters, was that really ambitious enough? I should say yes, though, because Morgan has a writing pattern similar to my reading one. He seems to be alternating between elegant Regency Romances ("Indiscretion", "An Accomplished Woman") and more serious biographical fiction about historical personnages who did not always lead easy lives ("The King's Touch", "Passion", "Symphony"). His books are enjoyable to read in both cases, though I confess I prefer the romances where I can be reasonably sure of a happy ending. "The Taste of Sorrow", as one can guess from the title, will not be all sunshine and laughter. It starts glumly enough with the death of the Brontë siblings' mother. There will be more deaths, I realise, in this book than in Johnson's terrorist-stuffed thriller. So far, the funniest part of the book has been a scathing description of poor old Carus Wilson, Charlotte's model for Mr Brocklehurst (a villain not even I can like - how come so many teacher/headmaster baddies are such unsubtle monsters? Dickens's Squeers is no better). And even that was grim in its way. Well, let's see if the tone lightens up a bit further on. I'm looking forward to Morgan's take on Madame Heger.