Curiously, and I’m sure co-incidentally, it finally vanished just as a journo I know asked them for a comment on the story he had put together.

Nearly 1 in 3 UK women have experienced domestic violence (source). Domestic violence is defined as:

Violence against women is any violence that targets a woman because she is a woman. It is also violence that disproportionately affects women.

It includes physical, sexual or psychological harm such as domestic violence, sexual assault, forced marriage, stalking, ‘honour’ attacks, human trafficking and female genital mutilation. It also includes threats of violence and kidnapping.

(source: Home Office)

Facebook currently has 500+ ‘fans’ of hitting women. The group has been reported by various people but still exists. The discussion topic ‘best place to hit them’ includes suggestions to “punch them in the ovaries”. The picture shows a blond man punching a woman with braiding, which can be read as rascist.

If you are on facebook, even if you only log in once a month to see what that kid you hated at school is up to now, please take a moment to report the group and have it removed. It promotes violence against women.

I don’t care if they say it is ‘just for fun’ or ‘just a laugh’. Violence against women is a hate crime. Joking about violence against women helps validate the people who assault women and encourages them to think what they are doing is okay.

And please post about this through your status update, or your twitter, or on livejournal. Please raise awareness that facebook have yet to remove a group inciting violence and hatred, despite it breaking their terms and conditions.

(I’d like to point out I’m against violence towards people based on gender, sexuality, religion or race. This one is just really bugging me.)

I’m trying to keep up this year with the 365 challenge. Last year’s failed sometime around March. I foresee June being the crunch point this year. We’ll see.

2010 slideshow – in progress

2009 slideshow – abandoned

The Bird Room

Don’t you hate blurbs that deceive you? The Bird Room promises to be “a candid, funny and joyous portrait of love and desire in the modern age”. Only one of those adjectives actually applies, and then only if you assume the candid refers to the sex and don’t expect it to equally apply to love and desire (neither of which are the same thing).

The prose limps along, never enabling you to engage with the characters or care about them. Alice, the “smart, sexy” love interest, doesn’t get to narrate and her words and actions, as relayed by Will (the putative protagonist), make her seem as broken and emotionally blank as the other characters. There’s certainly no joy in the book, and pitifully few laughs.

You can see the glimmerings of themes, lurking behind the facile plot. William, Will’s friend, is his more cool double: the one who left Manchester for Glasgow, the one who travels, the one who gets girls despite not being a looker, the one who isn’t paranoid about things. Clair puts on the identity of Helen so she can be all the things she isn’t: she leaves home (although not Manchester); she wears contacts; she leaves her old job to be an actress in online porn.

The problem is any potential themes are drowned by a deadened prose style and minimalist plot. It feels like reading a book where someone has mistaken ‘graphic’ for ‘adult’, and thus splattered references to sex on every page. To be honest, I read far better sex scenes in fanfic, and at least there the characters tend to be engaging and have a complexity of emotions. Each character in The Bird Room has one state: paranoid; shallow; narcissistic; confused.

It’s taken me a week to read it. Not because it’s long (a mere 200 or so pages in B-format paperback) but because after an initial session with it, I put off reading the rest of it until this morning.

The Revenge of Moriarty

There are many ways to write Sherlockian fiction, as my shelves groaning with non-ACD books attest (and I have barely made a dent in the full array). Some stick with Watson’s voice. Some go for Holmes’ view on events. Some narrate it from the point of view of another character (e.g. the cabman in A Hansom for Holmes, or a housemaid in Erasing Sherlock). Gardner’s conceit is that the story is constructed from a combination of the decoded diaries of Professor Moriarty and accounts by the non-canonical Inspector Crow. Revenge is actually the sequel to The Return of Moriarty but as this was a charity shop find I wasn’t overly worried about reading it first.

There are also several ways to review non-ACD Holmes stories. If purporting to be by Watson, you tend to look at the plausibility of the narrator’s voice. You might read it with an eye to how the puzzle reveal fits with ACD’s. You might just look at how in or out of character the canonical characters are.

Or you might just read it and think “but this is a bit rubbish, and sexist to boot”.

The plot is not overly bad, and certainly no more slight than a lot of novels. Moriarty is a character I think of as a cipher anyway. Unlike Colonal Moran or Irene Adler, I’ve never seen Moriarty as more than a plot device, there to be Holmes’ foil. He’s more interesting in his absence. Gardner twists and squeezes and generally contorts Moriarty until he fits better with the idea of a, well, a Bond villain. His Moriarty is no thin but terrifying Professor of mathematics turned to crime, but a virile man of action who disguises himself as his older, dead, brother.

I mention Bond because Gardner also wrote various Bond novels after Fleming’s death. I can see why. Gardner’s characters see women as Fleming’s did: good for sex, or for ensnaring enemies using sex, for having babies and not a lot else. That’s what you expect in Bond. It’s not what you expect in Sherlockian fiction. Holmes’s marital advice to Crow – and who would go to Holmes for advice on women? – is to put his foot down, put his wife in her place and get her to start putting out again.

Of course, women aren’t a strong feature in ACD’s Sherlock Holmes stories. They are housekeepers, or ladies with problems that need solving. Even when Watson is married, his wife (or wives) is secondary to the batchelor life of Holmes. However, the women that appear – including Irene Adler – are not treated with contempt. Watson, the normal narrator, is a gentleman. Holmes may be dismissive, but he is not disparaging. In the Revenge of Moriarty, the narration seems to have an even lower view of women than the characters do.

That made this novel unpleasant enough in tone that, even if I thought the plot was cracking and the characters entertaining, I’d not recommend it to anyone.

No, it’s that I’m expecting a baby and it turns out the first trimester is quite tiring and headache-inducing. And reading on paper is so much softer on the eyes (see my theory on e-readers).

I’ve also just stared in amazement at the very same model of pram we were all wheeled around in as kiddies in the 60s and 70s. I learnt most of my childcare skills in the late 70s, and keep discovering there are things you don’t do any more. Like putting you baby in a giant pram and leaving it in the garden for the afternoon. Damnit.

One thing I’m realising is that I have a curatorial urge. A twitter analysing tool, Klout, suggests I am a connector but looking at my online life I think I’m more of a curator.

I’ve 133 RSS feeds going into my google reader account. Some are checked daily, some weekly. Articles I like are saved to my del.icio.us account. I’ve just added the RSS from that account to feed into my twitter account (this blog already feeds twitter). Del.icio.us and twitter can also feed my facebook account, although that’s a bit unreliable because Facebook keeps mutating. I’ve played with tumblr but I think I am a tad old skool and prefer to have just three clear and connected channels (blog, twitter, del.icio.us).

But there’s more to my curatorial habit than just going a bit linktastic. Two RSS feeds in the reader are flickr tag searches: tate and tate modern. If I see a shot I like of the Tate Galleries in those feeds, I click through and invite the poster to add it to the Tate Galleries group. Another feed tells me of any new images posted to the group: I check that one daily as people sometimes ignore the posting rules of the place.

It’s a very magpie habit. I don’t collect obsessively (unusual in Who fandom, where remembering how many episodes a Pertwee story had is considered by some as important). I just grab stuff I like and splatter it around, thinking others might like it as well.

So, my aim this year is to be consistant. Not in terms of content – that will remain as random as ever – but in terms of setting aside some time each week to bring everything up to date. It’s likely to be Saturdays, simply as that’s also the day I read a newspaper, but don’t hold me to it.

The End of Mr. Y

Mr Toppit
Charles Elton
Penguin (2009)

(I try to review books individually, but I wanted to get these last two done before the end of 2009 and, as they are thematically linked, I cheated.)

Both these novels have books within them which possess the protagonists. With Mister Toppit, the book series within the book has a protagonist based on the main narrator – Luke Hayward – as a child and he spends his adolescence attempting to escape his fictional counterpart. Only a few sentences of the Hayseed Chronicles are quoted in the novel. With The End of Mr Y the fictional book has a much greater role: anyone who reads Thomas Lumas’s The End of Mister Y is cursed, vanishing from the real world. After her professor leaves suddenly, Ariel Manto finds his copy, with one key page missing. She is compelled to find the missing page, follow its instructions and discover what became of both her professor and the book’s author.

Authors as father figures are key in both novels. Mister Toppit is told as a series of interconnected narratives from the different people involved. Primarily Luke but also his sister Rachel (who was denied a role in the Hayseed Chronicles) and Laurie, an American hospital radio presenter who witnesses Arthur Haywood’s death. Arthur, the author, is the only character to be denied a point of view, existing solely through other people’s perceptions of him. Saul Burlam, the professor in The End of Mister Y, is both a fatherly and vaguely sexual figure to Ariel – a woman who has already reimagined herself (she tells the reader she renamed herself).

Another odd similarity between the books is that I had to check each time whether they were set in Britain or America. The End of Mister Y is set in an unspecified university town and it only becomes clearly British when Ariel pays in pounds for a book. Mister Toppit is partially set in LA but otherwise dashes between a West Country house and Soho. Again, it wasn’t until Arthur was walking around Soho Square that I was sure the book was set in Britain. It’s an odd criticism to make, perhaps, but I do like prose to belong distinctively rather than to be from some odd mid-Atlantic nothingness. I don’t mean towns need to be named, just that I shouldn’t need to double-check the publishing details to be sure where a book was written.

The main difference between the books – one that seperates them quite clearly – is that in Mister Toppit, the Hayseed Chronicles remain books. Written as a form of escape by Arthur, they trap his family. The fans struggle to see Luke as himself and not as the protagonist in his father’s books, whilst his sister’s absence from the books causes her to lose her real identity and his mother is annoyed to be trapped in real world wranglings with Laurie and others over posession of the books’ ‘inheritance’. In The End of Mister Y, the fictional book creates an escape for Ariel and other characters, plunging them into the addictive Tropsphere.

Mister Toppit is fundamentally realist, The End of Mister Y is fantastical. The End of Mister Y deals with ideas of language, physics, reality, reading. Mister Toppit merely looks at how a fantasy can destroy lives. Of the two, I’d say The End of Mister Y should be easily the one I preferred, but its epilogue soured it for me.

The Wilding

The Wilding explores a secretive, closed world a generation after the English Civil War. Jonathan Dymond’s uncle dies, starting an unravelling of the tangled past by his nephew.

Jonathan, a cider-maker, narrates his journey from an innocent to an experienced man as he tries to uncover who his uncle thought had been denied their birthright. He visits his stern widowed aunt Harriet, and encounters a beggar woman, Joan, and her daughter who live in the woods behind his aunt’s house. Within his story, letters written by the unusually literate beggar woman are embedded. She tells her tale carefully as she suggests his aunt is her callous half-sister and that, when the soldiers came to the village, Joan was cast to them to hide another shameful secret. Harriet – and Jonathan’s father – both claim Joan went willingly to the soldiers to become a camp follower.

It’s quite hard to sum up the plot. It’s straightforward enough, but each time Jonathan thinks he has discovered the truth someone tells him something new that turns his world over.

Throughout, the world of cider apple growing and cider making is used both as a means to allow Jonathan to travel in a time when people rarely did and as metaphor for squeezing the truth out of the hard, sometimes bitter people he encounters. The cider he makes at his aunt’s keeps going wrong, turning sour in the barrel, whilst the cider at home is sweet and sharp. A wilding is a bastard cider apple tree, sown by accident and growing where it is unwanted.

Overall, the novel is an enjoyable historical in the Chevalier pattern. Its plot is not as densely packed as a Chevalier or a Waters, where I always find myself utterly immersed, but the theme is as dark and the prose races along so that I was keen to get back to it each evening. McCann manages the trick of allowing the reader to be half a step ahead of the narrator, so you fear what you suspect will be true because of how it’ll affect him.

***
I was slightly wary of this book: it’s the first book I’ve received as an early reviewer so I planned to read it over the break not because I favoured it over the many books on the to be read shelves but because it’s part of the deal. Free book = read and review. I’m relieved the first one I’ve done like this was actually enjoyable.

I’ve got a stack of reviews to write up today, but I’ve been getting through the site admin first. So a fresh install of Wordpress, a fix on the Simple tags plug-in, writing the disclaimer and looking at the stats (nothing interesting).