Eric Arthur Blair - tallest figure - poses with the POUM militia. His wife Eileen O'Shaughnessy Blair crouches beside him. |
Sunday 20 January 2013
Eric Arthur Blair: The Death of Idealism
Sunday 6 January 2013
Gate Way Books
When I was a child I read, a lot. Nothing in particular, just whatever I could get my hands on. Then, I became a teenager, discovered drinking and other such evils, and gradually I stopped reading.
It wasn’t a conscious decision, it was just that one day I discovered that I didn’t have the time to do all the things I wanted to do in that day, and so it was reading that was cut from the schedule.
When I was 18 and getting ready to go to University, I found a book in Eastwood Library, Nottinghamshire that brought reading well and truly back into my consciousness. That book was "M/F" by Anthony Burgess.
Those who are unaware of "M/F" will surely be aware of Anthony Burgess’ more famous work “A Clockwork Orange”. “M/F” is an altogether weirder proposition and, while it lacks the full-blooded violence and darkness of Burgess’ earlier work, its bizarrely Oedipal, carnivalesque characters and situations come together to form a truly nightmarish atmosphere wholly unto itself.
The protagonist, Miles Faber – himself a sort of Caulfield-esque college dropout – finds himself on a nightmarish pilgrimage across the Caribbean in pursuit of the poet Sib Leguru, his intellectual idol and muse. On his travels he meets a bizarre lion-headed man, a bird woman, and his freaklike estranged twin Llew – events which are played out in front of the backdrop of a noisy, frightening and chaotic West Indian carnival.
Freudian in almost every sense, the book draws upon evocations of the ego and the id, as well as the power of childish nightmares and even the more incestuous aspects of Dr Sigmund’s philosophies. But while freakish and labyrinthine are two words often used to describe this book, it remains the book that caused me to fall back into love with literature, and for that I am eternally grateful.
Of course it “lead me onto harder stuff”, but had this not have occurred, god knows what I would have been doing right now instead.
What were the “gate way books” that got you back into reading after a long period of literal-inactivity? Let me know…
The International Anthony Burgess Foundation hosts We4Poets Live this November. Click here for more info.
It wasn’t a conscious decision, it was just that one day I discovered that I didn’t have the time to do all the things I wanted to do in that day, and so it was reading that was cut from the schedule.
When I was 18 and getting ready to go to University, I found a book in Eastwood Library, Nottinghamshire that brought reading well and truly back into my consciousness. That book was "M/F" by Anthony Burgess.
Those who are unaware of "M/F" will surely be aware of Anthony Burgess’ more famous work “A Clockwork Orange”. “M/F” is an altogether weirder proposition and, while it lacks the full-blooded violence and darkness of Burgess’ earlier work, its bizarrely Oedipal, carnivalesque characters and situations come together to form a truly nightmarish atmosphere wholly unto itself.
The protagonist, Miles Faber – himself a sort of Caulfield-esque college dropout – finds himself on a nightmarish pilgrimage across the Caribbean in pursuit of the poet Sib Leguru, his intellectual idol and muse. On his travels he meets a bizarre lion-headed man, a bird woman, and his freaklike estranged twin Llew – events which are played out in front of the backdrop of a noisy, frightening and chaotic West Indian carnival.
Freudian in almost every sense, the book draws upon evocations of the ego and the id, as well as the power of childish nightmares and even the more incestuous aspects of Dr Sigmund’s philosophies. But while freakish and labyrinthine are two words often used to describe this book, it remains the book that caused me to fall back into love with literature, and for that I am eternally grateful.
Of course it “lead me onto harder stuff”, but had this not have occurred, god knows what I would have been doing right now instead.
What were the “gate way books” that got you back into reading after a long period of literal-inactivity? Let me know…
The International Anthony Burgess Foundation hosts We4Poets Live this November. Click here for more info.
Daily Mail Proclaims YA Fiction “Sick”
Never ones to shy away from a ‘morally outraged’ headline,
the Daily Mail recently ran a story about the ‘evils’ of young adult books that
have the audacity to tackle weighty themes, or worse, themes which are important
to their target audience.
Tanith Carey, writing for the Mail, described the plotlines
of books like “The Fault In Our Stars” – a bestselling children’s novel
centring on a 13 year old cancer sufferer – and “Thirteen Reasons Why” – a book
dealing with the suicide of a young teenage girl – as “mawkish” and
“distasteful”, evidently decreeing them to be unsuitable reading material for members
of our fragile younger generation.
I wonder what it is in particular about these subjects that
Tanith Carey finds so obscene. Scanning her article in the Mail, I can only
conclude that it is their realism that she finds so shocking; the fact that –
at some point in most of our lives – we are going to have to confront these
things head on.
What the author seems not to recognise – or to wilfully
ignore, depending on your viewpoint – is that these issues are real issues for
youngsters as well as for adults. Rather than allowing children to use literature to negotiate and work through
these themes in a Bakhtinian sense, Tanith Carey would sooner see them not explored
at all.
Carey also calls upon two of the traditional tenets of the Daily
Mail’s canon of immorality: “sex” and “foul language”. Anyone who thinks that sex
and swearing are somehow beyond the radar or vocabulary of an average teenager
has been reading too much “Just William”.
So what exactly is Carey’s point? That children’s fiction
should deal only with football and adventuring for boys and ponies and light
romance (no sex) for girls? Surely Carey realises that modern teenagers have
bank accounts and internet access; any child with the inclination could easily
pick up “American Psycho” from Amazon, or find something far darker on the
internet itself.
Or is Carey trying to make the point that the regulatory
codes governing the publishing industry are not stringent enough to protect our
youngsters? Maybe, then, children should not read at all until certification
falls into line with that of films and video games.
The fact is, under close scrutiny, it becomes abundantly
clear that Tanith Carey does not have a coherent point at all. Instead this is
just another story of faux moral outrage that the Mail concocts every now and
again to give their strait-laced, Audi-owning readers heart palpitations over
breakfast.
Don’t let the Daily Mail’s insincere moral crusading
guilt-trip you into thinking you’re in some way a bad parent because you let
your 13 year old read a book about cancer, and don’t let the Mail’s kneejerk
censorial attitude dictate what you or your children read.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)