Misrule's Adult Reading

There's been a lot of talk over the years about the quality of critical thinking and reviewing in yer average book blog—concerns that I've shared at times. It's not so much the fangirl stuff that bothers me—overt expressions of enthusiasm are either irritating or delightful, I find—but more just plain bad reviewing. Like all of us, I have over the years read some outrageously uninformed reviews, where the blogger has revealed more about their own cultural ignorance than they've realised. I've read mean-spirited and nasty reviews, where the blogger has apparently taken great joy in demolishing a book and made it personal. I've made condescending reviews where all kinds of assumptions have been made about the writer and their motivations. And I've read plenty of just badly written, dull reviews that reveal nothing about the actual quality of the work.

I always put it down to the fact that yer average book blogger has never gone through any kind of editorial apprenticeship. They've never had to submit work to an editor in order to publish in the first place. They've never had their work edited even for house style, much less for content, tone, accuracy. And so they've never had any opportunity to learn from experienced reviewers the standards of critical writing: don't retell the plot; don't give away significant plot points (although to be fair, in the world of the intertubes, bloggers are pretty spoiler-savvy); "play the ball and not the man", ie, DON'T MAKE IT PERSONAL.

There's nothing new in any of that—if anything, if this blog post were just about book-blogging, I'd be about five years out of date anyway, although I still think a lot of these points remain salient. But hopefully most of us now read book review blogs with a pinch of salt and an understanding that they're not professional reviews—and at least they're not as bad as your average Amazon customer review...

But if bad reviewing were the domain of the amateur blogger—what are we to make of this? 

That link takes you to a review of Leslie Cannold's first novel, The Book of Rachael. The review is written by Theo Chapman. I don't know who he is; I don't recall seeing that byline before, but the trusty intertubes tells me (via LinkedIn) that he is a sub-editor, journalism lecturer and book reviewer for the Sun-Herald.

If you don't know anything about the book, it is a novel imagining the life of Jesus's sister, who Cannold calls Rachael. Cannold was inspired to write the novel after she found that while the names and other details of Jesus's brothers were recorded, there was absolutely no trace of any of his sisters—it was, as she explains in this interview, a shock for her to realise how completely they'd been forgotten. (I was surprised she was surprised, actually!) In the novel—and yes, this post will be full of spoilers, but honestly, if you don't know how the story of Jesus turns out...! Anyway, in the novel, Jesus, named Joshua, is in love with the woman known to history as Mary Magdalene—they are in fact lovers, although not married.  Rachael, some years Joshua's younger, is rebellious, fractious and challenging from early childhood. At 15, she falls passionately in love with Joshua's best friend, the soldier Judah Iscariot, who has been away fighting to Roman occupation, and they are married soon after.

There is another sister, Shona, who is raped and then forced, under
Hebrew law, to marry her rapist, who takes her away from her family and
continues to misuse her for years. And then Maryam, Joshua's lover, disappears with her father, and it is when Joshua leaves Nazareth in search of her that his ministry begins.

There's no doubting Cannold's feminist impulse in writing this book, and a fury at the injustice served to the women of this society permeates the narrative—Shona's fate being at the extreme (but not uncommon) end of the lot of women, the novel also canvasses the more prosaic daily injustices suffered by women in that time and society. We also see the worship of the Goddess Queen of Heaven by women such as the healer and midwife Bindy, to whom Rachael is for a time apprenticed. In Joshua and his father Yosef we have potentially anachronistic men who value and reward Rachael's intelligence and passion for learning by teaching her to read. (I say anachronistic, but cannot it also be possible that there were and have been such men at all times and places in history—men who did not share the mores of the day regarding the place of women? And if that is possible, then it seems entirely plausible to me that the Jesus of the Bible as I read it would have been just such a man. And anyway, the main thing is, this is a novel and Cannold makes it work in the fictional version of the historical world she has created.)

So it's a politically-driven novel, and while Chapman makes it out to be more of a polemic than I think it is, there's no question that this is a novel written from an unequivocally feminist position. I do think it's a bit of a stretch to say that Cannold has Jesus dying for his "feminist beliefs", as Chapman offers in the first paragraph, but that's something you could argue the toss over. Personally, as a feminist, I enjoy reading a novel that overtly takes on one of the biggest stories in the history of the world and recasts it within a feminist framework. (I would say that, my thesis being on feminist retellings of fairy tales, and having been raised by a feminist Christian mother.) I can equally understand someone not caring for the book on the same grounds—and I also demand more than pure politics in my fiction—I want a good story with characters and attention to language, and I get that from Cannold's novel, even while I at times found the narrative style almost oddly elliptical.

No, what really really bothers me about this review is this:

The literary style of The Book of Rachael is pure chick lit and
at one level it's a story that can be enjoyed as a historical drama
set in the Middle East about 2000 years ago.

And glad I was, because this was one of the funnest launches I've been to in ages. Anita is one of those people who utterly embraces life, and pours all her brilliant energy into everything she does (and everyone she loves). Her book—which I read on the weekend after the launch, on my brief Melbourne trip, of which, yes, I'll get back to shortly—is a delight, a wish-fulfillment, international, Indigenous, cross-cultural romance that makes you wish you were in Manhattan on every page. And in love. With a cocktail in hand. Or hands.

Anyway, the book was launched by Anita's even more impossibly gorgeous friend Terry Janke, and celebrated in fine style by rapper Mark Ross and breath-takingly awesome singer Emma Donovan, who sang the tops of our heads off. Gleebooks, my favourite bookshop, was jam-packed with Anita's friends and family and fans, and the queue for signings, after the launch, was pleasingly long.

It was a beautiful, celebratory night in honour of a great woman and her fabulous book. And, oh look! Here's me with Doctor Anita and the amazing scriptwriter Geoffrey Atherton. First, we take Manhattan...

"The beautiful thing about a book is that it comes alive in the act of grace that is reading."

Richard Flanagan, in an interview with Phillip Adams on Radio National.

Heard 28/11/08—I think it was a repeat of the previous night's Late Night Live.

Like children's and YA books, genre fiction (crime, fantasy, science fiction and so on) is usually reviewed in job lots of three or more books, so it's fantastic that Blood Ties got a decent review space all to itself—and positioned in prime a prime spot on the front page of Spectrum's book pages, directly under the featured author review.

HERE IS AN impressively different fantasy novel, challenging one of the most deep-seated and inappropriate fantasy conventions. Why is the monarchy the political default mode of contemporary fantasy? Why do fantasy heroes and heroines risk all to restore the rightful king? What happened to democracy in the mass-market field?

Blood Ties doesn't try to answer those questions - it disdainfully sweeps them aside and seeks to democratise itself from the core...

So good to see genre fiction treated with such intelligence and respect—and so happy for Pamela!

Blood Ties was launched by speculative fiction writer and Pamela's friend Marianne de Pierres. Marianne described her original meeting with Pamela at a book festival some years ago, recounting an incident at a restaurant where Pamela revealed her uncanny insight into human nature (by correctly observing that the waiter fancied Marianne). Marianne made a nice link to Pamela's natural "sixth sense" about people to her ability to create characters "right down to the bone". She also read a passage from the book, which Pamela went on to say was a scene that she'd more or less bled onto the page (and so was particularly pleased that it was the bit Marianne chose to read).

Pamela's response was to describe the long (11 years) gestation of Blood Ties, starting with the event (the auctioning of her flat in the Eastern suburbs, back about the time she and I first met and became friends) that triggered the opening chapter and sentence of the novel—The desire to know the future gnaws at our bones. Pamela read part of the opening chapter of the novel before fielding questions from the audience.

Book launches are often pseudo-swanky affairs, with lots of faff and bubble—and god knows, I love 'em. But I really liked that this launch was also an open, public event, that gave the "average punter" the opportunity to hear about the business of writing and publishing from the inside. Questions from the audience ranged from what is your writing routine like (cups of tea? computer game distractions?) to what is the best advice you can give to secondary school students with a talent for writing (get them to read widely was Pamela's answer—reading is more important than writing at this age) to is there a difference in your self-editing when writing for children and for adults (nope) to how do you go about submitting work for publication?

In the audience were family, friends, fellow writers and at least four of Pamela's publishers/editors (Bernadette Foley from Hachette Livre, publisher of Blood Ties; Cathie Tasker from Koala Books, Sarah Foster from Walker Books, who is republishing Pamela's wonderful junior novel Victor's Quest and its forth-coming sequel Victor's Challenge; and Jonathan Shaw, previous editor of The School Magazine—Pamela's first publisher of fiction for children).

Also at the launch were some of Pamela's students from the Sydney Writers' Centre, where I also teach.

Some of us went back to Pamela and her husband Stephen's house after the launch (just around the corner and down the street from my humble flat), where I had the opportunity to properly meet and drink champers and chat with (the fabulous) Marianne de Pierres.

Turns out (hardly surprisingly) that Marianne and I both know and count as a friend (as we also admire her as, simply, fans), the inordinately gifted Margo Lanagan. Marianne and Margo are in a writer's workshop group together, and Mariane and I shared our mutal appreciation of Margo's remarkable talents. Marianne believes that Margo is one the greatest living writers (with no "genre" disclaimer, or any other disclaimer, come to mention it)—and we both agree that "Singing My Sister Down" is a story that will still be talked about in decades to come, and held up as an example of perfection in the short story form.

But bringing this back to the woman of the hour—today belongs to Pamela, after all—Marianne also told me that she believes that Pamela is as gifted and original a writer as Margo (if more "marketable"). She sees a similarity in their creative vision, and their facility for story-telling.

Indeed. And may Blood Ties find the smart, warm and dedicated readership it so deserves. Oh, and a film deal would be good! (Although Pamela thinks it's better suited to a television series—are you reading, Joss Whedon?)

Pamela (left) and Marianne in Pamela's home library at the after-launch party.