Endangered species - the subjunctive

Just because a book is written for the 'commerical' market doesn't mean we can assume that readers are a bit thick and will be put off by good English. Whether the use of the subjunctive is disappearing because of this idea or just through sheer ignorance, I don't know. If I was taught it at school, I forgot about it, but it was brought specifically to my attention by a mentor concerned about my development as a writer. The use of the subjunctive lends a beautiful quality to language. Examples include such sweet phrases as 'be that as it may' or 'would that I could'. Briefly it is used when expressing a wish or a possibility, that is, not an absolute. For example: 'I wish my brother were here' (not was). There's not a single example of the use of the subjunctive in the seven hundred papages of Labyrinth. It is not an easy aspect of grammar to master, but it's worth the effort to develop an ear for it. Don't make the mistake of assuming that all sentences beginning with 'if' will take the subjunctive: there are exceptions. My third sentence in this piece, for example, is correct, although I have no idea why.

The mystery of the Labyrinth

I woke up this morning, knowing what I was going to write here, but also determined not to name names. I don't like negative reviews and didn't want to get into that. However, I thought I'd just check on Amazon to see what anyone else thought of Kate Mosse's Labyrinth, which I've spent the last three days reading while I waited for Norovirus to do its worst and leave. I was so shocked, so relieved, I nearly wept. Listen, this book has had reviews to die for and has sold in huge quantities. I do recommend that anyone interested in the commercial fiction debate should read the reviews for Labyrinth on Amazon.co.uk. They make fascinating reading, and leave you in no doubt that the great British reading public is not stupid (except that we haven't learnt to recognise buddy reviews in the media for what they are). Review after review carries a grudging one star (you are not allowed to leave the star field empty)and each is enlightening in its criticism. So, what went wrong with this book? If it had come to me in mss, I would have said the following:

"It is obviously well-researched and lovingly done, but it is far too long. In fact, it is interminable and I was nearly in tears by the end, longing for it to finish. Because, you see, the ending was so entirely predictable. At least a third of this book could disappear without any loss. As for the characters, there are far too many of them, and almost all are wooden stereotypes. There is no depth of characterisation. You quite cheekily say in your blurb (yes, I know who writes the blurb) that it's an adventure story featuring two women who don't stand around waiting to be rescued. Oh yeah? Whatever you tell me about the character of Alice, I got the impression of someone standing wide-eyed and saying, 'Ummmm' while things happend to her. In your own notes on your own book at the back (how precious can you get?) you have a section called 'characterisation' which I read with interest, only to find myself being asked if I had guessed which one in the medieval sections echoed which ones in present day. Well, no, I hadn't. Too busy looking for something about them to be interested in. I strongly suggest you take a course in writing, for you obviously have some talent, and before sending it out again, make sure you get it edited."

Naturally, I would have then edited out the cruelty and fashioned a much kinder response. But she would have risen up in righteous anger to point out that she has a degree in English from Oxford, has worked as an editor for top publishers, teaches Creative Writing at the University of Sussex and is a founder of the Orange Prize. At which point I would have fainted clean away, unable to comprehend such a mystery as this.

One lesson I've learnt from this exercise is to check Amazon reviews before buying anything again. What does it teach us about getting published? The lesson here is as inescapable as it is obvious: it's not who you are but who you know that counts. Now isn't that sad?

David Suggests a New Genre

What follows is an extract from an email which David sent to my disappointed author, turned down on the basis of being 'neither literary nor commercial'. He has a novel suggestion: for the world that loves categories, let's invent a new one.

"Unfortunately, in so many areas of life, it often appears that the modern world isn't much interested in substance, only attractive packaging (and cheapness). However, I think that is only appearance - it will continue to draw the mass of people, but I suspect that, as in the area of food, change is under way and that increasing numbers are seeking something of real substance. It'll probably take a bit longer to work through to food for the mind and spirit, and it may well never be mass market, but I think it will be a growing one.

The only thing that will really satisfy you as a writer is to be true to yourself - to that indefinable something that you connected with in the portrait in the National Gallery, and the love and intrigue that it generated. If you're happy that you are doing justice to that in your writing then be unshakeable ('And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise'). Least of all rewrite out of commercial considerations - unless writing commercially is your true vision.

Frankly, if I were a writer, I'd be quite disheartened if ***** wrote to me "Do you want to write commercial fiction or literary fiction?" How come 'either or', as if these are the only two types of fiction that can be? In fairness, ***** is just reflecting current publisher thinking - but this thinking is basically an accountant's view, and after that it's a marketing team's view, and at the end of the queue there might be a whisper from an editor.

If we must think in genres then I'd like to propose a new one, 'true fiction'. . . This is neither clever packaging of nothing much at all, nor graceful literary pyrotechnics, but fiction which is lit by an inner light and perception, and is true to and manifests that. Not that there haven't been such works, they just haven't been given a genre till now."

Jonathan's view

While I take a couple of days off to recover from the Norovirus, here are two contributions I've received by email. This one is from Jonathan, who makes incredible lustreware which fulfils William Morris's dictum for arts and crafts: both useful and beautiful. He writes:

"First about the lack of lustre in modern language. I am a great fan of John Ruskin, and find his prose majestic in vision, and vivid in detail. The best of it rolls like some unstoppable wave - whether of righteous indignation or of detailed and delicate description. There is nothing to touch his style that I have come across. Hemmingway wrote terse, spare and effective prose, but there was a great loss involved in this paring economy of language.

Second: commercial versus critically-acclaimed. I agree that this is an unfortunate dichotomy. Chiefly I think it springs from intellectual snobbery, which permeates many artistic fields and not just the literary. But the argument is based on very dubious logic - something along the lines of: lots of people are ignorant; lots of people like this (book/picture/story/film); so only ignorant, or mainly ignorant people like this. I am not ignorant, so naturally I don't like it. What's more, if I don't like it, it can't be good. More succinctly, it runs: this is popular, so it cannot be good. Which line of false reasoning also has the delicious variant: my work is hard to understand, so it must be good. Or my work is misunderstood, so it must be good. In my own field, there is a deep dividing line between those potters (now dignified by the title 'Ceramicists', or sometimes 'Ceramists') who feature in exhibitions sponsored by the Crafts Council, and those who make a living selling work to the public. The new, the wacky and the boundary pushing get publicity...the old hat sells. It is not a watertight boundary(which boundaries are?) but it is a slightly unfortunate division. The problem to some extent is that most of those who can, do; and many of those who can't, teach.

I have always thought there is something healthy about getting along without grants and awards; for if you want to make a living, you have to give people what they value, and are prepared to pay for. Where is the shame in this? Of course it may involve compromise. But to remain entirely uncompromising is, I think, to do nothing. The pure world of principle and inaction."

Literary or Commercial?

I was told today that a book I’m currently championing is written in a commercial style (i.e. language) but has a literary content. When I asked what was meant, I was told that, for this book to be commercial, the protagonist should be female and there should be ‘some bosom heaving’.

In the current issue of Myslexia (issue 36), there is an article by Lesley Lokko, author of ‘blockbusters’, in which she says, ‘there’s something about the honesty of commercial fiction that I adore. Fundamentally, commercial fiction is about two things: good storytelling and good sales.’ She goes on to say, ‘Good definitions of what constitutes “literary” and “commercial” fiction are hard to come by. Most critics waffle indecisively about the boundary between content and style, or prose and plot, and so on, citing the Booker long list as the definitive literary guide . . . but if there’s one thing everyone seems to agree on, it’s the fact that the definition is slippery and shifting, and that no one seems to know whether that’s A Good Thing. I think it’s brilliant.’

In regard to the author I’m championing (as yet unpublished) I think it is vitally necessary that publishers allow for hybrids. Otherwise they, rather like TV companies, are guilty of continually dishing up the same, and to a formula.

So, I’ve made myself sleepless tonight trying to attempt that definition. It is true that commercial fiction is more plot-driven than literary fiction. I think literary fiction suffers from the post-Jamesian idea that ‘character is plot’. Shakespeare would have said that character without plot is a body without a skeleton, but then, bless him, he was a commercial writer. (The sales of Venus and Adonis made him the richest writer ever to have lived before JK Rowling – no bosom heaving there, but much about female lust).

It is also true that the characters in commercial fiction tend to be two-dimensional, bound into their archetypes and predictable. Dickens would say, ‘so what?’, but then he was a very commercial writer.

Commercial novels do tend to have a romantic or sexual element (i.e. hot pages, which I confess to finding gripping, though I never write them myself and am glad that it is no longer true that a bodice must be ripped in every book). Jane Austen and Charlotte Bronte wrote in this genre. You can see where I’m going, can’t you? Most of our literary giants were commercial writers in their time.

Who are the exceptions? James Joyce, Virginia Woolf and Joseph Conrad spring to mind: great writers of difficult reads. It’s too late in the night to go off and do some research to check my facts, but anyone interested in this subject is advised to consult Arthur Quiller-Couch’s ‘The Art of Reading’. Quiller-Couch was an Edwardian critic, the last of his kind to speak out for truth and beauty. He was supplanted at Cambridge by F R Leavis, who introduced the idea of taking literature seriously. Seriously – key word, that. An important distinction between Quiller-Couch and Leavis is that the former wrote novels himself. Leavis only wrote criticism. I’m not saying that Leavis was an evil demon, only that he was responsible for much that followed, and the situation in Eng Lit today is such that I strongly advise any would-be writer not to study it at university.

I suspect that the division between literary and commercial is datable to the mid-twentieth century and the ideas of Leavis and his contemporaries. That is, it comes after James, Joyce, Woolf and Lawrence. Before Leavis there was simply a spectrum catering to all tastes, and not the dreadfully snobbish – however morally correct – division that now holds.

Personally I would love to see a fusion of genres, to have a book which is well-plotted, a gripping read, with great character development and a theme addressing moral questions of our time. Why not? Instead I seem to be faced with a choice of the literary equivalent of a cheap box of chocolates (made with saccharine) and a healthy raw salad. What I crave is a roast dinner.

Has any modern novel satisfied me? Yes. Louis de Berniere’s Captain Corelli’s Mandolin. Some found it insufferably tedious in its first hundred pages (before the romance kicks in), others ludicrously romantic (after the first hundred pages). I found it had a greatness to it that I hadn’t experienced before in contemporary literature, and was not surprised when watching a TV film about its success to find that its admirers encompassed the whole spectrum of British society, from workers to royalty. What was its secret? The author loved his characters, wrote beautifully, did terrific research and felt passionately about war, about Greece, about the people of Cephalonia and their sufferings. In short, heart and mind were in balance. Poor de Berniere suffered, of course, from popularity. You don’t hear much of him these days. And he never won the Booker Prize.

So let’s do for the English novel what Jamie, Hugh and Gordon are doing for English cooking: simplicity mixed with innovation, better ingredients, more passion. Healthy, organic food with incredible flavour. I could go on, and mention the division between ‘serious’ and ‘popular’ that’s infected all branches of the arts, but it is now four in the morning.

Writing from the solar plexus

I have been teaching creative writing for a long time, perhaps twelve years, but yesterday's tutorial with one of my American students (in fact, all my students are Americans, on programmes at Oxford University) was the best yet. She was finding it difficult to express what her novel is about; she didn't really know herself. I sat like a TV psychiatrist and probed with questions until we got to the nub of the matter: why  she wanted to write it. It involved a confession on her part to past misdemeanours. What she wants to do is to educate people and better inform their opinions about certain things. She is angry, with herself and with the world.

Now, as she spoke, I felt her words in the solar plexus. It was so strong a sensation that I asked her what part of her anatomy she was speaking from. Not surprisingly, it was the same, the solar plexus. Her instruction for the week is to write from there, to feel as she writes. It doesn't matter if it is crude, malformed and unliterary. Just get it out. We can talk about style, word-choice, sentence variety, the use of the semi-colon, and it matters not a jot if the content is no good. What makes content good is the passion of the writer and the truth of what is said.

Thus great with child to speak, and helpless in my throes,/Biting my truant pen, beating myself for spite,

We need to give birth to our writing, to scream and thrash, to howl in anguish. And when it comes, it is bloody and covered with mucus and placenta. That's content. I'm tempted to say that style is washing the babe and clothing it, but in fact I think it's in its genes and will leave that discussion for another day.

'Fool,' said my muse to me; 'look in thy heart, and write.'

I wonder now what Sidney meant by 'heart'. The seat of feeling does seem to be in the solar plexus. In Indian philosophy, 'heart' is a much larger concept than the physical pump behind the left breast. When I checked 'solar plexus' in Wikipedia, I found this:

According to Hindu beliefs, the solar plexus chakra is "the center of etheric-psychic intuition: a vague or non-specific, sensual sense of knowing; a vague sense of size, shape, and intent of being." As such, some psychics recommend "listening" to it since it may help out in making better decisions in one's life on many different levels.

In my study of Sidney, such as it has been, I can see that when he wrote Astrophil and Stella, when, in fact, he wrote this first sonnet in the sequence, he had changed as a writer. As he says himself, he stopped looking for words, inspiration and a model in other writers, stopped valuing study above direct contact with nature, and begin to write from the heart. I can only wonder if by 'heart' he meant 'solar plexus'.

David and I have been enjoying a joust-by-email with friend Jonathan over the past fews days, inspired by Jonathan's provocative statement that novels are 'not improving' and, therefore, not worth reading. Once the dust had settled, we saw that we all believed the same thing, that very many modern novels are not worth reading. It is not enough to create a plot and some characters, to write even a gripping story beautifully. Not enough. What the reader needs is to feel the writer's passion, about some aspect of being human. When we read a good novel, when we feel improved by what we have read, it's as if a hand has reached in and squeezed that organ behind the abdomen, the solar plexus.

Delayed Gratification

Did I say 'The End'? Silly me. The typesetter is off on holiday until 2nd February we discovered today, when we phoned in a flap to find out why she hadn't sent the files for the cover to the printers. That's it, then. No hope of the promised January publication, but still a chance for my favoured date of February 14th - very appropriate for Venus.

Had to admit mother to the John Radcliffe Hospital again yesterday. Having learnt lessons previously, I took a flask of hot drink and a good book. There I was, deep in Sidney's Astrophil and Stella, when a young Korean woman came to fill in a form. Having established name and address (already taken in the ambulance), she asked, 'Do you consider yourself White British?' Before Mum could say 'Eh?', even before an expletive of surprise issued from my lips, she followed with 'Church of England?' and checked the box. We had about an hour to ruminate on the significance of our colour and theological inclinations before the doctor came.

'Fool,' said my muse to me. 'Look in thy heart and write.'