Monday, June 12, 2006

Whither women's fiction?

Also in today's blog

Charlotte Lamb remembered
A record number of Amazon reviews?
Half-witted heroines
Regretting £6.99 spent on £10,000 prize-winner
Andrew Brown's view of the matter

For nearly 20 years I enjoyed a weekly exchange of news and views about the book world with my Mills & Boon colleague Charlotte Lamb, who also wrote mainstream novels under her real name Sheila Holland. She died five and a half years ago and I still miss our correspondence.

Last night, after watching, on TV, an excellent film Music of the Heart, starring Meryl Streep as a violin teacher at a school in New York's Harlem district, I received an email from Jane Holland, the third of Sheila's five talented children.

Jane tells me she has organised a Charlotte Lamb blog in her mother's memory. More about this in a future blog.

Whither women's fiction?


Ten years ago this month, I faxed [as we did in those days] the following comment to another writer.

"Yesterday I bought Brayfield's Harvest which is utterly different from her previous blockbusters [including shorter] and very gripping, but has too many unpleasant or mixed-up characters so that, in the end, in spite of the lovely descriptions of life in Gascony, and the interesting behind-the-scenes on TV stuff, one is left feeling vaguely depressed."

Ten years on, after reading two current bestsellers, both written by women for a predominantly female readership, my depression about the fiction scene is no longer vague. It has developed into a serious anxiety that the kind of novels I've been enjoying all my adult life are in danger of extinction, if not already extinct.

Record number of Amazon reviews?


On Friday I skimmed through the 214 readers' reviews of Kate Mosse's novel Labyrinth posted at Amazon UK. I didn't make an exact count of the pros and cons, but the overall impression was that opinions were fairly evenly divided between loving and loathing.


For example an enthusiast wrote- "Labyrinth is a work of excellence. a book that all those who appreciate literary craftsmanship will treasure long after their first reading. A much welcome change from the histrionics if the pseudo-alternative-mystery-history makers, which it leaves several laps behind."

Someone else wrote - "As this is my subject (23 years of research) I was so looking forward to reading this book. I'm sorry now I wasted my time. This work has been badly researched in some major areas, but also has silly, avoidable mistakes, which I found irksome. Two examples drawn at random are : brass didn't appear as a metal until the 16th century, and it would take two drivers a minimum of twelve hours to drive from Toulouse to Chartres…"

A third reviewer had mixed feelings - "A lovely wee surprise of a novel. It's essentially a jolly good yarn in the mould of Dan Brown with a chunk of history, myth, legend and reincarnation thrown in and I honestly couldn't put it down...One thing that did drive me absolutely mental though, was the truly awful editing and repeated lines, e.g. How many times does a reader want to read the line " the short hairs on the back of his/her neck stood up"? I counted about 7 times."

Half-witted heroines


What did I think of Labyrinth?

In the Author's Note at the beginning, I didn't like the use of "modern-day" or the three unnecessary words in the sentence beginning "During the course of the invasions…"
In the present-tense Prologue, I was put off Alice, the heroine in the modern part of the book, when, having narrowly missed being crushed by a massive boulder dislodged from a mountainside, she sees an opening and, knowing it is stupid, possibly dangerous, enters a long narrow tunnel instead of alerting the archaeologists at work lower down the mountain.
The scene took me back 45 years to the period when Victoria Holt wrote Mistress of Mellyn [published in 1961, the year Kate Mosse was born] and started a vogue for gothic romances in which half-witted Victorian heroines heard a noise from the attics in a sinister mansion and, instead of doing the sensible thing, crept upstairs by the light of a candle to investigate.
After the four-part Prologue, Chapter 1 starts on p 27. Chapter 82 ends on p 689, followed by an Epilogue to p 694. Dipping into this ponderous tale half a dozen times, hoping to come across a gripping scene, I was disappointed. Luckily the book was lent to me.
In this week's issue of The Bookseller, in the Nielsen Bookscan Top 50 list, Labyrinth is at No 11, up from No 13 last week. Total units sold since paperback publication on 6 January, 680,015.

Regretting £6.99 spent on £10,000 prize-winner


On the same chart, Gardens of Delight by Erica James was down to No 9 from No 6 last week. Paperbacked on 6 May, it has sold a total of 52,624 units. Both the hardback and paperback jackets seem aimed at the chick lit reader, rather than the middle-aged-to-elderly gardening enthusiast who, like me, has spent her life enjoying novels by Evelyn Anthony, Ann Bridge, Georgette Heyer, M M Kaye, Nancy Mitford, Rosamunde Pilcher, Mary Renault, Mary Stewart and Mary Wesley.



Many of the books on my shelves have Post-it notes inside their front covers on which I have pencilled notes of things to remember such as a scrap of poetry.

While reading Gardens of Delight, the winner of the FosterGrant Reading Glasses Romantic Novel of the Year Award 2006, I used six Post-it notes to make 66 critical comments about the story, including "Chapter Four would have been a better opening than Chapter One".

The Amazon reviewer who felt that Labyrinth was badly edited should try Gardens of Delight which doesn't appear to have been edited at all. We read "equally as", "get to see more of", "overly bonhomie manner" - hasn't the author heard of bonhomous? - "over the coming days, Lucy's cold got a lot worse", "seeing as he was so in the know", "looked like it had", "underway" for under way and "he'd" four times in six lines.

There are nine main characters in this novel, four of them women. The reader's initial impression of Lucy is formed by a flashback to an act of teenage hooliganism perpetrated at her expensive boarding school. Now, with 30 looming, she's still hung up about her father leaving her tiresome mother for an Italian woman.

Helen is a 45-year-old who used to run her own travel company but has married a rich man of 61, with sex problems, for no better reason than that he pursued her relentlessly and can solve her financial difficulties. Savannah is her obnoxious step-daughter. Until Francesca appears, late in the story, there is no female character with whom the sensible-but-romantic older reader can identify.

The men are an equally rum lot. Mac is an elderly chap recovering from a stroke, Conrad is his almost-50 nephew, driven to the brink of suicide by the improbable accident that killed his wife. Orlando is a wimp, Alessio an impossibly gorgeous Italian pianist, and Marcus is Lucy's vanished father now married to Francesca whose fatal illness looms over the end of the book.

If this is the most romantic novel published in the past year, those pipped to the post must fall a long way short of my definition of romantic. So far there are no reviews of the paperback at Amazon UK. Of the two people who have reviewed the hardback, one wrote "Erica James never fails to please me with her books, which are like old friends... good company; a bowl of Heinz tomato soup on a cold day ... comforting." The comparison with tinned tomato soup says a lot about this reviewer.


What is worrying about these two books is that Kate Mosse and Erica James write such slipshod English and no one at Orion has recognised their shortcomings and made an effort to remedy them by having the novels expertly edited.

Perhaps Andrew Brown was right when, last month, he wrote a piece headed "Bad books sell better than good ones because so many people are semiliterate."

He went on "It is not just that they are written by people who can't, in any interesting sense, write; they are read by people who have not properly learned to read. I don't mean their taste is uneducated, or that they can't spell, or that they have trouble with long words, though all those things may be true; I mean that they have not internalised the activity of reading so that it feels natural.
The links between speech and reading and writing are, in a fully literate person, so strong that all three appear to be aspects of the same activity. I really do hear the words I write as I write them, and if I am trying to write conversationally I will often say the words as I write them and sometimes make grotesque typing errors because I have said out loud the crucial words of a sentence and failed to notice that I did not write them down. It all feels like the same kind of expression. To a fully literate person, authors have voices more distinct and personal than most of the people they will ever talk to."

The piece raised a lot of comment, including, "Oh come on. Bad books sell well because there are an awful lot more indiscriminate buyers than discerning ones. No one ever lost money underestimating the public's taste."

But surely it was the discerning readers/buyers who made Patrick O'Brian a bestseller?

22 Comments:

At 11 June, 2006, Anonymous Anonymous said...

Semi-literate, indeed. I don't know about schools in the UK, but the study of grammar fell out of favor in schools in the US in the 1960s. I never really learned anything about grammar until I was in college. Fortunately, I had excellent, tough English professors who demanded that we learn how to write well. Bless them.

And thank you for mentioning Mary Wesley, one of my favorite writers. Another favorite: Elizabeth Jane Howard. Have you read her series of four novels about the Cazalet family?

 
At 11 June, 2006, Blogger Anne Weale said...

Grace, although many years ago I met Elizabeth Jane Howard at an East Anglian Writers' dinner in Norwich, I don't think I have read any of her Cazalet chronicles.

However I've just checked the online catalogue at my public library and they have the first book in stock, so I'll pop in tomorrow and borrow it.

Anne

 
At 11 June, 2006, Anonymous Anonymous said...

I agree with your comment on some of the modern womens'writing being published today. One of my old favourites, although I rarely see anything written about her, is (was) Brenda Jagger. Her Barforth Trilogy are some of the best thumbed novels on my bookshelves, and not only by me. They are usually the books that any visiting female friends choose to read while they are here. Have you ever come across any of her novels?

 
At 12 June, 2006, Blogger Anne Weale said...

Thanks for your recommendation, Margaret. Have checked the public library catalogue. No books by Brenda Jagger, so I'll trawl some of the local used book shops.

This author's name rings bells, perhaps because she was serialised in women's magazines.

More later. Anne

 
At 12 June, 2006, Anonymous Anonymous said...

Gosh, I think I'm semi-literate.

Have you tried Laurie R. King? She has a series starting with 'The Beekeeper's Apprentice' based on the conceit that Sherlock Holmes met a girl after his retirement, and trained her as his apprentice.

There is an excerpt of the first book on her website.

 
At 12 June, 2006, Anonymous Anonymous said...

Excerpt from. Semi-literacy strikes again.

 
At 12 June, 2006, Blogger Anne Weale said...

Marianne, thanks for telling me about Laurie R King. Have just made a quick trip to her site. Much amused by "She spent her childhood reading her way through libraries like a termite through balsa". Me too! Shall be spending more time there later. Sounds like a "find". Thanks again.

 
At 14 June, 2006, Blogger Anne Weale said...

Treva's comment "a dedicated bookworm will read anything rather than nothing" is spot on. Rather than read novels that don't really appeal, I've always found the biography and travel shelves of the library a rich source of good reading when there's nothing enticing on the fiction shelves. Of course there isn't always a library within reach. When travelling I've made some good new-to-me author discoveries in the book swop shops used by backpackers in remote corners of the globe.

 
At 15 June, 2006, Blogger Adrian Weston said...

Tinned Tomato soup is probably the best parallel for the modern publishing industry and the book retail sector's attitude to its products.

I hate tinned soup.

But there are still some nutritious and delicious books out there to feast upon.

 
At 15 June, 2006, Blogger Anne Weale said...

Hear, hear to your first para, Adrian.

I'm a bit puzzled because I've received notification of a second comment from you, recommending a book by Patience Gray which, having looked it up at Amazon, I'm certain I shall enjoy. Thank you.

However your recommendation hasn't appeared here yet. Maybe later.

 
At 18 June, 2006, Blogger AnneMarie Brear said...

I remember readinf Charlotte Lamb's books when I was a teenager. My mother thought Mills & Boons an excellent way for me to learn about relationships. :o)
Sadly I thought all men should be wealthy, gorgeous dark haired men who had secretaries. :o)

I'll raise my glass of wine tonight to Charlotte Lamb and all the other Mills & Boon authors I loved to read as a virginal teenager.

 
At 18 June, 2006, Blogger Anne Weale said...

Unlike Anne Whitfield, who wrote the previous comment, I had never heard of Mills & Boon until I was 24 and had M&B romances pressed on me by a landlady. Sometimes I wish I had never met her, but that is another story which I plan to tell in an autobiography.

At her website, Anne Whitfield looks too young to have been a virginal teenager, but I suppose they have never been a completely extinct species.

 
At 22 July, 2006, Anonymous Anonymous said...

Perhaps it's just me and my youth; but if I had to guess, I'd say you were a devout Daily Mail Reader?

Somehow I doubt the world is going to hell...the world is no less literate than it was 50 years ago. The world is less than perfect, and publishers will sell what makes stack loads of money.

Let us not forget that Shakespeare and Jane Austen were both populist massmarket authors. Ask any English A-Level student to point out the plot flaws and repetitions of set phrases...they'll have no problems at all. In fact, creation of cliches (in the original French meaning) is exactly this, creating shorthand code of use throughout a piece of work...gosh isn't it terrible how often Austen uses the work 'mortified' or 'mortification' in Pride and Prejudice? Shocking stuff...lazy writing obviously. Or maybe it's actually a literary device? Like the time that she suddenly enters the narrative as herself with that magical 'I' - or maybe that was just bad editing too?

 
At 24 November, 2006, Anonymous Anonymous said...

I agree completely about Erica James' Gardens of Delight. I hated it. It read more like an illiterate trashy Jackie Collins novel than the endearing niels I had come to expect of Ms James.

Never mind her publishers, who is her literary agent?

 
At 24 November, 2006, Anonymous Anonymous said...

Oops - novels, not niels!

 
At 07 September, 2015, Blogger oakleyses said...

michael kors outlet, uggs on sale, nike air max, michael kors outlet online, replica watches, louis vuitton, tiffany jewelry, ray ban sunglasses, replica watches, nike air max, nike free, uggs outlet, louis vuitton outlet, louis vuitton outlet, longchamp outlet, jordan shoes, burberry handbags, longchamp outlet, christian louboutin uk, michael kors outlet store, polo ralph lauren outlet online, prada outlet, polo outlet, longchamp outlet, ray ban sunglasses, prada handbags, burberry outlet, ugg boots, nike outlet, oakley sunglasses wholesale, ugg boots, louis vuitton outlet, christian louboutin outlet, michael kors outlet online, michael kors outlet, michael kors outlet online, tory burch outlet, tiffany and co, oakley sunglasses, christian louboutin shoes, gucci handbags, oakley sunglasses, christian louboutin, louis vuitton, uggs outlet

 
At 07 September, 2015, Blogger oakleyses said...

michael kors outlet, michael kors, north face, north face uk, louboutin pas cher, vans pas cher, sac longchamp pas cher, air max, coach outlet store online, nike tn, michael kors pas cher, converse pas cher, nike blazer pas cher, timberland pas cher, burberry pas cher, new balance, hollister pas cher, polo lacoste, polo ralph lauren, chanel handbags, kate spade outlet, hogan outlet, coach outlet, true religion outlet, nike air force, guess pas cher, hollister uk, jordan pas cher, nike free run, sac vanessa bruno, lululemon canada, true religion outlet, nike roshe, oakley pas cher, michael kors, true religion jeans, ray ban uk, sac hermes, coach outlet, true religion outlet, coach purses, kate spade, longchamp pas cher, ray ban pas cher, nike air max

 
At 07 September, 2015, Blogger oakleyses said...

mulberry uk, jimmy choo outlet, wedding dresses, asics running shoes, vans outlet, bottega veneta, nike trainers uk, longchamp uk, abercrombie and fitch, insanity workout, nfl jerseys, hollister, hollister clothing, soccer jerseys, giuseppe zanotti outlet, herve leger, nike roshe run uk, ghd hair, nike huaraches, ferragamo shoes, reebok outlet, mont blanc pens, north face outlet, new balance shoes, chi flat iron, nike air max uk, babyliss, valentino shoes, hermes belt, nike air max, nike roshe run, north face outlet, celine handbags, lululemon, baseball bats, beats by dre, nike air max uk, mcm handbags, nike free uk, ralph lauren uk, p90x workout, abercrombie and fitch uk, instyler, mac cosmetics, soccer shoes

 
At 07 September, 2015, Blogger oakleyses said...

replica watches, marc jacobs, doke gabbana, louis vuitton, timberland boots, ugg pas cher, coach outlet, michael kors outlet, links of london, louis vuitton, michael kors outlet online, toms shoes, lancel, iphone 6 cases, gucci, converse outlet, louis vuitton, hollister, karen millen uk, ugg, swarovski crystal, pandora uk, ray ban, thomas sabo, pandora charms, supra shoes, ralph lauren, ugg,uggs,uggs canada, converse, swarovski, louboutin, juicy couture outlet, ugg,ugg australia,ugg italia, montre pas cher, juicy couture outlet, oakley, vans, nike air max, louis vuitton, ugg uk, pandora jewelry, pandora jewelry, louis vuitton, michael kors handbags, hollister, wedding dresses

 
At 19 June, 2018, Blogger Unknown said...

qzz0619
uggs outlet
san francisco 49ers jerseys
michael kors outlet
michael kors outlet
pandora charms
ugg outlet
canada goose outlet
pandora charms sale clearance
canada goose
cheap jerseys

 
At 10 July, 2018, Blogger Unknown said...

www0710
mishka clothing
adidas soccer shoes
air max 90
oakley sunglasses
bottega veneta outlet
ugg outlet
mulberry bags
ray ban sunglasses
dsquared2 jeans
michael kors handbags





 
At 17 July, 2018, Blogger jeje said...

coach outlet online
reebok
true religion jeans
yeezy boost 350 v2
christian louboutin outlet
cheap ray bans
true religion outlet
christian louboutin shoes
louboutin shoes
off white shoes

 

Post a Comment

<< Home