![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cyphomandraAny connections between the following are left as an exercise for the reader.
Morris Gleitzman, Bumface. Starts off with the main character being told off by his teacher for drawing a submarine in class rather than the penis he’s supposed to, which gives you some idea of where this is going. Angus is the oldest child of a famous television mum with three kids by three different men, all of whom she leaves Angus to look after. She has recently acquired another boyfriend, and Angus is deeply afraid that another child will also be on the way so he sets out to stop her.
Gleiztman is like Jacqueline Wilson in choosing topics for children’s literature that are potential minefields (have just realised this in in fact literal in at least one of his books!); his approach is usually lighter (I don’t often laugh at Jacqueline Wilson’s books) but no less serious in intent. His characters are also more concerned with the world around them, whether this is vegetarianism or the environment or political situations, and I think it’s great that he’s doing this – Boy Overboard and Girl Underground deal with Australia’s treatment of refugees, for example – even if it doesn’t always come off (there’s a scene in Boy Overboard where the family rescue their mother from a soccer stadium where mass executions are taking place, which is a pretty hard sell as a kind of comic escape sequence). The second plotline in this one is about a girl , Rindi, whose parents have arranged a marriage for her to an older man back in India; Angus meets her at the family planning clinic, where both of them are attempting to access contraceptives for their own reasons. I like her a lot, but the final resolution to her situation is, as with the sequence in the other book, a hard sell; I don't want dark and depressing if it can be avoided, but I'm not convinced that what I got would a) work and b) last.
Penelope Balogh, Up with the Joneses. Published in 1967, this is a rather teeth-wrenching story about a nice white middle-class English family who decide they want to adopt a black baby girl, for reasons that are rather vague. I read this in fascinated horror while standing at the library book sale as there was no way I was even handing over 20 cents for the thing - it skates blithely past almost all adoption-related issues (apart from an unnerving bit where they trick the son into wanting this particular baby by sticking a Matchbox car in her crib when they walk through the orphanage) as well as most of the racial ones - it's not, necessarily, that it's bad, but it possesses a steadfast refusal to consider any of the possible more complex implications of the story.
Gillian Bradshaw, Island of Ghosts. The antidote to that appalling movie “King Arthur”, this is also about Samartian troops being sent to England to serve under Roman command, but it’s actually good. The main character, Ariantes, has to learn how to work with the Romans without losing touch with his own people; there’s a nice balance there, and it’s helped by the fact that Ariantes feels like he actually belongs in this time, rather than being a modern clone (yes, he's horrified by the Roman slave system and frees his own slave, but he also collects the scalps of his dead enemies). The romance is a tiny bit precipitate but works.
Evelyn Waugh, Scoop. A book whose time has passed, or at least for me. I’m either halfway or two-thirds of the way through The Sword of Honour trilogy, which I like better (although it's on very long hiatus, as I started it almost three years ago); while satires on journalistic behaviour aren’t necessarily outdated, centring them all around an unstable imaginary African state subject to frequent coups with rival factions arguing in an amusing fashion over who’s really black, with all of the main, speaking, characters firmly white, is, at least hopefully. The bit I liked most in this was when one of the senior editors visits the old country house of the main character, armed with many hopelessly inaccurate expectations about country life; the encounters in Africa are all far more one-sided. I was also unnerved by a disturbingly biological TLS review on the blurb – “Mr. Waugh’s ribald wit spurts in a brisk uninterrupted flow upon the caprices of sensational journalism,” but will refrain from further comment as it all goes rapidly downhill.
EM Forster, A Room with a View. In this case I think reading the introduction (after the book) has consolidated my main problem with the story – I really enjoyed the opening sequence in Florence, which I thought was excellent, particularly in terms of character, but felt that once the characters left Italy there was a loss of tension in the narrative that never quite picked up again. The introduction helpfully informed me that Forster had spent years working out what to do with his beginning, and now it's hard not to read it as a bolted-on ending. This has not helped my finally getting around to finishing A Passage to India, which will now have to wait for some other form of impetus.
Diana Gabaldon, Lord John and the unfortunate spin-off. I should stop reading these, because they’re retrospectively sucking out all the enjoyment I actually got out of the first two and a half books of the original series. This one overlaps timewise with Voyager, but the characters seem to have shown up from somewhere else – John Grey has, perhaps, wandered in from some researcher’s overenthusiastic thesis on homosexual behaviour and identity in eighteenth century English society, and Jamie Fraser is stuck with intermittent cameos as a) helpful guide and b) object of (mostly) restrained lust. The book does have an admirably clear blurb, which makes the plot much more coherent than it turns out to be; it’s hard to get all that excited about one of those “dark secrets from the past are slowly revealed in conveniently chronological order” set-ups, interspersed with earnest but uninteresting battle sequences and the discovery (via selective breeding) of dachshunds. I also think having a sexual relationship with your soon-to-be-stepbrother is madly tacky or, at least, worthy of slightly more consideration than a quick “I suppose it isn’t really incest”, but I am also equally appalled by the love interest being named "Percy", so maybe I should just stop being so picky.
Morris Gleitzman, Bumface. Starts off with the main character being told off by his teacher for drawing a submarine in class rather than the penis he’s supposed to, which gives you some idea of where this is going. Angus is the oldest child of a famous television mum with three kids by three different men, all of whom she leaves Angus to look after. She has recently acquired another boyfriend, and Angus is deeply afraid that another child will also be on the way so he sets out to stop her.
Gleiztman is like Jacqueline Wilson in choosing topics for children’s literature that are potential minefields (have just realised this in in fact literal in at least one of his books!); his approach is usually lighter (I don’t often laugh at Jacqueline Wilson’s books) but no less serious in intent. His characters are also more concerned with the world around them, whether this is vegetarianism or the environment or political situations, and I think it’s great that he’s doing this – Boy Overboard and Girl Underground deal with Australia’s treatment of refugees, for example – even if it doesn’t always come off (there’s a scene in Boy Overboard where the family rescue their mother from a soccer stadium where mass executions are taking place, which is a pretty hard sell as a kind of comic escape sequence). The second plotline in this one is about a girl , Rindi, whose parents have arranged a marriage for her to an older man back in India; Angus meets her at the family planning clinic, where both of them are attempting to access contraceptives for their own reasons. I like her a lot, but the final resolution to her situation is, as with the sequence in the other book, a hard sell; I don't want dark and depressing if it can be avoided, but I'm not convinced that what I got would a) work and b) last.
Penelope Balogh, Up with the Joneses. Published in 1967, this is a rather teeth-wrenching story about a nice white middle-class English family who decide they want to adopt a black baby girl, for reasons that are rather vague. I read this in fascinated horror while standing at the library book sale as there was no way I was even handing over 20 cents for the thing - it skates blithely past almost all adoption-related issues (apart from an unnerving bit where they trick the son into wanting this particular baby by sticking a Matchbox car in her crib when they walk through the orphanage) as well as most of the racial ones - it's not, necessarily, that it's bad, but it possesses a steadfast refusal to consider any of the possible more complex implications of the story.
Gillian Bradshaw, Island of Ghosts. The antidote to that appalling movie “King Arthur”, this is also about Samartian troops being sent to England to serve under Roman command, but it’s actually good. The main character, Ariantes, has to learn how to work with the Romans without losing touch with his own people; there’s a nice balance there, and it’s helped by the fact that Ariantes feels like he actually belongs in this time, rather than being a modern clone (yes, he's horrified by the Roman slave system and frees his own slave, but he also collects the scalps of his dead enemies). The romance is a tiny bit precipitate but works.
Evelyn Waugh, Scoop. A book whose time has passed, or at least for me. I’m either halfway or two-thirds of the way through The Sword of Honour trilogy, which I like better (although it's on very long hiatus, as I started it almost three years ago); while satires on journalistic behaviour aren’t necessarily outdated, centring them all around an unstable imaginary African state subject to frequent coups with rival factions arguing in an amusing fashion over who’s really black, with all of the main, speaking, characters firmly white, is, at least hopefully. The bit I liked most in this was when one of the senior editors visits the old country house of the main character, armed with many hopelessly inaccurate expectations about country life; the encounters in Africa are all far more one-sided. I was also unnerved by a disturbingly biological TLS review on the blurb – “Mr. Waugh’s ribald wit spurts in a brisk uninterrupted flow upon the caprices of sensational journalism,” but will refrain from further comment as it all goes rapidly downhill.
EM Forster, A Room with a View. In this case I think reading the introduction (after the book) has consolidated my main problem with the story – I really enjoyed the opening sequence in Florence, which I thought was excellent, particularly in terms of character, but felt that once the characters left Italy there was a loss of tension in the narrative that never quite picked up again. The introduction helpfully informed me that Forster had spent years working out what to do with his beginning, and now it's hard not to read it as a bolted-on ending. This has not helped my finally getting around to finishing A Passage to India, which will now have to wait for some other form of impetus.
Diana Gabaldon, Lord John and the unfortunate spin-off. I should stop reading these, because they’re retrospectively sucking out all the enjoyment I actually got out of the first two and a half books of the original series. This one overlaps timewise with Voyager, but the characters seem to have shown up from somewhere else – John Grey has, perhaps, wandered in from some researcher’s overenthusiastic thesis on homosexual behaviour and identity in eighteenth century English society, and Jamie Fraser is stuck with intermittent cameos as a) helpful guide and b) object of (mostly) restrained lust. The book does have an admirably clear blurb, which makes the plot much more coherent than it turns out to be; it’s hard to get all that excited about one of those “dark secrets from the past are slowly revealed in conveniently chronological order” set-ups, interspersed with earnest but uninteresting battle sequences and the discovery (via selective breeding) of dachshunds. I also think having a sexual relationship with your soon-to-be-stepbrother is madly tacky or, at least, worthy of slightly more consideration than a quick “I suppose it isn’t really incest”, but I am also equally appalled by the love interest being named "Percy", so maybe I should just stop being so picky.
