Maps and Legends: Reading and Writing along the Borderlands by Michael Chabon

The thing that taught me most about literature as a kid was the study of essays, a form of literature that seems to have disappeared from the 21st century classroom. I remember greeting a lesson involving essays with sheer delight. Here was an opportunity to analyse, to look at structure and language, to argue a case.

So I was pleased to buy a copy of this new book from Michael Chabon, which is a series of essays about reading and writing. I’ve read only one, with a pencil in hand and joy in my heart. It’s like sitting down to a great meal. Yum yum.

The argument, much of it verbatim, presented in Trickster in a Suit of Lights is:

Entertainment has a bad name – it means junk and too much junk is bad for you according to clever people.

But maybe these intelligent serious people are wrong. Maybe the problem with entertainment is that we have accepted such a narrow, debased concept of entertainment and as a result mistrust and despise our human aptitude for being entertained.

He also says entertainment gets a bad rap: because it’s pleasurable it’s somehow tacky. This hasn’t been helped by mass production of entertainment leading to shoddy products.

Chabon wants to propose expanding our definition of entertainment to encompass everything pleasurable that arises from the encounter of an attentive mind with a page of literature.

He thinks it’s time writers reclaimed the role as entertainers and suggests short story as an ideal way to do this.

Short stories, though, suffer from a sort of constipation of form that results from the abandonment of genres – rather than writing things like horror, science fiction, fantasy and other genre pieces in their short stories, writers are focusing instead on the trendy and overworked ‘moment of truth’ story. Readers are dying of boredom because every story is the same.

Genre he says is regarded as unworthy of a serious reader’s attention because it implies formulaic writing. He says much of this emphasis on the formulaic and conventional stems from the approach of publishers and booksellers who use genre largely as a marketing tool, complete with trashy covers and standardized imagery. Some mainstream writers do occasionally break out and write something with a suspiciously genre-like focus but the publishers treat these books differently and they never appear as, say, science fiction because they are presented and located as literature. He would like to see all fiction set on shelves together.

Chabon goes on to say that accomplished writers who do work in the genres use the formulae and rules as the basis for playing, as an opportunity to flout, invert, break or ignore the rules.

Developing this theme of mockery and inversion, he moves to discuss the Trickster in literature, a character who appears in a multitude of literary traditions and who is always associated with borders and crossroads. Trickster goes where the action is; indeed many writers also ply their trade there, in the no mans land between genres, the land the Trickster inhabits, stirring things up, breaking the conventions, undoing history and challenging the nature of art. And here at last we have entertaining and interesting writing.

A satisfying exercise. I look forward to the rest of the book.

Ghostwalk by Rebecca Stott

I know I said I don’t like ghost stories but this one is better than most and Rebecca Stott writes nicely. It’s a sort of thriller where a friend is found dead and the woman takes on the job of completing the friend’s research and writing work. This is where the ghosts come in and they are malignant, so it’s creepy enough. Interwoven with all this is the main character’s love affair with a charismatic scientist and the involvement of a group of animal rights protestors. However this novel is so complex that it gets a bit murky – Stott never really resolves things quite clearly and it’s a bit like those religious fundamentalists I was listening to at the Writers’ Festival who said the explanation of faith is faith itself. So it’s an entertaining enough read, especially if you’re interested in 17th century history and she has a good turn of phrase. 3 stars.

Lustrum by Robert Harris

This follows on from Imperium and charts the next five years of Cicero’s life. It’s a rattling good read if you like historical fiction and covers the time of his appointment and reign as consul, the rise of Julius Caesar and Cicero’s fall from grace. Harris paints him as the one honourable man left in Rome, which is interesting. My ancient history is so appalling that I can’t even form an opinion but I enjoyed the story and will look out for the next one which I presume will cover the last stage of Cicero’s life.

Twelve Books That Changed the World by Melvin Bragg

I feel a bit of a cheat about posting this book because I only read half of it. It was good but highly specialised in its interest: each of the books he wrote about focused on a critical aspect of society and how it had been influenced by a major publication. The books about feminism and human rights and evolution and even football I found interesting but I really couldn't get into the stuff on the invention of various sorts of ploughs and spinning machines NOT WHEN I HAD A NEW iMAC AND A NEW KINDLE AND A NEW NETBOOK PC TO PLAY WITH!!!!! Yes, I was seduced away from it all by new technology. In the absence of my new toys I probably would have finished Twelve Books, and learned something wonderful, but for the moment it has gone by the board. The first half rated four stars though and it would be a specially good book for a bloke to read, what with all that equipment in it. (BTW the new technology is wonderful and I've loaded six books onto the Kindle.)