I have a new book out called “The Patient”. I’m now in that stage of having to talk about it all the time – to keep the publisher happy, to give myself a chance of selling enough copies to be able to publish another one – which I don’t really relish. But there is something interesting I can talk about with this one and the run in to its publication as it relates to the wider universe. It has to do with fiction in the current age and how certain assumptions are creeping in that will make it very hard for challenging fiction of any description to continue being produced.
When you get published by an imprint attached to a major publisher, they send your book out for review. They give it to all the big newspapers and magazines, hoping to get a bite, but they know for relatively unknown writers a safer bet is to send it out to book bloggers. These are people who will be willing to write a review in return for a free copy of a book. I got a lot of pick up this time from these bloggers, who knows why. I suppose the book is set in a hospital and deals with medicalisation as one of its themes in a time when that is relevant to a lot of people, but I’m only guessing. Maybe they liked the cover – sometimes it is as superficial and unrelated to what you actually wrote as that.
Anyhow, as is always the case, some of the reviewers really liked it, some of them sort of liked it, some of them sort of didn’t like it and some of them hated it. So far, so normal. Yet what interests me this time round is what I’ve picked up on as a strange form of political correctness that I believe is very dangerous. In fact, if spread across novel writing as a whole, the genre might as well pack it in.
“The Patient” has two main characters, Mr and Mrs Sincope, a couple who are about to have their first child. He is a fairly terrible person – he is sexist, xenophobic, arrogant without even any justifiable cause. In fact, one reviewer summed him up beautifully:
“If you wanted a picture of your typical, think I am better than everyone, misogynist, racist male – he is it.”
Great, the reviewer got it, spot on – always nice when your character is understood. Except, this is the next line in the review:
“It was really distracting from the book and difficult to read.”
In other words, having a sexist male character in a book that is specifically about sexism and a woman’s right to her own body is….distracting? Just having to be confronted with the actions of a misogynist in a novel is now “difficult”?
I realise what I might be heading into here is the territory of a writer bitching about negative reviews – I assure you, that’s not what this is about. Even the positive reviews of the book I have found a little bewildering, as they tend to have a “really enjoyed this, cracking read, but beware, it’s somewhat offensive” vibe to them – “This didn’t bother me, but it probably will appal most people”. No, the reason I feel the need to write about this is that there appears to be a widespread idea, baked in for a certain group of people now, that if a novel has a sexist, xenophobic character, even if this character is obviously a “bad guy”, then the book is in itself is sexist and xenophobic as a result. As in, just presenting characters who have these traits, even if they are being displayed so that they can be shown to be problematic, is somehow crossing a line in the sand.
If you think this isn’t that important, I should let you know that book bloggers have become to some extent gatekeepers in the publishing world. Getting reviewed in a major publication happens but is rare and increasingly difficult unless you are very famous and/or your last book was an international best seller. The source of decent reviews for most up and coming writers are these bloggers. And the fact that so many of them, even those who liked my book and gave it a good review, have trouble with politically incorrect characters being present has shaken me a little. It will have a definite effect on how much writers of all fiction will want to ‘rock the boat’.
I think of someone like Irvine Welsh, as leftie and right on as you can get, and all of the horrible characters in his books. Think of Begbie or Sick Boy in Trainspotting – actually, think of any character in that book, including Renton. Once upon a time, challenging your audience with distasteful scenes and characters in order to make a point about the world was the edgy thing all vaguely progressive writers did. I guess I didn’t get the memo.
Anyhow, given all that, if any of you faithful readers can have a look at the book and tell me if you think it is actually offensive, I would be grateful. Plus, if enough of you who read this buy a copy, I can shut up about the book and talk about other shit for a while. Here it is:
In other words, having a sexist male character in a book that is specifically about sexism and a woman’s right to her own body is….distracting? Just having to be confronted with the actions of a misogynist in a novel is now “difficult”?
A possibility you may have missed: No, it isn’t ‘distracting’ or ‘difficult’ obviously.
But: it is important for these internet-vanity-published loons to signal to their readers that they noticed that the character was Bad.
That way if the tide turns against either the book or the author — as happens, there have been several instances recently of books that have been out for, in some cases, years being suddenly classified as wrongthink and recalled to Minitrue for ‘corrections’ while the authors write their grovelling apologies — the reviewer can point to that bit of the review and say that even if their review was generally positive that they spotted The Problem and warned people about it, so they were on The Right Side all along.
In other words: it’s not about the book, or the character. It’s insurance for the reviewer’s future reputation, so that if you get cancelled they can easily cut you loose, disassociate themselves from you, and not get dragged down in your wake.
None of this makes it any less pernicious of course, but it might make it more understandable.
(And of course if they’re really lucky, it might not just save them from being cancelled with you but might enable them to actively enhance their standing by looking like they were ahead of the curve — look at all the social cachet being claimed in the wave of the J. K. Rowling thing by people going, ‘Well of course I was pointing out all the problematic stuff in the Harry Potter books at the time so my social justice spidey sense is clearly more finely-tuned than the people who are only just getting out the pitchforks now.’)
I actually think you’re bang on with this one. It’s about them looking over their shoulder, terrified of being cancelled. Jesus, what a world.
Just make sure to keep that ‘WORKERS OF THE WORLD UNITE’ sign nice and high in your shop window.
Sometimes the radiance of the writing eclipses dodgy subject matter. Think of Nabokov’s Lolita or Jean Genet’s Le Journal du Voleur. But you could be right if it is the case that such books could no longer be written.
I would guess that a writer does have to provide sufficient reward for his or her readers. An unpleasant character can be a turn off and a reason for a reader to lose interest. There have to be enough compensating rewards.
It makes you wonder what some people think is ‘a good read’. Literature is rammed with people with very dodgy attitudes – Macbeth, Milton’s Satan, the mayor of Casterbridge, Dean Moriarty, Philip Marlowe, the emperor Claudius, Urbain Grandier……etc etc etc. Possibly, their authors understood that there is little dramatic tension in ‘ nice person meets another nice person, they have lovely chats in which they expound their correct political opinions, have great sex and live happily ever after’. Although it occurs to me that those bad guys are all men, so maybe if the authors had troubled themselves to write strong sassy female or trans characters……maybe it’s not too late and we could go back and correct these books by a bit of rewriting in tune with modern sensibilities? Though I think the chances of making that work for Marlowe are less than for Satan.