Don't make literature your religion: a reader's plea

The stupidest thing ever said by man or woman was not said by George W Bush or Sarah Palin but by Joseph Brodsky in his Nobel lecture:

I'll just say that I believe - not empirically, alas, but only theoretically - that, for someone who has read a lot of Dickens, to shoot his like in the name of some idea is more problematic than for someone who has read no Dickens. And I am speaking precisely about reading Dickens, Sterne, Stendhal, Dostoevsky, Flaubert, Balzac, Melville, Proust, Musil, and so forth; that is, about literature, not literacy or education. A literate, educated person, to be sure, is fully capable, after reading this or that political treatise or tract, of killing his like, and even of experiencing, in so doing, a rapture of conviction. Lenin was literate, Stalin was literate, so was Hitler; as for Mao Zedong, he even wrote verse. What all these men had in common, though, was that their hit list was longer than their reading list.




Good to know that so as long as we check the length of the lists we'll be alright. It's hard to see how Brodsky could have more greatly slandered those who don't read novels (which include so many of anyone's friends and relatives), but views like Brodsky's are widespread among the literary world, and always have been. As Terry Eagleton demonstrated in Literary Theory: An Introduction, the beginnings of literature as a field of study and literary criticism as a way of life were as a kind of replacement for religion, the rise of one coinciding with the decline in the other caused by scientific discovery and social change over the course of the nineteenth century and continuing into the early twentieth. Eagleton quotes from the inaugural lecture of George Gordon, an early Professor of English Literature at Oxford:

England is sick, and [...] English literature must save it. The churches (as I understand) having failed, and social remedies being slow, English literature has now a triple function: still, I suppose, to delight and instruct us, but also, and above all, to save our souls and heal the state.



The link between religion and literature is rapture, or ecstasy. When you immerse yourself in a piece of art you adore, it creates the illusion that there is nothing else: how could anyone not feel the same way about this work? How could they not feel moved? The only explanation is that they are not fully human: there's something missing, something hollow about their lives; they can't be truly happy, even if they think they are. Kenneth Tynan famously wrote: "I doubt if I could love anyone who did not wish to see Look Back in Anger." Even Kingsley Amis, scourge of the highbrows and normally a good bullshit-detector, suffered a lapse when he wrote that "to say or imply that [Shakespeare] is not our greatest writer marks a second-rate person at best" (His son Martin Amis wrote "I agree", which is less surprising). It might make that person a second-rate literary critic, but that's it. Was Tolstoy - who wrote a famously ridiculous essay on the worthlessness of Shakespeare - really a second-rate human being? Or was he just wrong about Shakespeare?

The supreme irony of this is that it reveals art as something which makes people smaller, and diminishes their empathy, even though boosting both our imagination and our understanding of human beings is the very advantage the same people claim it has given them over non-readers.
John Carey's books The Intellectuals and the Masses and What Good are the Arts have done sterling work exploring the history of this fallacy. He observes the obsession of literary intellectuals with the masses'
diet and pallor - even George Orwell couldn't come to terms with tinned food - their fear of the spread of mass literacy and the corrupting and too easily-gratifying effects of popular entertainment and their unshakable believe that, as they felt they had been improved by art, then the masses must be too. He points to the ghastly piousness of those in the nineteenth century who believed their favourite works of art could "improve" the working classes, such as Charles Kingsley:

Pictures raise blessed thoughts in me - why not in you, my brother? Believe it, toil-worn worker, in spite of thy foul alley, thy crowded lodging, thy ill-fed children, thy thin, pale wife, believe it, thou too, and thine, will one day have your share of beauty. God makes you love beautiful things only because He intends hereafter to give you His fill of them. That pictured face on the wall is lovely - but lovelier still may the wife of thy bosom be when she meets thee on the resurrection morn! Those baby cherubs in the old Italian painting - how gracefully they flutter and sport among the soft clouds, full of rich young life and baby joy! - Yes, beautiful indeed, but just such a one is that pining, deformed child of thine, over whose death-cradle thou wast weeping a month ago; now a child-angel, whom thou shalt meet again, never to part.




Fr and QD Leavis were probably the most prominent advocates for this position - applied to literature - in the post-war period. Carey - in a discussion of QD Leavis's Fiction and the Reading Public collected in his earlier book Original Copy - offers an excellent case study of how this led to an almost psychotic inability to comprehend their fellow human beings. He recounts how QD Leavis suggests:

if we wish to see what a mind warped by bestsellers us like, we shall find an "invaluable reference point" in the Gerty McDowell episode in Ulysses. "Such a life is not only crude, impoverished, and narrow, it is dangerous." It is, she declares, because such minds as Gerty's are among us that society is not "efficiently equipped for the business of living." This is certainly a remarkable procedure for a critic so opposed to escapism and to the substitution of literature for life. It is hardly what we should expect, either, when we take into account Mrs Leavis's constant warnings that literature ought to shock and disturb us rather than merely confirming our prejudices. Finding that the fictional Gerty McDowell accords gratifyingly with her own ideas about the mass audience, Mrs Leavis awards her the status of reality, and preaches about the danger to society Gerty represents, forgetting that Gerty is only a figment of a cultured imagination: an imagination, that is, representing the same educated minority as she belongs to herself.

It's not for nothing that Clive James wrote of her husband's influence "Leavis was our brush with totalitarianism: we caught it as a mild fever instead of the full attack of meningitis" and that Carey in the piece cited describes her own voice as that of "a cultural dictator - and in that sense recognisably and ominously a voice of the thirties."

As for more recent examples I'd like to suggest a further case study for Professor Carey: Ursula Le Guin's curiously detestable essay "Why Are Americans Afraid of Dragons?" . It has that sickly evangelical tone present in the bookchat of everyone from the Leavises to Jeanette Winterson. Le Guin's words resembles Charles Kingsley's in their condescension and weary compassion towards those poor deluded people who don't appreciate the things she does:

"What's the good of it all,' he says. "dragons and hobbits and little green men - what's the use of it?"

   The truest answer, unfortunately, he won't even listen to. He won't hear it. The truest answer is, "The use of it is to give you pleasure and delight."

   I haven't got the time," he snaps, swallowing a Maalox pill for his ulcer and rushing off to the golf course.

So we try the next-to-truest answer. It probably won't go down much better, but it must be said: "The use of imaginative fiction is to deepen your understanding of your world, and your fellow men, and your own feelings, and your destiny."

   To which I fear he will retort, "Look, I got a raise last year, and I'm giving my family the best of everything, we've got two cars and a Color tv. I understand enough of this world!"

   And he is right, unanswerably right, if that is what he wants, and all he wants.The kind of thing you learn from reading about the problems of a hobbit who is trying to drop a magic ring into an imaginary volcano has very little to do with your social status, or material status, or income. Indeed, if there is any relationship, it is a negative one. There is an inverse correlation between fantasy and money. That is a law, known to economists as Le Guin's law. If you want a striking example of Le Guin's law, just give a lift to one of those people along the roads who own nothing but a backpack, a guitar, a fine head of hair, a smile, and a thumb. Time and again, you will find that these waifs have read The Lord of the Rings - some of them can practically recite it. But now take Aristotle Onassis, or J.Paul Getty: could you believe that these men ever had anything to do, at any stage, under any circumstances, with a hobbit?
But, to carry my example a little further, and out of the realm of economics, did you ever notice how very gloomy Mr Onassis and Mr Getty and all those billionaires look in their photographs? They have this strange, pinched look, as if they were hungry. As If they were hungry for something, as if they had lost something and were trying to think where it could be, or perhaps what it could be, what it was they've lost.
Could it be their childhood?




The tone here is one of ecclesiastical regret - he's not going to like this but I fear I must tell him - with no awareness of the lunacy of the idea she knows more about someone's happiness than he does. When Ursula Le Guin is trying to get you to buy a subscription to The Watchtower, or at least a copy of The Dispossessed, I think you'd be wise to play Golf. It's not so different from Carey's example in What Are The Arts? of the words of Lord Justice Coleridge in 1857, who argued that the lower classes needed art "to purify their tastes and wean them from polluting and debasing habits."' Le Guin talks about the importance of understanding her fellow men yet can't imagine that someone who doesn't read fantasy would be happy. She assumes he will be aggressive and ulcered (that obsession with the masses' physical deterioration remains). The all-encompassing rapture leads to only one possibility: they're not happy even if they think they are. You can't get more religious than that.

   Then there's the hatred of the furniture of ordinary people's lives, and of their working for a living (those withering references to Maalox, mortgages, TV and golf). Le Guin reminds us that:

In the old, truly Puritan days, the only permitted reading was the Bible. Nowadays, with our secular Puritanism, the man who refuses to read novels because it's unmanly to do so, or because they aren't true, will most likely end up watching bloody detective thrillers on the television, or reading hack Westerns or sports stories, or going in for pornography, from Playboy on down.




There's a touch of wistfulness there in the reference to the past : certainly Le Guin shows far more disgust at the freedom to watch "bloody detective thrillers" than the earlier lack of freedom to read anything other than a single religious tract.

At one point Le Guin says "Now what about our man's wife?". Our man doesn't have a wife because he doesn't exist: he's a phantom conjured up by Le Guin's own contempt for those that don't admire the things she does, her sense of superiority and her zealous defensiveness towards her own work. This is an argument with an empty chair. Nevertheless, Le Guin continues:

She probably wasn't required to squelch her private imagination in order to play her expected role in life, but she hasn't been trained to discipline it, either. She is allowed to read novels, and even fantasies. But, lacking training and encouragement, her fancy is likely to glom on to very sickly fodder, such things as soap operas, and "true romances," and nursy novels, and historico-sentimental novels, and all the rest of the baloney ground out to replace genuine imaginative works by the artistic sweatshops of a society that is profoundly distrustful of the uses of the imagination.




There's a nasty little touch of snobbery in the assumption that in non-writerly households like these the husband will be the one who "allows" her to read novels. As for the sweatshop comment, one almost admires Le Guin's audacity in turning people who like her stuff and indeed buy her product into heroes protecting the imagination, and those who don't buy her books into enemies of that noble cause.The irony of Le Guin's essay is just how out of touch she is with her fellow human beings: fantasy has made her contemptuous rather than empathetic, complacent rather than thoughtful, and certain that he she knows the little there is to know about these wretched non-readers rather than curious about them.

Roald Dahl's children's novel Matilda dramatises this view (with scenes so snobbish the late Puffin editor Kaye Webb was reportedly reduced to tears at having to publish it). The wickedness of Mr and Mrs Wormwood, Matilda's demonised parents, is explicitly and repeatedly put down to their lack of interest in reading. "All the reading she had done had given her a view of life that they had never seen. If only they would read a little Dickens or Kipling they would soon discover there was more to life than cheating people and watching television," thinks Matilda. We saw in Le Guin's essay how the newspapers that terrified the 30s generation and the cinema that horrified DH Lawrence and Leavis had been replaced with television (which, as Le Guin reminded us, is now a substitute for the Bible). Here, the tinned food that horrified Orwell and Eliot is replaced with TV dinners, and where Le Guin has Golf, Dahl has bingo. Dahl's sneering at Mrs Wormwood's addiction to soap operas is strikingly similar to "our man's wife" in Le Guin's piece. To hate a soap opera is the sign of a good critic, but to hate someone for watching one is the sign of a bigot. This tension peaks when Mr Wormwood returns home after a taxing day selling second-hand cars (filled with sawdust and with rigged speedometers, naturally) and stares with hatred at Matilda reading a book. He tries to stop this by putting on the television, and when she ignores it he grabs her book and rips it to pieces:

She kept right on reading, and for some reason this infuriated her father. Perhaps his anger was intensified because he saw her getting pleasure from something that was beyond his reach. [...] There seemed little doubt that the man felt some kind of jealousy. How dare she, he seemed to be saying with each rip of a page, how dare she enjoy reading books when he couldn't? How dare she?




As with Le Guin's comments about how unhappy Onassis and Getty look, we see the book-zealot's view that those who don't like books must be very unhappy, even if they think they aren't. The rapture reading fills them with makes the possibility of happiness existing anywhere else impossible for them to consider.

When Matilda's beloved teacher Miss Honey visits the Wormwoods, Dahl descends into full-on class hatred. The belief that the working class are frightened of education is dominant here, as is the Wormwoods' physical repulsiveness, their addiction to the TV and their hatred of books. Dahl is unashamed in making Miss Honey address them as their educator, too:

"University?" Mr Wormwood shouted, bouncing up in his chair. "Who wants to go to university for heaven's sake! All they learn there is bad habits!"
That is not true," Miss Honey said. "If you had a heart attack this minute and had to call a doctor, that doctor would be a university graduate. If you got sued for selling someone a rotten second-hand car, you'd have to get a lawyer and he'd be a university graduate, too. Do not despise clever people, Mr Wormwood. But I can see we're not going to agree.




Miss Honey, like Le Guin trying to grab Our Man's attention before he disappears to play golf, is a weary pilgrim, trying to convert them to the church of literature.

Unlike Le Guin, though, I don't think Dahl's more reactionary books will temporarily shape their child readers into something resembling the author. In a letter to The Horn Book regarding Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Le Guin recounts how her young daughter went from "amiable" to "quite nasty" as she read the book. Quite a high - if simplistic - claim for the power of literature to change people, but an ungenerous view of readers. The critic of Roald Dahl must always balance - as Jenny Diski and Michael Irwin do more skillfully - the dislike of the adult reader with the enjoyment of the child reader, as Dahl's work is a particularly striking example of a reading experience that changes drastically as one grows out of one stage into the next (the Narnia books, too, are harmless when you're young, but obnoxious as one ages: it's funny how some books get more right-wing when you get older). Today, I find Matilda a dislikeable and compromised book, but as a child I would frequently reread it. Child readers can be left to reach these conclusions for themselves as both they and their reading experiences grow

We can still see the attitudes that produced the Wormwoods and "our man" in Phillip Hensher's execrable claim that "I think you can tell, when you meet someone, whether they read novels or not. There is some little hollowness if they don't", in Harold Bloom's views on children who read Harry Potter (which are even less researched than Fiction and the Reading Public - "Their eyes simply scan the page. Then they turn to the next page. Their minds are deadened by cliches" ), and in almost everything Howard Jacobson says. This, as anyone familiar with this blog will know, is not to say I don't believe that one's dislike of a particular book should be vociferously expressed, merely that is has nothing to do with whether someone else chooses to read it. Despite what Jacobson and Bloom tell you, harsh literary criticism is not a disagreement with anyone who enjoyed reading that particular book. I'd argue strenuously with anyone who claimed there was any literary merit in Mills and Boon (let alone Tony Parsons or Jodi Picoult) but anyone who directly sneers at someone for reading one is a despicable human being. I wholeheartedly endorse Adam Mars Jones's superb takedown of Stephen King just as I admire AS Byatt's piece pointing out that JK Rowling does not write the true heady wine of fantasy, but my views on King and Rowling's limitations do not put me at odds with anyone who enjoys their books. A typically odious anecdote from Howard Jacobson sees him describe having dinner with a Rabbi, who tells him that he took the family to see Chitty Chitty Bang Bang: "I wanted to kill him! It's the one thing I can't forgive Jews for - philistinism." He elaborates on this anecdote in another interview:

I just couldn't sit still. Chitty Chitty Bang Bang? It's total crap! Then I looked at his shelves and saw all these holy books and at the end, a Harry Potter! I said "You're a Jewish scholar! Where's the Saul Bellow? Where's the Philip Roth? Where's the Me?" We as Jews are people of the Book! So Rabbi! Read a book!'

I loathe this piece of sociopathic behaviour, and I say this as someone who would probably loathe Chitty Chitty Bang Bang almost as much if he saw it (Note also how the author's own work becomes a holy text proffered Watchtower style: even Le Guin didn't directly suggest that A Wizard of Earthsea was the kind of fantasy "our man" should be reading. And let's not get started on the idiocy of Jacobson placing himself in Roth and Bellow's league). A literary opinion is where you put forth your own response to a work. What's chilling about Jacobson and Bloom is that they wish their responses to replace all others: they're not putting forward an argument, they expect others to already have it. Again, one can't ignore the supreme irony here: that someone who can't even imagine the point of view of someone enjoying Chitty Chitty Bang Bang should write novels set in the inside of other people's heads, and believe that literature has enriched their imagination (Jacobson also has his own variation of Brodsky's idiotic thesis: "When were you last mugged on the Underground by someone carrying Middlemarch in his pocket?"). Jacobson is an unashamed Leavisite who studied under the man himself at Cambridge, and his latest novel, Zoo Time, dramatises these prejudices (that is, crudely hammers them into the shape of fiction rather than right-wing columns for the Independent, just as his last novel The Finkler Question did.) When he appeared on Radio 3's Night Waves to discuss the book, the excellent interviewer Philip Dodd compared Zoo Time to the other Leavis's aforementioned Fiction and the Reading Public, but I would disagree with Jacobson's response - "You could not have paid me a greater compliment." One thing the books have in common is a lack of interest in their target, a failure to know their enemy. Carey points out in Original Copy that:

Mrs Leavis did send out her questionnaires to authors, but her ideas about readers are not derived from any corresponding sampling or survey. There is no realistic enquiry into the conditions of life and leisure, into the mental and emotional habits, of the mass audience upon which she pronounces with such confidence. So far as we can see, she never, in the course of her investigations, spoke to a member of the reading public.

Jacobson falls back on obsolete references like Richard and Judy, and predictable targets like "woman's reading groups", plus buzz-words like "3-for-2" or "the graphic novel" which are apparently bad in some half-assed "less is more" sense. Just as Mrs Leavis looked back to an "organic" pre-mass media community of readers which never existed, so Jacobson looks back to a time when books like Ulysses were taken more seriously, even though as Edmund Gordon pointed out in a review for The Observer:

It's unclear quite when the golden age of reading that [Jacobson's protagonist Guy] Ableman pines for is meant to have occurred, but judging from his frequent allusions to Joseph Conrad, Henry James, James Joyce and Henry Miller, he'd situate it at least partially during the modernist period. Those were certainly great years for literature, but were they really so different in terms of literature's reception? Conrad's Nostromo and James's The Golden Bowl were both published in 1904, and it's true that they found contemporary readers, but Marie Corelli published two schlock bestsellers the same year, and these were incomparably more popular. Joyce's Ulysses and Miller's Tropic of Cancer, meanwhile, far from securing for their authors the kind of universal esteem denied to Jacobson and his contemporaries, were banned for several years after they were written. So much for the good old days.
The same goes for Ableman's horror of recent technological innovations such as ebooks and Twitter. In the past hundred years, the advent of mass-market paperbacks, radio, film and television have all been viewed as dooming the novel. For as long as literary culture has existed, there have been warnings of its imminent demise. It's a deeply reactionary attitude. 



Indeed, Jacobson's beloved teacher Leavis was once warned by police after referring to Ulysses in his lectures. Jacobson lives in an age where a copy can be found in any shop, and far more pieces are written in defence of modernist or avant-garde fiction in the literary supplements than were thinkable in the days of Jacobson's novelistic heroes. Radio 4 recently marked Bloomsday with a series of programmes including a full-length dramatisation of Ulysses. By contrast, when Joyce died, at the height of what Orwell called "the hunting of the highbrow"', the Times wouldn't even print TS Eliot's letter of protest at their stingy obituary. Had Jacobson been alive in Henry James's day, he would have been exasperated by the attention paid to Henry James's friend George Du Maurier's Trillby - which achieved popular success James only dreamt of - and no doubt bemoaned the public's preference for Bennett and Wells to James and Lawrence, while struggling to smuggle contraband copies of Henry Miller books into the country.

In another interview discussing the book,  Jacobson offered the following opinion, identical to Ableman's in the book:

I was sitting in the American Embassy a while back, trying to get a visa, and every woman in the room was reading the vampire series – you know, the one with the black cover and the bit of blood. Now people are reading soft porn! What happened to the fun of reading a good book? There are people who, when they say they prefer Henry James to Fifty Shades of Grey, they do actually mean that...



This reminds me of the the Sally Ann test for autism, which is to show a child two dolls, Sally and Anne, with a basket and a box. Sally puts a marble in the basket and leaves, and Anne removes it and places it in the box. Sally returns, and the question put to the child is this: where will Sally look for the marble? The idea is that the child with autism will simply say the box because of their failure of empathy: he or she acts on what they know rather than seeing it from Sally's point of view. The limited empathy of Howard Jacobson in the above passage, or when he mutters "you should be ashamed" when he spots someone reading Harry Potter on a train leads him to the same brick wall: he doesn't like reading those books, so how could anyone else? As Carey writes of QD Leavis: "she assumes that the literary works she prefers are simply superior, and to support this shows that they possess the qualities she likes. The argument is circular."

Jacobson and Bloom have both argued that reading Rowling or Tolkien doesn't lead a child to read anything else, but the list of readers whose experiences refute this is infinite. We could list EM Forster starting with the Swiss Family Robinson, Clive James starting with Erle Stanley Gardner and ending up learning Russian because he "could no longer bear not to know something about how Pushkin sounded” and any number of readers who go from Fleming to Le Carre, from Le Carre to Graham Greene and from Graham Greene to Joseph Conrad. Starting with garbage and ending up with Proust is the experience of most literary intellectuals, but the rapture of literature can close minds to this self-evident fact.The possibility of someone else reading this and getting something from it does not exist, just as the possibility of someone reading Dickens and Kipling without it changing their worldview, of someone reading Dickens and not finding it less problematic to shoot people, of someone who doesn't read fantasy not becoming dull or bad-tempered, of someone watching soap operas or "bloody detective thrillers" and not becoming corrupted, of people reading Middlemarch and mugging someone or of an intelligent man not owning any copies of Howard Jacobson novels on his shelves can not possibly exist. The rapture is all.

Ian McEwan's musings on this are more subtly irksome, representing the next stage in the evolution of this phobia. "It seemed almost blasphemous to write about someone who doesn't think Anna Karenina is much cop," ruminated McEwan in an interview on the writing of Saturday, a novel about a neurosurgeon. It should be taken for granted, and not just by novelists. On The South Bank Show around the same time McEwan graciously acknowledged that he now realised that people like his parents who didn't read literature were "not asleep" after all, as if this were a rites of passage rather than an admission of immense stupidity and snobbery. Henry Perowne, the protagonist of Saturday, is a demonstration of this "people who don't read are not inferior"' thesis, and while his creator's intentions may be more benevolent than Dahl's towards the Wormwoods, Le Guin's towards "our man" or Mrs Leavis's towards her interpretation of Gerty, he's just as bogus a figure. Le Guin sneers at her test subject for his drinking, taking pills and golfing, McEwan congratulate his on his ability to make a fish stew and play squash, but both are phantom lab rats, fictional characters created to prove delusional or condescending hypotheses.

   Having discussed what will happen to you if you don't read novels, we should consider the other side of the writers-as-saints argument: what can happen if you do read and write them, specifically the belief that literature has power, and that those who wield it are helping to improve the world. No-one who has read a word of George Orwell or James Baldwin could deny that literature has political power, of course, but fetishising "storytelling" is a more dubious prospect, as Oscar Wilde knew when he warned "all art is quite useless." Two refreshing counter-opinions to the idea of the storyteller as political hero are worth considering here.

One is from the writer Tim Parks in a review of Salman Rushdie's The Ground Beneath Her Feet, collected in his book Hell and Back:



In Haroun [and the Sea of Stories], Rushdie posits a world where all the stories there are flow together in beautiful harmony in one great ocean. An evil 'cultmaster' wishes to destroy this ocean. Novelist and critic Hilary Mantel glosses the idea appreciatively thus: "this tyrant hates stories because he aims to rule the world, and fiction creates an alternative world, a multiplicity of worlds he can never command." In this view of things - almost a critical orthodoxy these days - storytelling is seen as inherently liberal in so far as it offers alternatives to some outside-the-story reality. The story is thus understood as of its nature a hybrid on the factual world we know, its alternatives affording imaginative escape from that world's political powers.
But is this the case? Do stories flow together in tolerant harmony distinct from our "factual" world? Aren't they rather, with their rival visions, in urgent conflict with each other to establish what the nature of our world is, what the "facts" really are? Aren't evil "cultmasters" themselves supported by elaborate stories within the terms of which they do not consider themselves evil at all? Far from objecting to stories in general (usually they will be content to have people read innocuous tales that have nothing to do with anything), don't they rather object to those particular stories that undermine their own?
[...] Perhaps if  one begins to feel that it is enough to write fiction to be engaged on the right side of some global moral battle and indeed to "end up telling the truth", then there is a risk of growing careless.



He returns to this argument in a piece for The New York Review of Books -

Far from flowing together in a harmonious ecology, stories tend to be in constant competition with each other. Far from imposing silence, cults, religions, and ideologies of all kinds have their own noisy stories to tell. Christian fundamentalism with its virgin birth, miracles, exorcisms, and angels boasts a rich narrative flora; if we toss into the mix the Catholic saints and their colorful martyrdoms we can hardly complain that the censorship and repression of the Inquisition resulted in story-less silence.
Rather the problem is that preacher and polemicist want us to accept just one, mutually exclusive set of stories, one vision, which we must believe is true. And many people are happy to do this. Once they’ve signed up to a Christian, Muslim, Buddhist, or even liberal pluralist narrative it’s unlikely they’ll go out of their way to research competing accounts of the world. People tend to use stories of whatever kind to bolster their beliefs, not to question them.




The second viewpoint worth citing here is presumably from Chris Morris (it's from a piece co-authored by Morris and Arnando Ianuuci, but its anger suggests Morris). The subject is the aftermath of 9/11:

Hosting the film Baftas, Stephen Fry delivers an unspeakably trite and fucked-up heap of shit urging film makers to 'keep telling stories' in the face of world events - as if films make any fucking difference to anything, least of all the advancement of peace, as if in fact they don't more often promote, through piss like Black Hawk Down, the very surfeit of self-regarding superiority that makes the American West so unpopular in the first place. Naturally the audience of actors and industry luvvies spontaneously applaud like the blinkered, solipsistic, self-congratulating cunts they are.



Both raise the point that not only is the idea that by writing and reading stories we are helping in the fight against evil (which Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, a book particularly vulnerable to Parks's argument with its deeply unconvincing totalitarian state that bans books in general but doesn't produce any written propaganda of its own, must take a lot of the blame for), hubristic and insularly self-congratulatory, but that one could make as strong an argument for the negative political repercussions of stories as for the positive ones. More recently, Pankaj Mishra has quoted Parks's argument in a sharp review of Rushdie's memoir Joseph Anton for The Guardian:

Certainly, Rushdie's neat oppositions between the secular and the religious, the light and the dark, and rational literary elites and irrational masses do not clarify the great disorder of the contemporary world. They belong to an intellectually simpler time, when non-western societies, politically insignificant and little-known, could be judged solely by their success or failure in following the great example of the secular-humanist west; and writing literary fiction could seem enough to make one feel, as Tim Parks wrote in a review of Rushdie's novel The Ground Beneath Her Feet, "engaged on the right side of some global moral and political battle".
Indeed, such complacencies of imperial intellectual cultures were what Rushdie had bravely attacked in his brilliant early phase. "Works of art, even works of entertainment," he had pointed out in 1984, "do not come into being in a social and political vacuum; and … the way they operate in a society cannot be separated from politics, from history. For every text, a context."



What Parks, Morris and Mishra point to is the importance of not allowing our love of western storytelling to make us feel superior to other cultures, in the same way that Le Guin and Dahl feel that those who don't read are spiritually undernourished (those who have allowed their imaginations to degenerate into "wild and weedy shapes," to use Le Guin's Gissingesque phrase).

Where the whiff of this peculiar strain of fundamentalist zeal regarding literature has been most detectable has been in the troubling attitude of Rushdie and Christopher Hitchens towards the implications of the murder of Rushdie's Japanese translator Hitoshi Igarashi and the attempts on the lives of his Italian translator Ettore Capriolo, Norwegian publisher William Nygaard and Turkish translator Aziz Nesin (which resulted in the Sivas massacre) due to the fatwa upon Rushdie for The Satanic Verses. In 1997 (after all of these events), in an exchange of letters with Rushdie and Hitchens in The Guardian, John Le Carre wrote that:

when it came to the further exploitation of Rushdie's work in paperback form, I was more concerned about the girl at Penguin books who might get her hands blown off in the mailroom than I was about Rushdie's royalties. Anyone who had wished to read the book by then had ample access to it.

Rushdie and Hitchens's answers to this were unsatisfactory. Rushdie replied:

But it is precisely these people, my novel's publishers in some thirty countries, together with the staff of bookshops, who have most passionately supported and defended my right to publish. It is ignoble of le Carré to use them as an argument for censorship when they have so courageously stood up for freedom.


Hitchens wrote:

      May we take it, then, that he would have had no objection if The Satanic Verses had been written and published for free and distributed gratis from unattended stalls? This might have at least satisfied those who appear to believe that the defense of free expression should be free of cost and free of risk.
As it happens, no mailroom girls have been injured in the course of eight years' defiance of the fatwah. And when the nervous book chains of North America briefly did withdraw The Satanic Verses on dubious grounds of "security," it was their staff unions who protested and who volunteered to stand next to plate-glass windows in upholding the reader's right to buy and peruse any book. In le Carré's eyes, their brave decision was taken in "safety" and was moreover blasphemous towards a great religion!

Neither of these replies answers Le Carre's point, which is: should we put those people's lives at risk? To do so is to turn literature into fundamentalism.

Zoe Heller, in her review of Rushdie's memoir Joseph Anton, took up this neglected point:

Peter Mayer, head of Penguin, and Sonny Mehta, at Knopf, published the hardback editions of The Satanic Verses, but equivocated over and finally backed out from publishing the paperback. That both of them had responsibility for the safety of large staffs—men and women who were included in the terms of the fatwa, but who did not have the benefit of around-the-clock police protection—does not strike Rushdie as a sufficient justification for their decisions and he has much comic sport with what he regards as their “spineless” conduct.

Robert Gottlieb, the former editor in chief at Knopf, with whom Rushdie published Midnight’s Children, is also chastised for having once suggested that Rushdie would not have written his book if he had known it was “going to kill people.” Rushdie was so disgusted by this comment, he tells us, that he never spoke to Gottlieb again.

Readers will differ in their opinions of whether the free speech represented by The Satanic Verses paperback was worth upholding at any cost. But even those who take Rushdie’s side on this will be hard pressed to match his scorn for the opposing point of view. By the time the Rushdie Affair was over, it had resulted in the deaths of more than fifty people. The questions that Mayer and Mehta and Gottlieb raised about the wisdom and the morality of continuing to publish in such circumstances seemed then, and seem now, perfectly reasonable and humane.


It is troubling that this point has been seldom made. The belief in freedom of artistic expression has, in Rushdie and Hitchens's words, a dangerous zeal, which seems to be privileged over lives. Indeed, since the Rushdie affair, the lines of the battle have been blurred by a move towards the very Muslim-baiting that Rushdie was unfairly accused of. To make a distinction here, it's important to remember that The Satanic Verses, The Life of Brian, the film version of Brick Lane, Jerry Springer The Opera and the play Behzti were - regardless of their high or low quality -  artistic works that were automatically misinterpreted  and attacked by fundamentalists: to say that they are offensive is to side with those bigots, which is why Shirley Williams's assumption on Question Time that Rushdie had "deeply offended Muslims in a very powerful way" was disgraceful, sweeping aside all Muslims that have defended the book in favour of the fundamentalists, and why I was rather glad that Hitchens was there at the time, admirably demolishing Williams in his very best tradition. The cartoons in the Danish newspaper Jyllands Posten and the film The Innocence of Muslims, however, are very different propositions, no better than the moronic pastor Terry Jones's determination to burn the Quran. It's no more a restriction on "free speech" to censor these than it is to censor anti-semitic pamphlets or images of golliwog-style figures (which we rightly do). The audacity of the writer, satirist or filmmaker must be fought for in the face of intolerant monotheisim, but it must still be remembered that whoever produces a creative work is not automatically right. Literature doesn't by itself put us on the side of the just.

Next time you are moved by your favourite work of literature, try to imagine someone who doesn't like it (because millions exist.) If you can imagine someone who's happy, free of ulcers, remembers their childhood, has no hollowness in their voice and is not second-rate, than perhaps literature has made you wiser after all.

Skyfall and me

(CONTAINS SPOILERS)

This piece is mainly about Skyfall and to a very small extent about depression (under the surface, though). First, let's start off with how I felt when I first saw it. Bear in mind that the reason for the unfairly rantish tone to the section that follows is that I first saw the film with unreasonably high expectations. Skyfall has suffered a most peculiar fate for a Bond film: it's been overpraised. Bond films are not talked about intelligently, yet  previously the assumption from dull critics was that we all found them naff. One of the reasons I fell so hungrily on Paul Cornell's review of Casino Royale on his blog (it's linked to the right of the screen) was that it was precisely the kind of thing that no journalist was writing: it made no assumptions that we'd always hated the Bond films, and drew on previous films and books without assuming we hadn't read or seen them. In the age of Simon Winder's execrable yet favourably reviewed book The Man Who Saved Britain (which opens with the author rewatching Live and Let Die and finding it to be crap before going on to tell us what he nevertheless thinks these films and books tell us about Britain) and interminable professional pundits like Bidisha appearing on Radio 4 to tell us all why she didn't think there should be a 23rd Bond film, here was an actual critique of the film. The Sam Mendes-helmed Skyfall, though, everyone's decided to praise, and its faults have been unilaterally ignored. It's familiar to anyone who remembers the aura of holiness that everyone placed around Danny Boyle following his Olympics Opening  Ceremony. An example of the smugness of this "we all liked that, didn't we?" culture is a ghastly tweet from Lauren Laverne during the ceremony: "to anyone complaining about this, please fuck off forever."

So with that in mind, here's my original rather misanthropic take on Skyfall:

What's odd about this is how magnificent it would have been had it appeared in 2002 instead of Die Another Day. There, the Aston martin's reappearance, the "no gadgets any more" theme and the death of M would make perfect sense. This would have been a phenomenonal swansong for Pierce Brosnan

Instead, this stars an actor too young to have been active during the cold war, who's only played Bond twice before and who's playing a version that didn't become a double-O until after 9/11. He He was already sold to us as 21st-century Bond: in Casino Royale, he says "do I look like I give a damn?" when asked "shaken or stirred?" and the only gadget he was given was a defibrillator. The death of M and the Goldfinger modifications on the Aston Martin are odd given that M was rebooted in Casino Royale and the Aston was just a car Bond won off a thug in a card game.

Four years is not long enough to start from scratch if you've got the same actor in the lead: the amount of time that lapsed between The Dark Knight films was about the same, and yet imagine if tthe last one had featured references to the days of Robin, King Tut and Aunt Harriet.

GoldenEye proposed that Bond remain an anchronism in a modern world, Skyfall tries to get back to that concept, despite having created a modern Bond in Craig's previous 2 movies. The scene where Bond points out his gadgets are pretty meagre and Q replies they don't go in for exploding pens anymore isn't surprising or poignant because we've already had two gadget-less films, and this version of Bond has operated in a gadget-less world ever since he became a 00. It's as if Captain Picard had started reminiscing about the time he fought the Gorn.

However, this could have worked If the film had the balls to bring back some of the old chutzpah, to begin with Bourne-Bond and bring in classic Bond more and more as the film progresses. Instead we get the dull Ben Whishaw as Q, who patronises both Bond and the audience when he says "what were you expecting: an exploding pen? We don't really go in for that anymore" prompting me to say "yes, but wasn't it better when you did?" Is this grown-up storytelling, or an adolescent making a big thing of throwing his toys in the skip? (and I can't help remembering that the first of Bryan Singer's worthless X-Men films has the line "what were you expecting, yellow Spandex?": as if that film - and its boring black costumes - were something more interesting, less embarrassing, more substantial than that.

Then there's the fact that Bond contributes so little to the narrative. His first scene with Silva sees him fail to save Severine's life - and yet literally seconds later he does the very thing that would have done so, before revealing that he's already radioed for help. The London setpiece is similarly flat: he arrives at the enquiry, opens fire...and contributes nothing. Once he's shot the fire extinguisher, Silva gives up and leaves. And what was Mendes thinking of in the scene where Bond watches his quarry assemble a sniper's rifle, but lets him take out his unknown target before attacking him?

What's missing is verve: the opening scene tries so very hard to be Casino Royale, but Mendes is no Martin Campbell, and stupidly insisted on replacing David Arnold with his regular conposer Thomas Newman. Music matters: this scene would have been a lot more exciting had Arnold done the score.

Like the Aston Martin and the ill-judged Goldfinger homage in Fields' death in Quantum of Solace , the scene where Bond, an opponent and a gadget fall into a pit with a komodo dragon is clearly the director adding what he thinks is a "traditional" Bond moment, trying to recreate some half-remembered scene from his childhood viewing. Here Mendes is clearly thinking of Live and Let Die and its alligator farm scene, but if only Skyfall had more of that film's brio and invention (I can't imagine, either, that this scene of CGI Komodo dragons and no notable stuntwork will stick in children's imaginations the way the very real crocodiles and the splendidly dangerous stuntwork stuck in mine)

Then there's the emblems of stale humourlessness: the things that remind me I'm not watching a Bond film, as I was with GoldenEye. That fucking gunbarrel still at the end of the credits, instead of the beginning where it was dynamic and inspiring. Newman's score, bland credits again (a huge improvement on MK40's effort for Quantum, but Daniel Kleinman - returning after Casino Royale, for which he provided the most beautiful credits sequence ever created - seems to be on autopilot: his gunbarrel - assuming it's his - is no better than MK40's either - remember how good the ones he did for Casino Royale and the Brosnan films were? )

All three Craig films have attempted to shoehorn two Bond girls into a script that only needs one: here, at least Berenice Marlohe's performance is skillful, never grating as Caterina Munro's and Gemma Arterton's did, but the idea of the Doomed Woman whom Bond cannot save is getting creepily misogynist as well as tedious. With both her death and that of the victims in the train Silva sabotages, I couldn't help thinking: no-one in this film really cares, so do we? There's more emotion in the destruction of the aston martin. Doesn't the film have the same casual disregard for life as in a Jerry Bruckheimer movie?

On to the film's redeeming features: Daniel Craig getting to play a damaged James Bond, an idea that Die Another Day fudged; the skilful way the character of Eve is constructed; a decent supporting cast for once; the most exciting climax ever seen in a Bond film, a decent villain for once (although due more to the actor than the script) the pretty landscape shots, the mythic tones (Mallory, Tennyson, Churchill and best of all the gag about the model bulldog: a lovely mixture of deflating humour, poignancy and stirring iconography). The splendid moment when the series uses the word "fuck" for the first time. The film having the guts to suggest that Bond isn't fazed or offended by homoeroticism. Not enough. The film may have some pretty "remember the Bond films? What a shame he's a thing of the past" moments, but the entertainment is meagre and no more intellectually rewarding than before. Depriving Bond of gadgets and thrills doesn't make him Hamlet. We're depriving our children of magic.

A few weeks later, things got so bad I was making up alternative titles:

Desperate Need for a Script Doctor, No?

Crush a Fan's Dreams with Love

Never Say "I'm looking forward to the new Bond movie" Again

For Kim Newman's Tastes Only

That Draft Was Not Enough

I've calmed down a bit now. The Aston Martin complaint is trivial, and the comment about rebooting M is unfair, firstly because the three post-reboot films have allowed us to get to know the character enough for her death to be moving, and secondly because right from her first scene in Casino Royale, the writers have skilfully created a different character - tougher, courser, with more of a bullshit-detector -  than the one Dench played in the Brosnan films. This is one is actually closer to Fleming's M - perhaps even closer than Bernard Lee's was. The comments about the title sequence are unfair, too, as Kleinman has produced a fine piece of work even though it lacks the gorgeous colour and texture of Casino Royale's titles. The comments about Whishaw aren't entirely fair too; there's enough spark between him and Craig to suggest this could result in good things in the next film, and it was a step in the right direction to bring this away from the standard quippery of the John Cleese (who was clearly cast to try and recreate the Desmond Llewelyn style, like the similarly too-obvious choice of Stephen Fry as ersatz Q in Stormbreaker) model, and into more character based-comedy by making him younger and his disdain for Bond believable rather than part of a pantomime routine.

 But let's flash back to December 1995. I'm sitting in the cinema with my dad, waiting for the film I've been dreaming about -  GoldenEye  - to start. A terrific arrangement of the Bond theme accompanies a gorgeous new computer-generated version of Maurice Binder's Gunbarrel design by Daniel Kleinman. A splendid opening shot of a vast dam. A figure appears and there's magnificent bit of stuntwork as he attaches a bungee chord and leaps down the dam. Bond meets up with 006 (a slick introduction for the film's villain). The precredits sequence ends in equally spectacular fashion, as Bond drives a motorbike off a mountain in pursuit of a wayward plane. There's so much to list here.  Famke Jannsen as the ribcage-cracking Xenia Onatopp, knowing exactly the kind of full-bodied Camp her character needs to make her come to life, and pitching her performance perfectly. A marvellous introduction for Judi Dench as the new M, which begins with her calling Bond "a sexist mysoginist dinosaur, a relic of the cold war" and ends with her telling him to "come back alive."  The same flair for action that Campbell would later bring to Casino Royale, giving us a tank chase (a tank chase !) that's got everything: the Bond Girl barely concealing a "he's coming for me" smile, the Bad Guy guzzling from a hipflask and barking panicky instructions to his driver as the tank approaches, soldiers pirouetting though the air as their vehicles collide. The sheer, joyous, Christmasty, Bondness of it all. At the end of it my imagination was full of tank chases, tanks derailing trains, femme fatales with ribcage-cracking thighs, heroes bungee jumping down vast dams, exploding pens, fights atop giant satellite dishes, impeccably tailored heroes who grab machine guns, gun down countless Russian soldiers, remove their leather belts (which naturally doesn't result in their trousers coming down) and after a quick smile and a "trust me" to the Bond Girl, fire grappling hooks from them and then smash their way through a window without so much as ruining the line of their suit.

Compare the Q scenes: in 1995, we get the delightful Desmond Llewelyn in full-on Merlin mode. In fact, forget Merlin: he's Father Christmas. In 2012 we get Ben Whishaw in an Art Gallery. As Bond himself says, "Not exactly Christmas." And note just how well the exploding pen mocked by Whishaw's Q actually works in GoldenEye: it comes at a moment establishing that Natalya rather than Bond has turned the tables on the villans, and allows Bond to continue to advance the narrative (unlike the Bond of Skyfall) without diminishing Natalya's contribution. Minor baddie Boris has a nervous habit of clicking a pen three times: when he confuses Bond's pen for his own, Bond and the audience struggle to keep track of whether the pen is armed or disarmed.

In 2012 my inner child feels short-changed, despite Skyfall's considerable merits, and Brosnan is still my favourite Bond.

Skyfall is the slickest, cleverest example yet of the cultural trend that gave us Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight, Quantum of Solace and the version of Doctor Who offered by the Death Comes to Time webcast and some of the New Adventures novels, just as Craig-Bond is a slicker version of Dalton Bond. It's a more entertaining take than those cited, a stronger take, and one that gets far more mileage out of the concept, but it's still leading to a dead end. The great critic Adam Mars-Jones put a name to this phenomenon when discussing the film of Watchmen on Newsnight Review "It's sordid escapism that I don't understand: I get sordid, I get escapism, I don't like them mixed." The original Watchmen, of course, rather spearheaded this dubious movement along with Frank Miller's The Dark Knight Returns, but no-one understood - and continues to understand - this better than Moore himself, who delivered this magnificent rant against the Legacy six years after its publication (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KJqLVsPD7Js 6;40 mark)

I think that I'd have to echo what David Bowie said about his influence: this is the face that launched a thousand pretensions. At the time I hoped that Watchmen might show up a lot of the essential silliness and redundancy of the superhero genre. It wasn't meant as a revitalisation of the superhero, it was meant as a tombstone for the superhero, at least in my terms. I could 't see any point in doing superheros after Watchmen. Unfortunately, everyone else could, and there have been an awful lot of bad Watchmen clones. Not just specifically Watchmen ones: this would extend to Dark Knight [Returns] as well, people who were looking at those frankly grim and postmodern superhero comics of the mid-80s, and instead of moving on from there, have just recycled them again and again and again for the last six years. It's almost like postmodernism by numbers: you make a few references to William Burroughs, you make a few references to some currently popular band like REM that will impress your young readers with how hip you are, you throw in some garbled sub-psychadelic philosophy, and you've got a Modern Comic. Doesn't matter whether it has any substance, doesn't matter whether it has any direction... but it hits enough of the right buttons so that people will recognise this as something modern and experimental and daring, and of course it is not in the least bit experimental or daring. To me the people who have taken chances are not in the mainstream. The people who have taken the chances are the people like Chester Brown, the Hernandez brothers, Peter Bagge, Julie Doucet, all of those people.  They are not getting big royalties for this summer's giant Batman crossover, but they are doing the work that is dangerous and radical and innovative. They're the ones who deserve the credit.

In Watchmen Moore, unlike Miller, Christopher and Jonathan Nolan, David Goyer or Purves and Wade (and Moore himself in other projects) wrote about human beings. No disrespect to those writers, of course, (I enjoyed The Dark Knight Rises, Batman Begins and Casino Royale immensely, and don't get get me started on what Blade means to me) but they are dealing with mythic, iconic rather than psychologically layered characters, and their work is at its strongest when it embraces this. It didn't say much for the comic world that they tended to lump Watchmen and Dark Knight Returns together, (I'm reminded here of Lawrence Miles's observation that Doctor Who and Quatermass are opposites rather than kindred spirits as is often lazily assumed). What Frank Miller did in  Dark Knight Returns  and Batman Year One was exactly what he later did in Sin City (which no-one ever claims as anything other than pulp): he retold Mickey Spillane and Dirty Harry stories, but with a dash more verve, and a refreshing willingness to push towards the more grotesque aspects always present but only touched on in the world of Mike Hammer and Harry Callahan. To argue that this made Batman a more plausible figure and was a work of great intellectual significance - let alone that it is fit to stand alongside Watchmen, Maus and American Splendor - is as preposterous as claiming that Sin City can stand comparison with The Wire. There's an element of wishful thinking here: fans like to convince themselves that what they enjoy has social, political or philosophical depth. It's easier to convince yourself that your favourite superhero story has something to say about the Iraq War then actually go and read a selection of books and articles about the Iraq War; a cultural equivalent of finding out you can work from home. The modern Battlestar Galactica is the most abhorrent manifestation of this: a slackly paced, poorly acted farrago of cardboard characterisation, predictable dialogue, macho top Gun dogfights and right-wing moralising, all dressed up as something that cares about serious issues (let's not forget George Monbiot's praise of Avatar as a pro-environmentalist movie here, or the those who suggested that Bane's "Occupy Gotham" movement in The Dark Knight Rises was based on the Tea Party rather than, say, Occupy Wall Street.)

I can't help but think of a quote from Doctor Who writer Gareth Roberts: "a failure of the imagination that would see Miss Marple as a player of chess on a thousand different boards, just because she always turns up when there's a murder." Roberts was talking about the 1988-89 seasons of Doctor Who, which were directly influenced by Alan Moore and Frank Miller's work at the time, with Script Editor Andrew Cartmel even telephoning Moore to ask him to write for the show. Roberts's summary isn't quite fair, especially as a description of the televised shows (some of the best Doctor Who stories - Ghost Light, The Greatest Show in the Galaxy, Remembrance of the Daleks, Survival, The Curse of Fenric - were made at this point ) but it's certainly true of what came after them. Virgin's New Adventures novels and  the Death Comes to Time  webcast built  on the ideas from the 88-89 seasons, and did indeed turn the Doctor into a much less interesting figure, who referred to himself as Time's Champion with a straight face, solemnly told us that "my duty must take precedence over all", roared "your TARDIS is revoked!" and "I'm playing with a fire so dangerous I could scorch eternity," and allowed innocent people to die for the Greater Good.  In the New Adventures, he turned out to be a mystical figure called The Other who threw himself into a "time loom" and bonded with a Time Lord called Theta Sigma. He also turned out to have deliberately killed the sixth Doctor because he was in danger of embarking down "the road that leads to the Valeyard [the Doctor's evil alter ego]" and "someone needed to take over and become the Ka Faraq Gatri [destroyer of worlds, bringer of darkness, oncoming storm]." The one portrayed in Death Comes to Time, meanwhile, turned out to have omnipotent power to hold back the deaths of those he cared about and vaporise entire spaceships at a single command, but was  charged never to use this power. I'd have to agree with Roberts that this is a much less interesting version of the character. It may have gone wrong in the 1990s, but this "player of chess" movement started in 1988-89.

Elsewhere in 1988-89, Timothy Dalton was James Bond and Michael Keaton was Batman. To what extent can we see Dalton-Bond as part of this "time for our heroes to grow up" situation? It's tricky, because the spectre of Ian Fleming has always hung over any shifts in the franchise, and it seems likely that, as in 1981's For Your Eyes Only, Cubby Broccoli was motivated more by a desire to get back to the series's roots and to Fleming rather than anything to do with developments in the comics world. What probably does link the worlds of Bond, comics and Doctor Who are two things: postmodernism (in the vague bastardised meaning of the word), and the rise of fandom. Regarding the former, Philip Pullman's analogy of Adam and Eve realising they were naked is probably still the most apt here, accounting for that peculiar phrasing in EM Forster's "Dear me, oh, dear me, yes, the novel tells a story." Embarrassment and shame arrive, and we realise that we're allowing ourselves to be entertained. Novels like Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49 and Paul Auster's New York Trilogy do the same thing with detective thrillers: we're solemnly told that the detective can never uncover the truth, that meaning is endlessly deferred and that no satisfying climax or denounement can be reached. The trouble is, an actual thriller writer -  Raymond Chandler -  did this so much better: and he could make his thrillers thrilling as well. A favourite teacher of mine at university responded to my suggestion that Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49 would have been more interesting had it featured a scene where Oedipa is captured and taken by the Trystero organisation to their lair. "But that would be like something out of a 007 film," she replied. Yes, I replied (internally, a few weeks later), but wouldn't that also be better? Wouldn't that dramatise Pynchon's obsessions with entropy, conspiracy theories, and make them more interesting and vital? Wouldn't it breathe life into them, instead of dropping them into the narrative like stones? To be fair, the postmodern detective trend also gave us Dennis Potter's magnificent The Singing Detective, but that works because it's about the author of the mystery: the detective sections would be unsatisfying if broadcast on their own.

To move to the second point, the rise of fandom resulted in generations of fans demanding respectability, a situation still with us today. From the 1980s onwards, they've hated the casting of Bonnie Langford in Doctor Who, the bit with the miniature Doctor in Last of the Timelords, the batnipples on the suits in the Joel Schumacher Batman films and the comedy scenes in Superman 3, and they wanted a "back to Fleming" approach after the silliness of Moonraker. For Your Eyes Only started the dour/camp cycle (although You Only Live Twice/On Her Majesty's Secret Service prefigured it). The biggest fear in fandom is that of embarrassment: they want something they can show their girlfriends, something that the mainstream media can assimilate more comfortably. Steven Moffat's comments for a 1995 fanzine interview(http://nzdwfc.tetrap.com/archive/tsv43/onediscussion.html)

summed it up well:

It's not that I don't like it, but I wouldn't care to show it to my friends in television and say look, I think this is a great programme, because I think they might fling me out... Unless I chose my episodes very carefully, I couldn't sit anybody I work with in television down in front of Doctor Who and say 'watch this, this is a great show...What I resented was having to go to school two days later, and my friends knew I watched this show. They'd go 'Did you see the giant rat?!' and I'd have to say I thought there was dramatic integrity elsewhere.

That's the kind of peer pressure-conscious response (is there any more detestably unDoctorWhoish phrase than "my friends in television"?) that filmmakers are so keen to avoid, and why Moffat's own run on Doctor Who is careful to avoid the idyosncratic, the untested and the non-audience friendly (Twilight good, Sylvester McCoy bad: that's how the sworn enemies of this blog think, and while you'll never get another Love and Monsters under Moffat, which is their triumph and my bane). Skyfall is the slickest, cleverest example of FEP (Fanboy Embarrassment Prevention) yet. As I've said elsewhere on this blog, will we see a dark, gritty reinvention of Harry Potter in a couple of decades' time?

Yet...Skyfall is good-natured entertainment , made with loving care. Its quietly elegiac tone is affecting, and it's a fine lesson in how less is more: the climax, which as someone said to me on Twitter, resembles an

explosion-filled episode of Last of the Summer Wine, is the stuff of legend. It's got Bond returning home, it's got Bond hiding in the same priest hole where he took refuge when he heard his parents had died, it's got Albert Finney as a grizzled gamekeeper who taught Bond to shoot and was there when his parents died, and must now do both again, it's got the Aston Martin DB5 and its modifications appearing again in such an Excalibur-like fashion that it doesn't matter at all that this makes no sense in terms of dating or continuity, it's got Bond's surrogate parent dying yards from the grave of his original parents. Bond's line "I never liked this place anyway" before the most satisfying explosion I've seen in any action movie, the way Bond looks at Kincaid when he realises M's gunshot wound is terminal and M's line "I fucked this up didn't I?" are the stuff of iconic heroic drama. The film knows that Craig and Dench performing scenes like this together is as good as any FX fireworks.

Daniel Craig's triumph is in his ability to get dramatic weight out of taciturnity: compare the film with the duff scene in GoldenEye with Bond and Natalya on the beach. Bond is sitting there looking very taciturn indeed, and Natalya asks how he can be so cold. "It's what keeps me alive." says Bond. "It's what keeps you alone," replies Natalya. They then embrace, and the moment of taciturnity passes. The scene screams "interlude": you sense that everyone in the cinema is thinking "let's move on to the action," but in Skyfall hearing that Bond hid in the priesthole for two days after his parents were killed is as gripping as the action. Die Another Day featured a neat revelation: Gustav Graves has modellled his new appearance on Bond. "Just in the details," he taunts Bond, "That unjustified sneer: a defence mechanism concealing such inadequacy."' The trouble is, it's only there for that one scene. Skyfall manages to dramatise Bond's taciturnity, so that it feels like a poignant theme central to the entire film rather than a few lines that sound cool when heard in the trailer but which just sit there in the film (Miranda Frost's "a man no-one can get close to" speech in Die Another Day is another example of the latter, which was indeed plundered from for the trailer, and Scaramanga's suggestion that the two of them have much in common in The Man With The Golden Gun is yet another). The word-test scene in Skyfall may have proved ideal for the teaser trailer, but it's clearly not just there for that reason: it's part of the emotional core of the story, it sets up the theme as well as the narrative of the climax, and Craig is able to convey, in his reaction to the key word, the sense that this means something to him, whilst Brosnan was unable to respond to Graves's slurs with anything other than a quip (raising his pistol: "my defence mechanism is right here" - a moment that also compares poorly with the splendid moment in Skyfall where Bond is entirely unintimidated by Silva's come-on and even teases back with the line "what makes you so sure this is my first time?" It's a little moment that makes Bond a more three-dimensional, interesting figure.

   The use of humour has also vastly improved: instead of the "quips" of Brosnan, Connery and Moore and the humourlessness of Dalton, we have humour based on warmth and character details. Bond's "deep water" line is my favourite: the quips are now portrayed as something Bond - rather than the audience - likes, and this exchange becomes a splendidly poignant final moment between Bond and M. Equally good is the exchange between them about Bond's obituary, the ejector seat gag, the shooting practice scene with Bond and Kincaid and the aforementioned payoff with the bulldog figurine. This is proper humour.

Michael G Wilson and Barbara Broccoli, even more so than Cubby Broccoli and Harry Saltzman, shaped the dreams of my boyhood. It's not their fault this film was spoilt for me by overpraise

Hey Fandom: Any Room For An Opinion?

Regular readers of this blog, particularly its more mature pieces - will have noticed I'm in the tricky but interesting position of trying to bring the language of criticism - heartfelt, individualistic, provocative, unashamed - into the world of fandom, which tends towards the conformist - (did everyone else dislike it?) - the tentative - (of course that's just my opinion) - the anti-intellectual (you're taking it too seriously, how pretentious to use such big words, what are you on about?) the accusatory (you're just jealous, you're just trying to demonstrate your own superiority) the insulting (don't be obnoxious, don't troll, get a life, he's mad, what a strange man) the abbreviated (LOL, TL: DR, IMHO) and the labelling (Hah! Comic Book Guy from The Simpsons! Trainspotter! Geek!)

One of the creepiest trends on both twitter and forums  is the trembling, "don't hit me" use of "IMHO" in an opinion. Why do it? Of course it's your opinion: what else could it be? The only way "that's just your opinion" would work as a riposte to anything on this blog would be if I'd claimed to be able to produce figures backed up by The Lancet. Yet so many are nervous of upsetting someone who liked that show, book or film, they're deliberately removing authority and even conviction from their tone.

This is partly because criticism exists in a separate world from fandom, and perhaps a truce of some kind needs to be called. If you enjoy watching something and only want to share that enjoyment, then understandably you might see any less than adulatory opinion as pissing on your parade. Conversely, though, if you want to be left alone with other positive-minded fans, surely you can leave those of us who are enjoying debating an interesting point alone too rather than coming over to shout "WELL I LIKED IT!" There's room enough for both types, and no need for one to antagonise the other.

What's more worrying is seeing this panicky response to criticism spreading amongst writers themselves. Paul Cornell has written superbly about fandom foibles - this piece on canon and this one about fandom's relationship with drama are essential reads - but this curious conversation about Doctor Who Confidential on the comments section of his blog  provides a typical example of the brief glimpse of humourless, feudalistic threat displayed when one of the readers/viewers, without being rude or offensive, speaks out of turn:

Rob:
Sourpuss comment coming, for which I apologise in advance: The "family feel" of DW:C is no doubt wonderful to be part of, but it's the single biggest contributing factor to my no longer watching the show. The whole thing is so cliquey and self-congratulatory that it often seems as if an in-house lark has been broadcast by mistake. 'Ave a word, there's a love...

Paul:
Rob, how many Making Ofs do you know that are scathing attacks on their subject matter? They like what they do! And they transmit that to the viewers, and the whole makes a jolly celebration.

A third poster, SK, had a terrific reply to this:

Some 'making ofs' are actually watchable, interesting pieces which show how various effects (special or otherwise) were achieved, and what the people behind the scenes were aiming at (which is especially interesting if it didn't quite come off, and they realise that it didn't quite come off).

Not all of them are as cloying and indulgent.

A debate like this is surely everything a comments page is for: neither Rob nor SK have been rude: all they've done is criticise a TV programme. But this was Paul's reply:

Excuse me, SK, I rather harumph at your tone, especially at this time of the year, and especially because the people concerned were mentioned here only because they were kind enough to send me a gift. They don't deserve to come here and see that. Which is not to say I don't think you should be free to say it, just not in my gracious abode. Now, have some mulled wine.

And that's it. Discussion quashed. The mulled wine reference doesn't quite disguise the flash of warning: "careful old chap, don't care for your tone." The thing about "jolly celebrations" is that those in a different mood need to be cast out.

It's significant that this conversation should have revolved around Doctor Who Confidential, as that show was a good example of the Pollyannaism and enforced jollity that has taken hold of Doctor Who since 2005. SK's point is strong: compare DWC to the featurettes you would find on, say, the DVD of a Christopher Nolan Batman film. They assume their audience wants to know interesting details, and have enough respect for them to reward that curiosity rather than endlessly praising their own work. Peter Jackson, Christopher Nolan and the team behind Seinfeld realise that there's more you can give the audience than a "jolly celebration."

The world of Doctor Who, of course, didn't always use to be like this. In the 1990s, when new content consisted of  novels and fan-produced videos rather than a lavish Caitlin Moran-approved BBC One series, there was a greater belief in the importance of refusing to pull punches in your criticism. Doctor Who Magazine's reviewers at the time - Craig Hinton, David Owen, Vanessa Bishop - were searingly honest if they disliked a novel, video, factual book or documentary, even though this would sometimes cause tension if the author was offended.

 In the same decade, Red Dwarf Smegazine once had a feature called "The Great Red Dwarf debate", in which Steve Lyons and Joe Nazzaro debated whether the show had gone downhill or hit its stride with series 3. Lyons argued that what had made the earlier series work had been lost. Now, I don't agree with Lyons's view- for me Red Dwarf matured from 3 onwards - but I find it interesting: it's the kind of discussion I want to read and enter into. Can you imagine Doctor Who Magazine running a similar debate today? They've run one about whether the brightly coloured Daleks are better than the old ones: that's as controversial as it gets. Turning to the most recent DWM, I notice the latest "debate" is about what is better: horror in Doctor Who or science fiction in Doctor Who? It's interesting, too, that while the stronger reviewers like Vanessa Bishop, David Owen and Gary Gillatt all continue to review releases related to the old Doctor Who  (to the same critical standard as before), the DVD release of series 5 was reviewed by Toby Hadoke of "Moths Ate My Doctor Who Scarf" fame, while their most prominent reviewer of new episodes is the remorseless Graham "I loved it" Kibble White.

The example I used in an earlier blogpost for the tendency to stomp on any interesting opinion in order to create a sense of critical agreement and unity was Steven Moffat's response to hallor on twitter. To recap, this was the conversation (Moffat had just referred to River Song as bisexual)

Hallor:
appreciate the thought but I don't understand how River works for bisexual visibility when people need to be told she is bi

Moffat:
?????

Hallor:
If people need to be told she's bisexual, she's clearly not contributing to bisexual visibility. How is this hard to grasp?

Moffat:
When did I say I thought I was contributing to bisexual visibility?? Please stop being rude to me, you have no reason to be.

Hallor:
I'm just questioning your portrayal of a character you claim to
Be bisexual. How is that rude? I thought this was a discussion.

Moffat:
How is your rudeness hard to grasp?

Hallor:
I've been nothing but polite. Disagreeing with your opinion on something does not automatically mean I'm being rude.

Tom Spilsbury [editor of DWM]:
The comment that was rude was the 'hard to grasp' one. I know, because I get strangers who talk to me like this too. It is rude.



Good though the response to my blogpost on twitter feudalism was, it's depressing how many people took the view that Hallor's tweets were rude. I still can't see the point of responding to a coherent and civil question with five question marks, nor can I understand how five question marks could denote anything other than a failure to grasp something - what else are question marks for?

Anyway, Steven Moffat deleted his Twitter account in September, which his wife says is due to work commitments, but which Graham Linehan and Ian Levine saw as evidence that the "trolls" had won, and which script editor Andrew Ellard claims was preceded by a series of tweets of Dickensian pathos asking how he could reduce his more negative "@s". (See September 2013 update below this piece)  Those mean, mean fans. Don't they know what it's like to work in the media? Don't they release the damage opinions can do? Hard to grasp: what a cheek. Feel free to say their episode made you cry and that Matt Smith is fantastic and that you hope the Cybermen are coming back, but asking about River Song's contribution to bisexual visibility in the media: that's just out of order. It's sad for those of us who find the latter kind of discussion more interesting.

It's interesting to compare this conversation with a piece of correspondence published in DWM in May 1994, in which a reader from California named Sarah Keller wrote in to protest against the late Craig Hinton's review of Paul Cornell's Doctor Who novel No Future. Here's some extracts:

With all due disrespect to Mr Hinton, I ask that this whining overgrown schoolboy be fired and forced to grow up for a few years before thinking he is equipped to review books.
[...] Another example of Craigie's 'wit' being unleashed is his attack on Paul Cornell's gay characters in Love and War. I felt they were portrayed as people. Interesting people with problems. Which means that they can be "deeply unhappy" and unfortunately die of AIDS! It happens in life. Maybe not in Hinton's worldview, but as I've said, he needs a strong dose of reality. Certainly, honey, gays can be well-balanced and just happen to be gay, but some also dare to have human problems.
[...] This foolish little git is becoming more than I can tolerate. Please, please, please put a nuzzle on his rabid snout and kick him out into reality. He is disgusting.

Here's some extracts from Craig Hinton's reply:

Sarah - you seem to have misinterpreted my criticism of Ace and Benny in Paul's book. I was referring to the complete lack of character development since Love and War.
[...] in the Sixties, the Lord Chamberlain's office in Britain decreed that the only homosexuals permissible on stage and screen had to be "deeply unhappy", tragic people, whose nature meant they were flawed human beings. My comments expressed my disappointment that it's taken a long time for the opposite view to be seen in the series.
[...] Please don't presume that my "world-view" excludes people who have died of AIDS - I only wish this weren't true.

Sarah Keller's letter, like Hallor's tweet, brings up interesting issues. Unlike that tweet, it actually is rude, using wildly abusive language, implying that Craig Hinton was homophobic and wrongly assuming he wasn't gay. What's fascinating is that it doesn't occur to Hinton not to respond politely and intelligently: his reply is admirable and quite moving. The comment made by the editor at the time before he hands over the discussion to Hinton is noteworthy too: not only does he also decline to reciprocate Sarah Keller's rudeness, but his remark that "the 'who's your favourite doctor?' discussions of my youth are now stating to seem like a long time ago"' is actually used as a joke, a rueful acknowledgement that the time has come away to put away childish things. Nowadays it's not at all a joke, it's DWM editorial policy. Keller's letter would not have been published, and the current editor would have blocked her on twitter.

Paul Cornell has praised both the review and the letter in recent years when someone posted it on a forum. A quick look at the posts he used to make on the Doctor Who newsgroup rec-arts-drwho reveals a Doctor Who fan unafraid to challenge dreary received wisdom, frequently using the admirable maxim "dissent is good" (one I'm sorry he used first, as I can't use it for this blog), and raising the valuable point that Doctor Who itself is about someone who loves new ideas (a point he also makes well in the more recent canon piece, and which Lawrence Miles has made about Ian Levine, observing that no-one would detest Levine's closed mind and contempt for opinions different to his own more than the hero of the TV series he has dedicated his life to).

Similarly, Gareth Roberts, another writer for the modern series, wrote a sharp piece in DWM in July 2003 - two years before the show's resurrection. He rightly asks: "if you were coming to Doctor Who for the first time with Trial [of a Timelord], what on Earth would you think the series was about?" and writes of Silver Nemesis "I have no idea what Lady Peinforte, or Herr De Flores, or the Cyberleader want. What does the Nemesis do? The Doctor and Ace are so odd that's almost as hard to figure them out." Isn't this equally true of the recent series, which features as its heroes a girl whose baby has been stolen from her but who doesn't care about that too much, a woman who happens to be that baby grown up into a regenerating, time-travelling, gun-toting archaeologist, the girl's husband, who died and spent centuries watching over her as a plastic android replica, but is back to normal now, and a Doctor that all three have seen gunned down? Given the dream-like opportunity of writing for a wildly successful TV version of the show, a generation of intelligent critics like Cornell and Roberts have blunted their fangs as far as Doctor Who is concerned.

The presence of  writers on Twitter and logging on to forums, leading to them accidentally ingesting criticism, is a complicating factor. It's significant that Paul Cornell's objections to speaking ill of Doctor Who Confidential centred around the possibilities of those that worked on it seeing the comments. The antipathy towards fans Answering Back doesn't stop at twitter "@" etiquette, though. It's fair enough to say that it's unreasonable to send mean tweets on a show directly to its writer (mean being crucial here: not "I appreciate the thought but don't understand how River works for bisexual visibility" or wondering if someone who used 5 question marks is finding what you said "hard to grasp", and the same goes for "didn’t enjoy episode three, but episode two was surely best of the series! Love your shows, and IT I can really relate to, thanks!" which resulted in a lesson in etiquette from Graham Linehan detailed here. With forums, however, the comments are not addressed to the author. Russell T Davies and Benjamin Cook's shocking book A Writer's Tale, which unintentionally explains so much of what went wrong with Doctor Who from 2006 onwards, contains an enlightening section where Davies reveals that writer Helen Raynor logged on to Outpost Gallifrey and read what fans had said about her Dalek story. Davies relates that, according to her, the experience was like being ganged up on and threatened by a group of bullying men. He reveals that he had to spend a large amount of time on the phone persuading her that they did indeed need her services. Now, if people had been sending Helen Raynor unpleasant remarks about her work directly to her, or making them to her face, I would agree with Davies's point, but to chastise someone for criticising a TV programme on a public forum because of the possibility of the author choosing to log on and read it is a preposterous as eavesdropping and then saying "How Dare you?" Sending strangers harsh criticism of their work uninvited is unpleasant and pointless but to say that you shouldn't make those criticisms anywhere on the Internet in case the author finds the site is a step too far. None of this is to say that a lot of nonsense isn't uttered on forums, of course, only that those that utter it are not "trolls", as Graham Linehan or Ian Levine would brand them. Trolls abuse people, not episodes of TV shows.

Another Doctor Who writer, James Moran, responded to one of Graham Linehan's anti-forum rants with this telling tweet:

You'd think comedy forums would be funny, wouldn't you? Read one once that was slagging off a mate. Yikes.

Every writer someone criticises is someone's mate and yet the very idea of criticising someone's mate has now become such a palpable fear, it's seen as a damaging enough case to end the tweet there, as forcefully as if Moran had said "can you believe they even drowned a little puppy?"

After the ferocious Graham Kibble-White had unleashed his nervously-awaited critical take on Victory of Daleks (he really liked it) someone asked his editor Tom Spilsbury on Gallifrey Base what he would do if Graham the Jackal loathed an episode. His response was that he couldn't see how he could employ anyone that mad. One thinks here of the response to Lawrence Miles's provocative - and in my view, spot on - argument on his blog that The Unquiet Dead endorsed anti-asylum seeker xenophobia in DWM's Fact of Fiction on that story. The piece summarised Miles's argument, and then simply expressed gratitude that most fans "knew when to stop reading things into" Doctor Who. That was it: no counterargument, no defence of the episode, no refutation of Miles's argument. The cry of fandom: stop reading things into it: we're not going to tell you why we dislike or disagree with your reading of it, nor offer a contrasting reading of our own: we just want you to stop reading. The dreariest conversation I ever had was with a fan who used to tell me I was "overanalysing" whenever I ventured a less than positive opinion about Doctor Who. He subsequently shortened this to just that word with an exclamation mark, which he fell back on whoever I said anything he disagreed with. This is a dangerous fallacy. You can't over-analyse anything or read too much into anything: you can analyse something poorly (in the other person's opinion), you can read or interpret something poorly (in the other person's opinion) but you cannot think too much. If every decoding is anther encoding, then every disagreement should be another opinion: what's chilling about fan language is that it attempts to bring the debate to a halt: arguments are met by insults and denials, but not counter-arguments or defences of whatever was criticised.

When I wrote my piece on The Thick Of It, an obvious aim was to stir debate: no decent writer only writes pieces he or she knows everyone will agree with. On Twitter I had some pleasing debates with admirers of The Thick of It, exchanging contrasting ideas while remaining friends. The comments section of the blog, curiously, was a different story, attracting insults only a few days after the blogpost went up (unlike the pieces on Moffat's Doctor Who and Graham Linehan, which still haven't attracted anything offensive). What was most telling about the first comment, written in a tone of humourless anger throughout, was what it didn't say: there was no defence of The Thick Of It, nor was there any actual rebuttal of any aspect of my argument: instead the piece focused on my stupidity for having written such a disrespectful article in the first place. There was a lot of insults: the piece was "rubbish", it was "egotistical" of me (I actually have to agree with Martin Amis here and say calling a writer egotistical is like calling a boxer aggressive: I'm not sure a meek, diffident essayist would be worth reading) to think that I could "deconstruct" The Thick of It, the piece was "not really criticism at all" but "an impotent attempt to assert your intellectual superiority." Again, note the denial: rather than countering the criticism, a very loud "NO!" is sounded: I don't need to disagree with you or because your opinion doesn't exist. I tried to make some of these points in my replying comment:

Hello angry anonymous comment-person.
Interesting that these panicky reactions to someone saying something critical about your favourite show apply as much to The Thick of It as they do to Doctor Who. (God knows what a Thick of It Forum would be like)

It's not egotistical to deconstruct Shakespeare, let alone The Thick of it. Is your strange idea of deference towards a tv show part of that tired old "when you make tv shows yourself then you can talk" argument, or do you think no-one has any business talking disrespectfully about tv? Would you prefer me to know my place? Are there no tv shows you feel superior too? How intimidating you must find switching on the tv if so. Don't you even feel superior to Jeremy Kyle? Piers Morgan? Frankly I'd rather have an egotistical critic than a diffident or meek one.

There's a slight contradiction between your annoyance at my less than polite tone towards a tv show and your own towards me: apparently it's fine to leave messages on someone's blog saying their piece is "rubbish" and that they are motivated purely by an "impotent attempt to assert you intellectual superiority" (and personally, I've no problem with you doing that) but bang out of order to mock a much-loved tv show on one's own blog. Have a look at The Thick of it on iplayer: there, see? It's still there, the nasty man's horrid little blog didn't hurt it.

The sheep-like attitude you would seem to
prefer to see in viewers and bloggers is depressing. No-one should be afraid to say they don't like something. It will have no effect on the programme/book/film (so if you're of a fan of it: why worry?); what it will do is encourage debate.

What's particularly striking is that you offer no counter-argument or defence of The Thick Of It: you focus entirely on how you hated the post.

The piece IS a criticism of The Thick of It: they exist, get over it. They're not going to cease to be criticisms and stand revealed as the work of "impotent" and "egotistical" fakes because you point at them and scream "that's not real!"

A second commentator named Melissa Naylor posted a brief reply telling me I "came across as obnoxious" and advising me to "work on your people skills". The debate - which could have been on The Thick Of It, comedy satire, fandom and politics - had now descended into insults (again, note the wide gulf between "work on your people skills" and "appreciate the point but don't understand how River works for bisexual visibility"). Rather than post testy replies on the dubiousness of holding forth to complete strangers about their "people skills", I deleted all three of our comments. This was a mistake, and in retrospect I should have kept a copy of the conversation to quote in full.

However, I offer two reasons for this uncharacteristic act. Firstly, if I wanted to swap insults I'd join a forum (although you can approach me on Twitter for that kind of thing). Secondly, I'd prefer to debate the pieces on Twitter rather than on the same blogpage, as my posting a defence immediately below the piece itself seems to me to dilute it: it should stand for itself, and follow-up comments I write within a day are inevitably going to be weaker than something I've spent time thinking over. Many blogs don't enable comments, and I've long wondered if it isn't self-defeating for an author of a long provocative essay to put shorter posts immediately below it, and both of the comments bear this out as the posters are clearly uncomfortable with things that are actually going to be a given in anything I write (of course the essays are going to be egotistical, of course they'll be unafraid to "deconstruct" anything and of course they're not going to worry about "people skills"). Leaving comments enabled makes this more like a forum with the essay as the first post, and that leads to other posters wondering why the first person posted such a long piece, and why they expressed an opinion with the assumption that it was true, with no IMHOs in sight. (If you don't like this piece,by the way, you can tweet me at @richardhcooper)

The same panicky, anti-intellectual tone can be found on some of my favourite responses to my "How Steven Moffat Ruined Doctor Who" blog, which were posted on a forum  (I quote from them in a spirit of interest, not spite, as these comments are not addressed to me, which makes them opinions, not insults):

This article is nothing more than a long-winded opinion made to sound authoritative and important. Some of us don't like the vapid, cheesy emotionalism of episodes like Love and Monsters and the whole of RTD's time and prefer arc-heavy, mystery laden shows. It's fine to have an opinion. He seems to be confusing "I don't like it" with "It's bad and has no value." I sure as hell disagreed with a lot of what RTD did at the helm, but I wouldn't accuse him of "ruining" the show.

If you look toward the comment section, it all makes sense. He basically tears Moffat apart using pseudo arguments, makes lite criticism of RTD to seem like he's bring fair and balanced, and adamant Moffat hates eat it up as though it were an intelligently well thought out article backing their own opinions. It's persuasion on the most basic level. Appear intelligent by saying things people won't necessarily understand, be assertive in your opinion, and sprinkle in exactly what people want to hear, in this case it's the opinion that Moffat is a horrible writer that has ruined Doctor Who.

After reading through this, I realized I'd read through it before. And Terror is right. It's a long winded way of saying that this person just plain hates Moffat Who. I had written up a list of things to refute points and such, but I just can't be bothered to. People are always bashing the current showrunner and saying tv has degenerated from intelligent material to flashy lights and bangs. I was about to type up more but I had to stop myself. I'm stopping. I remember the first time I read this, it actually convinced me of a few things and I started disliking Moffat. It's articles like these that now force me to require a good slap in the face every time I start to whine about some aspect of the show that is apparently not good. These rants are like commercials- they get in your head.

As others have said. It's too conflicting with itself, ignoring a lot of parts of Classic Who. And far too negative. Why the hell does he even watch this show? He seems like a bit of a negative sod overall too. Sure...it's an in-depth analysis...but it's an incredibly picky analysis.

What a sad title for a topic. I don't mind discussing these things here, but in the future, could you please link articles with titles like "An opinion piece on Moffat", etc.? I love visiting this place and I really dislike seeing sentences like these hovering halfway down the page every time I go here.

This is the kind of guy that irritates me the most. He thinks that just because he has a blog, and can write an essay length entry, that he is intelligent and knows what he is talking about.

Claiming that JNT was better than Moffat? The balls on this author.




It's fascinating, endearing and sad to see the lengths the commentators go to deny that they were impressed or saw any merit in the article, whilst describing the dangerous, seductive cleverness of its rhetoric. Exactly how could I "make" a long-winded opinion "sound authentic and important"? That would be quite a skill. The one thing that seems to be absent from these fans' world-view is the conceit that something can be entertaining, well-written, interesting or  enlightening even if one disagrees with it. They seem to soften momentarily, expressing interest in the way the piece is written, (do they not realise that "the balls on this author!" is precisely the kind of compliment an essayist dreams of ?) and then quickly back off.

The third comment is the most fascinating, revealing the palpable sense many fans have that a differing opinion poses a threat. The commentator sees my piece as a potential brainwasher. If anything, that's preposterously flattering to me. Raymond Chandler used to direct people to his bookcase when they asked if Hollywood had ruined his books. "There they are - they're fine." Couldn't someone tell fans the same thing? The distinction the first commentator makes between "I don't like it" and "it has no value" is false, and would only be valid if I had a tendency to wipe master-tapes, burn books and shout "what are you reading that rubbish for?"'at people reading Dan Brown on trains. Only a bigot would: I pose no threat to what you like, even if I happen to hate it.

It''s a familiar set of comments to anyone who's ever observed forum posters respond to a Lawrence Miles piece. Is he mad? What a saddo. Why talk about the show so much if he doesn't like it? Why's he use such clever words to sound clever? Why's it so long? Why's he so pretentious? What's he on about? The notes sounded most often here are a lack of interest in  anything you can't understand, and annoyance at opinions different from your own, neither of which are very Doctorish traits.

One of the most chilling moments I've had on the Internet came when I found out what TL:DR meant (if you don't know yet, google it. If you don't experience any revulsion you may be reading the wrong blog). It's the ultimate expression of the fear of different opinions, the fear of reading, the fear of controversy, reduced to an easily replicable slogan, which doesn't even bother to spell out its own words. The essay is a long form. The freedom it affords its author to develop their ideas comes from its assumption that the the reader can take or leave it. The piece isn't written for your convenience, so its length and the forthrightness of its opinions are not tailored accordingly. It's only aimed at readers who are prepared to consider another's viewpoint. If you can't be bothered to read the piece, is there much point in bothering to take issue with it?

The reaction to Christopher Priest's piece about the Clarke nominations saw the problem spreading wider still. Priest's blogpost was far from perfect, but it was an interesting and heartfelt piece that raised a number of good points. Damien G Walter's curious response piece put it down to jealousy - heaven forbid it might be an opinion:

So why then would a man held in rather high esteem by the community of Science Fiction writers and readers throw a hissy fit about the recently announced Clarke awards shortlist? The immediate assumption one might make is that Priest is somewhat vexed about his own novel The Islanders being overlooked for this year’s shortlist. And no doubt this is one of many straws piled upon this particular heehawing donkey’s back, but in this case probably not the most significant one. A more significant reason might be that Christopher Priest has spent most of his professional career not being J G Ballard. The two writers began their professional careers around the same period of the early to mid 1960′s, among a number of writers who would become known as the New Wave, all loosely connected by their shared agenda of making SF a serious and respected literary genre. Priest is not now among the first writers that come to mind in discussions of the New Wave…which is of course the point. [...] Christopher Priest has spent his entire career being close enough to the top table to smell the gravy, but has never quite been invited to sit down.  [...]And now, just when Priest might have expected to be acclaimed as an elder statesman of the genre, another wave of writers have taken the limelight instead. The bulk of the criticisms Priest lays at the feet of the current generation of SF writers including Charles Stross and China Mieville are products of his own swollen, bruised and delusional ego, but a few are true

Equally dispiriting was Pat Cadigan's open letter to the Guardian  in which she said she was "really disappointed to see The Guardian has picked up what is an extended tantrum by a disappointed writer and treated as if it should be taken seriously." Just what is the most depressing part of this? Is it the insistence that this must be down to jealousy - a complaint which essentially denies the existence of a criticism instead of refuting or countering it - or the idea, echoed by Cheryl Morgan in her response to Priest, that one thing that SF doesn't need is people taking it too seriously. Stay out of this, Guardian, no controversy here, nothing the outsiders need to know about: now let's get back to praising each other.

As Catherynne M Valente pointed out here: "saying 'he’s just jealous' as a way of discounting everything a person says does not become a critic." Adam Roberts, similarly, suggested that debates are what shortlists are for, not encumbrances to them. One might also recall the reaction to AS Byatt's excellent piece on Harry Potter, dismissed by Salon editor Charles Taylor   - as a "Goblet of Bile":

It’s clear that we’re dealing here with an acolyte at the temple of high culture barring the doors as the ignorant masses who love pop culture come a knockin’. Loath as I am to resurrect the old canard accusing writers or critics who dislike a popular work of art of being jealous, in Byatt’s case it might be true. Remember, this is the same writer who went into a highly publicized hissy fit some years back when Martin Amis was given a lucrative advance against future books. It’s only human for writers or filmmakers or musicians to feel resentful and even contemptuous when what they consider good, serious work is being passed over in favor of some pop artifact. But sooner or later, if you choose the life of a writer, you damn well better be able to make peace with the possibility that in all likelihood you will not enjoy spectacular commercial success. Byatt has it better than most, enjoying a modicum of fame, more than her share of respect, and the distinction of being one of the relative few who has been able to make a living at literary fiction. But success on the scale of J.K. Rowling’s clearly gets under her skin.

As with the reactions to Priest, the isn't a counter-argument but a very loud SHUT UP! Note also that Byatt's piece contains this:

- as they do not now review the great Terry Pratchett, whose wit is metaphysical, who creates an energetic and lively secondary world, who has a multifarious genius for strong parody as opposed to derivative manipulation of past motifs, who deals with death with startling originality. Who writes amazing sentences.

Perhaps Taylor has never head of Pratchett: a vastly superior writer to Rowling who attracts far more literary snobbery (and whose collected short stories features an introduction by Byatt as erudite and delightful a corrective to literary snobbery as anyone has ever written). Fay Weldon's comments were spot on:

Byatt does have a point in everything she says but at the same time she sounds like a bit of a spoilsport. She is being a party pooper but then the party pooper is often right.

This leads us to my favourite piece about this topic. It's a fine argument for the superiority of anger, contempt, indignation and conviction over mulled wine and forced jollity. How can one have an interesting opinion without negativity, any more than one could have one without positivity? When we get angry about things is often when we care the most, and frequently more things are achieved by people who have had enough than by Pollyannas. Of course "it was the worst thing in the history of television" and "you can't write" are bloody useless criticisms, but only because they're one-note, poorly expressed and, in the case of the latter, personally insulting. We need to judge critiques in terms of quality rather than negativity. As the great Adam Mars-Jones - perhaps the best critic working today - said recently, "the only bad review in my book is one whose writing is soggy, its formulas of praise or blame off the same stale shelf" (He also said "a book review is a conversation that excludes the author of the book. It addresses the potential reader", which is a valuable reason why "Amy Pond is one of the most unconvincing and poorly-crafted characters in TV history" is better blogged than tweeted to her creator, why calling the author of a blogpost "obnoxious" is better posted on a forum than the comments section of the actual blog itself, and why you should  never go on the offensive against someone for what they said about your work on a forum).

Tell me Bond films or Doctor Who are crap and I'll be bored. Tell me why you find them dreary, repugnant or troubling and I'll be interested, even if I don't agree. Tweet to me "Read your latest blogpost: God, you're so full of yourself" and I'll struggle to see what you'd expect in reply, tweet to me "your piece is riddled with holes: for instance..." or "that's a preposterous argument because..." and I'll be interested enough to debate with you.

The age of TL:DR and IMHO has left a generation frightened of opinions. Increasingly, the image for the future of interesting critical opinions on SF, fantasy and comedy looks like that of a boot stamping down on a human face, and whatever the owner of the boot might say, that doesn't look like Comic Book Guy's face to me. If it's "people skills" you want, maybe you should join a forum or find a meeker blog. There's no mulled wine here.