The Best of Books, The Worst of Books

On naming my top ten favourite writers, I was surprised – and a little embarrassed – when it was pointed out they’re all male.

In my defence, for most of our history, women have had little encouragement or opportunity to write, so there are far fewer female-authored novels.  Or maybe as a bloke I just naturally prefer books by men?

I do have other criteria.  For a start my strict 200 page rule – brevity is the soul of wit (Shakespeare being the sole and occasional exception).   

I also keep to the present - historical novels in particular don’t float my boat (I can read a textbook - or better watch Horrible Histories, far too funny, clever and educational to leave to kids).  

And I don’t put much store by popularity (Booker disappointed me with Life of Pi and when they did choose one of my list, Ian McEwan, they picked his worst novel, Amsterdam). So I stick to authors I know and love – Julian Barnes, William Boyd, Martin Amis (not only male, but also white, middle-aged and British – suits me just fine!).

So when my lovely sister-in-law Sasha gave me Wolf Hall I may have been less than gracious: it spectacularly failed my size test (a whopping 650 pages), was set way back in Tudor times, was famous mainly for having bagged the Booker - and was by some unknown guy called Hilary Mantel. 

The early years of Henry VIII just didn’t appeal.  Eight wives all chopped, right?  Or was it divorced, beheaded, died; divorced, beheaded, survived?  Should I care either way?  Worse still, it wasn’t even about him, but rather his little-known fixer, Thomas Cromwell.  Never ‘eard of ‘im.

Oh how wrong could I be?  This is a stonkingly good read.  The atmosphere of medieval England is deliciously evoked, the political and social intrigues captivating.  I’m still not sure why I should care, but I really did – I couldn’t get enough of it.  

Frustratingly, I struggle to put into words just why this is so well written – I even re-read pages to pinpoint how it was done; there’s no fancy long words or complicated structure, just somehow brilliantly put together and utterly gripping storytelling.

So there I was – this Hilary Mantel bloke had just shattered my reading prejudices.  And then I go and find out she’s a woman: gutted!

What next?  With eyes opened and mind widened, I went straight for another author unknown to me but celebrated by others – and who, I am led to belive, is a also woman:  none other than E L James and her ubiquitous 50 Shades of Grey.

If the contrast were in a novel, you would dismiss it as an improbable fiction.  I kept reading at first in the mistaken belief that it just had to get better; then out of perverse curiosity as to how much worse it could get; and finally I was in crud stepped in so far that returning were as tedious as to turn over.

I feel slightly cruel pointing out that this is an utterly terrible book, but you’ll thank me if it saves a week of your precious reading time.

Seriously – this is the worst book I have ever read.

E L James simply can’t write.  How was someone with such a limited vocabulary allowed to pump out over 500 pages before her editor took pity?  Take the main character, a smarmy perv called Christian Grey, for whom our silly heroine falls in lust.  His description is painful:  fingers are without variation “long”, character always “mysterious”, eyes predictably, repeatedly “gray”.  

Yes that’s right – he’s called Grey, and he has gray eyes – clever eh?  Clearly emboldened by this stroke of literary genius, she bravely travels the spectrum to offer blushes “red as the communist manifesto” (probably confusing it with Mao’s little books, bless).  When she stumbles on a potentially more interesting description like “oxblood” for furniture, she uses the same adjective three times in as many paragraphs.  Please, somebody, give this woman a bloody thesaurus!

After over 100 pages of mind-numbingly mundane build-up, we finally get some of the much-hyped bedroom action:  orgasm 1 has heroine “shattering into a thousand pieces”; orgasm 2, demonstrating her astonishing range of descriptive skills, sees her “splinter into a million pieces”.  

Unable to develop character or drive the plot through dialogue, James stoops to unbearably crass use of her main character's ‘subconscious’ and ‘inner goddess’.  Conversations are followed in italics by such profound analysis as “Whoa!”, “Holy hell!”, “Crap!” and “Jeez!” (I kid you not).  The only mercy is her kind editor removed the multiple exclamation marks.

This is basically the faintly ridiculous fantasies of a semi-literate teenager.  James would have struggled to scrape a GCSE in English even before the grades were toughened up.  Fail!

So where does this leave me?  I still insist life is too short for long books, with rare exceptions.  Popularity makes a book worth investigating, but not necessarily reading.  

If my horizons are broadened, maybe I should escape from little England to French, African, North or South American novels?  Scour book prizes and best sellers to keep up with literary fashion?

Sorry, but for now I'm still sticking with what I know - whilst 50 Shades... besmirches my recycling bin, I’m devouring the sequel to Wolf Hall, the equally thrilling and unputdownable Bring Up The Bodies by Hilary Mantel, one of my favourite authors.