A long book about hobbits

Back in March I said I was going to read The Lord of the Rings, and because it takes me months to do anything I say I’m going to do, I’ve only just finished it (I did read other books first, because I'm also easily distracted). It seemed like something I should have already read, so I could say it was ‘one of the favourite books of my childhood’, or something similar. There was a time that I did try to read it, about ten or fifteen years ago, but didn’t get past The Fellowship of the Ring, because there were other, shorter books to read. This time would be different. This time I would get right to the bottom of every single detail and come out the other side. And now I know more about Middle Earth than the actual, real country I live in. I can point to a place called the ‘Gulf of Lhûn’ on a map. I can name at least five different fictional rivers. I know that Elvish bread fills you up but doesn't taste that good. I know that the Dúnedain descended from Númenor. I know what words like ‘Dúnedain’ and ‘Númenor’ mean.

The most impressive thing about the The Lord of the Rings is this world. Apart from the layers of history, there is an immersive sense of place. Travelling across Middle Earth is being in a place that has never existed, except in the mind of everyone who has read it. It seems that every inch of it is described (it helps that Tolkien has a hundred different words for ‘field’). You can share in Frodo and Sam’s journey because you’ve seen every step of it. The mental distance between the Shire and Mordor is massive, and not just in imagined distance. When they leave their green and cosy land, every step they take is towards a looming darkness. As they get closer to the end, it genuinely feels like they’re going somewhere really, really bad. The ‘Land of Shadow’ is obviously not a nice place, and you can tell ‘Mount Doom’ isn’t going to be a party, but it’s only when you read it that it all starts to seep into your mind. I knew what was going to happen, and I still thought there was no way these hobbits were getting home.

Tolkien was very eager to point out that this story isn’t a metaphor. It is what it is. There is philosophy there if you want, but I think Tolkien just created this stuff because it’s cool. He imagined a world of people and monsters and made them fight. There are long-winded parts, but he is not a boring writer. Boring writers rarely write about undead warriors on flying hell-horses, or armies of walking trees, or the lairs of giant spiders. This is all there because it’s fun, and underneath all the mythology, it is a story about hobbits. They are the little people in a big world that they don’t understand. As they learn, we learn. When everyone else is giving regal speeches about swords, the hobbits are the warm, likable heart of the book. Imagine Middle-Earth without them. Who would we care about? By focusing on the underdogs, Tolkien shows that he cares more about the story than ancient history. From the chase through the Shire to the huge battles, they are always completely out of their depth, and always getting stronger.

And how can they ever take on the Big Bad? Possibly the Biggest Bad of all, Sauron is so evil we don’t even need to see him. He’s so terrifying, being within ten miles of him makes people faint. There is no need to meet Sauron. There is no description of him. He just is. The ultimate evil that is waiting at the top of his black fortress. The books don’t even bother with that literal Big Eye that the films created. Here his ‘Eye’ is just all around you. The closest glimpse we get of him is when the dark mists surrounding his fortress part for a moment, and ‘as from some great window immeasurably high,’ Frodo sees a ‘flame of red.’ We only experience the trouble and darkness that he has caused, and that is enough. It’s a lot for a few hobbits to do.

It is a book that has the power to be both completely enthralling and mind-smackingly dull. The worst parts are when everyone is sitting around in complete safety, and we have to hear about how lovely the elves are. They’re all ‘glimmering’ and ‘glittering’ and full of long stories and songs about a thousand years ago, which aren’t actually of any use to anyone. It all makes the contrast sharper, because the best parts are where the heroes are starving, tired, despairing and hopeless, crawling through a dead land in final desperation. There is no ambiguity here: the goodies are the ones who look good, the baddies look bloody awful, but they do make things dramatic. And then there’s the parts where Gandalf is standing at the gates of a burning city, facing down a black-cloaked fire-headed doom spirit, or where he’s wrestling a towering flame-demon while falling down an abyss to the bottom of the world. Because Gandalf knows what makes a good book: leaving things till the last moment. The boring parts are there to trudge through; the good parts you’ll remember forever.

Is all my stuff obsolete?

In my lifetime, which seems to be getting longer all the time, I have amassed a lot of stuff. In the bottom of my wardrobe there are stacks of old magazines. There's a lot of them. About fifteen years worth of a games magazine that I was subscribed to. There is no good reason for me to still have them. The magazine was eventually closed down, like all magazines will be, because who wants to own a pile of paper when you can get everything on the internet? And that pretty much goes for a lot of my other stuff. There didn't used to be a problem with it. Now somebody could easily call it clutter. Why have all this physical media when it could be transferred to a computer?

Are racks of CDs now plastic irrelevancies when they can be contained invisibly in a silver box? In fact, CDs are easy to get rid of. The discs are only a storage medium for data files. It's the music that counts, and that can be stored on a computer. Transfer them over. Get rid of them. Yes. But what if I don't want an album on iTunes, but would still like to keep it? Okay, I'll keep a few. Not many, though, right? After all, some new computers don't even come with optical drives, because why would you even need one, like some loser stuck in 2005? Technology is marching forward, determined to leave physical media in the past, and if I'm not on board then I'm just not doing it right. The last few years have been a tipping point. Some people have ruthlessly cleared their shelves, and some, like me, haven't really bothered.

I might be changing my mind. For instance, I've been slowly going off the idea of owning films. It might seem like a good idea, but in reality I'll watch a DVD once then put it on a shelf forever and never touch it again. And what's the point in that? I used to watch all the commentaries and little extras. They just seem like a novelty now. So I should get rid of the DVDs. Well, maybe. Mostly. Everyone needs a few favourites to watch sometimes, and I'm not convinced there's a proper digital alternative. A streaming service like Netflix will only ever have some things, and I like the idea of owning a collection. It's possible to download films to iTunes and connect them to a television, but who really does that? And when it comes to books, I still choose to be stubborn, even though I could make the same arguments: paper is just a material for displaying words, words that could be on a screen, and I only ever read these things once. The difference, though, is that unlike data on a disc, books are real objects. They are nice to own. They are nice to have. The only time I see the point in e-books is when I'm trying to clear out old books, which isn't that often anyway. Maybe I would read more without wondering where I was going to fit each new book onto a shelf. Maybe I wouldn't.

There's a brutal and kind of appealing way to approach all this. I've read articles that say we should throw everything we're not using away and live in rooms of pared down minimalistic beauty. Just clear everything out, the articles say, get rid of anything that is clogging up your air space and keep the essential things. I imagine, though, that this is more fun to think about than it is to actually do. Tidy is good. I like tidy. Actually, that's not true. I like tidying. That's the satisfying part. A tidy room is boring. There's nothing to tidy. Even writing about tidying is fun. Not going to watch that film again? Throw it out the window. Why do I have these old books? Get rid of them. Make space. Start fresh. Sounds good. Sweeping away all these physical objects might be fun, like I was lessening some imagined burden, but I suspect there isn't much difference between an almost empty room and the lair of a psychopath. Because what would I have if I threw everything out, dumped all my films, pushed all my books onto some little device? A lot of empty shelves is what I would have.

Using books as decoration seems like a hollow argument, but the media we surround ourselves with is part of our identity. Lining a shelf with certain books is saying 'this is what I like, these are my favourites'. There are some objects that relate to my history. Like my vast collection of Nintendo games that I could never part with, even though they take up all that space. And the stacks of magazines that I believe have some connection to the time I read them. I will never really look at them again, I know that, but I do need to keep some stuff from the past. This is where I disagree with the constantly evolving idea of newness, with all the yearly updates of slim computers to more efficiently hide and organise our things. Yes, CDs and DVDs are on their way out, but we need to keep some real objects from the past, not virtual versions of them. Tidy is good, in moderation. Prune the DVD collection. Donate old books. Clear CD racks. The rest can stay. Some of my stuff is obsolete, but I'll keep it anyway.

A short book about hobbits

I've been reading The Hobbit, which is probably the literary equivalent of a nice cup of tea. There's something comforting about it. It can't be nostalgia, because I don't really have any memory of reading it before, even though I found a scruffy old copy of it in my wardrobe. It reads like a gentle wander across Middle-earth, and that's a nice place to be if you're not actually there. Yes, there's violence and terror, but it's a cosy story. Unspeakable danger isn't so bad when it's narrated like a bedtime story. And there's not much to think about, because there are only hints of the deep mythology that Tolkein would create later, like it's just dipping your toe into a very deep pool. Apart from everything else, The Lord of the Rings and the other work that surround it are a masterpiece of world-building. There's more there than anyone could ever know. If you wanted to, you could learn about the history of every blade of grass. And I'm starting to think that's the best way to read it. I've read The Fellowship of the Ring before but then stopped, because, after all, it is very long and sometimes very boring. Maybe I wasn't reading it right. The problem is that I already know the story, so reading it passively isn't going to work. Instead, the fun is in the details. It's like a game to piece it all together, with the maps and the timelines and Appendix B with the things about the stuff. There's a whole world in there. Whether it's worth it or not, I'm not sure. The Hobbit is a children's book, and quite short, so I don't know if my interest will last much further. If I make it all the way through, I could read The Silmarillion, which is mostly in another language.

This is all a contradiction, because I've never had much patience with long books, and I expect I'll leave Frodo somewhere in a field again, halfway through his adventure. I do like the idea of it, though. This is why I don't mind The Hobbit films being too long. They're indulgent escapism. And I can just about see how they did it. The book does fall into three pieces, each with a neat climax, and it can be stretched out to three films if you really take your time and invent some other things. I'm glad they did it. It's fun to be in that world again. At the very least, I'm now the sort of person who browses the Lord of the Rings Wiki for fun. There's a lot on there. I could read that instead.

Bad people ruin good books

I read a book that I really wanted to like. It wouldn't let me, and I'm starting to think it didn't want me to. It's The Magicians by Lev Grossman. The problem is not the story or the ideas. These are good. A teenager is admitted to a school for magic and goes looking for the fantasy worlds he's read about in books, expecting them to be real. It's a story about the idea of escaping into a fantasy place, and what that does to people. This character thinks he'll find fulfilment on a magical quest, and even when he's found it he's always looking for another secret door to take him somewhere else. It's a clever and sometimes brilliant view of the fantasy genre, managing to build its world and still be a parody of itself. It's a fantasy book for people who have grown up reading fantasy books.

Or at least, it would be. The problem is that it's a good story ruined by the decision to make most of the characters awful gits. I didn't want to spend any time with them. They're not villainous, just the sort of people you could meet in real life and wouldn't be friends with. Selfish, privileged, and miserable in their best moments, and really, really horrible in their worst. I'm not sure if this was intentional or not. It's a brave decision to turn the reader against the characters, except I was worried that I was meant to be relating to them. They have recognisable problems. They act and speak like real people. Only, real people that I don't like. I don't remember another time that I've put off reading a book because I could only handle so much of a character in a week. I'm sure somebody, somewhere, must like them. Possibly the author, although it read like he wanted to see how far he could push them down before trying to redeem them. They are realistic, well-written portrayals of rubbish people.

Characters don't have to be likable, but they do have to be interesting. This lot were neither. It feels like a contradiction, because I admired almost everything else. There were elements of the plot that were genuinely surprising and unsettling, with a proper sense of otherwordly nightmare. I like that kind of thing. I wanted this to be one of my favourite books. Obviously, there's plenty of fiction with horrible protagonists. Murderous thugs and villains that you want to watch or read about.This isn't that. This is pretending the heroes are relatable when they're actually deeply irritating. The Magicians is the first part in a trilogy. I want to read more but I can't, because I'd have to deal with these mopes again. It's not worth it. Five hundred pages can seem like a very long time. I'll forgive a book for being a bit boring if I like being with the characters. I can't forgive one that invents a world and a story that's completely brilliant, then sabotages it with people you only want to slap.

Finding something good to read

Good books come from different places. A friend might recommend something to you. You might overhear something being mentioned. Sometimes a good book just makes itself known, by being in the right place at the right time, or by strange coincidence, or by just being really famous. Sometimes I don't know what to read next, but a good book always turns up, by the mystical forces of whatever. What doesn't work, is going to look for one. Especially on a computer. I don't think computers have any idea what a book is, even though they help to make them. To a computer, a book is just a collection of words that someone has typed, bits of data that become an object you can buy. Sites like Amazon don't give recommendations based on the real content of a book, they just know that somebody who bought this also bought that, and so you should buy it too. It's logical, but not very useful. Only a person knows what a good book is.

I made an account on Goodreads*. It's a website that recommends books. That's the whole point of it. You tell it all the books you've ever read and it shows you other things. I think, though, it might be a bit useless. My first mistake was saying I really like a Haruki Murakami book. It's response seemed to be, 'here are some more writers from Japan'. Never mind. And it's divided everything into genre, like fantasy, sci-fi, and 'mystery', because if there's one thing your book collection is missing, it's discipline. I've never thought, 'yes, I would like to read some science fiction now, I will go and look for some science fiction'. I just want something I'll enjoy. I don't know what genre things are half the time. Goodreads says that one of my favourites, The Road, is science fiction, despite that not being true at all.

The biggest problem with all this, though, is that it will never recommend something completely different to me. Something I never would have thought of. Only a friend can say 'this is brilliant, you should read it'. And that's the only recommendation I'm going to trust. Stupid internet.

*Like all social media, it does a good job of making you feel inadequate in a really blunt way. The first thing it tells me is 'You have no friends yet'. Oh.

Four hundred pages too late

It's a shame to be four hundred pages into a book and only then realise that it's really boring. I have a choice: read the remaining hundred pages or just give up. Yes, sorry, Cloud Atlas is boring. The idea is that one soul is travelling between six different people in six different times. Which means there's six different stories. Occasionally there's a sentence thrown in like 'you know, I feel like I've lived another life five hundred years ago,' but they're unconnected and mostly, yes, boring. There's a good one in the middle about the people of a ruined world speaking in a Riddley Walker-type language. But apart from that, I wish I was interested.

Am I wrong? Everyone who's quoted on the back of the book seems to like it. And it's going to be made into a film. I'm just annoyed because I read all those words expecting something good to come of it. I could have been doing something else, you know.

The Martians are coming

I've been reading The War of the Worlds. It's pretty dark.

"Where the road grows narrow and black between the high banks the crowd jammed and a desperate struggle occurred. All that crowd did not escape; three persons at least, two women and a little boy, were crushed and trampled there and left to die amidst the terror and the darkness."

The War of the Worlds, H.G. Wells

I mean, calm down HG. It's only the end of the world. The whole thing is done so well it makes me worried about Martians. Not really concerned, but when I hear loud noises I assume it's the invasion.

Things to do now that Harry Potter has finished

Harry Potter's over then. Done. Finished. Not coming back. Not even a little bit. Some people seem quite upset about this, so I've compiled a list of other things to do.

1. Read some more books
J.K. Rowling wrote some very good books. There's other ones too. Books by other writers. They're not really as good as Harry Potter, and you probably won't enjoy them as much, but they're still available. Some of them are actually quite boring. So, yeah, keep reading.

2. Watch some more films
The Potter films are pretty much indistinguishable from each other until everything blows up at the end. The last one's got a good bit where Neville cuts off a snake's head with a sword. There's still other films to watch. I like The Social Network. Have you seen that yet? It's really good. It's out on Blu-rays, and you can even buy the Oscar-winning soundtrack.

3. Eat some delicious biscuits
I like custard creams. You could eat a dozen of those. Hob-Nobs are good, especially the chocolate sort, but you've got to make sure the crumbs don't go everywhere. Shortbread is okay, and sometimes comes in plate-sized chunks. Jammy Dodgers are a bit niche these days, and are probably expensive. Party Rings are disappointing if you're not actually at a party.

4. Join some sort of website
'Registration for Pottermore starts soon,' says the website called Pottermore. 'Explore the stories like never before' and 'discover new writing from the author'. This is just a guess, but I think this will be rubbish. There's no way there's going to be any new Potter writing without a large cheque from a publisher. It'll probably just turn your mouse cursor into a wand.

5. Try to make one eye look down and one eye look up
If you do this your eyes will break and roll backwards, and then you'll only be able to look at your brain. So this probably isn't the best thing to do. I don't really know why it's, um, on the list.

Or you could just read the books again.

Stuff and stuff

There's Stuff and there's stuff. The things you've accumulated throughout your life deserve a capital letter. Boring and plain objects that you don't care about is just stuff. Because if you think about it, every object in your collection of Stuff has memories attached to it. Usually not very exciting memories, but you might remember unwrapping a film, or reading a book for the first time, or listening to music in a certain place. Some things might have come in on your birthday or Christmas, and the rest you bought or found. All of it together is arranged in order somewhere, in rows and piles and boxes.

So, I decided to count all my Stuff:

94 books
28 films/tv seasons
88 CDs
128 games

The most noticeable thing there is how many films I don't have. I usually rent them, and I only really feel compelled to own a few of them. And still, that list isn't right. A lot of Stuff has been given away, or sold, or lost. Stuff that isn't relevant anymore. I seem to keep books, even though they take up a lot of space. And games. You can't get rid of games.The other noticeable thing is that I have many objects. 338 things.

Does your collection of Stuff fill rooms? Or do you burn everything every few years?

Books don't run out of batteries

I recently let Apple try to explain to me why their e-books are A Good Thing and not An Awful Thing. I've seen these iPads. They look fancy. I mean, I would have no actual use for one, but they're really shiny. The adverts show all kinds of wonders. Listening to a magazine. Watching a newspaper. And, I don't know, eating a book? When you download one it goes onto a virtual bookshelf. Which is nice. It almost looks like a real bookshelf. But then you open one up, and this is where it all goes wrong for me. Apple boast about the advantages over paper. You can change the font and text size. Highlight hard words to look them up in a dictionary. Go straight to the page you were last on, because the machine remembered it for you. But I don't want to customise books. I don't want to change them. A book is a solid thing that has been designed and produced and exists in the world as an object. It can't be changed. Books don't have to loaded. They don't run out of batteries. In telling us that an e-book is just like a real-book, they've forgotten the most important thing. A piece of data in a machine is not really there. You can't hold it. You can't keep it. I bet it doesn't even smell of anything.

There is a possiblity I am being grumpy. This is, obviously, what happened to music. People who bought records can now scroll through iTunes. And in some ways, it's better. Having all your music two clicks away. That's good. I download music, but I've noticed a difference. If I really like an album, I'll buy it on CD. So I can have it. The downloads mean less to me. It doesn't feel right spending the same amount of money for information on a screen. If I downloaded a book, it would be because I didn't really want it.

Books

Recently I've been reading a lot of books that I think I should read but don't actually want to. Important, difficult books. Reading The Unnamable by Samuel Beckett becomes an act of will. Sammy B (as he was never called by anyone in his entire life) was tearing things to pieces. The book is a long monologue by someone who isn't sure he exists. Interesting philosophy? Yes. Entertaining book? No. Then there's The Castle by Franz Kafka. There's definitely a story here - a man is trying to get a job from the mysterious authorities in the Castle, but he's not even allowed to talk to them. In Kafka's case, because of the sheer genius of the man, he got away with dieing before he even finished his books. Which means that no-one had the heart to edit them and take out all the irrelevant bits. It's powerful, but a big investment for something that doesn't even end.

And now, after some time away I realise that it's better to read the books that just tell a good story. Something absorbing that you physically don't want to put down. Where you aren't glancing at the page numbers every five minutes. Thankfully, Murakami can supply this. Kafka on the Shore is a story with characters and everything else you'd expect. No intellectual exercise, no struggle, just a story. And in his own charmingly surreal way. So I'll be reading more of this and less of that. If anyone has any suggestions for some good wordy pages, let me know. I'll need some more to read.

The Pillars of the Earth: Slightly different hair but no happier

At the end of it all The Pillars of the Earth seemed to ask: how many bad things can happen to people in their lifetime? The people of Kingsbridge have an extremely bad time. They're trying to build a cathedral, but it doesn't go very well. I wrote before about my expectations for the series, and its relation to the original novel. In watching it I was reminded just what these characters have to overcome. It's all down to a pair of thoroughly evil people: Waleran Bigod and William Hamleigh. They plotted and murdered their way through half a century. One an ambitious bishop and the other just plain bad. This is how to fill fifty years. Look at Jack Jackson, the hero of the story. He wants to marry Aliena, but before he can do that he has to be banished, strangled, banished again, and turned into a monk. Then she marries somebody else. He transforms from mute boy to master mason, despite not looking a year older. It's a sprawling story where people have to wait decades to get what they want. A new episode might jump fourteen years into the future, when everyone has slightly different hair but are no happier. It makes the payoff all the more satisfying. When William is clouted over the head with a rock it comes after weeks of waiting. It makes everything better.

The backdrop to all this strife is the argument over the throne. With so many political deals and earls to slaughter it becomes difficult to follow. And nobody really cares anyway. Sometimes the throne will swap hands between episodes, and the battles just seem to amount to a bunch of people on horses riding around in the same field. Never mind then, all the entertainment is happening elsewhere - with the monks and the wool merchants and the fancy new rib vaulting on the cathedral. It's not as powerful as the book. Sometimes an adaption just can't hope for that. But it does a good job of making you forget.

The worst time to try and get a cathedral built

The Pillars of the Earth is a very long book. It takes a while to build a cathedral in the 12th century, especially when there are lots of thoroughly evil people around to try and stop you. It's a sprawling story where people grow up and grow old and kings see off several generations of traitors. It's also brutal, violent, and uncompromising. So you'd have to be brave to try and put it on television - brave people like Ridley and Tony Scott. There's Ian McShane as a sly bishop, Rufus Sewell as a nice builder (there must be some mistake there), and Matthew Macfadyen being very Welsh. But the most important thing to mention here, particularly if you've read the book, is that the adaption is spot on. It could have been lifted straight from the (many, many) pages of the book. When an adaption is this good it replaces the images the book left in your mind. You begin to believe that you always imagined Earl Bartholomew to look just like Donald Sutherland. The town of Kingsbridge, with all its sulky monks, has been taken straight from your brain. The only slight difference is William Hamleigh, who doesn't quite look enough like the embodiment of evil. In a way though, all these comparisons are irrelevant. Without ever having heard of the book, The Pillars of the Earth should still live up to its promise as an intricate and muddy medieval drama. It could never have fitted into a film, it needs hours and hours (and hours) of room. I'm looking forward to seeing how it progresses across the century, and listening to more of Prior Philip saying 'It's God's will it is, I'm shooer of it'.

If you haven't read the book, and fancy giving a chunk of your life to an historical epic, read it first. If you're not that bothered, just watch this. It's only just started on British telly. After watching the next eight hours I'll tell you if it was worth it.

A sheep that may or may not be running the world

I didn't seem to like the last Murakami book I read. Admittedly, I didn't really understand that Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World was meant to be parody of 'hard-boiled' fiction until it was too late (the clue was probably in the title). I liked its fantasy tone but found it a bit flat, a bit slow, and a bit too eager to be all 'postmodern'. Although despite all that, it's clearly a good book. The fact that I didn't like it seems beside the point. But the boring bits are still boring, I don't care how postmodern they are.

Now, A Wild Sheep Chase, written before Hard-boiled Wonderland, actually impressed me. To be honest, I'm probably going to like any book that has the sentence 'a sheep that may or may not be running the world' in its blurb. It's a sinister sheep too. It possesses people and uses them to build an evil empire. Murakami took something completely banal and flipped the switch to 'interesting'. There's passages where people are just explaining the farming of sheep in Japan. But it works because, at the bottom of it, you know there's something completely different. This book felt much more like a journey, an adventure through the sleepy towns of Japan. The images are sharp and the characters distinctive. Most Murakami books are described through these people. Apart from an evil sheep, this one has a girl with reality-bending ears, an 'ovine-obsessed professor' and a 'manic-depressive in a sheep outfit'. This Sheep Man is a highlight, turning up near the end of the story and speaking entirely without pause. He says that he hides in the mountains because he 'didn'twanttogoofftowar'. So, in all, it was a good idea not to give up on Haruki Murakami. There's a lot of hyperbole surrounding him, but some of it might be deserved. It's just a case of finding the right book.

The two types of plot

Somebody once told me that there are only two plots in all fiction: boy leaves home and stranger comes to town. As metaphorical as they are, I'm not sure I trust it. Let's have a look at various film, book, and TV things:

• The Road There's a lot of leaving home going on here. They find that nice bunker full of peaches and then they leave again. So it happens more than once.
• Doctor Who In general this seems to be both. The assistant leaves home because the Doctor has arrived, who is pretty strange.
• The Bourne Identity He's on a journey, but was he ever at home to begin with?
• District 9 Lots of scaley strangers coming to town. Also, the protagonist is turning into an alien, so that can't be very comfortable.
• The Lion King It's Hamlet, right? And in Hamlet people go mad, which is strange. This is maybe stretching it slightly. Shakespeare is awkward.
• Taken Boy leaves home to kill everyone in France. Technically he's an ex-CIA operative, but lets say boy.
• A Knight's Tale He's definitely leaving home here. He goes back at the end but that doesn't count.
• Pride and Prejudice Stranger comes to town. In Jane Austen it is always stranger comes to town.
• Lost Everything at once from ten different viewpoints and alternative timelines. Also: polar bears.
• Lord of the Rings Probably the definition of boy leaves home.

Does it work? Maybe. But then you could easily write a story that doesn't follow the rules, just to be sly. I did not include sly artists in this list.

Where characters get frowns from

I was rifling through old essays (maybe it wasn't a rifle, more of a sift) when I came across something I'd written about character depth. It was a long essay, and it was mainly me trying to sound cleverer than I am, but this was a bit of it:

If depth already exists within the reader, then the character is constructed instantly. When the reader identifies with a character, they recognise certain qualities or traits that they have in common, and so believe the character to be a representation of themselves. The character then acquires the depth of the reader by sharing a personality and becoming an extension of the reader.

Many characters, even in a very small part, contain something you can relate to. Josh Lyman is the Deputy Chief of Staff at the White House but in some ways he's still a bit of a child. The Doctor is a Time Lord but he's also a nerd. Dexter Morgan is an emotionless serial killer but he also likes a beer in the evening. Taking characters into yourself (maybe less with the last one) turns them into something important. If someone that's a bit like you doesn't get killed by rampaging demons then you might feel a bit better about yourself.

Mostly though, I just think this is rubbish. Everything on screen is not a representation of ourselves. They are fictional creations written to appear human. They need to have depth by themselves, not relying on some nice viewer or reader to adopt them. So what does it mean when a character is called 'flat' as opposed to 'three-dimensonal' - what does character depth mean? Well, my Very Clever essay used a quote from a real academic-type. They said that a character should act on 'multiple impulses that cohere into a single identity'. Yes. So they need to show more than one impulse, more than one emotion. Tony Soprano is a crime lord but also wants to be a good father. Stringer Bell tries to be a gangster and a businessman at the same time. They need to be more than one thing, they need to change. What's my point? Much like in the essay, I don't have a point. But it's, you know, something to think about.

Two novels by Ishiguro

Ishiguro novels seem to have a thing about the past. The two that I've read, When We Were Orphans and Never Let Me Go, are both written from a point in the future, looking back at what's past. And if Ishiguro didn't know how to hold a story so well, they might be as dull as I've made them sound. He takes something familiar, something everyone has read before, and twists it a little bit to bring reality in. In Never Let Me Go it's clones. Created for organ donations and hidden away in boarding schools. The idea is taken straight out of science-fiction but here it's a placed in a real setting - late 90s England - where their existence seems more difficult. The book is completely uncluttered by science or explanation, it's just about the people. For large sections it'll seem like a story about school, or about 'university', but then they mention their donations. It's all bit sinister. These characters are human, and that's the most troubling thing. After all the childhood games and the (slightly annoying) teenage politics, they're just slabs of meat to be sold off. Their deaths are unceremonious and understated, because that's what they were there for in the first place.

And the detective of When We Were Orphans writes from inside his own fantasies. He's convinced that his parents, who were abducted in Shanghai when he was young, are still being held captive twenty years later. They're clearly not, but he plays out the detective game until it breaks. He's stuck as a ten year old - the entire profession of 'detecting' is a way of delaying adult reality and responsibilty. The language is a lot posher, more adapted to the boring London society. It's rare for a writer to almost completely change their style from book to book. Ishiguro chooses a voice and goes with it, keeping himself in the background. It's not an easy thing to do. But if there's a link between the two, it's that both see childhood as formative and inescapable. It completely makes up who these characters are. Only now it's become a collection of memories that they have to decipher one by one. It has become a story that they have to tell themselves. In other words, it's a big pile of literary stuff that Ishiguro can write pages and pages about and still leave things untold. That's enough for now, but I might read more one day.

All of this is Kafkaesque

A lot of what I read is described as 'Kafkaesque'. I had no idea what this meant, so I thought it would be a good idea to have a look at one of Kafka's novels. After reading The Trial I still had very little idea. The book itself is a surreal, sometimes slightly difficult, picture of a corrupt legal system. A man is arrested but can gather no information about his case and learns that the trial may last the rest of his life. It seems to say that the law (or the Law, as it's put in the book) is a distant and dangerous system that can accuse citizens but can never be approached. It appears to exist for the sake of it, laying judgement on people just to exert its power. But what gives them the right to do this? And what is innocence and guilt? That's the sort of thing I got from it. The internet tells me it's also about spirituality, but I must have missed that bit.

The internet is more helpful in defining 'Kafkaesque' - 'marked by surreal distortion and often a sense of impending danger'. Seems pretty straightforward now. When reading the book I was constantly reminded that it was an unfinished, translated work. Apparently German sentence structure and double meanings make translating Kafka a pain. And after Kafka's death the chapters were still unarranged and some were unfinished. It's difficult to know what to make of it. But aside from that it's still strange to read. Most of the characters seem to be metaphorical and nearly all the chapters are self-contained. It's interesting though. I'll probably have to read more. And at least now I understand what the blurb on the back of that Murakami book was on about.

The Road is better than films

There's something about Cormac McCarthy's books that make them an easy fit for film. Hardly anything is changed from page to screen. The Coen brothers pretty much copied No Country for Old Men into a screenplay, and now The Road has been given the same treatment. Which is fine by me. The books are so tightly plotted that there's isn't any need to mess around. Watching The Road is like running through the book in your head. 'There's the bit in the house with the - yeah - there's that bit, and when they find all that stuff in the bunker, and when they get to the sea and find the thing'. The man and the boy are still having big problems, with Viggo 'I'm not just Aragorn' Mortensen doing a good job of playing the worried father. And after early trailers made the film look a bit too, well, explodey, it's turned out to be the wonderfully depressing post-apocalyptic bleak treat that we were promised. The camera seems to have a permanent grey filter on it and the pacing is slow enough never be exciting.

The problem is, it didn't get to me in the same way the book did. I'm not sure why. Maybe that's a one-time thing. Maybe I can't really care a second time. Or maybe Cormac McCarthy's words are better than anything anyone can put on screen. It's a film that pays complete respect to it's source material and does everything right. So maybe that's the problem. Books aren't films. Films aren't books. They can't achieve exactly the same thing. In the novel we could get inside their heads a little bit. In the film we're watching them. Not the same. Although if my only complaint is about all film, then there can't be much wrong with it.

Ten rules for writing fiction

These aren't my rules. They have very little to do with me. But I do agree with them. They're good rules. This isn't the sort of blog where you'll read about the magical essence of being a writer, and I have no interest in suffering for any art. I just write stories sometimes, and sometimes advice is needed. This week some newspaper or other asked authory types what their rules were. There's a long list. Some are philosophical. Some are sensible. I've put my favourites down here.

1. Only bad writers think their work is really good. - Anne Enright
2. If it sounds like writing, rewrite it. - Elmore Leonard
3. Do not search Amazon for the book you haven't written yet. - Roddy Doyle
4. To use an adverb is a mortal sin. - Elmore Leonard
5. Never use a verb other than 'said' to carry dialogue. The line of dialogue belongs to the character; the verb is the writer sticking his nose in. - Elmore Leonard
6. It's doubtful anyone with an internet connection at his workplace is writing good fiction. - Jonathan Franzen
7. You can never read your own book with the innocent anticipation that comes with that first delicious page of a new book, because you wrote the thing. You've been backstage. You've seen how the rabbits were smuggled into the hat. Ask a friend or two to read it. - Margaret Atwood
8. Never use the words 'suddenly' or 'all hell broke loose'. I have noticed that writers who use 'suddenly' tend to exercise less control in the application of exclamation points. - Elmore Leonard
9.  Don't go into detail describing places and things. You don't want descriptions that bring the action, the flow of the story, to a standstill. - Elmore Leonard
10. Fiction that it isn't an author's personal adventure into the frightening or the unknown isn't worth writing for anything but money. -  Jonathan Franzen

The rest are here.