Philobiblon

* After Africa elected its first female president, it looks as though South America is about to follow suit. Michelle Bachelet, a survivor of torture under General Pinochet, has a huge lead in the opinion polls for Chile’s general election, which will be on December 11.

What makes this even more unusual is that she appears to be confident enough to be explicitly feminist, saying that she will ensure that 50 per cent of her Cabinet ministers will be female – a figure that I think has only been equalled or beaten in Scandanavia.

* Then a Japanese royal escaped from the palace. Princess Sayako renounced her status to marry a commoner. (Of course he might only be a bonus, when you think of how the poor princess who married in has fared.)

This Guardian article says it was a “dramatic break with the past, and that was driven home to me by an email letter today from the Ichiroya Kimono Flea Market. (They sell antique kimonos and other Japanese antiquities, but also write a newsletter in entirely understandable if slightly off-key English that gives a fascinating insight into another world view.) Yuka writes:

“I love the photos of the both Emperor and Empress when their only daughter entered and came to their table. You may not believe it but they are the first who attended their children’s wedding reception. … You can see how happy they looked and their peaceful smiles are the ones of ordinary parents. They greeted all the guests stayed until everything was over and thanked and sent the guests off — it is a natural thing but was a very unusual thing in the royal family history.
… The children used respect language to the Emperor and Empress, and in public, we could never see them hug each other or speak frankly each other but in these short words, we could see their bond and warm caring of each other.
Many people lined the streets and wished their happiness. Some people said, they felt the royal family is now very close to them and they could never forget the smiles of relief of Sayako san’s parents-they certainly looked different from the faces we see in their public appearance.

The BBC has a series of pictures.

* Meanwhile in France, the apparent president-to-be, Nicholas Sarkozy, has had a meeting with an editorial house. After that, his ex-wife’s book was pulped “and deleted from the firm’s computers”. So much for free speech – although what’s the bet it is on the internet within days?

After a week pretty well glued to my keyboard, looking at the gorgeous blue skies outside, I decided on a break today, so joined a Central London Cycle Touring Club ride around the lane and by-ways of St Albans and environs, including Hatfield, Colney Heath, South Mimms, and Shenley, finishing at Watford Junction. So if you saw a red-faced cyclist in a black balaclava, puffing their way very slowly up a hill in those environs, while the rest of the party (several of whom I was giving at least two decades to) waited patiently at the top, yep, that was probably me.

Still, I did make 26 miles (42km) in the end – although I had my doubts a few times after lunch.

Things I learnt:

* South Mimms is quite a nice little village, not just a motor-way service stop. (The White Horse is a pleasant pub too – another cycling party, numbering well over 20 arrived just as we were leaving, and the staff were quite relaxed about the invasion.)

Looking around for this post, I found from this lovely little local history:

Vicars in the late 19th century criticized the prevalence of drunkenness: P. F. Hammond refused the pot of beer offered him at the church door in 1889 (Footnote 71) and his successor, W. H. Wood, urged that the number of public houses should be reduced. In 1894, besides beershops, there were eight public houses in South Mimms village, serving a population of 250.

Today I think there are only two; at least that was all I saw.

* A cold day in November will see lots of cyclists out – we saw a total of three other organised groups, including one group of boy racers, some of whom were wearing shorts! (The BBC tells me the top temperature in St Albans today was 5C.)

* Ice is quite possible in these conditions. One of the boy racers, drawing up very slowly at an intersection in front of us, fell over, and looked very embarrassed about it. (Apparently boy racers look down at CTCers.)

* I also learnt how to cycle on ice (which is rather like driving). Just try to keep everything pointed in a straight line, and pray. Or don’t go out at all, which might be my future approach.

* On the architectural side, I learnt about Hertford spires, as on the church at Aldenham, and why a barn might be stood on mushroom-shaped posts. (The theory is that it would keep the rats out, since they couldn’t climb around the bulging part.)

You are sitting in an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting. In the intimate space of the Courtyard Theatre at King’s Cross, you’re not just watching, you are in the meeting.

Seven alcoholics are telling their harrowing life stories – simply, naturally, with only as much melodrama as comes naturally to their characters.

Jack (Riley Stewart), from an Irish background, comes from a family of alcoholics, his mother dying at the age of 13 left him an orphan. (Earlier, his father had drowned in a puddle while in an alcoholic stupor.) Jack drank to forget; he drank to find a family. Of course both efforts failed.

Then there’s Tim (Gary Lawrence) who cries as he talks of his family – led by his macho football coach father – refusing to accept his homosexuality; he still can’t use the word “gay”. Then his story gets even darker.

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Dominating British news is the shooting yesterday of a female police officer by robbers in Bradford. (And the officer has now been named.) A tragedy, and it would have been an equal tragedy had a male officer been shot, but it would not, I’d venture, have got anything like the same level of media attention.

And the term WPC (Woman Police Constable) has been resurrected for the occasion, despite its technical non-existence for decades. (It was used in the era when female officers were restricted to “safe” duties.) The Times has a good rundown on the change. (And there’s a history of women officers in London here.)
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No surprise that Martin Newland has quit as editor of the Telegraph. His is a salutary tale about how if you want to be and editor, and get to be an editor, you’ve also got to pick your proprietor carefully. And an ex-Daily Mail man is taking over. The Mail-zation of the London papers continues.
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Australia’s greenhouse gas emissions have increased 23 per cent over the past 13 years. A disgrace – and particularly stupid given that Australia is highly vulnerable to climate change.
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Then a bit of light relief: Detrimental Postulation on how the simple concept of feeding a lock through a loop is too much for some people. Mind you I can sympathise with the bike man, in that fitting a lock through two parts of the bike, then an too-thick railing or badly designed bike rack, is a serious challenge. Note to all building owners: if you want bike racks, copy the ones at the British Museum, they are perfectly shaped and placed.

And, via Beyond the Sunrise, Lego for social theorists. Do you want to build Judith Butler, or Anthony Giddens?

The framework of genre – be it sci-fi, detective fiction or thrillers – is, when used well, like a comfortable old coat, into which you slip with an anticipatory sigh of comfort. But once a novel strikes a false note, you suddenly start to notice the moth-holes, and the musty smell dry-cleaning cannot remove.

Out of my holiday reading, three books fitted into the classic – don’t break the mould – take on genre. Martin O’Brien’s Jacquot and the Waterman is that particular sub-formula of the foreign detective novel. The police detective is still usually an outsider, a mess with women, often with an alcohol problem – the only twist in this case is that Daniel Jacquot is a former rugby player “still remembered for the winning try he scored for France in a Five Nations Final against the English at Twickenham”.

The investigation, of nasty, sudden killings of women, proceeds on its expected path – the rate of crimes increasing, the police force under pressure from the media, until the final twist that reveals the killer. (Here telegraphed a long way out.)

There’s a touch of local colour – descriptions of the backways of Marsailles, a smattering of French words, but they fail to lift the entirely prosaic story, and character out of the mundane and predictable. This is genre used as the grungy old parka.

Then there was The Art of Getting Bent, by M. Sahm. Pure science fiction, it imagines a world in which a plague that annihilated millions has forced humans to either don cybernetics suits, or to become “Splices”, taking on a significant proportion of human genomes in order to be resistant to the plague.

It is an interesting idea, and the science is carefully explained in the classic genre matter. Unfortunately, however, the quality of the writing doesn’t match that of the thinking. The dialogue is clunky – all of the characters sounding the same, and the similes … well the writer would be well advised to lock that particular rhetoric tool in a strongbox and throw away the key.

Finally, and the best of this classic bunch, is Christopher Brookmyre’s Boiling a Frog. The comic thriller is perhaps one of the hardest genres to do well, and Brookmyre is one of its finest explonents. With Frog Brookmyre is back on his best milliennial form – his Not the End of the World had me very nearly rolling around on the floor in hysterics.

The first set-piece of the novel involves a prominent politician who has a name for being a womaniser, but is actually gay, an unfortunate accident with a vibrator, a straightlaced, Catholic spindoctor and a good-type female GP who suffers a broken angle on her medical mission of mercy to deal with the vibrator. In the wrong hands this could just be silly, but Brookmyre’s pen is sure.

So that’s straight genre. You know what you get. But what about the cross-breeds?

First up is Minette Walters The Shape of Snakes This is psychological mystery/detective story, with the added trappings of “real crime” – letters, photos, computer records. And it is absolutely gripping. At its centre is the death of “Mad Annie”, an eccentric, mentally ill woman living in London in 1973. Her former neighbour, the amateur detective in the case, returns after many years away and seeks finally to solve the “case”, not that anyone else who lived in the street or was associated with the death sees it as such, or at least wants to admit it as such. Gradually, however, the realities are peeled back, and much rot is revealed beneath polite suburban surfaces.

Then there’s The Time Traveler’s Wife, a novel published this year to considerable critical attention. It could easily be billed as science fiction – at its centre is a man who is shifted back and forth through time – something over which he has absolutely no control, and this “fact” is given a serious, scientific explanation. It is a conceit that works brilliantly. To manage this naturalistically, in a manner that the reader comes to suspend disbelief and really feel for the man’s plight, is an outstanding task.

Yet this is not being billed as sci-fi, but a love story, which it is, but that is very much the weaker part of the book – soppy, Hollywoodish and fairytalish. But perhaps because women are perceived to like “romance”, and they buy far more books than men, “romance” is the label it wears.

So what conclusions have I drawn from this sample across a range of classic beach reading? “Pure” genre done well can be a joy, but a blend of the same quality is always going to be richer and more gripping, just because you’re never sure how the yarns will come together into the whole fabric.

*This is my long-delayed review of my holiday reading. Very alert readers may recall I promised it about two months ago. Such a pity they haven’t yet invented a conduit between your head and the keyboard that doesn’t require use of the fingers. But phew; now I can finally move that reproaching pile off the corner of my desk.

As I was leaving the Independent I posted out an advert with my farewell message, saying the subjects I was particularly interested in writing about. One of them was “being a single woman – and happy about it”. I called myself the “anti-Bridget Jones”, but I added, I wasn’t interested in writing a sex column.

So what has my first job been as a freelance journalist in London? Appearing tonight on the BBC World Service’s World Have Your Say to talk about it, you guessed it, sex – or at least about Heidi Fleiss’s plans for brothels catering to women.

I also ended up talking about Roy Keane leaving United, and the issue of freedom on the internet.

You can listen to the hour-long programme on the website, through the link above. (It does have some interesting stuff – and no I’m not necessarily biased.)

The sound on my computer has never worked – it has been on my list of things to try to sort out one of these days, but perhaps it is a good job I haven’t. I fear listening to yourself is likely to be as uncomfortable as staring closely at pictures of yourself, as I was doing yesterday.