Conor Fitzgerald's Blog

I have just installed a new version of Wordpress, overwriting my entire site. That's FIVE blog posts lost.

I have resolved to come out of my shell a little and be a little more forthcoming. I have therefore started my website/blog all over again.

Forthcoming does not mean I shall be pleasant. One of the things holding me back from interacting with people has been the notion that I should try to come across as thoroughly likeable. Not finding anything good to say about anyone or anything for a year, I rather let my site flag.

Anyhow, here's me trying again. Comment by all means.

So, as I said in the previous blog entry, the Kindle and similar products, being digital, infect the texts they contain with contingency. A work on a Kindle can never pretend to be perfect or permanent. But maybe I can get over this and maybe, as my editor Ben Adams says, the coming generations simply won’t see it in this way. After all, in the past, slates were wiped clean, vellum was abraded, manuscripts overwritten and, of course, books were burnt. I could therefore be dead wrong. The electronic book might be longer lasting than bronze, as Horace (writing on parchment, copied on to vellum) put it.
So I’ll move on to my second objection, which has to do with the effect of electronic publishing on our mode of reading. I mentioned that the Kindle enabled me to acquire a book immediately in a remote location, and that this was very useful. The Kindle and the iPad and other similar products provide instantaneous service and immediate satisfaction. The question is, do books do the same? That is to say, what is the effect of a book being delivered instantaneously without any effort on the part of the customer? My fear is that if book is delivered with gratifying immediacy but fails to deliver immediate gratification, the reader may feel cheated or, at the very least, vaguely dissatisfied and, most of all, impatient with the book, which is inferior to his Kindle (Or her Kindle. Or his/her iPad or her/his Sony reader etc: I am picturing an overweight red-faced man, and he has a Kindle sticking out of his outsized jacket pocket, so I’m sticking with the masculine pronoun, even though I know women read more).
Some books are written not to deliver immediate gratification. Some are written deliberately to be hard, slow and awkward. Sometimes books are slow and awkward because the writers had mismanaged some of the mechanics of plot and character, but then blossom to become masterful works. Most of all, however, a book is a medium that demands a large investment of time and effort, which is what the Whispernet and Apple promise to do away with. A book is not necessarily seeking efficiency, but the system of electronic delivery is. To my mind, there is a fundamental mismatch here. Patience is a virtue that reading requires and often rewards.
Apple and Amazon fetishize consumer experience and make impatience a virtue. But the boor in the line who can’t wait to get his food is also likely to be the same guy who complains most loudly that he doesn’t like what he got. And even if we are not boorish consumers, the magic of the “Whispernet” and the Apple store make us want to try again, to go back for more so we can experience their magic again. The result is we gobble down the words, tripping and skimming through the text without paying proper attention. This, indeed, is one of the aspects of Goodreads that bothers me. It seems to encourage a form of speedreading, and a sort of bidding contest among participants. Why tell the world you read 5, 50 or 500 books? Just enjoy the books.

Books take longer to absorb. They are slow food for the mind but are increasingly being delivered by massive fast-food merchants. Apple and Amazon are for the mind what McDonald’s is for the body. They also have a similar homogenizing and debasing effect on appetite. Always to eat in McDonald’s while abroad rather than test local foods is the mark of a coward and an ignoramus, of a man (yeah, the same fat guy above) who is fearful of novelty, scared to ask for things he does not know and unaware that his chosen diet is both bland and noxious. To travel in the world of culture with a Kindle or, worse still, an iPad, strikes me as being similarly misguided.
Or do I exaggerate? Obviously, I feel that I am sweet reason itself on this question. But I will admit to getting a little heated at the fact that we are destroying our planet by burning coal to power the servers that allow people to play with virtual cows and sheep on Facebook, or sling fat birds around on their iPads, no matter how fun this may be. But that is definitely the subject for a different blog entry.

I have a Kindle. I came late into the game, being resistant to the idea of e-books. Now that I have one, I am both persuaded by it and more forcefully opposed to it than before. But to begin with, let me acknowledge how useful it can be (or was, on one occasion).

A while ago, I was asked to do a review for the Irish Times on the latest John Connolly book, The Burning Soul. The Irish Times put the review copy in the post and sent it to my address in northern Italy. But I waited for three weeks and the book never arrived. By now I was preparing to return to Rome, and I might have asked them to send me another copy there, but time was running short. A final check of my post on the morning of my departure brought me a gas bill, but no book.

Waiting in the middle of the countryside for the first of the three trains that would bring me on my long 500-mile journey back to Rome, I took out my Kindle and downloaded Connolly’s book. By the time I had got back to Rome, I was three quarters of the way through it. The following day I finished the book, and the day after I did the review, and sent it in just in time. That was my first and very propitious use of the Kindle. If you are stuck in a rural district and you need a book for work purposes, then the Kindle’s your man. But since this is a peripheral benefit that I had not anticipated, and since the tone of this blog entry is still anti-Kindle, why did I buy the damned thing to begin with?

I bought it for two reasons. Let’s start with the plausible-sounding one that I like to I tell serious people (and my wife). An author who repudiates this remarkable new form of publishing is being willful and pretentious. Whether we like it or not, e-books are here to stay. If an author refuses to accept them and what they signify, s/he is failing to accept with the world as is, and rejecting the legitimacy of a format that the public seems determined to adopt. This is a frightfully haughty (i.e. bad) stance for a purportedly creative person to take. A writer determined to succeed must embrace the new technology. By this logic, the Kindle was not an impulse purchase, but a compulsory investment, and until I have such wealth that my wife doesn’t even notice that I just spent my son’s shoe money, this is the line of argument I’ll be using.

The second reason, the real one about which the wife knows nothing -- she is Italian and can’t read this, is that I was in an airport and, having no interest in perfumes and having already bought a very large Toblerone, I naturally gravitated towards the only other sort of store that I find interesting, the one selling music and electronics. Except they don’t really sell music anymore and I already have an MP3 player. I was nonetheless drawn in by the Apple iPhones but, because I have a political conscience and shreds of personal dignity, I could not bring myself to buy one. By now aching to make an extravagant buy that was unconnected to Steve McJobs, I found the only thing left was a Kindle. So I bought one. Then I had the nice young salesman set it up and register it to the WRONG Amazon store (no, you can’t change the setting, not really).

(As for the possibility of splashing out on books, well I was flying Ryanair, and everyone knows that Ryanair planes crash and incinerate everyone inside if anyone boards it with more than 25 grams of luggage - hence the heightened vigilance of their courteous staff. Since the Boeing 737-800 is known to be incapable of carrying any extra weight whatsoever, buying a book is essentially a form of terrorism, which would make me no better than a Muslim with a toenail clipper or a Tamil with undeclared toothpaste).

Since then, I have downloaded other books on to the Kindle. I tend to download the sort of books I would prefer people not to know I read, and it turns out this is a common practice. So what is the problem? I have two objections to the Kindle, but I am kind of boring myself a little now, so I think I’ll mention just one of them.

My first objection is that an electronic book is a digital creation and, because I am old and full of sleep, I believe that what is digital is also provisional. The digital format suits an ongoing project or a work in progress. The defining characteristic of a digital text, such as this blog, is that it is amenable to amendment. I regard the digital file I create on my computer as part of the input stage. The unchangeable published book is the finished product, the output. For this reason, an e-book, for me, belongs to an indeterminate space surrounded by contingency. It lacks definitiveness and definition because it is so open to revision. Semiotically, these are all interesting qualities, but they make it harder for me to suspend disbelief, to close my critical mind, to stop looking for typos, errors and infelicitous phrasing that might still be corrected. For these reasons, an e-book seems more like a text book, course work or an object of study. Reading becomes almost a task rather than a pleasure.

My second objection is almost moral – but I think I’ll save it for my next blog entry.

If you have ever visited Rome as a tourist, you will almost certainly have gone to Piazza Navona, whose centrepiece is Bernini's Fountain of the Four Rivers. This is a great baroque work of writhing stone and splashing water surmounted by an ancient Egyptian obelisk.

This very famous monument, bang in the centre of the Piazza, was commissioned by Pope Innocent X whose original name was Giambattista Pamphili, who is a central figure in my novel The Fatal Touch.

The inscriptions below the obelisk are fascinating examples of the arrogance of not just the Pamphili family, not just the popes, both of us Westerners with respect to other cultures.

Although the pyramids are generally recognised even in popular culture thanks to films such as "The Mummy" as predating the Islamification of that area of the world, there is still our deep suspicion of the culture that built the pyramids and now finds itself occupying a central part of the Muslim world.

The Fountain of the Four Rivers in Piazza Navona is surmounted by a tall Egyptian obelisk that the Pamphili Pope had brought from the outskirts of Rome where it lay discarded and broken in three pieces having been originally stolen from Egypt by the Romans in the days of the Emperor Caracalla. We can be thankful that the rescued a piece of ancient Egyptian art, but we should be under no illusion that his motives in displaying this piece of imperial loot where broadminded. The obelisk is topped by a carved white dove, symbol, as we know, of peace but, more to the point, symbol also of the Pamphili family. The dove on top of the Egyptian obelisk is intended to show who is boss. It is also intended to signify the superiority and triumph of Christianity over this weird and evil Egyptian culture.

So the dove, a Christian bird (an American eagle is our modern-day equivalent), is seen to triumph over the evil monsters of Egypt, a reference to the hieroglyphics below. Why are these monsters evil? They are evil because they are Egyptian. The Latin inscription reads:

"Innocent X, Pope, installed this stone inscribed with the riddles of the Nile, above the flowing waters with which, with great generosity, he provides healthy distraction for those who walk below..."


What is interesting here is that the inscription explicitly states that the obelisk is inscribed with "riddles". That is to say, the obelisk is inscribed with a language that nobody understands. Yet on the first inscription that we looked at, we are told that this language is somehow evil. That which we cannot understand, that which is foreign and ancient, that which comes from where Muslims now reside, is evil.

As it happens, the inscriptions on the Egyptian obelisk are understood now thanks to the deciphering of the Rosetta Stone. But that did not happen until 1822, long after the obelisk and its inscriptions appeared in Piazza Navona. Meanwhile, the message of western contempt for other civilizations is now lost on the millions of visitors who understand the Latin inscription no better than the hieroglyphics that it mocks.

Unmannered crime
Whereas "impressionist" was once intended as an insult but later became a label for a recognisable style of art, the word "mannerist" was once intended as a label for a recognisable style of art but later became a form of insult.
I live in a city, Rome, where mannerist and baroque art and architecture prevail, far more than in Florence, which is where you want to go if prefer the earlier period, the High Renaissance. Rome has much beauty, but is also a heavy and exhausting place that seems tired of its own history compared with the airy elegance of many Tuscan-Renaissance towns.
When "mannerist" is intended as a term of abuse, it is used to suggest a lack of authenticity in a work of art. A mannerist work might be accused of preferring style to substance, of showing off, of being a bit jaded, a bit "clever" and rather overdone.
The term comes from the innocent Italian word maniera, meaning style. If an artist had a "maniera", he had a recognizable style, and he was therefore a "mannerist". I believe the reason that "mannerist" became a slightly derogatory term has to do with a human instinct both to admire and to distrust excessive accomplishment. An artist who has enormous skills, who has a notable style and has mastered the techniques painstakingly acquired by his or her predecessors, an artist who does not have to worry about themes, or work out the rules of perspective like Brunelleschi had to – in other words, a supremely qualified artist who can draw on a rich heritage, will have the luxury of being able to add an extra dash of style and manner, but will also have to bear the burden of accusation of unoriginality and glibness. He or she may well be seen as no longer trying hard enough, no longer making mistakes, no longer producing very bad as well as very good works. Even an artist such as Michelangelo who drove the Renaissance forward can be said to have become a mannerist in his later days, once he had settled down and found the mode of representation that suited him most.
I feel that English-language literary fiction has been stuck for a long time in a mannerist phase. I do not think the same is true for genre fiction, or at least for crime. Our genre is massively overpopulated, overpublished, overdone, oversold and omnipresent. There is way too much of it everywhere, and so much of it is, frankly, awful. This badness, however, can be a sign of rude health, especially when it comes from interesting practitioners who are still trying and failing rather than always succeeding.
In recent years, crime has begun to gobble up other genres such as historical fiction, romance, science fiction, comic fiction. It has even overstepped the boundaries of fiction itself and taken on the non-fiction canon, with police procedurals that read like study notes for aspiring cops, murder mysteries that turn into scientific or legal textbooks. Some (Camilleri) include cookbooks inside their pages, many are like tourist guides to cities around the world, others contain treatise on subjects ranging from sociology (a lot of that) computing and genetics to church-building and electricity distribution (Grasshopper by Barbara Vine).
Crime may be a big bubble due to burst like an Irish property market, and it certainly could do with some puncturing, but it is also a genre on the move, hungry and still searching. It has overreached itself because it is still in flux and won't settle down. It is therefore no coincidence that the branch of crime fiction that is most "mannerist", the branch that has stopped thrashing wildly about in search of themes and seems happy to play elegant variations on its past glories, is the "Whodunit". I suspect it is simply a question of maturity, since the whodunit (or, the "cosy" as those who dislike the form often call it) is also the oldest kind of crime writing, the one that began with ETA Hoffmann, Arthur Conan Doyle, Edgar Allen Poe and Willkie Collins at the end of the 19th century. Whether the apex of this form is Agatha Christie, Ellery Queen, Dorothy Sayers, Earle Stanley Gardner, PD James or any other of the eligible candidates past and present is open to debate, but it is definitely of a "quieter" and more mannered disposition. Buyers of, say, Donna Leon, are like visitors to a certain type of gallery. They read the books with complicity and understanding, much as connoisseurs in the 16th century will have read and understood the symbols, allusions, style and themes of a painting.
There are plenty of other intra-crime niches where the writing is similarly "mannered", skilled and appreciated, but the genre as a whole remains a big, messy, occasionally violent and clumsy adolescent that is still growing towards maturity. As the genre continues to evolve, it also draws in - or generates - certain writers whose output is undoubtedly "literary" and even intellectual in intent and effect.
Meanwhile, all literary fiction seems stuck in the mannerist era, making the occasional half-hearted foray into experimental prose. Perhaps the problem with certain very fine contemporary writers such as, in no particular order, James Lasdun, Alan Hollinghurst, Julian Barnes, Martin Amis (yes, absolutely), Ian McEwan, Justin Cartwright, Zadie Smith, Jonathan Franzen, Kazuo Ishiguro, J.M. Coetzee et al. is that individually, they are simply too good, which often raises envious hackles, and collectively they are diminished by the long and glorious tradition that has preceded them. One of the characteristics of a classical or renaissance period is that bad writing was allowed to flourish even among the Greats, especially among them. Nowadays, practitioners who have the legacy available to them are expected to do better, and they do, but I am not sure this necessarily works either to their or to our benefit. Good contemporary writers are condemned to always being good, always writing better sentences than most of those that Dickens or Thackeray cobbled together, yet never approaching either of those writers for scope and importance. It might do Coetzee good to write a few lousy paragraphs.
For all that crime has had some greats, it has nothing to compare with the giants of the literary novel, for which we who attempt to write the stuff should be grateful.

The Booker Prize longlist was announced a few weeks ago, and once again it contains no novels from the category of genre-fiction. By genre-fiction, I am referring to sci-fi, thrillers, crime, romance, fantasy, horror, westerns, comic writing and so on. (I neither object to nor approve of this exclusion, though I would suggest that over the past four decades the Booker has become a literary genre in its own right).

To be sure, not all the long-listed, shortlisted and eventual winning novels are the same. Even so, the exclusion of genre-fiction from the Booker certainly narrows the field. With the summary elimination of so many popular categories at the start of the annual battle for the Citadel of High Art, it becomes possible to make out the advancing column of Booker long-listers as it appears on the horizon and prepares to charge, often under heavy sniper fire, across the vast plain of pitfalls that leads from publication to recognition.

By the time a single surviving book wins, it is hard not to feel that, whether through luck, skill, or the death of its erstwhile comrades as they traversed the battlefield together, it has earned its success.

Before arguing over whether genre-fiction deserves its preliminary exclusion from the Booker and, indeed, from the canon of serious or "literary" writing, a point about which some genre-writers or their exponents (Stephen King's fans and Lee Child's ego come to mind) have become quite exercised, we need a workable and simple formula for distinguishing serious "works of fiction" from mere genre novels. At the risk of crass reductivism (but this is a blog, after all), I think we can concoct this formula from just two existential ingredients: sex and death.

Whereas serious or literary (Booker-ish) fiction will usually seek to address both sex and death, genre-fiction (non-Booker) tends to take an "either-or" approach.

Accordingly, one genre-fiction group (romance, chick lit, sex and shopping, erotic, teenage fiction, adult, humour) tackles sex but not death. The other group (crime, thrillers, mystery, military, war, westerns, fantasy, and sci-fi) tackles death but not sex. When a genre novel encroaches upon the wrong territory, the results are often embarrassing (sex scenes in thrillers, death-bed scenes in romances).

I have included sci-fi and fantasy in the death category because they are usually concerned to posit the possibility of worlds other than the mortal one in which we live.

Horror is a special case. Like literary fiction, it seems to be trying to take on the themes of both sex and death, which is perhaps why Stephen King's fans believe he should be admitted to the order of serious writers. But horror is still genre-fiction, because rather than exploring both sex and death, it equates them. Sex is death, death is sexy. Sexual acts and violent acts are almost coterminous. All that flesh, the colour red, fear, danger, things and people that writhe, strange things happening in the dark, groans and screams, nightclothes, repulsion-attraction, moral abandonment, the animal within and the beast without continuously underscore the equivalence. Stephanie Meyer was wise (or morally subtle) enough to realize that all the sex her readership expects is already contained in her wholesome vampire product line. Through readers' complicity, the explicit is implicit.

Historical fiction, although in some senses a genre, is always treated with that extra dose of reverence due to serious literature, because, apart from the academic qualifications it often demands of its writer, it necessarily deals both with death ( its characters belong to the past and we are constantly aware of their mortality) and with sex (it has to include sex in order to bring the characters, whom we know to be dead in reality, to life between the pages).

Literary, historical and Booker-ish novels are therefore more ambitious, but for this very reason, very few manage to achieve what they set out to do. When they do achieve it, they can be great. When they do not, they are literally worse than worthless because they subtract from the sum of human endeavour by wasting people's time. A genre novel may also make demands on time, but, as a known quantity deliberately chosen by the reader, it offers enjoyment in return. Time spent in enjoyment, no matter at how "low" a level, is not time wasted.