Ali Mercer

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Tips on how to write a novel in (next to) no time

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Novels are time machines that take in hours from their writers and convert them into the ability to transport their readers elsewhere. They eat up evenings and weekends and whatever you throw at them. It’s amazing how long you can spend agonising over a couple of sentences. On the other hand, it’s equally surprising how much you can produce in just five minutes.

If you’ve got a job, and/or caring responsibilities, and want to write a novel but have no spare time, how are you ever going to fit it in? Part of the answer is sleight of hand. You need to kid yourself that it’s feasible until you’re so deep in that there’s no way you’re going to give up. You have to get over the hump.

Here are some tricks and ruses that will help to get you started and keep you going. The time your novel takes up is going to have to come out of somewhere, sadly; you’re never suddenly going to get a whole new load of hours in which to write it, unless a very wealthy and obliging patron comes along. So, what gives?

If there’s anything you routinely do that you don’t really like doing and would prefer not to bother with, why not cut back on it? In my case, that has meant embracing my inner domestic slut. The inner domestic goddess is no help at all on the writing front – we’re barely on speaking terms. And to paraphrase Rose Macaulay, better a house unkept than a life unlived (or a book unwritten).

I do feel ashamed of my writerly sluttishness, but console myself with the thought that Iris Murdoch apparently had a very messy house. And as for Quentin Crisp – he maintained that after the first five years, the dust didn’t get any worse.

You’re almost certainly going to have to cut some corners somewhere.

During your precious writing time, resist interruption. According to Anne Stevenson’s biography of Sylvia Plath, Bitter Fame, when Plath was a new mother living in Devon she tried to write in the morning and leave housework till the afternoon. However, she was liable to be interrupted by surprise visits from the local nurse and midwife, who would head on upstairs and find Plath working away, undressed, the bed unmade, and the chamber pot unemptied.

The Person from Porlock called on Coleridge and Kubla Khan ground to a halt. If you can avoid letting the Person from Porlock in, then do. It may be necessary to cultivate a bit of writerly ruthlessness.

Be very, very selective about what TV you watch. Consider abandoning all reality TV. The reality you invent will be much more compelling. Maybe this will mean some holes in your water cooler chat, but you’ll manage.

Get to know some other writers. If one or two of them are published, so much the better. It’s proof that it’s possible. I met Jenny Colgan socially back in the mid-90s and a few months later there were posters for her debut novel up all over town. It happens.

One way of meeting other writers is to do a creative writing course, selected according to the funds and time you have available. The Arvon Foundation runs week-long residential courses that don’t cost the earth and there are various online options. Some terrific writers have done creative writing courses. Many have not. It isn’t a pre-requisite.

Set yourself a deadline and make sure that someone else knows what it is. The carrot – publication, praise, renown, money – is far off, and likely to keep on getting jerked out of reach, so a stick is more likely to help you on your way. A deadline is an excellent stick.

When I was writing Stop the Clock, I set myself the target of writing a chapter a month, for twelve months, at the end of which I figured I’d have a novel, of sorts. I handed over each chapter on the due date each month to a colleague at work (in a brown envelope so no one else would pick it up and start reading.) I missed one month’s deadline, which was when my children had chicken pox. Just knowing someone was expecting me to deliver spurred me on.

Find yourself a reader, or readers, but choose with care. With an early draft, you don’t need detailed feedback. That can come later. In the meantime, while you’re trying to get the damn thing out, ‘I liked that bit’ will probably suffice.

You may not need much more than to know that someone has read it. You certainly won’t want detailed criticism. Hint: your ideal reader will probably share some of your tastes and values, but is unlikely, especially in the early days, to be your spouse.

You will also need at least some people around you who believe that what you are trying to do is worthwhile, even if you haven’t yet shown them what you’re writing. If your spouse or partner is one of these, count your lucky stars. However, you should beware of telling the world at large that you are writing a novel. Play your cards close to your chest until you’re really getting somewhere. This helps to create the psychological space and sense of freedom you need to make stuff up (which is what you need to do for writing to cease to seem like hard work, and become a pleasure).

More tips to follow…

My top seven novels about female friendship

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Friends, by my daughter

When I was writing Stop the Clock, I looked at lots of other books about groups of female friends that follow the outcomes of different attitudes to work and men and family life, and the decisions women make and how this affects their relationships with each other.

Here are seven novels about women’s lives and friendships that I’ve enjoyed hanging out with over the years.

  1. One I keep going back to was Terry McMillan’s Waiting to Exhale, which I think is just terrific – funny, frank, sexy and moving (and full of relationships with men that don’t quite work out).
  2. The mother (grandmother?) of all these books about groups of women has got to be Little Women by Louisa May Alcott. OK, it’s about sisters, but still – different types of woman, different attitudes to how to be a woman, and to what sort of man and relationship to aspire to. I often think of the bit where Jo passes the manuscript of her book round, and people tell her to cut different bits out and it ends up getting thinner and thinner!
  3. Light a Penny Candle by Maeve Binchy. Her first. I still remember the cover, with bold red-headed Aisling and quiet blonde Elizabeth. That seems to be a common dynamic in these kind of stories – the go-for-it girl and the one who is more reserved but would secretly like to be wilder.
  4. Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Café by Fannie Flagg. A gutsy tomboy, a shy, lady-like girl, and a bad bloke. Warm, but also dark and surprising: southern Gothic. Cuts between the Depression and the 80s.
  5. Lace by Shirley Conran. Meet Pagan, the Cornish aristo; Maxine, married to a French count; Judy, the American magazine publisher; and Kate, the writer. Epic romp across decades and different countries, with designer luggage. (I wrote a blog post recently on why Lace is a much better read than Fifty Shades of Grey.)
  6. The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan. Brilliant telling of the stories of four Chinese women who have come to live in the US and their American-born daughters.
  7. Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood by Rebecca Wells. Again, looks at both friendship and mother-daughter relationships (the main mother-daughter relationship is pretty damn fraught, and the friends – the Ya-Yas – intervene to try to repair the damage). There’s a great scene when the troubled mother welcomes in a woman selling cosmetics door-to-door, who is hopeless as a saleswoman but also desperate, having fallen on hard times, and the two of them restore each other’s self-belief: quintessentially feminine.

Friendship and falling out in Stop the Clock

Good times bond people together– I guess it’s the honeymoon principle. Bad times, too, especially if you help each other get through them.

With old friends – the friends you make at school, or university or college, or in your first job – the history that glues you together is a compound of both the fun stuff and the disasters, plus something else; you come to define each other. The friend who knew you back then as well as now, who has seen you change, really knows you; someone you just met only sees the person you appear to be today. But change can mean distance, too; how far can the bonds of friendship stretch before they break?

The three main characters in Stop the Clock, my debut novel, are close in their mid-twenties, but their lives are set to head in different directions. Lucy, married and a mum, has no desire to go back to work; Tina is ambitious and career-focused; Natalie just wants to settle down with her boyfriend, or thinks she does. By their mid-thirties, they have ended up in quite different positions as far as their love lives and careers are concerned – but is the picture about to change yet again?

Old friendships – like any long relationship – sometimes hit a rough patch. (I still feel bad about ruining my friend’s egg poaching pan that her grandmother gave her. What can I say – in an ideal world, nobody would ever let me near a cooker.)

Stop the Clock looks at what happens when there are tensions between friends, when the goodwill built up over the years is put to the test. Following what happens to the three friends was a way of dramatising the different kinds of lives that women lead, depending not just on our choices, but also on chance – the opportunities that come our way (or don’t, however much we wish they would).

Parents of children with autism: so many differences, so much the same

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All children with autism have difficulties in three areas – social imagination, social communication, and social interaction, the so-called ‘triad of impairments’. So, for example, an autistic child playing with a toy car might not have the natural instinct to make it behave like a play version of a real car – racing and crashing with other cars, say. Instead, the toy car is a little thing that looks like a car, and has wheels that go round.

Not having social imagination is not the same as having no imagination; children with autism can have ideas and use language in ways that are startlingly original. But it does mean not being big on the kind of imagination that lends itself to play with other children.

I’m putting in lots of qualifications here because once you get through the triad of impairments, all children with autism are very different. Hence the headline of disability campaigner Nicky Clark’s article for the Independent: ‘When you’ve met one person with autism, you’ve met one person with autism’.

That’s true of parents of children with autism, too. Obviously we’re all very different. And yet we all have some big things in common. So when I watched Nicky Clark’s recent interview on the Ambitious about Autism website there was a lot I recognised. What she said about her reaction to the diagnosis struck a chord… that sudden realisation that you have a child with autism, and all you know about autism is Rain Man. I think, too, the problems of taking children who behave differently out in public must be familiar to many if not all parents of children on the autism spectrum. And one of the key problems is everybody else’s reactions.

Other people: sometimes lovely…  sometimes part of the problem

Sometimes people are delightfully tolerant and laid back, and sometimes they can be quite snotty, especially if they think what they’re seeing is bad behaviour. What they don’t realise is that the parent of an autistic child is managing an extraordinarily difficult balancing act. The baseline is that the child needs to be kept safe. The hope is that whatever the outing is, it will be a success, that the child will learn something about how to behave in the outside world, or maybe even enjoy the experience, and the family will be able to enjoy some time together. And the fear is that one thing after another will go wrong and the child’s anxiety will escalate into a total meltdown, which is always the looming threat in the back of your mind.

Oh, and just one other thing: I wish people would stop trying to insult politicians by suggesting or stating that they’re autistic (a certain kind of commentator seems to go in for doing this very aggressively online). I mean, come on. I guess they think they’re being funny or, most likely, they’re not really thinking at all. Or maybe they actually like being nasty. Always a possibility.

What will happen to my child who is on the autistic spectrum when I’m not here?

Another familiar worry that Nicky Clark refers to in the interview on the Ambitious about Autism website is this: what will happen to my child with autism when I am no longer around to look after him or her? I think all parents fret about what would happen to their children if they died (and many of us push that fear to the back of our minds, tell ourselves it won’t happen, and don’t do anything about it). But if you have a child on the autistic spectrum, the worry becomes, not what will happen to my child if I die, but what will happen to my child when I die.

If you are a parent to a child who is going to face major challenges in living independently, you lose that assumption that if you are around till they reach adulthood, they will ultimately be able to carry on without you. I’m sure empty nest syndrome is very hard, but getting to that point is a sign that you have done what a parent is there to do – you have nurtured your child through to independent adulthood – and for some families getting to that point is an almost impossible challenge.

Parenting involves letting go, and if your child is particularly vulnerable, that process is much more fraught. Ultimately, whatever provision you make, you feel that your child is going to end up dependent on the kindness of strangers. Will they be kind? In the end, you can only hope they will.

But, of course, in the meantime, you can try to help people to understand, which is what Nicky Clark does so well. Women don’t always rush to stand up for themselves, but by God we’ll stand up for our loved ones, and I foresee her being an indefatigable campaigner for years to come.

Somebody else who deserves a big vote of thanks for helping to raise awareness of autism is Louis Theroux. My husband and I weren’t quite sure what to expect from his recent BBC Two Extreme Love documentary about autism, but found ourselves nodding along in recognition; there was just so much in it that was familiar.  I really liked the approach he took, of being a sympathetic listener.

The sunlight on the wall

I was very touched by what Nicky Clark had to say about the special moments, and that rang true, too. My son has a lack of guile and spite that is really quite astonishing, and I get the impression that this innocence can often come hand-in-hand with autism. I was interested, too, in what she had to say about the ability of people on the autistic spectrum to see straight through to the heart of other people, past all the peripheral and superficial aspects.

My son strikes me as being very good at picking up on non-verbal cues. If there’s stress in the air, he picks up on it without anything being said – I know that all children do that to some extent, but he’s particularly sensitive to the atmosphere. And he would be unlikely to be beguiled by someone pretending to be something they were not, because he wouldn’t really be drawn in to the pretence in the first place. I’ve seen other parents comment on this, too – there can be an otherworldly quality to autism. With my son, I sometimes wonder what he is taking in that I am oblivious to.

One of the people who works with my son told me one day that he’d seen a patch of sunlight shift on the wall and started laughing. She said she would have loved to have known how he had perceived it. I’d love to know, too.


The cover of Stop the Clock

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Here’s the final cover of Stop the Clock, my debut novel, which is due to be published on August 16. Let the printing presses roll!

I really hope everybody likes it… I think it’s a beauty. You know that moment when you finally make it to the café, and get to sit down with your cappuccino and have a read? (For me it would probably be a latte, a chocolate brownie and The Fear Index by Robert Harris, which is what I’m reading at the moment.)

It’s just such a luxury: that little bit of time. That’s what this image makes me think of. Also, I like her pink nail varnish!

My other half tells me that in France, they have historically had a quite different attitude to the whole business of covers, and been quite high-minded and gone in for plain white with a title on – though apparently this is beginning to change. Personally, I think the cover is part of the fun of owning the book. Here’s a shortlist of five other covers I really like – you’ll probably remember them, because they’re all the sort that stick in your mind:

  1. Bridget Jones’s Diary by Helen Fielding – the slightly sepia-tinted chick with the curls and the fag
  2. One Day by David Nicholls – so good! The silhouette of the lovers’ profiles
  3. Riders by Jilly Cooper – a model behind looking very fetching in white jodhpurs
  4. The Devil Wears Prada by Lauren Weisberger – the red high heel turning into a devilish trident
  5. Captain Corelli’s Mandolin by Louis de Bernières – anyone who was in London in the mid 90s will remember when this jolly blue-and-white cover, which looks like a naive painting, was absolutely everywhere on the Tube.

The cover of my other first novel, which I wrote when I was at primary school, has suffered a bit from the passage of time, but you can still just about make it out – here it is!

the cover of my other first novel

Lace: the comeback queen of holiday reads

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Lace by Shirley ConranAs school’s nearly out, here are my top three holiday reads of all time:

  • Fear of Flying by Erica Jong (which I read in Fuerteventura, 1995)
  • The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood (New Zealand, 2000)
  • And… last but not least… Lace, by Shirley Conran (Cornwall, 1999).

If you’ve never read Lace, you’re in luck, because according to this week’s Grazia it’s being re-released this summer. So now a whole new generation of readers will meet Maxine, Kate, Judy and Pagan, and Lili, the film star who gathers them together in New York in 1978, and demands to know: ‘Which one of you bitches is my mother?’

There’s lots of glamour and wealth in this novel but a hard edge too; it doesn’t shy away from the sordid, though it doesn’t luxuriate in it either. It’s a big fat page-turning saga, with much more of a sense of history and place than you might expect, given its reputation as a bonkbuster; there is a whole lot more to it than sex. Its characters don’t just wear beautiful clothes and pursue high-flying careers; they belong to their times, and the times shape their lives.

The brief prelude, featuring a thirteen-year-old Lili, is pretty grim, and gives you just enough of a glimpse of her tough past for you to understand why she is so hostile when she meets the four women later on. And then you’re swept back to a Swiss finishing school in 1948, to meet the four women in the early days of their friendship, already with some foreknowledge of the troubles that lies ahead… I hope that makes it sound like a good read. It is!

Big 1980s reads: A Woman of Substance and The Thorn Birds

Lace came out in 1982, though I didn’t read it till much later. The book that made most impression on me around the time Lace was published was Barbara Taylor Bradford’s A Woman of Substance, which came out in 1979.

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A Woman of Substance charts the long climb of Emma Harte from poverty and shame to wealth and power – at a price. She is unmarried, pregnant and still in her teens when she leaves her job as a maid at Fairley Hall in Yorkshire, but goes on to build up a vast international business empire and take her revenge on the lover who let her down.  Now there’s a satisfying story arc – none of this business of marriage being the most a girl can aspire to.

That driving ambition is mainly what I remember about it. Emma Harte doesn’t have all that much luck with her men, and her children turn out to be a quarrelsome bunch, but she doesn’t let disaster lay her low; she comes back fighting and goes all the way to the top, and her motto is, ‘to endure’.

And then, of course, there’s Colleen McCullough’s The Thorn Birds, published in 1977. The Australian outback! The priest! The scene where Meggie has to have all her hair cut off! The dress the colour of ashes of roses! Forbidden love! Why hasn’t someone filmed it? It’s nearly 20 years since the telly mini-series with Richard Chamberlain. You know what, I might just have to go track it down and read it again.

Destruction, revelation, survival: stories about writing

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They say you should write about what you know… and one thing writers know about is writing.

Here are eight novels in which writing, or the desire to write, plays a sometimes destructive, sometimes liberating role. One thing’s for sure, writing in literature is not a fast route to a happy ending. Often it’s done in secret and then exposed. Sometimes it brings the truth to light. Usually, for good or ill, it’s an agent of change.

Look out for artists, actors and musicians in fiction – sometimes they’re useful proxies. Journalists, too.

In my book, Stop the Clock, one of the characters starts writing a newspaper column which causes all sorts of trouble. Her friends think it’s about them. Maybe it is. They don’t like it.

Frost in May by Antonia White

After Watership Down by Richard Adams, this was the second novel that made me really cry. Nanda Grey, a Catholic convert at a super-posh Catholic boarding school attended by lots of aristocratic Europeans, decides to start writing a story, which she keeps tucked away out of sight. She decides to make all her characters really really bad, and into various nameless vices (she doesn’t know much about vice so this requires some imagination) in order for their eventual redemption to be all the more dramatic. How does it work out in the end? If you don’t know, I’ll leave you to find out.

Antonia White wrote another three books about the same character, and they’re all very much worth reading. The last one, Beyond the Glass, describes what it’s like to have a mental breakdown and end up institutionalised, which was something else the author knew about.

The Help by Kathryn Stockett

So: a first novel about the writing and publication of a first book, with dramatic results. Skeeter has an impossible deadline to meet, and faces an impossible challenge: persuading the black maids she is meant to be writing about to risk sharing their stories. Still, if Aibileen and Minny help her, maybe she’ll make it…

Peyton Place by Grace Metalious

Until I read this I had the vague idea that Peyton Place was a wishy-washy soap opera. Then I discovered the book on which the long-running TV series was based. Published in 1956, it’s a pretty angry book about a pretty New England town where the falling leaves mask something nasty buried underneath the sheep pen… It’s like the world of David Lynch’s Blue Velvet 30 years later, where evidence of grimness lurks just beside the white picket fence.

One of the central characters, Allison, is a lonely innocent (played by a young Mia Farrow in the TV version) who dreams of becoming a writer. Her mother, Constance, grew up in Peyton Place, moved away, and then returned with Allison. Constance is doing her damnedest to preserve a facade of respectability, even though her relationship with Allison’s father (who worked in publishing) wasn’t quite what she would like others to believe.  And then Allison befriends local beauty Serena Cross, who knows a story worth telling, though for now she’s keeping it to herself…

I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith

Cassandra Mortmain is hungry and penniless, but she lives in a (rundown) castle and has a journal to write in. She also has a beautiful sister, a daffy stepmother called Topaz (a former artist’s model), and a hopeless father who wrote a cult hit years ago, but now hides himself away and produces absolutely nothing.

Cassandra’s journal is going to be exchanged for a succession of grander volumes as her fortunes change (but at what cost?) This book includes a scene described by Antonia Fraser as one of the most erotic ever written, according to the introduction. (I don’t think it’s a spoiler to say it is not explicit.)

A Life Apart by Neel Mukherjee

After his mother’s cremation Ritwik takes flight, leaving India and his brutal childhood behind for Oxford, where he has a scholarship to study English literature. One evening he is picked up by a stranger; he is afraid, but still goes along with the encounter, which is both vivid and dreamlike, absurd and otherworldly.

When he gets back to his college room a story presents itself to him. What if he were to write about Miss Gilby, the prim Englishwoman who made a fleeting appearance in a film, Ghare Bairey, that he had seen nearly ten years earlier?

Adrift in London without a work permit, he continues to pursue the story of Miss Gilby in India in the 1900s. She struggles to establish herself as a companion and English tutor to an Indian woman, and witnesses the unrest and resistance stirred up by Lord Curzon’s partition of Bengal into Hindu and Muslim states.

Miss Gilby, like Ritwik, is a migrant, trying to live in an often unreadable world. But will they both be able to survive the time and place in which they find themselves?

The Ghost by Robert Harris

By the time you read this… what has happened to the writer? If what you write fails to please, or falls into the wrong hands, what’s going to become of you?

The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood

The first Margaret Atwood I read. Features a story within a story within a story: but who’s telling what?

The golden rule of writing: ‘nobody knows anything’

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I bet even in her very wildest dreams E L James, the author of Fifty Shades of Grey and its sequels, never imagined that it would turn out to be the runaway publishing success story it has become.

But then, who ever really knows what’s going to work before it’s out in the market? I’m a big fan of William Goldman’s Adventures in the Screen Trade, the recurring motto of which is: ‘Nobody knows anything’.

Goldman wrote the screenplays for Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Marathon Man and The Princess Bride, so clearly he did know something, and in his book he discusses how to set about adapting stories for the screen. But what he meant by ‘Nobody knows anything’ was that you can’t tell whether you’ve got a hit or a flop until it’s out there. (Apparently he didn’t get very good marks in his creative writing classes in college, which should be heartening for anyone else in the same boat.)

The Great Gatsby and Jane Austen

Once books or paintings or other works make their way out into the world, it can take time for them to find their place. So Van Gogh died in penury and his art now sells for squillions. And F Scott Fitzgerald, author of The Great Gatsby, went to his death having absolutely no idea that in 2012 the book would be adapted all over the place, performed unabridged, and regarded by many as pretty much as close to the perfect novel as it is possible to get.

According to Jay McInerney in The Guardian back in June ‘many of the 23,000 copies of the book printed in 1925 were gathering dust in the Scribner’s warehouse when Fitzgerald died in obscurity in Hollywood 15 years later’.

Even Jane Austen, who has something not far off a cult following – the Janeites − nearly 200 years after her death in 1817, was out of print by the 1820s.

It’s a funny old game. Maybe we should qualify the adage ‘Nobody knows anything’ by adding, ‘Not for a while, anyway’.

Temple Grandin, autism and the power of early intervention

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There’s an amazing video on the National Autistic Society website of Dr Temple Grandin giving a speech. The video is amazing not just because of what she has to say, but the fact that she can say it at all.

Most of us would be pretty scared of addressing a hall full of people, but here is someone who is autistic, for whom communication is particularly challenging, speaking in public at length, fluently and lucidly and with such authority… She’s incredibly impressive.  And it just goes to show what someone with autism can achieve with the right kind of support early on.

You can find the video of Temple Grandin’s speech, and some more about her, on the National Autistic Society website.

Temple Grandin: early encouragement, later success

Temple Grandin didn’t speak  until she was three and a half, and when she was diagnosed her parents were advised to put her in an institution. They didn’t. They found a speech therapist for her. A childcarer played endless games with her and her sister. In the speech recorded in the video, which took place in June this year in Reading, she says that one-to-one attention is what autistic children need in order to learn.

She gives some insights into what it’s like to live with the sensory perception difficulties that often go with autism: the pixellated vision, the challenges of trying to interpret other people’s apparently super-speedy speech. She also makes the point that autistic children need to be stretched, and looks back to her own fear about going to stay on her aunt’s cattle ranch.

Encouraged to go by her mother, she went, loved it, and ended up forging a career as a designer of livestock-handling equipment, and becoming one of the best-known people with autism in the world. I haven’t seen the film about her (Temple Grandin) starring Claire Danes, but I want to – her story is so inspiring, and Claire Danes is such a good actress, it should make for a great film.

Changes to the system for children with SEN: cost-cutting masquerading as efficiency?

But what about all the children with special educational needs (SEN) who don’t get that intensive help early on? We know that early intervention makes a big difference, but the system for allocating resources to children with SEN in the UK seems to be designed to slow up access to help.

Applying for a statement is a long and bureaucratic process; evidence of need needs to be absolutely watertight, and gathered over time. But once you’ve got a statement, it is legally binding; the level of help identified in the statement has to be provided.

Now the government proposes to sweep the system away. It says it wants to make things better, but there are so many unanswered questions. Will whatever replaces statements also be legally binding?

Ofsted seems to have decided that too many children are labelled as having SEN. How did it decide? Did it ask the parents? And if children need help, they need help, don’t they, regardless of why? Are they going to get it? Or is this really just another cost-cutting exercise, masquerading as improved efficiency?

Why Jilly Cooper’s Octavia beats Fifty Shades of Grey

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The great thing about a paperback as opposed to reading on a Kindle is that it’s really easy to peek and cheat and skip bits. So: I peeked. I had a quick skippy read of Fifty Shades… and I bet lots of other readers, like me, have looked at it more out of curiosity than anything else. And will any of us re-read it? Surely many of us won’t.

So – it’s become a massive publishing phenomenon, and that kind of success puts it in the mainstream, even though some of the stuff in it is almost alien to most of its readers, and likely to stay that way. And it’s in the middle of a mad comment blizzard that shows no sign of abating.

  1. I do get what Suzanne Moore in the Guardian is on about. She sees it as regressive, selling the ‘old fantasy of romance’ etc. But is anyone really convinced by it as a love story? The emotions in it don’t come across as very real to me – they seem to be there as an excuse. Problem is, when feminists take on something like this it’s hard not to end up sounding like puritans or killjoys.
  2. Er, people… isn’t the fuss a little much? There was mention of someone in this week’s Grazia who’s actually scared to open it because she might end up so dissatisfied with what she’s getting in real life… It’s not THAT exciting, and some of it’s quite queasy making.
  3. How very English it all is… Rainy summer… Jubilee… The English vice…
  4. It’s a bit humourless, no? Cf Jilly Cooper’s Octavia, which I read when I was quite young and impressionable, which does seem kind of wholesome in comparison to Fifty Shades. It has a masterful hero, but a lot more character and story, some jokes, and a cute dog.
  5. But isn’t Fifty Shades just the teensiest bit absurd? She’s called Anastasia, for heaven’s sake, and he’s called Christian…
  6. This is fantasy, right? If she was busily submitting to a short fat bald broke bloke called Bob… well, she wouldn’t, would she? And to some extent, it’s a fantasy about money. So the super-rich want to be in  charge? Tell us something we don’t know.

The Fear Index and the inhumanly rich

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I bought Fifty Shades of Grey today, finally, but ended up reading The Fear Index by Robert Harris instead. With a banking scandal all over the front pages, it seemed the perfect time to start on a thriller about playing the financial markets (and what happens when that goes wrong).

Dr Hoffman, who is so far the hero, or anti-hero, is a physicist living in Switzerland who runs an extremely successful hedge fund and has become the kind of rich that separates you from everybody else. When a policeman asks what his company does, he says, ‘It makes money.’ He seems put out that anyone should have the impudence to ask.

When the policeman complains that he can no longer afford to live in Switzerland but has settled in France where it is cheaper, and has to drive in across the border, every day, Hoffman thinks, why should I care? But from the reader’s point of view it’s hard not to sympathise with the policeman as he tours Hoffman’s grand but unhomely property. Especially when he reflects that he’s probably going to have to work in his retirement to make ends meet, something neither his father nor grandfather had to do (surely lots of people know that feeling – pension forecasts can be pretty disheartening.)

From the outset, something is out of kilter; something doesn’t add up, and Hoffman knows it and is afraid. Robert Harris is brilliant on the entitled hollowness of the inhumanly rich; Hoffman’s house and office are curiously blank, fortress-like spaces that are designed as an assertion of power to keep the outside out, but can’t quite manage it.

It’s like the summer house where the journalist stays in The Ghost, which is secluded and detached from the outside world to the point of being like a prison, and also unreal.  He was another lonely figure trying to figure out whether there was really anything to justify his unease. It ain’t paranoia if they’re really out to get you… and in Robert Harris novels, they usually are, though you might just survive long enough to find out why.

The first Robert Harris novel I read was Fatherland, which is a great What if? story: what if Hitler had won a war, and the Holocaust had become a secret, and someone had then found out about it? After that I wanted to read more. His books are always about power – how people with power use it to try to control what other people know, how they respond to threats to their power, and what it’s like trying to work or communicate with powerful people and hold onto your integrity (and not come to a sticky end). They’ve got a real authority. You know he knows what he’s talking about.