Scribble Scribble, Hiss Scratch

Irvine Welsh squares off against Hilary Mantel for the Booker prize.

Oh, dear, the literati are at it again. That's them you hear down at the end of the garden, yowling and screeching, spitting and biting. Want to stop the noise? A bucket of water should do the trick, or you could try shouting, "Who'd like a nice, tasty Man Booker Prize?" Either should get their attention. Several recent news items/articles are proving, once again, that novelists are, pound for pound, the cattiest people on the planet.

First up is Irvine Welsh, author of Trainspotting, who complained at this past week's Edinburgh international writers' conference that the judges of the Man Booker Prize discriminate against Scottish writers. He even calls them racist. Next up is Declan Burke, an Irish crime writer. In an article for the Irish Examiner he interviews three crime writers on the subject of whether crime fiction can also be called literature, and whether a crime novel will ever scoop a Booker. We also learn in this article that at an upcoming crime fiction conference in Scotland, two noted crime writers (Ian Rankin and Peter James) will actually debate this question (get your tickets now before scalpers jack the prices up). Finally, we have Laura Miller in a piece at Salon.com opining that the reason the young adult fiction market is dominated by female writers is that male writers feel that there's no prestige attached to this genre. Men, she argues, concentrate their writing efforts in fields that earn critical accolades. Like the Booker, I assume.

What these stories and opinion pieces reveal is the green-eyed jealousy and animosity so many writers exhibit towards their brethren, and their willingness to make their feelings public. There are the genre writers who feel that room should be made for them at the grown-ups' table, and then we have the literary writers who claim they're being insufficiently praised, or that the wrong writers are getting the kudos. And God forbid if you're a writer who sells books in the millions. A mega-selling author like, say, J.K. Rowling or Dan Brown inevitably attracts a ton of ridicule from their peers.

It seems to me that all this very public angst and anger is unique to the world of fiction writing. No other art form has participants who are so anxious to engage in public acts of criticism and cannibalism. Last time I checked, David Hockney had no issues with Thomas Kinkade's success, and unless I missed something in art history class, sculptors have never felt they were being taken less seriously than painters or vice versa. Does Yo-Yo Ma make snide remarks about Steve Martin's banjo playing? Is Andre Rieu venting on Twitter about the fact that he hasn't been offered the baton with the New York Philharmonic? Did Jean-Luc Godard ever complain that he should have been given a shot at directing one of the Star Wars sequels?

It's certainly true that all cultural fields have their share of in-fighting and backbiting, but the literary world seems to be filled with a constant background hum of anger at the other guy or girl. Why is this? I think writers believe that their particular art form is the big kahuna of creativity: painting, music, dance, and films are, in their view, either ephemeral, limited in intellectual scope, ghettoized in galleries, or too populist. Literature, they feel, is, and always will be, the art form of record. And if that's the case, deciding what's literature and what isn't, and who gets the gold stars for good work, becomes exceedingly important.

What makes all this invective and bitterness amusing is its utter pointlessness. There has never been a universally agreed upon definition of "literary" fiction, so it becomes futile to try and describe a novel as being literary or merely genre. There's simply no benchmark for defining the difference between the two. There's good writing and bad writing, just as there's good sculptures and bad ones, and great songs and lousy ones.  And crime fiction writers really do have to shut up and stop whining about not being taken seriously; you guys sell a ton of books and the quality of your writing is frequently superb. You should spare some sympathy for those boobs still writing westerns: nobody pays them any attention. Speaking of westerns, that's the only rebuttal needed for Laura Miller's argument; that particular genre's a prestige-free zone and it's solidly male. And as for Irvine Welsh, he makes a very poor case for the idea that Scottish writers are being scorned by the Booker judges. He bases his argument on the fact that in the history of the Booker only 11 out of 255 nominees were Scots. That's roughly 5% of the total. Sounds low until you remember that the Booker is open to writers in the UK and the Commonwealth, and that represents a population of well over a billion people. That makes Scotland, with its population of just over 5m, wildly over-represented on the list of nominees. Of course, England also gets far more than its fair share of nominees, so it's really authors from India who should be doing the complaining here. The Booker prize judges are clearly biased in favour of UK writers. What Welsh seems to want is a greater share of that bias.

Book Review: The Big O (2007) by Declan Burke

A warning: I didn't finish this book, so if you think it's unfair for someone to review a partially read book stop reading now. Still with me? Good. The Big O is a sad case of a good writer laid low by bad decisions. This crime fiction novel is, by any standards, an absolute dud. But, as I said, Burke is a good writer. His prose is crisp, quick-witted, and his dialogue can pack a punch. But he's like one of those Olympic figure skaters who look great, skate effortlessly, and then crash to the ice every time they try and do something clever.

Burke's first bad idea was to drink too deeply at the inspirational well of Elmore Leonard. Modern crime fiction has been heavily influenced by Leonard, but Burke appears to be mesmerized by the master. The standard Leonard plot has a criminal scheme at its centre, usually a swindle or complex theft, around which coalesces a variety of shady and not quite so shady characters. The players in these dramas have ulterior motives and alliances that often interfere with the course or the result of the central crime. Leonard has his characters do a kind of criminal dance of anticipation and reaction around the crime that's at the core of the story. Leonard makes the twists and turns of this dance tense and fascinating, but, most importantly, he keeps his stories moving forward at all times.

Burke has borrowed Leonard's plot structure but neglects to put his foot on the accelerator. The central crime in The Big O is the kidnapping for ransom of a plastic surgeon's wife. When I gave up on the book just past the halfway mark it was largely because the plot had barely advanced an inch. Characters are introduced, schemes discussed, and nothing happens. Burke works hard to show the unlikely links and cold-blooded alliances between the characters, but it all amounts to a lifeless schematic drawing. There's lots of talk, but nothing gets done.

Burke is so wanting to produce a Leonard he ends up draining his novel of any kind of regional flavour or identity. The story is set in Ireland, but Burke works very hard to avoid alerting us to this fact. Place names are barely mentioned, and the dialogue is pretty much stripped of any slang or nomenclature that would make us think these characters aren't from, say, Detroit. I'd call it a mid-Atlantic crime novel except that Burke leans so heavily to the west it becomes a mid-Lake St. Clair novel.

The main and minor characters come in two varieties: loathsome and not quite so loathsome. Burke has a sure, quick hand when creating a character, but here he's given us wall-to-wall shitheads. Elmore Leonard is also good at creating baddies, but he doesn't go overboard, as Burke does, in highlighting their nastiness. Leonard gives his villains positive and neutral qualities to make their negative qualities stand out all the more. Burke's characters have the asshole meter set at 11 at all times. What's worse is that Burke can't stop reminding us that they're rotten; for example, by page 50 we're very aware that Frank the plastic surgeon is a loser, a wanker, and a bastard. Unfortunately, Burke finds new and more redundant ways to tell us this over the next 100 pages. Shut up about it already!

Ray and Karen are partial exceptions to the nasty character parade. Ray is the kidnapper-for-hire and Karen is the surgeon's wife's friend. The problem with Ray and Karen is that way too much time is spent following their budding relationship. They flirt, they date, they banter, they have sex, they talk about sex, they breakup, they flirt, they talk some more about sex, and this goes on and on and on. Burke's second bad decision was to have these two in a relationship. It eats up a lot of time and it isn't the least bit interesting.

And now we come to Burke's worst idea: sex. The problem isn't descriptions of sex, which might have added a frisson of softcore fun to the proceedings, but his decision to have characters talk and think about sex more or less constantly. Burke seems to believe this is part of character-building but after a point it becomes distracting. In relation to this, there's a nasty streak of sexism in the novel. This takes the form of consistently describing women in terms of how sexually attractive or unattractive they are. Male characters aren't held up to the same standard. Early in the book a minor male character named Ferret is not described in any way, shape or form. A few pages later an even more minor female character is described as "an overweight woman with straggly hair." Ray meets another meaningless female character and spends a paragraph assessing her attractiveness, ending with the observation that "she'd want him to take her rough, like a pig snuffling truffles." Even the women get in on the act; Doyle, a female cop, is questioning a woman who's been kidnapped and threatened with rape. Her attacker also threatened to "staple her tits together" and Doyle thinks to herself that "...they'd need to be big staples. Marsha packing a pair of M&Ms in a training bra." Hilarious!

Like I said, I packed it in halfway through the novel, not too long after a R-rated Benny Hill-like scene in which Rossi, a demented thug, gets his erection caught in his zip. I wouldn't normally review a book I disliked this much, but it's frustrating to find an author who can clearly write, but who can't make an intelligent creative decision.