Journalism: all articles in categorised under Lectures

The elephant in the kitchen: women satirists

12 February 2009

Modern satire is the kind of subject which ought to be easy enough to address. Hardly a week goes by in which some new play or film or novel is called satirical. In the past year we have had Election, about political corruption as filtered through an American high school, and Pleasantville, a satire on the idealisation of 1950s family life. The Channel Four programme on paedophilia for Brasseye aroused huge controversy this summer. Satirical magazines like Private Eye are national institutions. We even have a children's novel I was a Rat by Philip Pullman, using the fairy-tale of Cinderella to probe at the relationship between Royalty and the Press. Satire has never seemed so healthy. Laughter, as Nabokov observed, is the best pesticide. Modern life scarcely lacks pests. The modern satirist can find him or her self surveying the world around and thinking like Clint Eastwood in Dirty Harry "Ask yourself - do you feel lucky, punk?"

A writers' life

12 February 2009

I'm here today to tell you about being a novelist, and especially about being a woman novelist, but what I'm going to tell you isn't about the romantic side - like discovering you love reading so much that you want to write books of your own. I'm going to tell you about the business of being a novelist, which is the nasty side.

In defence of the domestic novel

01 September 2005

To many readers, the domestic novel might appear to need no defence. Earlier this year, however, two well-known young novelists, Ali Smith and Toby Litt, claimed that the submissions they received for an anthology of new writing were dull, depressed and domestic - as if, they said, 'too many women writers had been injected with a special drug that keeps them dulled, good, saying the right thing, aping the right shape and depressed as hell.' Predictably, a number of women novelists were contacted by newspapers to ask for their response, and all were very indignant. Some cited the names of woman writers whose chosen subjects were the opposite of domestic; others described how the domestic could be sexed-up by making it part of a genre such as the gothic or the detective story...

Are we being served?

30 June 2005

Eight years ago, I published a novel called A Vicious Circle satirising the corruption of the literary world. It caused a scandal which, perhaps naively, I had not anticipated, and even received a libel threat from one critic, that got it dropped by Penguin. Yet there was not a single thing that my imaginary critic, the louche and cynical Ivo Sponge, told his protégée about how to review that had not been said to me in real life, by a variety of critics and editors. When I first became a published novelist in 1990, I had not realised just how mired with politics and corruption the reviewing business is, but, like many readers I had often been puzzled by the way unreadable books were made wildly fashionable, while good books discovered browsing in bookshops were neglected or misrepresented. It was only when I began to review myself, and read proofs before the critics got hold of them, that I became incensed...

The uses of enchantment

01 October 2003

'All great novels are also great fairy-tales,' said Nabokov, the author of Lolita. Many critics and academics usually ignore this observation. For the past hundred years, ever since EM Forster's sneer that 'Yes, alas, the novel, tells a story,' telling a story, let alone a fairy story is still seen as something fit only for children. Although you may, as readers, value novels such as Jane Eyre, Mansfield Park and Great Expectations partly because of the wonderful tales they tell, as intelligent readers you are only supposed to praise their author's style, or their characterisation, or their use of symbols. Style is an art: plot, or storytelling, only a craft. To call someone a storyteller has become tantamount to saying they are the sort of low-brow writer sold with gold foil on the cover at airports...