Britain’s bookworms: misanthropic and death-fixated
Jesus, Britain’s readers are a miserable, bitter bunch. Judging by the ‘100 books you can’t live without‘ as voted for as part of World Book Day yesterday, we like our escapism full of death, grinding misery, war, death, disappointment, disfigurement and death.
Take a look at the list. ‘Jane Eyre’ – a main character is blinded and crippled by his mad wife. ‘Harry Potter’ – an increasingly grim burlesque of murders and maimings. ‘To Kill A Mockingbird’ – they kill the mockingbird. The Bible – where to start? Let’s just say that after page after page of war and suffering, the main character’s son is tortured and nailed up in a grisly death scene.
Then there’s ‘1984′, the nightmarish, dystopian satire that’s become a handbook for western governments since The War Against Terror was declared. There’s ‘Catcher in the Rye’, possibly the most over-rated book ever written and tome of choice for Beatle murderers and permanent adolescents everywhere. And then there’s ‘The Lovely Bones’, where a raped, murdered and dismembered 14 year-old narrates from the afterlife, ‘The Remains of the Day’, where a repressed butler devotes his life to serving a Nazi sympathiser when he could have been knobbing the housekeeper, and ‘Dracula’ where a Eurotrash goth is done in by a Dutch doctor.
It never stops. There’s bodies all over the place. ‘The Great Gatsby’ (shot), ‘Rebecca’ (murdered), ‘Anna Karenina’ (suicide by train), ‘Hamlet’ (dithers, shags his mum …possibly – and is then poisoned), and ‘Winnie the Pooh’ (crystal meth addict and spree killer who turns the gun on himself).
The final miserable proof is the presence of *three* Thomas Hardy novels in the list. Hardy was a bastard who took delight in grinding his characters into the shit. In ‘Tess of the d’Urbervilles’, the eponymous country girl Tess gets ideas above her station, is seduced by a utter cad, marries another man but is abandoned and is executed for said utter cad’s murder. ‘Far From The Madding Crowd’ sees the wilful Bathsheba Everdene getting ideas above her station and marrying an utter cad who fakes his own death. He then reappears and murders the repressed farmer who is wooing Bathsheba and she ends up reluctantly marrying the yokel who proposed to her in chapter one. In ‘Jude the Obscure’, the titular stonemason gets ideas above his station, marries a right cow, fails to get into university, lives in sin with his cousin and dies after his son commits suicide. Hardy’s hateful running theme was that the lower classes should know their place. Anybody who reads him for pleasure is a pervert.
Where the hell is the Gruffalo when you need him?
(First published in this week’s edition of The Friday Thing.)
Posted on March 3rd, 2007 at 7:21 am
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• 8 Comments |
Hardy’s hateful running theme was that the lower classes should know their place.
No it wasn’t. It was that people from the lower classes who don’t know their station get crushed by hateful attitudes rife among the richer classes. It’s unlikely that Hardy, whose background was humble, would have had anything other than sympathy for these characters (and Jude in particular).
These kind of lists always make me wonder whether the people who voted have actually read the books, or if they just think that they *should* have.
Well, when that bloke what wrote the Holy Grail Tom Hanks bullshit can become a billionaire we know that as a species, the Human Race is doomed.
Couldn’t agree more about Catcher in the Rye – maybe I read it at the wrong age but it honestly is the most overrated book I’ve ever come across.
Love it! Your one-sentence summary of the Bible is superb and I’m with you on Hardy – a miserable man! Do you think the people who say they’ve read these books actually have? – None of them are exactly easy reading, are they?
What, Hardy isn’t easy reading?
Just to make Tess even grimmer, I do believe that she is in fact raped rather than seduced (although we might be talking about a different event – I must admit I can’t read Hardy – utter grimness interspersed with interminable pastoral description is really not my thing).
On the upside of the list – no.1 is a “lives happily ever after” sort of tale.
Quick links for monday…
Chris Lightfoot is dead. I liked his weblog. He dropped off my radar a bit when he stopped posting frequently, but had he returned, I would have found out from many other bloggers linking to him enthusiastically. He only wrote……