Overheard Conversations #1

Overheard Conversations 

Brotherhood of People

Lachlan: 'I had an incredible time in Morrocco. It opened my eyes so much to other cultures. These guys, we went to the markets, ate this food, we smoked hookahs in cafes on the streets. I went to this dinner with all these people and we danced and ate and drank. It was like I was part of the family. I felt so welcome.' 
Denise: 'Were there many women at that party?'
L: 'Whaddya mean? Nah, not that I saw.'
D: So the dinner was men-only then?
L: 'Yeah, it was incredible, they were so open and treated me like a brother, you know. Amazing culture, so much friendlier than ours.'
D: 'Where were the women?'
L: 'Shit, I dunno. At home? Why does that matter?'
D: 'Where there any women at the other places you went to? Any young girls?'
L: 'Fuck, who knows? I'm not talking about women, I'm talking about how amazing Morocco was. Everywhere I went I was treated like a part of the family. It's part of their culture, you know. The women do their own thing. They're fine.'
D: ‘Right.'

Denise: 'So I just got back from Morocco, you know. Amazing architecture and gorgeous scenery you know. Quite beautiful.'
Jack: 'How was the food?'
D: 'The food was great, but you know, I had to be accompanied everywhere by a married couple if I went out to eat. It made things pretty tough. I was there with another girlfriend, you know Greta - she's totally straight and nerdy, right?'
J: 'Yeah completely, how'd she go?'
D: 'Well, we'd go for dinner at a restaurant and a couple of times, old men just came straight up to the table and flat-out asked Darryl how much we were. It was horrible. Happened a few times. But the architecture and gardens we went to see as there was much less harrassment at those, it was all gorgeous.'
J: 'Asked to buy you - hilarious!'
D: 'Well, we couldn't go to a lot of places without accompaniment, we couldn't actually go into a few places at all. We got harassed almost constantly even though we were with Darryl and Helen. So many stupid marriage proposals, it was exhausting. We tried to go for a swim. We both wore long-sleeved t-shirts that were down to our thighs. It was so hot, we just wanted a swim - the beaches are gorgeous.' 
J: Yeah, I've heard, my mate Lachlan, he went out every day, he loved it. Said there were heaps of people there.
D: 'Kind of. There were one or two women in full hijab, but all men really. We couldn't swim at all.'
J: ‘What, you can't swim? Lachlan said it was great.'
D: 'Yeah we can swim. But each time we tried to go in the water, men would follow us and ask us to either marry or sleep with them. We couldn't go in the water by ourselves. It was awful. Greta was in tears. We had to give up.'
J: 'Nah, Lachie had a fantastic time. Sounds like a great place. He reckons anyone would love it there.'

D: 'Right'.

Shadow Country by Peter Matthiesson

Okay - so I can't get into this book. 

I'm about 20 pages in and there's a million and one characters already and they're all speculating on EJ Watson and relating his history.

So far it is 98 per cent exposition - it's tough going and I'm no stranger to long exposition-filled passages. I'm a MASSIVE Charles Dickens fan and I can get through one of his big ones in a couple of hours. Dickens is the world leader in exposition, but I'm having trouble with Shadow Country. There is minimal action, just people talking on and on about EJ. And on. And on.

The reviews for this are fearsome wonderful. It is considered by not a few to be a great American novel. A friend recommended this to me and I value her taste in literature...

So. I'm going to start again. I may need to write the characters down to keep track of them. 

Expect to hear back from me on this one.

Update: 31.05.13 - Stillll reading it!

Virtual Light by William Gibson

I'm not sure if I've read William Gibson before. I got this book at a garage sale years ago. Finally got round to reading it and it was a bit of a let-down. Maybe it was edgier when it first came out, but it didn't seem to do much other than portray a dystopian future with not a hell of a lot else. Maybe I haven't even finished it - I can't remember the ending, it's such a non-book. It kept promising but didn't really deliver, to sum up.

A bit about Gibson. 

Born in 1948, Gibson is American-Canadian and is the God of cyberpunk - regardless of who is actually credited with starting cyberpunk. He's thought to have predicted the internet - world wide web - no freakin mean feat since barely any other SF personage has managed to do so. He moved around a lot as a kid, read a lot of SF, evaded the Vietnam War draft by emigrating to Canadia (thank goodness, says the SF community), became immersed in counterculture - although exactly what that consists of, who knows? I apparently did that - big whoop as far as I'm concerned… He's also involved in the early emergence of Steampunk - a genre that I love. He is one of the movers and shakers of cyber literature and tech-culture. The man is pretty freaking COOL by all counts. He has influenced countless movies, bands and writers. 

The more I read his bio, the more interested I am in reading more of his stuff despite my meh feelings from VL. It's worth just reading his bio for the wow-factor. Enough of William, onto the novel.

A future Earth with much poverty and overcrowding - kind of like a Blade Runner movie feel to it. I kept getting the feel of a very overcrowded and techno-sized ghetto. One of the two main characters, (three if you count the city or bridge), Chevette, is a bicycle courier, who 'proj's' round the city, delivering packages. (the use of 'proj' as slang for 'moving') really jarred with me, although Gibson includes in his acknowledgements a reference to a bicycle guy who helped him get the courier lingo down right. She lives in what I gathered was a shipping container-like city on the remains of the San Francisco bridge - which collapsed in a huge earthquake. She was rescued by this guy, Skinner, who's kind of one of the long-term residents who seems to have been around in our time and is nifty at salvaging desired flotsam from the past that sells for a good price. Rescued in that, when she left her shitty mother and came to SF, she was near death from illness and Skinner took her back to his place and saved her. Purely platonic from what I can see, BTW. So Chevette has to deliver something to someone one night in a classy building that is also having a very high class party. In an uncharacteristic move, Chevette nicks a pair of sunglasses from the back pocket of a sleazy executive-type a the party.

This act provides the motivation for the rest of the events in the book. Basically, they're 'magic' sunglasses - they are virtual reality sunglasses. COOL! I thought, what's she going to see? Is it going to be dangerous? futuristic? cyberpunkish? Well, it's kind of dangerous and kind of futuristic but so incredibly boring that I really hope it was cool at the time of writing. You can see the plans that a bunch of developers are making to redo the city up and make it rich and exclusive. That's it - the glasses are only really used that once to see these 'blueprints' and then that's it as far as awesome virtual sunglasses go.

Both main characters were really interesting and had great backstories. There were a couple of other side-characters who were also interesting.

The other main character is a late 20s guy, Berry Rydell who is a little too impulsive to work as a policeman and has moved into security, where, again, he proves a little too emotion-driven to be able to do the job the way the bosses want. At first he's set up like hard-boiled kind of detective/policeman guy. He's likeable and he has a crush on Chevette once they meet up. He is moved to SF because he's gone and killed someone he probably shouldn't have while on duty and is working for a security firm where he crashes into a house in a crime scene that's probably a set-up and so he's moved over into their less legit area of security. He's given an assignment with two guys searching for these glasses - ostensibly just for the girl who they claim killed someone. So Chevette's on the run cause she gets tracked down as the likely candidate and her bestie from work (one of the two interesting side-characters) is shot. She turns to her kind-of boyfriend who appears to an arsehole who deal drugs, the main drug of choice being dancer and he kind of brushes her off. She would at this point be entirely lost and decides to head out of town until … plot mover! ... she is found by the baddies and lots of shooting happens and what-not until Rydell defies his co-workers and the Russian mafia guys and hit man who are all also chasing Chevette and flees the shoot-out with Chevette in a car.

So, they're on the run, visiting Chevette's ex, Rydell's old security pal, Sublett (the other interesting side-character) and Sublett's mother. Sublett is allergic to nearly everything, an albino and likes to quote old movies at Rydell. He's part of a religious sect that thinks tv will save your soul. See - he's interesting. 

Then Rydell hooks up with the 'Republic of Desire' three people who appear to exist nearly completely in the virtual world and pull a Deus Ex Machina to help Rydell and Chevette expose the nefarious plot to swankify San Fran and get themselves all off scot-free. That's it. End of the party. 

This was written in 1993 and was nominated for a Hugo. I have just read that it's the first in the three-parter 'Bridge' trilogy. The Bridge, I'm assuming, is a symbol of the link between the past and future, old and new, blah blah. I think VL was a letdown overall - where's the virtual reality? It's there near the end, but only Rydell accesses it, which makes it too exclusive and inaccessible to the reader. The title is evocative of these futuristic and amazing sunglasses that only a few people have access to which you see for about half a page in the book. So it's more a metaphor I suppose for the reality of SF and the exclusively rich who think the poor are rabid criminals, ready to rape and pillage and murder at any chance. The poor are just doin their thing, trying to get by. The reality is a lot plainer and pedestrian. Chevette and Rydell both end up liking each other - helps that they're both young and good-lookin, don't it? The Republic of Desire sounds highly promising but again ends up being not much of anything that the reader can really get into - it's all Rydell's business and we watch on.

Gibson really is a great writer, which makes the story readable, and I think I'll be going for Neuromancer next in the Gibson oeuvre, although I've got a copy of Pattern Recognition. Actually, maybe I'll actually do Difference Engine next - one of the first Steampunkers. But Virtual Light - I'm giving it 5 out of 10. If he was a shitty writer, I would have given it 3.

(Just an aside, I'm watching Buffy while writing this - how is it that Buffy and the Scooby gang weren't all banned from The Bronze? What the hell were the proprietors thinking letting them come back again and again? They consistently trashed the place every time they set foot in it!)

Come, Thou Tortoise, Jessica Grant

It's been a while.
Let's just put it down to me enjoying the Now, shall we?
Part of that enjoyable 'Now' has been starting a book club. A friend asked me if I knew of any book clubs that we could join. I only knew of two that some friends were in. But one was a Lesbian club and as we are both straight, I didn't want to crash their party - there must be few enough gay book clubs in Melbourne without two straighties muscling in on things. And the other club -  two of my friends regularly attend it  but they had so far never seemed to think that a fellow booklover who works for a publisher and teaches about how to make books might be interested in coming along.
So, I took matters into my own hands and she and I started our very own book club. We've got around 14 members, most of whom never come along. Around 6 or 7 people are virtual 'attendees'. One is an absentee member who lives in another state - she's a recent addition, so we'll see how we manage that!

Anyway, since I'm reading these books and making notes at the same time, I might as well commit my notes to digital.

Come, Thou Tortoise by Jessica Grant. (this book was suggested by my co-book club manager. Excellent - I'm now a club manager. She'd given us one or two dogs of books IMHO over the last year, so I suspect a few of us readers were wary of this latest offering, what with the peculiar title and all (we're just so provincial - sigh. Turns out though, that she was also riddled with doubts about our acceptance of it too.)
It was hard to get info on Jessica, even on the internet. She's Canadian, as is the main character in this book, Audrey. She actually looks a helluva lot like my old psycho housemate who took to wandering about the house, muttering loudly and when I would ask what she had said, thinking 'hey, there's only two of us in house, she must be talking to me...' would snarl at me, 'I'm not talking to YOU!' Maybe the nutbar ended up moving to Canadia and became an author under a pseudonym? Well, good for her!
This book is her debut novel, but she has won a few writing awards previously to this being released.

So first off, I was a bit annoyed with this book. Five pages in and Audrey the main character deliberately misspells a word and then corrects herself. I am NOT a fan of deliberate corrections in print. I know and I know the author knows that I know that I'm reading something that has been through the wringer many times. You can't pretend you've accidentally made an error and correct it. It doesn't work in written format! So that pissed me off.
THEN she did it again on the next page in an email to someone - that just compounded it a quadrillion times!
My next note reads: 'This author is really trying hard to piss me off. Page 8 Audrey says she dislikes people who read. So far, this book has used a deliberately non-standard Literary style - minimum punctuation and not distinguishing with speech quotes when people are talking. I assume this author wants people to read her book. Then the main character hates people who read. The author needs to get on top of this shit soon.
Now I'm in the tortoise's head? It's even letting me know the meaning of the word 'internalised'. So she hates people who read and she uses many French phrases.'
Yeah, I can look up the French phrases and if I'd bought this on my kindle, I'd have found it even easier to get translations. But as it is, I obtained a print copy ( and don't even get me started on how hard it was for just 6 Australian chicks to get hold of a copy of this book each! Nearly each of us still bear the scars) So anyway, as you can see, Come, Thou Tortoise and I did not start off our relationship amicably.

Audrey is a Leapling. She was born on Feb 29 - so she's only had about 6 birthdays and often acts a lot like it. Am I making this book appealing yet? Well, you know what? I cried in a public eatery when I finished this. It is a breath of fresh and welcome air in the world of intense and text-filled diatribes that we keep getting from all those lauded Extremely Louds and Heartbreaking Geniuses we keep getting on our bestsellers lists. Bleurg to them compared with this.
Audrey is indeed impulsive and literal. And I warmed to her. She has a life of adventures that only she could create and her thoughts are constant and bewilderingly wonderful. She deals with people in a way that disarms you as a reader. I constantly had this train of thought running through my head: 'What? Who says that to someone? This Audrey is nutso! Aargh, can't believe she did that, she's so cool!'
When she steals the gun of the Sky Marshall in the plane and locks herself in the bathroom in order to save her fellow-passengers, I felt a glimmer of camaraderie in this character, who I had been grumpy with for some time. Although, the one problem I have with her is that she does discover she has a low IQ - her father, when she found out, told her to ignore it and it wasn't important. This is something that I think Jessica Grant feels quite strongly about herself. I didn't know that Jessica felt this while I was reading and it did very very occasionally feel a little laboured when Audrey became a little too 6-year-old ish for her own good. But that was rarely and overall she is a fantastically complex and well-rounded character. (by the way, about a third of this book takes place in the now in Audrey-time while she is in Canada dealing with her father's death and when she goes on a detective hunt to the UK,  another third in Audrey's past childhood in Canada and the last third in Winnie the tortoise time - a mix of the now in Portland being looked after by a friend of Audrey's and of her own tortoise past.)

When Winnie the tortoise begins to swear, I think I lost my heart to this book. I love Winnie - I want a tortoise. I don't know if we can get them here in Australia and I suspect my rather ill-tempered feline would rip it to shreds, given half a chance (why that cat is so grumpy, I'll never know! I suspect that old housemate of some scurrilous acts in connection with the poor little thing's initial development, but again, I'll never know!). So I just have to content myself with Winnnie. Winnie is a winsome character. She has her own personal past that no one can ever begin to guess at, she's about 80 years old or more and has many opinions on the humans around her.

There are some just all-round wonderful people in this book. One thing I do like about this book is the way Jessica can create characters who you may not necessarily like at first - such as Chuck, the partner of the girl looking after Winnie while Audrey is back in Canada for her father's funeral. I didn't like Chuck, all he did was recite endless Shakespeare - Winnie didn't appreciate this either. He used her as a book weight too. But Chuck became quite fond of Winnie and when he is forced to hand over Winnie to Clint, Audrey's ex, who comes to collect Winnie simply because, it appears, he has decided to rejoin the world after skipping out for ages, Chuck's protectiveness of Winnie makes him an instant favourite.
We find out about Cliff and how Audrey drove around the US with Winnie (who loves to sit on the dashboard) looking for him in her determined way. Cliff is a pill but again, at the end, he redeems himself.
Oh and the nefarious Lionel de Tigrel, her father's arch-enemy! I thoroughly enjoyed Audrey's enmity towards this unknown person who kept stealing her father's scientific limelight to the point where he is the major evil instigator in her planet-traversing search for her lost mouse, Wedge. For ages, I thought Wedge was a hamster - I'm not sure why...

Uncle Thoby is marvellous - he lives with Audrey's dad and was Audrey's other parent. I felt TERRIBLE for him. He is a fascinating character because not much is revealed about him. We know that he cares so much about Audrey that he refuses to drive her anywhere in a car in case his English-ness takes over for a second and he swerves to the wrong side of the road and endangers her.  We also know that Audrey loves him with all her soul.

This is a long book and well worth the time. There is much in it that I'm not going to reveal because I don't want to spoil it for anyone.
One thing I didn't get was that there was absolutely no mention of Audrey's mother. I don't know if this was deliberate so as to give more weight to what may have been a side-message of this story. But it was strange that Audrey being such a thoughtful and introspective person, would never wonder about or miss her mother.

I'm going to sign off here although I could write another couple of hundred words about the joy of this book.
Read it. And I can tell you after reading this that I would not say no to another book by Ms Grant.

9/10.

Gateway, Frederik Pohl. Book 19

Frederick Pohl. (last name rhymes with 'doll' [I think])
Born 1919, he was in the great depression! Good friends with nonentities such as Isaac Asimov, Cyril M Kornbluth, Lester del Rey - you know the usual bunch. Actually these buddy-buddy Spec Fiction authors are beginning to annoy me. Aren't there any famous spec fiction authors who aren't part of the gang?
Anyway, Fred was a Communist and served in the US Army. Take that, McCarthy! He began the futurians fan club in 1936, edited, Astonishing Stories and Super Science Stories. He was an agent representing sci fi authors from 1937 to the early 1950s. He was an acquisitions editor and did copy editing for Bantam Books, published as Frederick Pohl Selections. There really aren't too many people who get a series of books named after them.
How funny is this - he did work for Encyclopaedia Britannica on Emperor Tiberius and guess where he currently resides? Palatine (in Chicago). Coincidence? I don't think so.
He has also won nearly every sci fi prize there is to win.
The man is still alive. Nice work.

Gateway was written in 1977 and won a Hugo.
I am dying to get into the rest of this series.
It is the FUTURE. Earthlings have scoured the galaxy, looking for signs of intelligent life other than themselves. Eventually, they find it. Long dormant artefacts of what we decide to call the 'Hee Chee' civilisation. This includes spaceships that no one really knows how to use that have been left behind at 'Gateway'. If you can work hard enough to scrounge up enough money to get to Gateway, you have the chance to get into one of these ships and let it zoom you and a couple of others off to parts unknown. Will you find death? Hee Chee artefacts? A Hee Chee? If you find artefacts, you are paid enough money by the 'company' to set yourself up for the rest of your life. This doesn't happy to many though. More often than not the spacecraft are gone too long and the crew starve, the ship simply doesn't return, or you don't find a thing. More often you find death. No one has ever found a Hee Chee.
Pohl intersperses his text with adverts from the noticeboards at Gateway. They advertise everything, from massages to mission reports. They really add to the spacestation atmosphere, the feeling that you're definitely not at home anymore, that the company runs the place.
The protagonist has clearly hit it big at some point. But he is far from satisfied with life. We find out everything through his flashbacks while he is in psychology sessions with a company robot-psychologist. I quite like this method for this book. The Hee Chee idea is fascinating and pulls you right in. Will they find a Hee Chee? It seems to me to be the perfect name. Humanity arrogantly assigns a dead race this moniker, confident in its own longevity and superiority despite not having a clue as to how the Hee Chee spaceships operate.
And the trips out in the ships is gripping. It's only once you're out there and you watch the light pattern on the console that you know whether or not you have a chance of living. Certain ships hold a certain number of occupants, five being the maximum. There is only enough room for a limited amount of food. Once the lights change colour, you know you're nearly at your destination and thus halfway. If you've already used up more than half your food, then you're screwed. So for everyone, it's a tense trip out until the lights begin to change. Once they do and you know you'll survive, there's the excitement of where your destination might be. Will there be riches at the end? Will there be a supernova where there was once a Hee Chee destination and thus certain death? Will there be a single surviving Hee Chee to tell you where the hell the navigation controls are?
So each time Robin, (our Hero) goes out, or describes another trip, it's a nerve-wracking experience. It doesn't help that he is petrified of actually going out. The high fatality rate can deter many people and he meets up with Klara who feels exactly the same way. Even though I knew he hits it big at some stage, I still felt unsure of success when he does finally go out.
But it's the how of Robin's big financial gain that gets ya at the end...
I was excited when I realised this was the first of the Hee Chee series. I will be reading the rest soon.
9/10 on the spec fiction scale.

over and out.

I Am Number Four, Pittacus Lore. Book 18

This is a very new release and is about to to be released as a film. I am keen to see it after reading this, I'm hoping they can jazz it up a bit more.
Pittacus Lore is a collaboration between Jobie Hughes and James Frey. There isn't much out there on Jobie. He is 30 years old, he lives in New York city, attended University and has an MFA in creative writing. He's got his own website with a rather smoochy-looking picture on it. Maybe I should start putting up studio shots of me looking all cleavage and saucy... come on, call yourself a writer? The interesting facts section about him includes as a highlight that he did wrestling in high school - yup that's pretty much the apex right there.
But I think Mr Frey might be a little more well-known to the tv-watching world. The man of 'A Million Little Pieces' fame. Personally I don't give a damn that he made some of it up. Nothing in this world is literal truth and if you enjoyed the story, then you enjoyed the story. People don't start screaming at the Coen brothers over their liberality with 'True Stories'. Did anyone pull up W when it was clear his version of weapons of mass destruction was a fabrication in order to get public attention??? Hmmm.
So James is still writing other titles and has is doing quite well out of all that publicity, thank you very much. He has signed a deal with HarperCollins for three books and a tidy sum - the world goes on.

So, the much-hyped I am Number Four.
(I am currently writing this while listening to one of the worst freakin comedy shows I have ever EVER heard on Triple R - I've never heard anything so crap. They're called 'Lime Champions'. I seriously have never heard anything so unfunny and talentless: WTF, Triple R? It may be affecting my opinion of the book as I progress - interesting phenomenon...)
This is the first title in the Lorien Legacies series.
Number Four is one of a number of aliens who have escaped their homeworld of Lorien (hmmm, really. I just don't think that's a coincidence and for goodness' sake, find your own names) to Earth. Lorien was under siege by the evil Mogadorians (and for some reason, this is reminiscent of something else) and the only way to save the race was for the nine Garde (guards of Lorien) and their Keepers (called Cepans) to flee. The Mogadorians hail from Mogadore and attacked Lorien, causing a genocide of catastrophic proportions. The nine dispersed without throughout Earth, each accompanied by their personal Cepan. They carry a chest that is locked to each Garde until their powers begin to develop. It is only when they begin to hit their 'teens' that their powers, or legacies, develop.
The natives of Lorien to all purposes look human. But they all possess super strength and tattoos that denote their number in the 'chain'. Each time another Garde is murdered by the Mogadorians, another tattoo appears on each of the remaining Gardes to let them know. The Nine can only be killed in numerical order due to certain spells that have been cast. Three are dead. Number Four's number is now up.
Number Four has spent the last ten years travelling from town to town, adopting new personas with his Cepan in order to avoid identification. He is beginning to get very fed up with the impermanence of it. But at this latest stop, where he has taken on the identity John Smith, he begins to settle into High School and finds a friend and a rather tasty girl. There are the usual bullies who don't like new kids and he has to figure out how to deal with them without revealing what he is.
It is during this stint that his first power develops - he can emit heat or light. So he now gets to learn about his legacy, what other powers he might develop and he begins to remember what happened on Lorien.
He soon becomes identified and the dark forces from Mogadore track him. So begins a battle of humungous proportions and another refugee Garde turns up to help John and his gang. Also composed of a dog who John has named Bernie Kosar. Turns out (and this is a no brainer to figure out) Bernie also hails from Lorien and is a Chimaera. The Chimaera were secretly shipped out, only John had a memory of them leaving - hmmm. Bit convenient.
So the battle rages in and out of the high school. I found this section to be badly written. It was dark, messy, and most of the time the spacial logistics were impenetrable. People are moving everywhere, in and out of the school and the nearby woods. And strangely enough, no one else in this SMALL TOWN notices a thing. I've lived in one of those towns: everyone notices everything. That's how it works. So the gang are spewing light, bullets and crap everywhere in an effort to stop the seeming hordes and hordes of Mogadorians and their gigantic creatures. John develops another legacy during the fight and uses that to quell the anger of the creatures.
They don't necessarily win, but they survive and live to fight another sequel.
I'm not keen to read this again unless it's to try and make my way into what can be very dense scenes at times so as to understand it better.
I will go see the film as it had better have some damn good effects.
I give it 6/10 for YA sci fi.

Such a Strange Lady: a biography of Dorothy L Sayers, Janet Hitchman. Book 17

 I’m gonna be very clear from the beginning of this review. This is one of the sloppiest, badly written, biased, unintelligent biographies and books I have ever read. And I’m not alone in this judgement. I now know why I was able to get this second-hand when it’s so hard to get hold of anything else either by or about Sayers.

Janet Hitchman is an elusive lass and it is very difficult to get any details about her off the internet. There is no bio on Janet in the book and there are many spare pages that could easily have been used for this purpose in the book. (An aside: I’ve recently become a production controller for a publisher and I now look at books in a very different way. I was twenty minutes late to meet a friend because I got distracted in a bookstore, just looking at the finishes on covers. How shame-making! But I know that if you've got blank pages in the end of a book, it costs you no more to whack something in them - like. an. author. bio.) I honestly have no idea how she got this book deal – she was apparently asked to do it by the publishers. The publishers, in turn, put out the Wimsey books. I’m going to put up a picture of the cover because every time I glance at it from more than one metre away, the illustration of Wimsey with the car behind him reminds me of a giant penis sticking out of Wimsey’s crotch. I’m not a usually dirty-minded person – but I think you’ll agree with me that it does evoke that image.

Janet has written a couple of other books, King of the Barbareens, They Carried the Sword, and Meeting for Burial. It is to her credit that these are all now completely unknown in the wider world, especially as one is her autobiography. I wouldn't mind reading it just to discover how she became so mediocre. I’ve spent at least half an hour on the net, searching for some sort of definite bio on Janet. I can’t find a thing.

Janet did not have access to any of Dorothy’s letters and did not interview any of Dorothy’s close friends. (whether that was their wishes or hers, I don’t know). So much of this bio is simply conjecture. And Janet is capable of that. She speculates on Dorothy’s childhood, her relationship (or lack of) with her illegitimate son, her sexuality (and Janet’s writing on lesbianism is naïve and almost homophobic), pretty much on every aspect of Dorothy’s life, Janet simply speculates. The blurb on the back states that she has employed almost Wimseyan methods to discover Dorothy’s lifestory. Well, Janet ain’t no Wimsey and is definitely no Dorothy L Sayers.  

Ms Sayers was a secretive woman and apparently loathe for anyone to put out a bio on her. This one was published in 1975, seventeen years after Dorothy’s death. Janet just don’t seem to have cared and despite having no access to definite facts or documents, thought she would have a go. As a result, this is a bland bio. I constantly found myself doubting what she gave as Dorothy’s motives for doing this or that. I couldn’t figure out if I was just cynical or being very precious about one of my favourite authors. Turns out there are other people who agree with me on her credibility.

Dorothy was indeed considered a strange lady. But was she that strange for her generation? She was no more peculiar than any of the Mitfords, or Agatha Christie (disappearing for a week with no explanation ever forthcoming), or Vita Sackville-West. I mean, she was an intelligent woman who knew her own mind, her formative years were spent at a time when frivolity and eccentricity was encouraged in those who could afford it. Janet treats her as a curiosity and I get the feel of a point of view of knowing adulthood condescending to a truculent child. As someone else has commented, she dishes the dirt in a gossipy manner. This bio is not worthy of Sayers. I am disappointed that I read it. Her response to Dorothy’s treatment of her son is that she considers it an enigma. Come on, it’s 1923, you are a famous female author and you’ve gotten laid and you’re pregnant. Well, let’s just announce it to the world. Dorothy’s own writing well illustrates her awareness and thoughts on the weight of society’s opinions of the time and she acted accordingly. She is perfectly justified in thinking she needed to keep it secret. Why adopt out (which is what Janet thinks she should have done) when you have a cousin whom you know will look after your child? In fact your cousin takes on foster children, she is a perfect option for you. You can visit and keep in touch, it won’t be remarked upon that the woman has another child in her house. Dorothy was also worried about money for a large portion of her life. Why would you risk poverty and ostracism when you know you can have your child well-provided for? It appears to me quite the logical thing for Dorothy to do.

The Wimsey books too are dealt with in an objective and discursive manner. How can ANYONE be objective about Wimsey. He demands subjectiveness and adoration! He is one of the world’s most memorable literary characters and Janet does not do him justice. She goes into a lot of detail on Dorothy’s subsequent religious work – I suspect Hitchman is a devout Christian – her detail on this later work and her thoughts on many of Sayers’ life decisions appear to be informed by a religious sentiment. Her criticisms of the work and of Sayers are about as meticulous as mine are of her. She calls Harriet ‘tiresome’ and berates Dorothy for many silly mistakes. I don’t think I will go into the actual details of Sayers’ life as depicted by Hitchens for the reason that the motives attributed to Sayers’ every action and thought are just rubbish.

The only use this bio really had for me was to find out the basic facts of Sayers’ life and what else she wrote – I was much interested to discover she did a version of Dante’s Divine Comedy. I was also fascinated that she ended up married to someone whom she later discovered to be a complete dilettante and idiot. Much like a parallel author of her time, Nancy Mitford (forgive the repetition of this family twice in one post). I also knew nothing of her later passion for writing on religion. But I don’t feel that I know her anymore than from reading the Wimsey books. So, in my humble opinion, don’t get this book unless you want an unresearched and uninformed biography of one of the greatest ever detective novelists.