Day 46

17:45

I am starting writing late today: I got a book the other day called 'The Suspicions of Mr Whicher' and started reading it obsessively this afternoon until it was finished.

I don't want to be a curmudgeon, but I found it a massive let-down: frustrating, inconclusive and really padded out. Apart from conjuring up a vaguely nostalgic sense of 1860's England it has few real merits, and I don't understand the praise heaped on it.

I read a book years ago called 'The Riddle of Birdhirst Rise', mainly because it referred to a famous murder case that took place a few roads away from where I grew up in Croydon. This book is out of print now, and was never anything but a slightly salacious book in the 'true crime' section of Dillons. However, it was much better than this widely awarded new book. A comparison might be in order.

In this first part of 'The Riddle of Birdhirst Rise', the author sets the scene for the murders (three poisonings in the same family house in the 1920's), describes each of the deaths in turn, then outlines the remaining family members.

In the second part of the book, he goes through the possible motives for each person to have committed the crime: covers the press hysteria and the police investigation to catch the killer, and shows how almost impossible it would be for any of the suspects to have committed the murders.

And then, in the final few chapters, with the skill of a great detective novelist, he shows us who the murderer almost certainly was, using the previously unpublished suspicions of the head detective, newly revealed facts, and a simple timeline and setting out of motives that makes the murder, so obscure earlier, suddenly seem perfectly clear.

It is elegant, thought-provoking, and well-paced. Now let's look at the consistently brown-nosed 'Mr Whicher'. You are basically told who the murderer is in the opening pages of the book.

Then you are given all the contradictory evidence, already knowing who fucking did it. Then we are made to feel sorry for the brilliant police detective who's conclusions are regarded as so horrible by Victorian society that he is made an outcast (cue a hundred-page digression on his interest in flowers and a plot-spoiling overview of Victorian Sensationalist literature).

After 200 pages, the person we've been told who was the murderer from the start comes out and tells everyone that they are (most of whom - even in the fucking story - already knew) and the person is convicted, serves time, and is released to live a good long life while everyone else dies from syphilis or obstructed bowels. Then there are about a hundred pages of 'what happens next' to every stovepipe hat- and bonnet-wearing fucking character we've been introduced to in the whole book. It's like the monologue you might get sitting next to an old person with a photo album.

But wait - three pages from the back cover, without any new evidence, and without attempting to resolve the remaining contradictions of the murder, the author butts herself into the narrative and tells us she thinks someone else helped. How? Fuck you, that's how: you've reached the end of the book.

Awesome, Kate Summerscale. Thanks for wasting my time. Here's a tip: if you want to write a thinly-veiled survey of an event's impact on contemporaneous literature, and your thesis for the event is basically that no event nor human being, despite our best efforts, can ever be truly known or unravelled, don't write your book like a detective story, you fucking cock-tease.

I don't need to buy a book and read it to be told I can't really ever be sure about something that happened a hundred and fifty years ago. I kind of already already knew that.

And writing a detective story from a post-modern vantage that raises questions of what you can or can't know isn't new: Paul Auster has been writing books that bore everyone to tears for decades using that particularly crappy chestnut. When I see all the stickers and acolades on the front of this book, I think two things:

1) that maybe they shouldn't hand out literary prizes every year - maybe (and this is my theory for the Nobel Peace Prize, too) they should only be handed out occasionally on merit.

2) who the fuck are Richard and Judy to tell me what to read? It says something really bad about the age you live in when two functionally retarded TV mannequins become the most influential literary critics in Britain.

Man, I should have spent the last four hours writing instead of getting caught up in this bullshit.

06:00

This is getting ridiculous. I've been working for quite a while now, my eyes are fucking bleeding, and I still haven't made my word count.

This is really, really hard.

I'll blog more tomorrow. When I'm not so tired I hurt myself typing.

word count: 1,712
hours writing: 5.5