In which I actually write a review. Sort of.

As you may have gathered, I don’t like to review. I find it messes with my ability to engage with a book or a movie in the first place if I know I’m going to write about it afterwards. This makes the review useless to all mankind and deprives me of the experience I’m in the room for.

Occasionally, however, I write something about something I’ve enjoyed after the fact. Hence, this.

REAMDE

I thought, when I started reading this book, that Stephenson had turned in a classic Great American Novel. By that I mean that the introduction to the main character (although actually this is a seriously ensemble piece, so it’s probably better to think of him as the spine character – the events in the book could not take place without him, even when – as much of the time – he’s out of the room and has no knowledge of what’s going on) is a perfect, serious statement of a particular moment of American history – the present one. The prose has a ringing certainty, and a compelling portrait emerges of a man in later years, slightly aloof from his extended family, whose life has followed the major threads of his time. This is Stephenson pulling together the strands of his writing. You get powerful depictions of the heartland of America, dynastic storytelling, and a sense of the US as a fractious, complex, fascinating entity; woven into this, though, is a new world of online gold farming and the economics of MMORPGs as they become more populous than many nations.

So I was all set to read a kind of cross between John Steinbeck and William Gibson, and wondering whether this was going to be Stephenson’s “Great Book”.

And then the action started.

And did not stop.

For nearly one thousand pages.

This is not a measured, dynastic thriller stepped in draft-dodging, marijuana, and Warcraft. It is an epic, exhausting, non-stop action flick in book form. It makes Heat and Kill Bill look short, tame, and dull. It has, yes, an ongoing allegiance to history and culture. It does not suddenly abandon the slightly melancholic sense of ageing, or the awareness that what happens now depends in great part on then. But it surely isn’t the book I expected on page 20. Instead, it’s a superbly exciting, cross-cultural adventure with a cast of thousands (well, no, all right, but certainly about ten main characters who are in different parts of the world and rushing towards a final confrontation).

I loved it.

There are niggles, of course. Stepehenson’s Brits are real people when you get to know them, but they have a kind of veneer of showcase tweediness. Although maybe that’s just how the rest of the world experiences Brits. But then there’s a gang of jihadists caught between extremism and sexual violence all the time, and while there’s a vague nod to the notion that the majority of American muslims would consider them insane and nightmarish, it has to be acknowledged that we never meet a muslim character in the course of the action who isn’t a total bastard. That was a bit disappointing, because it’s something I’d really like to see Stephenson do: the journey of an immigrant into the US tapestry is a thing he understands. On the other hand, maybe there was a storyline like that and it had to be cut. There certainly wasn’t room for another two hundred pages in this book – as it is, the thing’s printed on Bible stock.

So: this is a blinding book. Expect a movie. But it’s not the showstopper I imagined it might be when I began – it’s a completely different showstopper. It won’t be the one which is bound in leather and kept on the shelf alongside your original print of Magnificent Ambersons. But you will not be bored, and you will laugh, and you will stay up late to find out what happens next.

Message = [ostensible content] + [subtext] : subtext = [context x (appearance+tone+style)]

And style includes fonts.

This morning I sent off a package to Conville & Walsh. I have a sort of love affair with the agency which represents me, because they are a fantastic bunch of people and the hiring policy there must be some kind of smoked mirror of my brain. Also, pretty much everyone who works there is hot. The place is a ridiculous concentration of literary foxiness and agenticular acumen. And I found myself thinking:

“Obviously, I can’t send this parcel with a drab font. It ought to be something more fun.”

I don’t know where it came from. In general, when I send them things by courier or post – which doesn’t happen very often, because almost everything is electronic these days – I just hand-write the label or use Times New Roman, which is my default setting for anything. On the rare occasions that Times New Roman feels inappropriate, I use Trebuchet.

And yet, not today.

Today I went through the entire gamut of possibilities available to me. I really wanted that address label to express a sort of glee. I wanted C&W to share in my feeling that this glorious, slightly cool September day is the first of an exciting new moment, an autumn of goodness and energy.

Trebuchet just wasn’t going to give me that.

In the end, I used Plantagenet Cherokee. It feels unusual without being ridiculous. I wanted a font of substance, not some Comic Sans wannabe…

I went through a lot of possibilities, people. I really did.

So I propose that there is, or should be, a Language of the Fonts, just as there was a Language of the Flowers and a Language of Stones. How superb to be able to send a covert message concealed in the choice of typeface. How fascinating to treat fonts like gemstones and conceal an actual text within a selection of letters from different fonts: to hide ‘desire’ in a sequence of characters printed in Didot Euphemia Sathu InaiMathi Ribbon131 and Exotc350! To chastise an errant correspondent by means of a drab sans serif. (“You’re not worthy of my elaborate typefaces, you regrettable worm!”)

Let the crypto-romances commence! Let the bible of flirtation be The Elements of Typographic Style! Let discussions of text come to fisticuffs and hearts break over a well-placed Verdana or an absent Helvetica!

Let there be a Language of the Fonts!

Why is sex scarier than death?

Seriously, people. Why?

I ask partly because it always infuriates me that you can take a kid to see a movie where people die all over the place, but God forbid you should let them see anything sexual. Murder’s fine, but sex… That might cause them to turn into… what? An adult? Are they going to age on the spot? I asked this question at the (wonderful) Phoenix Convention a couple of years ago, when I was being quizzed about werewolf stories. My feeling about reviving the werewolf was – and is – that I’d do it in a heartbeat if I could think of a way to make them interesting without making them about sex, because the sex=fear equation, in this decade, is just too infuriating to me. The kind book I did not want to write was basically Glen Duncan’s The Last Werewolf. Not because it isn’t any good – it’s a visceral and gripping bit of storytelling, and my intellectual exhaustion with the themes aside I thought it was impressive – but because I didn’t want, for myself, to go digging in that mineshaft. Duncan’s book, for sure, doesn’t shy away from the sex-and-death-and-werewolves discussion. The main character’s appetite is prodigious and varied and mired in self-hate. But I don’t want to go there because I want people in general to stop seeing sex as a source of horror. I realise that they won’t, of course, but I don’t choose to lend myself to that perception.

But mostly I’m asking because of this whole (insane) Gay YA thing.

In brief: the two writers of a YA novel with a selection of characters were told to straighten out their gay protagonist. The book isn’t a sex-fest. No one does anything more dramatic than kiss. It’s hardly Caligula.

But clearly to some people it’s a disaster that YA writing should have positive gay characters in it for gay kids to relate to. Downfall of civilisation right there. And those people make their feelings known loudly to school boards and libraries and what have you, and this scares some commercial concerns.

Which is a reason, by the way, to do more of it rather than less.

So I just want to say, quickly, before I go on to a related issue: Rachel Manija Brown and Sherwood Smith, you rock. Do your thing. You are excellent.

And in this connection [mild non-spoilerish minor revelations below]:

Angelmaker features characters of the same sex who are in a relationship. It’s obviously not a YA book, but it’s worth saying out loud that no one at Knopf or at William Heinemann so much as mentioned it to me. It simply was not an issue. Nor did my agent, Patrick, so much as comment on it. No one had so much as an indrawn breath. Nothing. Because they are all good, solid, sensible people.

In fact, my sole concern about these characters is that someone will feel that they are titillatory rather than lovable, which would sadden me. As it happens, I didn’t sit down and think “this person is going to be gay”. I actually had one character drawn as voracious at first, sleeping with a variety of exciting people because that was what they wanted to do, in a kind of James Bond kind of a way. Then bit by bit some of the scenes disappeared and I was left with an essentially straightforward same-sex relationship. Well, all right, a complex and probably pretty painful but loving and largely monogamous one. And I love the characters. They delight me and they make me happy and sad. That’s the only metric I have for whether they’re real.

In a sense, because you can’t ever actually get inside someone else’s head, you can’t know what attraction feels like to anyone else, never mind people of other genders. Thomas Nagel’s essay in Mortal Questions, What Is It Like To Be A Bat?, makes a pretty compelling case that you can only ever know what it would be like to be you experiencing someone else’s perceptions – even assuming that you could do that. So the question of representing someone else’s sexuality – even someone you made up – is impossibly difficult. All you can do is say what you think you’d feel and hope people can relate. It’s no good just writing down the way you feel or the way others describe their own feelings. I’m very familiar with the paradox: once, in the middle of my utterly wretched film career, I transcribed a conversation between two slightly tipsy executives discussing dating directly into a script. At the next meeting, they objected: “no one talks that way!” In vain I responded that they had – they said that since no one did, they couldn’t have. Sadly (or reassuringly, given that I didn’t really want to become a crazy stalker) I hadn’t taped the whole thing.

All of which has taken me a little far afield from my original intent, which was to say that, as with genius, so with sex: you can’t write about it directly because you can’t know what it’s like. All you can do is hint at it. With genius, that usually means you just allow a character to understand something no one else does, probably at great speed. If excellence is an ability beyond that of others, genius, perhaps, is a capability beyond the direct comprehension of others. Sex – attraction, sexuality, passion, desire – is familiar, but at the same time opaque. So all we can any of us do is hint, sketch, and hope like hell.

So that’s what I did.