When Mickey was a Wild Thing

A funny report from the Guardian on Maurice Sendak, writer of "Where the Wild Things Are". Seems he was copping some heat over how scary the film will be for kids. He tells them "go to hell".
Wild! Even better though, he goes on to recount the days when Mickey Mouse was a wild thing, and where his wild things came from.

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A few weeks ago Hilary Mantel won the Booker Prize for her fictional history of Thomas Cromwell, Wolf Hall.

I picked the book up when I heard it was a fav to win, flicked through it - looked like a good style, one I liked to read, so I was pleased to hear she won.

Then however, came the snipes, about the "genre" of "historical fiction". The Booker is of course notoriously prissy about anything that seems to be a genre outside pure "literary fiction" (whatever that means.); and the authors of genre strike back, and so on, and so on... tiresome.

In this case, I think Mantel went a bit far in sticking up for her "genre", historical fiction.

"In any case, it is no part of a novelist's duty to act as a first-strike force. Her skill lies in imaginative interpretation, not knee-jerk reaction. We have people well capable of processing the present; they're called journalists, and they need to be kept in work."

Whoa... They need to do some work, you mean. The present is embedded in the past and journalists are goldfish when it comes the context of their stories. Novelists can, will, and should roam everywhere.

For me there is art, pure art, which serves no purpose other than for us to enjoy and admire - as Oscar Wilde would have it - the perfect rendering in prose of a family's summer holiday on the Riviera, for instance. It can be written beautifully and weave the reader in among the emotions of the various relationships... but besides a little parcel of "feeling human", it serves no import at all. Gustave Flaubert's Madam Bovary, for instance, was overall, an inconsequential delight.

But then you have Wilde himself, in Portrait of Dorian Gray, who marries art with the examination of something far more significant than simple foibles - personal power. Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels interweaves fantastic story and political satire, and Aldous Huxley takes it to a modern consciousness of propaganda and power in Brave New World. On the other side you have George Orwell, who really wasn't much of an artist, but had a vision of the future, projected from his present and presented it with shocking clarity.

We're still talking about Huxley and Orwell, increasingly so, given the state of globalisation. But where Huxley saw science as the threat, and Orwell state might, that other slippery beggar slipped in between: "economics". Neither quite grasped the threatening beauty of numbers... - and the role of these economics in our present is certainly far beyond the scope of most journalists today.

So it was a thoughtless and ignorant, and therefore unfortunate remark from a Booker Prize winner. Certainly an indicator she's not destined for the Nobel Prize some day. Personally there's nothing more off-putting than a writer who does not know what they're talking about; or at least does not couch their opinion more carefully, aware of their own shaky ground.

Wolf Hall slipped down my to buy list.