Byatt's fairy stories

An open-air mall lined with cheap boutiques and stationery shops, and headlined by a supermarket. Next to the greengrocer (trails of trodden lettuce leaves) is a second-hand bookshop. Outside, a tray of 'cheapies' (proclaimed, in yellow) - dog-eared paperbacks, the spines so bent you can't read the titles. Inside, shades of brown that conceal you from the sensual frenzy outside. Dun brown carpet, streaked and scratched wooden bookshelves, lacquered brown counter, yellow pine chairs.

You remember - when you were young and starting out in your career, you were a bit... naive. No, not naive - you just don't know any better (there's a difference). In varsity, where output was graded and critiqued and the marker had a marksheet, every A or B stroked your ego. You deconstructed the state of your industry, on at least three different premises, and you read the thoughts of future peers. Deep down you believe you represent a gestating revolution in the industry and you are eager to learn how to hatch the darn thing.

I can't speak for yours, but in the local media industries, management is often first seduced by and later annoyed by the eagerness of 'newbies' (a grand Thursday night story, told into glasses of wine). See, they think 'eager' means 'exploitable' (and 'expendable') and 'young' means 'cheap'. If you are lucky, management empathises with you but shrug their shoulders because that's just the way it is. If you're unlucky, you get management who have been through the same thing and would like to carve you a matching chip.

Six months in to working with one of the latter, I was off sick with sinusitis. (Note that I do not get sick, that is, without a psychosomatic stimulus. Do not scoff. Whenever and with whatever I am sick, I suffer from some degree of 'sight impairment'. Yip, turns out acute sinusitis can temporarily infect the optic nerves. Partial blindness in one eye.) I was off sick and I was horribly sad. So I wrapped myself up and drove myself (squinting) to the shops to get a movie and a magazine.

Instead, snivelling and with a wad of tissues in hand, I detoured to calm my soul among ceiling-high bookcases, yellowing paper and the promise of treasure. A good rule is to only buy books you have been looking for. Or to buy a bookshop. What would I find? Rushdie? Fowles? Calvino? Mitchell? Or the classics - James? Forster? Woolf? Some poetry?

A black spine, about 15 cm high. The title set horizontally in a thin white font. AS Byatt. The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye: Five fairy stories. I pulled it from between its taller companions, forefinger behind the top furl of the cover - it was hardcover, with the dust jacket in perfect condition because it had been neatly covered in thick plastic. I knew then, but I'll tell you more.

The dust jacket is jewel green, with yellow text, the colours outdated now. The inside endpapers are the green of an evergreen shrub. The illustrations are taken from historical collections: a Persian musician, a jewelled peacock and a pious woman. The paper is thick but unvarnished, and textured in the type of grain you can see in brown paper. Each story begins with an historical black-and-white etching.

Mrs Byatt has been one of my favourite authors since I read Possession during my internship. (Damn straight I remember when - the book was thick and heavy, and the writing equally impenetrable.) I feel as though, under her primary author's voice, I can hear another, more tender one, always wondering. How does this work? Why? What happens when I pull this or that? Something sadly empathic under more academic toing and froing. Since then I had collected every secondhand book of hers I have 'unearthed', to build a collection of different editions.

This treasure is by far my favourite. It is my favourite because it represents the ideal of the secondhand hunt. It is my favourite because I was so sad and just holding this book in my hand... I can remember how overwhelmingly reassured I felt. Books like that are the reason I write and the reason I publish. When I think back, I can remember seeing it on the shelf, holding it and buying it, in a room made of blocks of browns. But perhaps that is just my sensory memory gratifying my emotional memory...

I have pulled out the book now and placed it next to me, to the left of my computer. Next to it is my next read: Ragnarok, also by Byatt. I found it by accident the other night, browsing the science-fiction section of the library. The book is thin - less than 200 pages - and a paperback. The yellow spine was pushed back into the shelf, so it was obscured by the tall and thick hardcovers around it. Is this how I am always to discover Byatt's allegories?

In defence of Mss Woolf and Plath

Where there's smoke there's fire, conventional wisdom tells me. At first I drafted a rampage about the fact that many other things release smoke and recommended changing the idiom to: Where there's smoke there's combustion. (I even looked up the relationship between the two, discovering that smoke is just a change in state that is a by-product of a chemical reaction. Huh. That's why I am not a scientist.)

Then I realised a logical error of deduction: Just because smoke is a necessary condition of fire doesn't mean fire is a necessary condition of smoke. Which, on second thought means the idiom still doesn't make sense, since you aren't guaranteed to find a fire if you see smoke - you could come upon a heap of smouldering phosphorous, for example.

If you are already bored, I apologise. But you know how I like to the circle the point, in the hopes of catching it (and you) unawares. Consider this added value: a science, philosophy and English lesson, for the price of wading through two paragraphs of in search of a point.

On to my heap of phosphorous: Virginia Woolf and Sylvia Plath are two of my favourite authors - and have been since I was in high school. Through their writing, I saw women who felt as I feel. Women who wrote in the 20s and 60s, when society was still (arguably) unaccepting of a woman's voice. I saw strong women, with force of wills, who dared.

I think I also saw a promise, that I could be a writer, even before I knew I could. (In my experience, being a writer is not a choice. It is a physical sense, an innate means of experiencing the world. But that doesn't mean using the sense doesn't take courage. Try it, just once, and I dare you not to tear up or delete the first draft in frustration.)

The Waves by Ms Woolf is my favourite of her novels, and one of my favourite novels of all. A group of college friends congregate at the funeral of one of their party. They haven't seen each other since college, about five years prior if I remember correctly. Buried hurts and loves surface, buried identities too. As if merely being together has the power to swallow time. Regression. Suspense. Suspicion. Ruined love. Alliance. Written as stream of consciousness.

Don't be put off by the opaque ramblings of James Joyce! Or by the echoes of navel-gazing, Woolf-inspired movies.

The Modernists gravitated to stream of consciousness - artists, writers, even psychologists. Few did it well; most attempts read like the experiments they were (a la Joyce). Ms Woolf actually uses punctuation and paragraphs; she restrains her liberties to the character voices. Her novels have a languid sensitivity that her non-fiction does not; they do not have the buried rage of Joyce's - although both carve out the inner landscapes of their characters with fine chisels.

This is not a plot-driven novel. There are no meet-cutes, murders or betrayals, except in the past tense, and definitely no car chases or explosions. It feels like The Secret History, except that here the dead guy is already dead. All of these reasons are why I would give body parts to have written The Waves.

This post's smouldering phosphorous is made of the associations of reading Ms Woolf and/or Plath. Of worshipping them. Both authors have become symbols (with or against their wills?), of feminism and liberalism. What does that say of me? Not of me as I am but of me as you see me. I am a feminist and a liberal (give me a chance!), but I hate those words. They make me cringe as much as you.

I believe that I have the right to navigate my own path. I also believe that chauvinism is institutionalised (I have evidence, my favourite of which is the exclamation that I am 'a smart cookie'). I believe that humanity is as good as it is bad, that people just want love and respect (again, I have evidence). I don't kill anything, even insects, because who am I to take life?

Mss Woolf and Plath are the smoke rising from this heap.

That irks me - that beliefs should be reduced to superficial revolts like bra-burning and chaining bunny-huggers to trees, diminishing their power. That I should be reduced by this association and so disregarded. Granted, we need to make snap judgements all the time because the world is flinging stimuli at us and we don't have enough hands to catch them.

Yet, we are prepared to take the time to read a novel like The Waves and understand the characters - even empathise with them. We are ready to open their boxes but I must huddle in the one I have been forced into. Not a chance. Instead, I rant and rave, because if you cannot walk in line, you must heckle from the sidelines.

Voile! The value of art

Art is escapism, right? It whisks you from your mundane or burdened world and plonks you into someone else's. You cringe at 'plonk', I'm guessing (I do), because it feels such a crude rendering of the sense of release you feel at your escape. (Escape?) Such a smooth, elegant, longed-for release. I'm out of adjectives to describe this sense and none of the ones I have used feel right.

Tell me, what are you - the specific you, reading this post, and not the general you of all readers - escaping from? The complications of modern life? Its mundaneness and routine? Or something more sinister?

There are the more fantastical escapes - sci-fi and fantasy, historical what-ifs - and then the escapes into the complications of other lives. Which do you prefer? Does it make a difference? What would you do face-to-face with a dragon or in another skin or faced with a perfect Prince or Princess Charming? (Can we know?)

Following on from the previous post, when I was about seven (young enough to be called innocent but able to read), my mother subscribed to a Reader's Digest series of hardcover books about legends and fairytales, on my behalf. Each new one would arrive every six months. The more... disturbing... she would hide, saying I could read them when I was older. Nothing stays hidden from a seven-year-old for long.

I adored the ones I wasn't supposed to read, probably because I wasn't supposed to read them, because the stories and illustrations were threaded with an illicit thrill, and because ala previous post, isn't that the intention? Both the stories and illustrations were violent, harsh, dark, possibly disturbing. But they were more 'real' to me than glittering fairies and happy endings.

They were an escape.

But... but... but... An escape is from, not to, the real; isn't that what I said, oh, 15 lines ago? So fickle is the blogger, such an hypocrite, abusing the impermanence of the online space.

No, wait! Why is George Orwell's 1984 one of The Great Novels? Why does it resonate when it is our world but not? Why do Terry Pratchett's novels have so much to say about the ethics of leadership? Because they are like telescopes: they cast a circular limit around a point and, with some fumbling, focus and magnify the point. They give us the distance to see ourselves.

For me, literature is about burrowing into myself - beyond the superficial landscape of the imagination - with a backpack of symbols, ready to inflict my magnifying glass on anything that latches onto one of the symbols, like an enzyme in my intestines.

Does this mean you can continue to judge a person by the books on their shelves? Perhaps; I confess I do. You won't know what that book represents to that other person, and chances are you won't get a satisfactory answer if you ask them bluntly. But maybe your judgement says something about you and your inner world, and perhaps that's enough.

In this vein, my favourites by a wide margin are Possession by AS Byatt and Seizure of Power by Czeslaw Milosz. Make of that what you will.