I do enjoy historical fiction and my favourite authors are Jean Plaidy and Philippa Gregory. Gregory’s A Respectable Trade is one of the finest novels of the slave trade that I have ever read, highlighting a little known aspect of it. So perhaps it was the surfeit of Plaidy and Gregory I had been reading and re-reading that made me toss aside Karen Harper’s The First Princess of Wales barely a third of the way through. Or maybe it’s just because this is a very bad book.
It was the cover that drew me in. If I’d seen this on the shelves under its original 1984 title of Sweet Passion’s Pain with no doubt a bodice ripping cover to match, I would have passed it over instantly.
But obviously the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, caused a marketing rethink. A change of title, a classically inspired cover, and suddenly we have what looks like a serious and scholarly recreation of the life of one of history’s most fascinating women, Joan of Kent, the wife of Edward Plantagenet, the Black Prince.
Unfortunately what we have inside is still the same bodice ripping trash, with a near rape every ten pages or so. Even given the morality of the times, this is distasteful, especially when you realise that Ms Harper has done virtually no research on her subject – or if she did, has utterly ignored it.
When this book opens, the real Joan of Kent – the Fair Maid of Kent, as she was later known – was about 10 or 11. At the age of 12, she was married to a far older knight, a man in his 40s. Not unusual for the middle ages, but Ms Harper has decided Joan must be quite a bit older for this story, since clearly the reading public will not enjoy reading about a 11 year old girl being raped by one future husband, while being married off to another.
Basically, Ms Harper has taken what is possibly a tragic story of the treatment of very young girls in medieval; times and turned it into a breathless excuse for the usual `hot’ romance treatment.
On Joan’s behalf, I am offended. As the mother of daughters, I am offended – since when did sexual abuse become the light hearted stuff of trashy romance novels? Does it matter if it was 500 years ago? It was still wrong.
Dress it up all you like, Three Rivers Press, all the pretty cover does is serve the purpose of spices and herbs at a medieval banquet – it covers the smell.

With a title like that, Rosemary Edghill’s influences are fairly clear. Edghill started out as a comic writer (so she can safely claim she killed vampires for a living!) and went through several jobs before becoming a full time writer.
She’s a genre gipsy (has written in every genre except westerns) and has been associated with the late Marion Zimmer Bradley, Andre Norton and Mercedes Lackey – so Edghill comes with quite a resume.
Paying the Piper at the Gates of Dawn is a collection of her short fiction. In her introduction, she tells the story of a rejection on which had been typed “find another hobby”. While that judgment was unnecessarily harsh, it’s not hard to see why some readers would be put off – Edghill’s prose is very wordy and sometimes hard to navigate.
For my money, the best story in the book is The Maltese Feline. Here Edghill cheerfully mixes her genres, crossing hard boiled detective fiction with Arthurian fantasy. Amazingly, she pulls it off, and the result is thoroughly entertaining.
I also enjoyed A Gift of Two Grey Horses, a lovely little Norse fable, and Prince of Exiles, originally published in Out of Avalon.
But I am still struggling to get started with The Sword of the North, where Edghill’s wordiness is out of control. So here is a book that I found to be like the Curate’s Egg – very good in parts – or perhaps even more like the little girl with a curl – when it is good, it is very, very good, but when it is bad, the prose bogs you down like lead boots.
I am a newcomer to Edghill’s work, though, and none of that has put me off reading her again. In all, I’m glad she didn’t find another hobby.

Start at A in this book and right away you discover that writers have no harsher critics than other writers. Take Truman Capote’s brief but bitter assessment of Jack Kerouac’s On The Road.“It’s not writing, it’s just typing.”
Imagine what he would have said if he’d heard the rumor that Kerouac wrote his first draft on sheets of tissue from public toilets.
It gets better. Joseph Conrad, author of such sea faring dramas as Lord Jim dismissed Herman Melville (Moby Dick) with the words, “Melville knows nothing about the sea.” In turn Conrad was roasted by Vladimir Nabokov, who huffed “I cannot abide his souvenir shop style, bottled ships and shell necklaces of romantic clichés.”
But none tops English poet Thomas Babington Macaulay, who said of Socrates; “The more I read him, the less I wonder why they poisoned him.” Nasty.
Stranger Than Fiction is a little treasure house of trivia about writers, some of it positively mind boggling. If you can’t stand another day without knowing which writers suffered from `Portnoy’s Complaint’, or which writer killed himself by Japanese ritual suicide, get this book. Others went insane, went to jail, went bankrupt or went to the bottle. Others just stopped writing altogether, like Robert Southey, who became Poet Laureate in 1843 and never wrote another poetic word. What a time to get writer’s block!
But none of this is surprising, really, when you read how many times best sellers were rejected before eventual publication. Can you imagine M*A*S*H getting rejected? The book that became the film that became the TV show engraved on viewers’ hearts? No less than 21 publishers turned down Richard Hooker’s original manuscript.
In the case of Richard Bach’s Jonathan Livingstone Seagull, one could only wish it had been rejected 19 times instead of the recorded 18.
See, I can do it too! Get this book and brush up on your epithets. Or just while away the time with some thoroughly entertaining reading.

Since the success of Harry Potter, film makers have cast their beady eyes over children’s literature, so it is no surprise to learn the Inkheart will be released as a movie in 2006. And for once, I am betting that the movie version will be an improvement.
Cornelia Funke’s Inkheart, translated from the original German by Anthea Bell, purports to be about Meggie, who goes on an adventure with her father, her aunt and a slew of characters who have come to life from a children’s book. Unfortunately, I can tell you a great deal more about these other characters than I can about Meggie, who remains shadowy throughout.
Meggie’s father is Mo, a book binder with the ability to bring to life characters from a book when he reads aloud. One night he is visited by a strange man called Dustfinger, who calls Mo `Silvertongue’. The next day Mo takes his daughter to the house of his wife’s Aunt Elinor, a fanatical book collector, dragging the child away from her home and her school, and not for the first time. Mo is on the run from Capricorn, a black-hearted (get it?) villain who wants a book that Mo has in his possession.As the supposed lead character, Meggie simply doesn’t cut the mustard. She is a bystander, whipped up in events over which she has no control and little chance to change the outcome. Even her big moment, at the end, is handed over to another character when Meggie fails to carry it out.
Compare this to the kids of Lemony Snicket’s delightful A Series of Unfortunate Events. Surrounded by adults afflicted by villainy and stupidity, the Beaudelaire children have to figure everything out for themselves and are active in sorting out the disasters they get into. Not so Meggie. Funke refuses to allow her to think for herself, and even on the rare occasion that Meggie actually tries to do something, Funke quickly has her recaptured or foiled in some other way. No, it is up to Mo, Dustfinger and even the mad book lover Aunt, to save the day.
As for character development, Funke completely funks that with Meggie. She draws an irresistible picture of another author, fleshes out the book collecting Aunt, and makes Dustfinger, Silvertongue, Capricorn and a baddie called Basta, positively come alive on the pages. But Meggie is the one we are interested in – Meggie, who has been dragged around most of her life because of her father’s silver tongue, Meggie who has never had a chance to make friends and loses herself in books – Meggie, who lost her mother at the age of three and only feels mild jealousy at the thought of her. Meggie has no substance at all, because we barely know what she feels about any of this. Funke has hung a plot on the poor child, and never gives her a chance to affect the outcome. Even that is left up to other characters – Meggie is excluded from the plan to outwit the baddies, until it becomes necessary for her to know.
In all great children’s books, the children are the stars of the show. No one keeps anything from Harry Potter, no one hides the entrance to Narnia from the Pevensie children, no one snatches the moment of victory from even Enid Blyton’s jolly bunch of Famous Fives and Stupendous Sevens.
So I am predicting that the film makers, who understand this basic principle very well, won’t stand for it in their version. Meggie will morph from a victim of circumstances to an active key player, and the final, pivotal moment at the end of the book will be all hers – as it should be here.

Listeners to BBC UK’s radio program Women’s Hour recently chose this book as one of the top 30 titles in a list of women’s watershed fiction. I decided the time was ripe to revisit this book and find out why.
Even at first glance, it’s not hard to understand – The L-Shaped Room broke a lot of 60s taboos. It had a strong, independent heroine, who fell pregnant out of wedlock and decided to have her baby, against the conventions of the times. It featured Jews, blacks and prostitutes in sympathetic roles, and exposed society’s double standards on the repercussions sex out of wedlock. Yes, it is a bit dated now, but it still packs a punch.
The main character is Jane Graham, who finds herself pregnant after a less than fulfilling loss of virginity. (Yes, women were virgins into their late 20s in the 60s.) Tossed out by her outraged father, Jane gets herself a room in a dingy boarding house – the L-shaped room of the title. In spite of her determination to remain aloof, Jane becomes involved with the other tenants, notably a failed Jewish writer called Toby, a black jazz musician called John, and a gossipy old dear called Mavis.
Reid Banks’ strength has always been atmosphere. Indeed, the L-shaped room itself seems to be the strongest character in the book and she evokes the seedy district of Fulham with precision. But she was writing from a 60s viewpoint, and to a 21st Century perspective, and some of the characters jar – especially the jazz player. You can’t imagine Morgan Freeman playing this shambling, blubbery, clumsy character that seems to have stepped straight from the pages of Gone With The Wind, rather than real life. It is annoying that Aunt Addie, a pivotal character, isn’t mentioned until almost halfway through the book – considering her importance to Jane’s story, she seems to wander in almost as an afterthought.
The book was filmed in the 60s, with some strange changes – Jane, for example, was played by French actress Leslie Caron. It was as if the film makers thought the audience would find the whole thing more acceptable if the fallen woman wasn’t a decent English gal – Frenchwomen, it seemed to say, are more likely to be `that sort’.
John was played by Brock Peters, from the movie version of another watershed book, To Kill a Mockingbird.
This book takes the reader back into another time as a recreated TV series or modern novel simply cannot do – Reid Banks speaks in the language of the times. For example, although there are homosexual characters in the book, the word gay is not used in reference to either of them. There are passages that will grate on the nerves of the politically correct, and an eye opening awareness that, in spite of the rigid conventions left over from the 50s, this decade really was a time when you could choose to be a starving writer, a struggling jazz musician, or an unwed mother, and still find a place to belong. Strangely enough, when you put the book down, you realize that people who do not fit in with society are far less acceptable, and far more likely to fall through the cracks, now.
There is no doubt in my mind why Women’s Hour listeners were so affected by this book. Even after all this time, Jane stands out as a woman who chose to carve her own destiny – an achievement in any decade.

Life as a writer is full of discovery, but life as a reader even more so. I love discovering a writer new to me, but very rarely do I discover a perfect writer, a flawless book. In Anchee Min’s Empress Orchid I have found both.
Writers who read can be a pain in the butt, mentally editing every page. “Shouldn’t have put it that way – that bit’s leaden – typo! – this character talks like a lifestyle show host…” and so on and so on. I don’t go as far as red pencilling lines, but from my library borrowing there are plenty of readers who do.
I doubt anyone would do that with Anchee Min. Her prose is so beautifully constructed, so spare and pristine, yet managing to convey a tapestry of rich, complex emotion, that I am utterly in awe of it. My inner editor slunk away in shame.
Empress Orchid is the story of the last Empress of China, Tzu Hsi, who is painted by history as `a mastermind of pure evil and intrigue’. But the portrait Min has drawn from her extensive research is very different – the last Empress was a proud, intelligent and passionate woman, a jewel in the setting of the Forbidden City in Peking.
The novel stretches over some of the most turbulent times of 19th century China, but it is more than a historical record. The details Min paints – of the beauty and the ugliness of the Forbidden City, the place of women in that society, and the struggle for a woman with brains to use them without getting hanged, beheaded or buried alive – are breathtaking. Her prose is simple, utterly readable, yet the images she conveys to the reader’s mind are filled with colour and passion.
It is astonishing to read that the Emperor had 3000 wives and concubines and was expected to service them all, and provide hoards of children. But Tzu Hsi’s husband only managed to produce two and one of these was Tzu Hsi’s son.
These women were not permitted any life but to wait on the Emperor’s pleasure – and Tzu Hsi soon got bored with dressing up every day in case she was called to the Imperial bed. She was the sort of woman who had to take charge of her own destiny, which she already had done by joining the `contest’ to become one his wives. It was an Imperial version of the Bachelor, or the Flavor of Love – with the exception that the rejects joined the lower ranks of the concubines and were effectively denied any chance of bearing a child unless they managed to catch the Emperor’s attention.
But as any history buff knows, it is not wise to stand on superior judgement of the past – we are just as crazy in our own way today, and you don’t even have to watch reality shows to know that.
I am off to seek out Anchee Min’s other books, and eagerly await her second volume in the story of Tzu Hsi.

I tried, I really tried, to finish Sharon Osbourne’s autobiography Extreme. After all I had enjoyed Life with the Osbournes on TV and felt some sympathy for Ozzie’s problems with the remote – I can’t work the blasted things either.
But this book really lives up to its title – by the time I got to the part where Ozzie chews the head off a dove (which he had intended to release as a symbol of peace and love!) and spits it into the lap of some unfortunate girl, I had had enough. Sharon had already excused a slew of bad behaviour, such as Ozzie defecating in inappropriate places (such as a hotel guest’s shoe) and her own problems holding her water, and whether it was the 70s or not, I just couldn’t take any more.
I am sure Sharon Osbourne is a great raconteur, and she might even have me laughing if she told these stories in person (although I would make sure my shoes were well out of the way) but the book is written as if she were regaling drunk dinner guests, splattered with expletives (most of them unnecessary but they do pad the word count) and it just doesn’t come across as very funny.
Instead, it sounds whiny and hysterical, and where she tries to excuse what was going on (like killing the dove) she made me recoil from the page. There is also an irritating snobbishness, such as when she meets Ozzie’s first wife and concludes they have nothing in common because Sharon shops at Dior. Well, dang me. Even her own mother gets the “we have nothing whatsoever in common” treatment, which is a bit harsh because I’m sure they at least have the day of Sharon’s birth in common.
I really wanted to like this book – on TV, the Osbournes came across as a scatty but likeable mob. But this book does a poor job of reinforcing that impression. Now it turns out I may be in surprisingly good company – apparently Ozzie can’t finish it either.

8.30am, July 16 2005, a small town in Queensland, Australia and a bunch of happy strangers are waiting for Harry…
I preordered Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince over a month ago, $10 down and the promise of a `magic price’ on HP Day. Since I had bought Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix through the same sellers two years ago, I was happy to go the same route again. For one thing, they always made a bit of an occasion of it.
This year was no exception. There were lots of little Hermiones and Harrys in the queue, including a young Daniel Radcliffe lookalike with glasses, but with dark blonde hair. He was getting a lot of covert glances from the Hermiones.
The staff rose to the occasion in pointed hats, and even dressed one of their number up in Harry Potter robes and glasses to keep the crowd amused. This he did, cracking jokes, casting spells on the other staff members and handing out lollipops.
The atmosphere was terrific – all over the world, at this time, HP fans would be doing exactly what we were doing, waiting for the boxes to arrive and the first books to be handed out. The sense of camaradie, even among older relatives just there to pick up a copy for a loved grandkid or nephew or niece, was heartwarming. It’s wonderful how a book can bring people together.
The lookalike situation got a little spooky – a dead ringer for JK Rowling, trailing two children, walked in and joined the queue.
Then came the big moments, as the boxes were carried in and lined up on the counter. We all craned our necks to see the first one opened. The store manager started handing out free Harry Potter caps to those who had preordered. No, I won’t be wearing mine – I have a grandson who will love it.
And best of all, the price was magical – all I had to pay on top of my $10 AUSD deposit was $12.50!
I won’t be publishing any spoilers as I read it – except to say the the illustration on the inside of the dust jacket is VERY intriguing…

There’s nothing like the life of a freelancer – one day you are snowed under with work, the next you have enough time on your hands to blog again.
Of course, things usually die down around Christmas, but this year the period leading up to Christmas has been particularly busy – not that there’s anything wrong with that! But I know that business will get quiet now until Christmas is over and everyone starts gearing up for the New Year.
A bit more downtime means I have more time for reading – oh joy! – and with Christmas so close, I have to knuckle down to some mserious decoration and present making, crafts being my other hobby.
I am currently reading The Archers – The True Story, by William Smethurst. It is fascinating and compulsive reading. Who knew there would be so much drama behind the comfy radio serial I used to listen to with my Mum? The ups and downs of the show over its amzingly long run on the BBC are faithfully recorded. I feel most sorry for Gwen Berryman, who played Doris Archer – in her advancing years she suffered terribly from arthritis and was forced to climb two flights of stairs to a stuffy little recording room. As arthritis attacked her hands, it was increasingly difficult for her to turn script pages quietly. I am now officially an osteoarthristis sufferer so I know how she felt.
The poor woman was kept in a constant state of fear over her job security, even though she often suffered so much pain that she felt she had to resign – but her resignations were never accepted, nor was her life made easier by the producers. If the actors were poorly treated and poorly paid, the writers were even more so, as they struggled to keep up audience interest.
But it was ever thus – in the world of entertainment, writers are the lowest on the totem pole.
Speaking of the BBC, I have discovered BBC Radio 7, a marvellous service replaying all my old radio favourites – The Navy Lark, The Goons, Round The Horne – as well as drama serials like The Forsyte Saga and Les Miserables, and documentaries like This Sceptered Isle. For a die hard radio fan like me it’s Heaven, and a wonderful escape from modern radio, which does nothing but play Britney Spears and rap songs ad nauseum.
Try out BBC 7, plug in your earphones and have fun!

I’ve been meaning put this review into the blog for a while, and after a bit of a blogging drought, what better way to warm up?
Dan Brown’s book is a good read, but it is about an idea rather than people, so don’t expect much in the way of characterization.
No doubt the leading characters will have more depth when they are played by Russell Crowe and Kate Beckinsale in the planned movie version next year. But that’s the way fiction is written these days – the writer has to create characters who can be played by movie stars, not characters who fire the imagination of the readers.
In fact, very early in this book, Brown drops a big hint that he sees Harrison Ford in the role of his protagonist, Robert Langdon, rather than Crowe – but Ford is getting on these days, and we all know that Crowe will do a good job of giving Langdon the depth he lacks here.
What carries this book forward is the plot, and that is interesting. Langdon is a professor of religious symbology on an enforced quest for the Holy Grail, in the company of a comely French cryptologist, Sophie Neveu.
But as anyone who has read anything remotely connected to the Holy Grail in the last 20 years, they are not going to find the Cup of Christ. Rather the grail is a metaphor for something else that I won’t mention here in case there is a prospective reader somewhere who doesn’t know. The adventure starts with the murder of the curator of the Louvre, and quickly gathers speed when Langdon meets Sophie and goes on the run. He is the prime suspect for the murder, and she has reason to believe that he has knowledge that can tell her more about her family.
The dead curator has left a trail of riddles and anagrams for the two to crack, and part of the fun of The Da Vinci Code is trying to figure them out before Langdon and Sophie do. The trail leads to fascinating places that are richly described, and leads the reader to the Internet to look up The Temple Church in London and the two pyramids at the Louvre. Brown even makes this part easy, because all you have to do is go to his website.
The shoes of the Bad Guy are filled by an Albino devotee of the Opus Dei cult called Silas, which no doubt will be interesting to cast. But it pays off for the reader. Silas is actually the most fleshed out and sympathetic character in the book, even if he is also the most murderous.
The one other character that fascinates is Leonardo Da Vinci himself – although he does not actually appear in the book, his presence hangs over it, and the discussions of the secret codes and puzzles in his paintings are riveting.