Lists: The Greatest British Novels of the 20th Century
See also:
My London blog (photos and ramblings):
www.williamruby.blogspot.co.uk
My novel, Kindness is a City:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Kindness-is-a-City-ebook/dp/B009N0DCY4/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1359279700&sr=8-1
LATEST ESSAY:
Fifty Shades of Shit: the Nadir of Our Cultural Life
There is a small but incontestable set of criteria to mark one out as a cretistine, that singular combination of philistine and cretin. These are:
- taking the Daily Mail for news and reviews
- not being totally bored of Adele yet
- owning all of The Pirates of the Caribbean DVDs
- believing We Will Rock You is great theatre
- reading Fifty Shades of Grey
Of these, an affinity with, fondness for or intimate knowledge of Fifty Shades… represents the ultimate—the categorical–testament to a person’s irredeemable level of cultural idiocy.
At the risk of falling on my own drawn dagger by actually knowing of them (I got them from other websites, honest), here are some quotes:
'Mentally girding my loins, I head into the hotel’; ‘'Her curiosity oozes through the phone'; “My subconscious has reared her somnambulant head. Where was she when I needed her?”; “My subconscious nods sagely, a you’ve-finally-worked-it-out-stupid look on her face”; “I gaze at my mom. Her earlier jubilation has metamorphosed into concern”; "Christian, you are the state lottery, the cure for cancer, and the three wishes from Aladdin's lamp all rolled into one"; "My inner goddess fist pumps the air above her chaise lounge’.
Notice if you will that I have avoided any of the really bad dirty bits. They are beyond parody, beyond sensible analysis. Even without them the quality of writing here would deserve some acute degree of censure and corrective surgery were it offered up by a GCSE English student with a new thesaurus. The synonyms alone would appal a Kentucky trailer park shit-kicker. It is the English language at its very worst: riddled with egregious self-harm, shorn of its beautiful simplicity. Such prose should be sought by nobody, or quarantined within its tiny literary niche, or condemned to the shredder.
Instead, it has been read 65 million times around the world. Sixty-five million times!
That’s twice as many times as To Kill a Mockingbird has been read, four times The Grapes of Wrath and six times Catch-22. The greatest English language novels of the last two decades—Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections and J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace—have between them garnered a tiny and almost insignificant readership in comparison. I can think of few more depressing literary statistics. That the average published writer of highly readable prose earns less than ten grand a year for their tireless efforts while the ‘artist’ who produced Fifty Shades..is now able to live the life of Marie Antoinette is something I prefer not to pursue too avidly for fear of a violent convulsion.
And not so much simply wrong, this rather is a clear indicator of the new low level of things in western artistic culture. Fifty Shades.. has become totemic of our steeply declining artistic sensibility in a world dominated by big brand obviousness and a crass neglect of personal individual taste. There are other culprits: Harry Potter, the Twilight series, The Da Vinci Code, Simon Cowell, the aforementioned Adele. They have all played their insidious part; but not like Fifty Shades…, not so harmfully, so obviously. The notion that books should be read and films should be seen simply because others are reading them and seeing them is the very least of the motivations for choosing art; instead, it has become the primary—indeed sometimes the only—reason why we read or see them.
Our narrowness has become alarming. We are lazy, and derive pleasure from things in an almost incestuous manner. It is art as inbreeding.
There are those who would claim that the legitimate significance of the book’s huge sales has been some kind of contemporary sexual liberation of a multitude of bored or misunderstood women that has been neglected by its men-folk and by its own erotic timidity. This is crassness upon crassness. Were Christian Grey a fat, balding fifty-five year-old photocopier salesman, then one might argue that the book’s readership was seeking assurance that their own amorous existence could be so, with the men in their lives capable of accompanying them on a new journey to fulfilment. But Christian Grey is a superlative millionaire Adonis, unreachable, idealised, symbolic of age-old fantasies and no more. Were Christian more recognizably a man of the real world as lived by the women imagining him, then these same women would be forced to act on their suggested new impulses and actually make the naughty bedroom thing happen. The fact that most will not—will not in fact actually want to because they see it for what it actually is, porn, ephemera—is the very clearest evidence you could ever need that these women are in fact more sensible of a simple modish event than the patronising promoters of the imagined importance of Fifty Shades..would give them credit for.
They read it because it is rude and harmless, a giggle, something akin to raking fingernails down a male stripper’s buttocks in a pub full of other briefly liberated women.
And were all of the millions indulging in this idiotic nonsense at least cognizant of their postponement of good sense then things would not be so bad. On the contrary I fear that Fifty Shades..will appear for some years to come in a multitude of ‘Top Ten Best Books Wot I’ve Read’ nominations, not least because its salacious nature may have kick-started a habit for reading fiction that had been dormant or near-extinct in a depressingly wide range of folk. People like Fifty Shades.. because it is memorable; memorably bad but stored forever in the very forefront of the frontal lobes of the simpleton, like a red rubber dress is on display in an Ann Summers shop window because more tasteful , hand-stitched cotton will just never do the same trick.
William Ruby
March 2013
Appendix
Oh, if you insist….here’s some of the crap sex bits:
- Anal: ‘I’d like to claim your ass, Anastasia.’
- Oral: ‘He’s my very own Christian Grey popsicle.’
- Bukkake: ‘I open my eyes—I’m draped in Christian Grey.’
- Indeterminate sexual activity: ‘His finger circled my puckered love cave.’
ENOUGH!
William Ruby
LATEST LIST:
Decline and Fall by Evelyn Waugh
A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
Animal Farm by George Orwell
Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie
Titus Groan by Mervyn Peake
1984 by George Orwell
Brighton Rock by Graham Greene
The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Graham
To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
I, Claudius by Robert Graves
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