The
truth can do what it likes, but fiction must follow rules.
In real life, even if we tried, we
couldn’t stop bizarre things happening. In
fact, most people don’t want to stop bizarre things happening. We love it when strange stories make the
news. What an odd old world we live
in! But fiction is not real life. A lot of the fiction we read has not got much
to do with real life at all. It is
reassuring and conventional. That’s what
fiction should be like, apparently.
An amateur reviewer has found tireless: too bizarre. Of all things, a fan of sci-fi, where you
might expect bizarre events to be the norm; a genre full of incidents and
characters too strange for us to come across in real life, at least for a
century or two. The War of the Worlds is an old favourite. Remember the alien squid? They’re not going to pop up on our radar
anytime soon, but they did help establish a few rules. The book is classic science-fiction. The alien squid are normal now.
For
the reviewer, tireless: is not just
too bizarre. It also imitates ‘decent
literary satire.’ This raises an obvious
question: what is decent literary satire?
Presumably in an effort to answer the same question, he started reading Samuel
Butler’s Erewhon, a satire on
Victorian society written in 1872, two minutes before he posted the review, according
to the book club website.
This literary satire has been around a
while. It must be decent literary
satire. Its alien squid have now become
the norm. Next day he gave Erewhon a three-star rating. A pity Butler wasn’t around to watch.
Of
course, our friend may be right; tireless:
may be awful, but however perceptive a reviewer’s comments are, they still tell
us more about the squid inside his own head than about the book in question.
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