Simon Alexander Collier
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Heartfelt, Hilarious, Horrendous

8/30/2012

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I was thinking about the adjectives used to describe books, particularly in their publicity materials or the Amazon product summaries, and was wondering what are the most unintentionally bad adjectives. My personal non-favourite is “heartwarming”. 

I have two problems with this: first, it suggests that the reader is seeking something which directly lifts the spirits, by infusing them with positive sentiment, rather than lifting their spirits more obliquely by being a really good book. PG Wodehouse lifts the sprits, because he is clever and funny, but nobody would call his books “heartwarming”. Even, to take an extreme example, Jude The Obscure lifts the spirits, by moving you with its greatness as a work of literature, although admittedly you do have to get through about 48 hours of wanting to throw yourself out the window before the positive feelings kick in. In fact, is there anything of any artistic merit that could accurately be described as “heartwarming”? “Hamlet - a heartwarming tale of the ups and downs of a Danish prince”? “The Godfather - a heartwarming film about a close-knit Italian-American family”? I suggest not.

My second issue with “heartwarming” is it presumes my emotional response. I will decide how to react and at what temperature I want my bodily parts, thank you very much! For the same reason, I think it is a mistake to describe books as “hilarious” or “hysterically funny”. It seems to me both presumptuous of your audience and likely to be untrue for many, however good the work is. I’ve stuck with “humorous” for description of my book, since that describes the style; the reader can decide how funny (if at all) they think it is for themselves.

There is a marvellous slang idiom in Japanese used by teenagers - “Zenbei ga naita” - which means literally “All America wept”. They use this to describe things that are of no worth, because many cheesy Hollywood films are marketed in Japan with that hyperbolic slogan, so if you hear it you know the film isn’t worth seeing. The campaign for “heartwarming” to acquire a similar ironic meaning starts (and probably ends) here! Meanwhile, knowing that such irony is alive and well among the spiky-haired youth of Tokyo is enough to raise the temperature of your internal organs.
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“Darling, you’re being historical!”

8/23/2012

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One of the reviews of “Milligan and the Samurai Rebels” on Amazon raises the important question of the historical accuracy of the dialogue. This challenge of getting characters to speak in a mode convincingly of their time while accessible to the modern reader is I imagine one that haunts all writers of historical fiction as it did me. There are I think two parts to this: inadvertent anachronism, and intentional modernisation.

With anachronisms, it is not only words but also objects that can be out of their time. Most well-known are slips by film-makers, such as extras in costume dramas still wearing their digital watches. English like other languages does of course change over time, and lexicographical lapses are easier to make than you think. One that my editor, Jo Field, picked up was my use in a couple of places of the word “Blighty” by Milligan to refer to his home country. “But it’s a posh, old-fashioned term that would surely have been used by a 19th century diplomat!” I spluttered to myself, before checking and seeing that it only came into use during the First World War and then went out of common useage in the post-Second World War period; an anachronism for a 19th century and a 21st century speaker.

Then there is intentional adjustment to improve accessibility for the modern reader. This is true in my book and others for some of the spelling, for example. Fully authentic historical dialogue, particularly in a supposedly humorous work, might at times be tough, or worse unamusing (think much of Shakespeare’s comedies), for a contemporary audience. Attitudes to women and minorities have also changed (think Taming of the Shrew or Merchant of Venice), although that can be used for comedic value, as say George McDonald Fraser does with his Flashman character. In general I aim for a balance between authenticity on the one hand and accessibility or effectiveness on the other.

How to achieve authenticity? That has to be through reading works of the time itself. Relying only on modern books about the period or on your own acquired impression of how people spoke “back then” can lead to error as the above “Blighty” example shows. I was lucky to have the diaries of Ernest Satow, a real figure and a character in my novel, to show me just how young diplomats of the 1860s spoke and wrote. And fortunately, sardonic understatement has deep foundations in the British version of the English language upon which I could erect my modest construction.

I think that through careful consideration, good editing and reference to 19th century sources I have got the language about right, but I can’t rule out the odd historical slip. Certainly I’m glad that my initial opening line of “Oi Milligan, lend us your i-Phone will ya?!” hit the cutting room floor.
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August Book of the Month: Romance Novel, by PJ Jones

8/16/2012

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August’s Book of the Month is a self-published story from the American humour (or rather humor) writer PJ Jones, author of several spoofs and the funny but also moving farce “Driving Me Crazy!”. I shouldn’t like “Romance Novel” - I have a limited appetite for the spoof form, and it sends up not only romance fiction, which I don’t read, but also the Twilight series, which I have neither read nor seen. Nevertheless, I found this book very entertaining because Ms Jones is pitch perfect throughout, hitting the right notes (or should that be the right wrong notes?) time after time. It’s very difficult not to like any form of fiction when done this well. If you’re familiar with the originals you’ll get even more out of it.

The old British comedian Les Dawson used to be very funny with his intentionally awful piano playing, but he could only do it so amusingly badly because he could play well in the first place. “Romance Novel” is a bit like that: you can tell that PJ Jones can write well or she wouldn’t be able to send up bad writing so successfully. In addition to the narrative voice frequently reminding you how absurd the whole thing is, the character names are faultless - Smella Rosepetal, Deadward Forest, Snake Long et. al. - and the running jokes - the baby whose name keeps changing, the token black character who refuses to be a token, the virginal mother etc - don’t wear off. From the great cover to vampires' obsession with the Bee Gees (I always wondered who bought their bloody records), there is quality humour throughout.

“Romance Novel” is perhaps not for those easily offended, since it introduces explicit sexual conduct, flatulence and bad words not usually found in Mills & Boon (or so I understand), but if like me you only object to that sort of thing if it is gratuitous, then you won’t object here; these are used always to send up the conventions of romantic fiction. 

Nobel prize winner? No. But unsurpassable spoof fiction. 
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Endangered Species

8/10/2012

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Sadly, my local second-hand English bookshop in Tokyo - the Blue Parrot - is no more. It has ceased to be. Bereft of life it rests in peace. It is an ex-bookshop. I can’t say it’s a great surprise: the last couple of times I’ve been in I got the feeling that business was grim. If they hadn’t nailed it to the perch it would have been pushing up the daisies a while ago. (That’s enough Monty Python. Ed.)

Anyway, I will miss the clustered charm that the Blue Parrot brought to the Takadanobaba area, but then as an Amazon customer and e-book reader, like one of the characters in Murder on the Orient Express (spoiler alert) in effect I had my hand on the knife too. Bookshops are in trouble pretty much everywhere these days, and one of the little reported consequences of the online and e-publishing revolutions is how they have transformed the purchasing of books by those who live in countries where the native language is not their own. The old model was that we English-speakers in Japan had no option but to trek across town to one of the small number of Japanese bookshops with a decent foreign language section - and there are only a handful even in Tokyo - where we were met with a fairly limited range of books and prices twice those charged back home. But these days we have access to the whole of Amazon, and even with postage our purchases are at most no more expensive and are often less costly than those from a local bookshop. The bricks and mortar outlets are under pressure for similar reasons everywhere, but the changes are particularly acute for English booksellers in places like Japan. So the Blue Parrot’s demise may foreshadow many more English language book retailers in non-English speaking countries kicking the bucket. Indeed, I read just recently that the main such outlet in Paris is to shuffle off its mortal coil, run down the curtain and join the choir invisible. (I’ve warned you. Ed.)

I remember the Kinokuniya bookshop in Osaka fondly (still there I believe), which was not only somewhere to buy reading material but also a great place to bump into Western friends and strangers in Japan’s second city. Something will be lost if these places go, but it’s important to recognise that a lot has also been gained; the reading options for those outside of a native language environment have improved immeasurably. If English-language bookstores in non-English speaking countries do go the way of the Norwegian Blue it will be a shame, but hypocrisy should be avoided. There is no point pining for the fjords. (Right, that’s it. Ed.) 

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"Checking out the competition"

8/2/2012

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I made a flippant comment on my Facebook page after buying works by other Japanese historical fiction writers that I was “checking out the competition”. The British writer David Walters, the first of whose Samurai Trilogy was among the books I purchased, asked (genuinely) if I thought Japanese historical novels were really in competition, and suggested that in contrast he thought they helped stimulate interest in this type of book and hence were complementary. I agree, and this interaction made me think a bit harder about the impact of one book on the market for other books, and indeed in which market it is that any given book is searching for readers.

The UK’s Monopolies Commission (and why was there only one? as the old joke went) used to look at whether certain companies were becoming too dominant in their market, which led to a great deal of work about how exactly you defined a particular company’s market. For example, is a bus company in the “bus travel” market or the “travel” market where it is also competing against train operators? It’s often not clear. The same logic applies with books. Is “Milligan and the Samurai Rebels” in the “Japanese historical fiction” market, or that for “historical fiction” or even just “fiction”? If the first of these then the Samurai Trilogy is my “competition”, but if the market is general fiction then everything up to Fifty Shades of Grey is a “competitor” (and suitably I’m getting spanked by EL James, as is every other author).

So one question without a clear answer is about the market, but another is that raised by Mr Walters – to what extent do books and authors “compete” with each other anyway? This is where the book market differs from say the travel market. On the whole, people don’t think “I had such a pleasant journey the other day on Company A’s bus that I’ll think I’ll make a journey I wasn’t otherwise going to make and try out the bus (or train) of company B”. But with books that is pretty much what they do; a book that is a positive experience for the reader may well lead on to purchases of books of a similar style, or even of books of a different style too because the pleasure of reading has become more evident to the individual concerned. Anecdotally, I understand that this is the positive impact the Harry Potter series had on the teenage fiction market.

So given the capacity to expand the market, whether that be narrowly or broadly defined, I don’t think authors are in competition with each other. I look forward to readers of the Samurai Trilogy trying “Milligan and the Samurai Rebels” and vice versa. And if I put any of them off Japanese historical fiction for life, I’m sorry David! 
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    Author

    Simon Alexander Collier is a former British diplomat and the author of "Milligan and the Samurai Rebels", a humorous, historical novel set in the Japan of the 1860s. 
    Born in 1970 in Oxford, England, Simon now lives in Tokyo, Japan. He is married with two children. 

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