Coming around agaaaain - recurrence of things
Ten debut novelists - predicatably litfic and photogenic and mainstream published, siiiigh and all about the beginnings and the relatively young. Okay, they are becoming more diverse, modified yay.
And here we have the rediscovery, not for the first time, of the unexpected virtues of a despised genre, though, honestly, I am not sure all the works under discussion are what one would normally classify as 'bonkbuster': What trashy novels taught me about life. What does unite them is that they are by women, about women, and for women. And meant to be pleasurable reads.
It is a truth universally acknowledged that there are some historical events that novelists just keep on revisiting and reworking: I think I first read a historical novel about this Jacobean murder case when I was 13 and I very much doubt it is the only one: A Net for Small Fishes by Lucy Jago. (And doesn't one of the dons at Somerville want to interrogate Harriet Vane about the Overbury case at some point in Gaudy Night?) Some years back I read an sf novel by LA Taylor, The Fathergod Experiment (1999, apparently recently re-released as ebook), in which the central plot appeared to me to be closely based on this case, but with (can't lay my hands on my copy, which is somewhere around) alien anthropologist observers?
Talking of anthropology and participant observation, A man's world… Tabitha Lasley's extraordinary account of the lives of offshore oil workers - okay, it is probably not in the least like Rosemary Daniell's 1985 Sleeping with Soldiers: In Search of the Macho Man, which also included a stint working on an oil-rig.
I see that it's been changed in the online version, but in the print edition the headline of this review was 'Impotence isn't a joke': also it is NOT THE SAME THING AS INFERTILITY and I am aghast that this misapprehension is still going around.
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