The Guardian's Blog, page 148

Teen fiction's ordinary romantic heroes

It's been claimed that seductive male beauties in YA fiction set unattainable standards for adolescent boys. But plenty of them are reassuringly unspectacular

Last week, a blogger asked whether the handsome heartthrobs of contemporary teen fiction were bad for boys' self-esteem: "While the adventures of Clary (in The Mortal Instruments) or Bella (in Twilight) act as a great self-esteem boost for female readers, reassuring them that it's OK to be shy or wish you were prettier or more popular, what messages do they send male readers?" wrote Millie Woodrow-Hill. "Have you ever read a piece of teen fiction in which a female protagonist falls in love with a boy who carries too much weight around his waist?"

While there's no denying that YA fiction has its share of heroes with chiseled cheekbones and dreamy eyes, by no means do these cliched cuties dominate the swoonstakes. The Prince Charming of YA fiction has a much more multifaceted and compelling counterpart; a romantic rival who's flawed, damaged or downright ugly, but no less desirable for it.

In What My Mother Doesn't Know by Sonya Sones, ninth-grader Sophie dates typically gorgeous Dylan, ditching him when she realises they have no emotional connection. Sophie ultimately falls for unpopular, unattractive Robin, an artistic, sensitive outsider who recounts his side of the story in the sequel, What My Girlfriend Doesn't Know.

Teen cancer patient Hazel, the narrator of John Green's The Fault in Our Stars, finds love in Augustus Waters, an amputee and cancer survivor with charm and a killer sense of humour.

Meg Rosoff's modern classic How I Live Now features troubled teen protagonist Daisy facing a fictional third world war. She falls in love with her cousin, who she initially describes as "some kind of mutt" with "hair that looked like he cut it himself with a hatchet in the dead of night".

In every example, the moral is loud and clear; it's what's inside that counts. And in a society obsessed with appearance, that's a powerful message teen readers need to be reaffirmed at every chance.

Teen fiction fulfills an important role for young readers, reflecting adolescent anxieties, frustrations and fears, and providing a safe, consequence-free space to explore their developing sexualities and desires. There's a long list of fantastic YA titles past and present that chronicle the real life volatility, clumsiness and confusion of these first romantic encounters in rivetingly authentic, recognisable detail.

So what of those conventionally captivating suitors, who may even sparkle in the sunlight? They usually fall into one of two camps: the hot but vacuous male bimbo, representing style over substance, most often dumped to demonstrate the importance of personality. Or the somewhat supernaturally good-looking guy; the misfit combining magnetism and menace.

From Zillah in Poppy Z Brite's Lost Souls series to Kade in LB Schulman's League of Strays, the reason these drool-inducing dreamboats are so exciting to read about is a trope as old as time: evil is sexy.

These charismatic characters use their appearance and sexual power to manipulate those around them, highlighting the importance of looking past aesthetics. Whether intentionally or otherwise, these ravishing romeos serve as analogies for the seductive possibilities of breaking the rules, but usually end up reiterating the same message as their imperfect opposites; that true beauty comes from within.

There are many dubious lessons being taught by the likes of Twilight (like the idea that sneaking into a teenage girl's bedroom to watch her sleep is romantic, as opposed to really rather sinister), but as a genre YA fiction is neither cause or catalyst for boys' insecurities.

If anything, the point made by most of these seemingly too-good-be-true romantic heroes is that they're exactly that. Mr. Perfect doesn't exist, in real life or in fiction. Teen novels teach their readers how to judge characters – in fiction and the wider world – and shape their ability to recognise actions, ethics and ideas as more meaningful than appearance. And surely that's a concept YA readers of both genders can celebrate and support.

Children and teenagersFictionMeg RosoffTwilightStephenie Meyer
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Poem of the week: The Charge of the Light Brigade by Alfred Tennyson

Not a protest, but in no way a celebration of a disastrous historical event, it remains a compelling dramatisation of battle

Once enormously popular and much-memorised, this week's poem, Alfred Tennyson's The Charge of the Light Brigade, was also vilified, according to JB Steane, as "horrid rubbish". It's a verdict Steane himself tentatively commends ("I think there might be something in it.") Even the poet seems to have found its popularity irritating. So how does it look from 2014? Great poem, good poem, bad poem, good bad poem?

It's certainly the kind of poem people love or hate for anything-but-literary reasons. The subject is an emotive one, centred on the timelessly appealing stereotype of heroic ordinary soldier versus incompetent high command (a theme which continued to grip the imagination of the poets of the first world war). Tennyson's poem is not, of course, a fantasy: it's a largely accurate account of an actual, and very dreadful, historical event which took place during the Battle of Balaclava. To its admirers, the poem's a tribute to the Light Brigade's selfless courage: to its attackers, it's the sentimental glorification of war and empire.

Written in response to a Times editorial, in which the author referred to "a hideous blunder" in the conduct of the battle, The Charge of the Light Brigade may signal a new journalistic genre of poetry, where, if the news can't be got from poems, poets can certainly get their poems from the news. But this is also poetry in the ancient costume of the ballad, re-tailored for new times by the Romantic poets a little earlier. The genre is an oral one, and it's significant that, before he wrote anything down, Tennyson sang the poem aloud as he walked over the chalk ridge near his home on the Isle of Wight. Back in his study he swiftly transcribed it, then sent it to the London Examiner, where it was published a week later, on 9 December 1854.

The Times article seems to have led Tennyson to the phrase, "Someone had blunder'd", and so to his perfectly-chosen metrical scheme – dactylic dimeter. "Blunder'd," though used only once, begets the rhyme with "the six hundred", main component of the poem's trenchant refrain. Tumultuous hoof-beats sound in these repetitions. It's as if one word had acted as an aural shortcut into Tennyson's whole imagination. The line, "Someone had blundered," almost casually inserted in verse two, is an understatement in the context, and all the more effective for it.

Since the poem soon became essential reading for the soldiers in the field, it seems that Tennyson's imagination stood the test of authenticity: at least, he had produced a story which drew assent. The poem is remarkable for the simplicity and dramatic immediacy of its description. The relentless pace of the cavalry as they gallop into "the mouth of Hell" is vividly rendered in the breathlessly short lines and thundering rhythms, whereas the return of the survivors brings a gasp of shocked recognition: "but not/ Not the six hundred".

Tennyson's poem doesn't contribute to the analysis of the "blunder" itself, though he might have found rich material in the psychology of the main players. I don't think it sets out to glorify war, but it's certainly not a protest. It recreates the sabre-flashing excitement of warfare, even in the ironical context of bare sabres against guns. There's a certain theatricality and exaggeration in the twice-repeated line, "All the world wonder'd". Skilful elision and brilliantly descriptive shorthand at times approach cliche. Yet its narrative grip and verve are beyond question. It's not a great poem, perhaps, but it is a great ballad.

Tennyson himself recites the poem on a wax-cylinder recording here. And, yes, the text has even been translated into Russian.

The Charge of the Light Brigade

       I
HALF a league, half a league,
   Half a league onward,
All in the valley of Death
   Rode the six hundred.
'Forward, the Light Brigade!
Charge for the guns!' he said:
Into the valley of Death
   Rode the six hundred.

       II
'Forward, the Light Brigade!'
Was there a man dismay'd?
Not tho' the soldier knew
   Some one had blunder'd:
Their's not to make reply,
Their's not to reason why,
Their's but to do and die:
Into the valley of Death
   Rode the six hundred.

       III
Cannon to right of them,
Cannon to left of them,
Cannon in front of them
   Volley'd and thunder'd;
Storm'd at with shot and shell,
Boldly they rode and well,
Into the jaws of Death,
Into the mouth of Hell
   Rode the six hundred.

       IV
Flash'd all their sabres bare,
Flash'd as they turn'd in air
Sabring the gunners there,
Charging an army, while
   All the world wonder'd:
Plunged in the battery-smoke
Right thro' the line they broke;
Cossack and Russian
Reel'd from the sabre-stroke
   Shatter'd and sunder'd.
Then they rode back, but not
   Not the six hundred.

       V
Cannon to right of them,
Cannon to left of them,
Cannon behind them
   Volley'd and thunder'd;
Storm'd at with shot and shell,
While horse and hero fell,
They that had fought so well
Came thro' the jaws of Death,
Back from the mouth of Hell,
All that was left of them,
   Left of six hundred.

       VI
When can their glory fade?
O the wild charge they made!
   All the world wonder'd.
Honour the charge they made!
Honour the Light Brigade,
   Noble six hundred!

Alfred TennysonPoetryCarol Rumens
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Is it The Wheel of Time's turn for a Hugo award?

It is an inflated copy of JRR Tolkien, but Robert Jordan's multimillion-selling series is an achievement the judges just can't ignore

The Wheel of Time began turning in 1990. Initially planned as a trilogy, by the time of author Robert Jordan's death in 2007 the series had grown to a mighty 12 volumes. Working from Jordan's notes, Brandon Sanderson added a further three volumes of eternal struggle. This sprawling fantasy epic has gone on to sell some 44m copies in north America alone, with global figures estimated as closer to 80 to 90m. That may be about a squillion times more than every Booker prize winner put together, but The Wheel of Time remains oddly unacknowledged beyond the fans that adore it.

But that's about to change, as a campaign has launched to get the entire 15 volumes of the series on to the 2014 Hugo awards shortlist. That's right, all 4,422,397 words and 129 point-of-view characters are, according to WoT fan Jenniferl, eligible under the bylaws of the Hugo voting process because the last of Brandon Sanderson's contributions was published in 2013. Imagine that every single episode of popular soap opera Days of Our Lives were considered to be part of one vast, awful, horrifying car crash of a movie, and therefore put forward en masse for the best film award at the Oscars. Then pretend the Oscars were semi-decided by popular vote, and the obsessive Days of Our Lives audience turned out to block-vote for it.

It's crazy as a band of beserkers – there's no way a 15-volume, two-author series of novels that was originally envisaged as a trilogy constitutes a single "work appearing in a number of parts" – but the Hugo judges have postponed the inevitable controversy, refusing to comment unless the "book" receives enough votes to gain a nomination.

Even if the series could muscle its way on to the shortlist, there's no guarantee it would much get further. For all its epic success, The Wheel of Time is not uniformly loved, even by fans of epic fantasy. Like Terry Brooks, Raymond Feist and Terry Goodkind, Robert Jordan's works bear a startling resemblance to JRR Tolkien's Lord of the Rings.

But if you put to one side the question of why so many writers should choose to imitate the multi-billion pound media franchise that is Tolkien's Middle Earth, then what's left is the text. And what a text. Adam Roberts anatomised the clunky writing and dodgy structures of Jordan's series in his own equally epic series of reviews, dissecting the first 11 volumes in an effort to understand a literary species that – by any common standards of artistic evolution – should not have survived.

Bad writing is, of course, somewhat subjective. If you're accustomed to reading the beautiful sentences of Zadie Smith or Michael Chabon then this kind of thing is likely to read like feral orc claws being scraped across dragon scales. Brandon Sanderson's prose is considerably tighter than Jordan's, but he still spends 11 entire paragraphs describing the wind blowing, and it ain't John Steinbeck. Laughter breaks the air, light spills, heads are, of course, thrown back. It's a clichefest , but, if you read it in the barrel-chested tones of Brian Blessed – the heroic rendition I imagine WoT fans have in mind – it kind of makes sense.

If the obsessive, unquestioning adoration of The Wheel of Time fandom seems to border on the religious, that's because it is. Fandoms of all kinds, and in particular those based around fantasy stories, often have the feel of a cult: a secret community that belongs to its believers, with a shared culture that reflects the values of their faith. There's a certain irony that 21st-century Britain – a largely secular state built on the foundations of rationalism – still grinds to a halt on the sabbath to worship a resurrected immortal with powers over space and time. Just because you're a Doctor doesn't mean you can't be a messiah as well, whoever you are.

Tolkien's Lord of the Rings was forged from years of research, channelling all his linguistic expertise and his experiences of the first world war to create a mighty myth for the modern age. The Wheel of Time can't compare – it is more like a magpie's nest, a meaningless muddle studded with shining objects. But in a world where religious experiences have been sidelined it has struck a powerful chord. It may not make any sense for The Wheel of Time to be on the shortlist, it may be only a badly-written patchwork of borrowed ideas, but anything that can address that desperate spiritual hunger has got to be worth a Hugo.

FantasyFictionJRR TolkienDamien Walter
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The Arthur C Clarke awards put women first

After last year's embarrassing all-male shortlist, organisers are this year reminding voters that women write SF too

Dogged by controversy after last year's all-male shortlist, the organisers of the Arthur C Clarke awards have responded in 2014 by raising the profile of female authors, publishing a separate list of the submissions from women writers.

Traditionally, all the books that have been nominated for the award are published just before the shorlist in April, but this year the list will be published in two parts, starting with a list of the 33 entries written by women.

The visibility of women in science fiction has been something of a hot topic in the last couple of years, with Damien Walter suggesting that "a genre that women have done so much to shape seems to have been co-opted by men."

As a response to last year's kerfuffle and the ongoing discussions about the profile of women writers, the Clarke awards director Tom Hunter says of the submissions reveal: "This year we've chosen to do this in two parts, first releasing this list of the 33 female authors submitted for the prize, which we hope will be a positive contribution towards further raising the profile of women writers of science fiction in the UK and beyond."

There's no guarantee that any of these 33 books will make it through to the shortlist in April – let alone come out as a winner – but on the strength of these nominations it's already a very strong field. There's Ann Leckie's Ancillary Justice, Lauren Beukes's The Shining Girls, Kameron Hurley's God's War, Cherie Priest's Fiddlehead, Margaret Atwood's MaddAddam, Madeline Ashby's iD … it's tempting to just call it a day and pick an all-female shortlist right now.

This announcement is no patronising sop to the embarrassment over last year's all-male list, a row which seems to have removed one of the major problems at a stroke. After all, according to Liz Williams, a member of the 2013 judging panel, last year's unbalanced shortlist was the result of unbalanced submissions. There were 82 submissions for last year's award, so with 33 already in the bag it looks like around half of this year's submissions will be from female authors. All the panel has to do now is pick some of them …

Arthur C Clarke awardAwards and prizesArthur C ClarkeScience fictionFictionMargaret AtwoodDavid Barnett
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Pen portraits: fine art in fiction

The Goldfinch, the painting Donna Tartt's new novel is built around, is just one of many real-life works of art reworked into literature

The Goldfinch, the Dutch painting that Donna Tartt's novel of the same name revolves around, attracted large crowds to a recent exhibition at New York's Frick Collection. But it's only the latest in a long series of works of art that authors have made the focus of novels and poems …

Michelangelo, Sistine Chapel frescos

The frescos' troubled, protracted genesis is at the centre of Irving Stone's novel The Agony and the Ecstasy, now best known via Carol Reed's 1965 film version starring Charlton Heston as Michelangelo and Rex Harrison as Pope Julius II, with whom the artist argued. Stone also wrote Lust for Life, about Van Gogh.

Leonardo da Vinci, The Last Supper

Leonardo's flaking mural is highlighted in Dan Brown's mega-selling The Da Vinci Code, as the artist's alleged inclusion of a woman among the disciples is part of its theory of his subversive assertion of a feminine element in Christianity, marginalised by the church. The same artist's Vitruvian Man is also prominent in the novel.

Bronzino, Portrait of Lucrezia Panciatichi

Milly Theale, the terminally ill heiress in Henry James's The Wings of the Dove, views the portrait in a key scene ("a face almost livid in hue, yet handsome in sadness and crowned with a mass of hair … a very great personage – only unaccompanied by a joy") and finds herself mirrored by the woman's sadness: "I shall never be better than this", she desolately recognises.

Bruegel (attr), Landscape With the Fall of Icarus

Auden's Musée des Beaux Arts, probably the best-known poem about art, focuses on the way the way the "boy falling out of the sky" is only a sideshow in the painting, ignored by its ploughman and ship: exemplifying how suffering "takes place/ While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along".

Bruegel, The Months

Five of Bruegel's six paintings of the seasons have survived, and a possible sixth is the MacGuffin in Michael Frayn's Booker-shortlisted farce, Headlong. The protagonist becomes convinced the missing work is a painting owned by neighbours, and does his utmost (including flirting with the woman) to get hold of it.

Poussin, A Dance to the Music of Time

Viewable at London's Wallace Collection, Poussin's neo-classical painting shows women representing the seasons dancing in a circle to a lyre. It informs the texture as well as the title of Anthony Powell's Proustian novel sequence, in which characters "disappear only to reappear" and no dancer can control the dance.

Vermeer, Girl With a Pearl Earring

Shown in the Frick exhibition alongside The Goldfinch, Vermeer's painting inspired Tracy Chevalier's bestselling novel of the same title, which invents a teenage servant as his model and speculates about how it came to be created. Sales were boosted by the film version starring Colin Firth and Scarlett Johansson.

Géricault, The Raft of the Medusa

Julian Barnes devotes chapter five of A History of the World in 10½ Chapters to Géricault's powerful image of sailors adrift on a raft after a shipwreck. They image a wider human condition: "How hopelessly we signal; how dark the sky; how big the waves. We are all lost at sea, washed between hope and despair, hailing something that may never come to rescue us."

Picasso, The Old Guitarist

The inspiration for Wallace Stevens's poem about reality and the artist, The Man With the Blue Guitar ("things as they are changed on the blue guitar"), which airs different ideas about art's role over several stanzas. The poem exemplifies its ability to transform its subject-matter in its title – Picasso's man is blue, but not his guitar.

FictionPoetryArtJohannes VermeerPablo PicassoLeonardo da VinciMichelangeloNicolas PoussinJohn Dugdale
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Anne Brontë: the unsung sister, who turned the gaze on men

Charlotte and Emily Brontë gave us romanticised, byronic heroes, but Anne refused to wear rose-tinted glasses when dealing with male alcoholism and brutality

She's part of a literary dynasty that has dominated English literature for nearly 200 years, her sisters' books are on the national curriculum and hardly a Christmas goes by without a Brontë adaption. So why has Anne Brontë been forgotten? I know, I know, you haven't forgotten her, you read her all the time, you've got Agnes Grey in your hand right now. But in comparison to her sisters, Anne is not read. Her books aren't on the curriculum, she only shows up in must-read lists in combination with her famous siblings and most people would struggle to name her other book (The Tenant of Wildfell Hall).

The problem with Anne was that she refused to glamorise violent, oppressive men. While Charlotte and Emily were embracing the concept of the brooding, abusive byronic hero, Anne preferred quiet, supportive men. Her heroes are curates and farmers, men who look after their mothers and resist the temptation to imprison or exile unwanted wives.

The contrast between Anne and her sisters is perfectly summarised by comics artist Kate Beaton of Hark! A Vagrant fame. In Dude Watchin' With the Brontës Charlotte Brontë and Emily Brontë are checking out some hunks as their younger sister, Anne, watches with growing frustration. "What about that one?" purrs the author of Jane Eyre, as a Mr Rochester figure skulks past. "The guy was an asshole," observes Anne. "What about that one?" simpers the author of Wuthering Heights, as a Heathcliff lookalike lurches into view. "If you like alcoholic dickbags," Anne retorts. "You are so inappropriate … no wonder nobody buys your books," snap her sisters.

The comic will elicit sniggers of recognition from anyone who's suffered through the vitriolic alcoholics in Charlotte and Emily Brontë's novels. The hero in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall sits in sharp contrast to Heathcliff from Wuthering Heights: Gilbert Markham helps Helen flee from her abusive husband, while Heathcliff abuses his pregnant wife to the point that she runs away. Markham reluctantly accepts Helen's decision not to marry him; Heathcliff takes out a 20-year-long revenge policy when Cathy does them same.

Charlotte and Emily were undoubtedly feminist in their views and the way they felt about their writing; Charlotte frequently had to be restrained by her publishers from writing to critics who reviewed her gender rather than her books. But for the most part they kept their feminism off the page, focusing upon brutal male characters whose main appeal tended to be their potential for redemption. Anne, however, was far more explicit about her feminism, and she wrote about men who expressed their love in words, rather than by dominating the women in their lives.

Charlotte and Emily's fascination with violent men, and Anne's aversion to them, can be traced back to their brother, Branwell Brontë. Whenever anyone scratches their head over how three daughters of a country parson managed to write with such passion and insight about human nature, my eyes start rolling. With a brother like Branwell – handsome, charming, alcoholic – the sisters were provided with more than enough inspiration. The different ways in which they interpreted Branwell's behaviour is where it gets interesting.

The seductive nature of a happy ending can't be disputed, and the two older Brontës provide it in spades. In Wuthering Heights, Heathcliff and Cathy are never united, but their children fall in love: Heathcliff's behaviour is almost justified, as it has brought Linton and Cathy mark II together. Likewise in Jane Eyre, Mr Rochester falls in love with Plain Jane, attempts to commit bigamy, is thwarted, his wife luckily burns to death and they live happily ever after. Charlotte and Emily offered their fictional Branwells a form of redemption that in reality he failed to achieve.

Anne, the sister who spent the most time nursing Branwell, either refused or was unable to romanticise what happened to her brother. In The Tenant of Wildfell Hall an abused wife, Helen Graham, runs away from her alcoholic husband, Arthur Huntingdon. She meets Gilbert Markham and falls in love with him but is unable to marry him. Anne's depiction of Arthur Huntingdon's decline drew heavily on Branwell's death and still stands out today as an unflinching depiction of alcoholism.

By romanticising their alcoholic, violent brother, Charlotte and Emily Brontë were presenting an optimistic view of the byronic hero. Anne Brontë, however, refused to wear rose-tinted glasses. As a novelist she is more honest than Emily and more unflinching than Charlotte, but that doesn't make for great romance or cosy TV adaptations. It's easy to say that because Anne refused to give us a brooding hero, her books are less widely read. But I would suggest that she was in fact just too honest about the nature of violence and addiction.

Anne BrontëCharlotte BrontëEmily BrontëFictionClassicsGenderWomenBeulah Maud Devaney
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Hilary Mantel to publish new short story collection

The double Booker-winner will set the literary world alight with a collection of short fiction due in September, The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher

Is this the most exciting literary news of the week? Not only is Hilary Mantel going to publish a short story collection in early September, but it is titled The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher.

Could it be that the queen of the Tudor soap opera – who has recently extended her empire to the stage as well as the page – is embarking on a dangerous new life as a writer of alternate history? Has she taken to political satire in the style style of Martin Amis, circa 1984?

Few clues are forthcoming from her publisher at 4th Estate. According to her editor, Nicholas Pearson, "Where her last two novels explore how modern England was forged, The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher shows us the country we have become. These stories are Mantel at her observant best."

Though the double Booker winner has published 13 books, only one of these is a collection of short stories, the autobiographically inspired Learning to Talk – and that was back in 2003.

September suddenly seems all too far away. But don't despair. Take a look at The heart fails without warning – published in the Guardian four years ago – and The Long QT – published in 2012 – and imagine the delights there are in store.

Hilary MantelFictionClaire Armitstead
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The bad side of Goodreads' Reading Challenge

Turning literature into a numbers game makes some sense for the book trade, but none for readers

We may be halfway through January already, but the spirit of new year is still in full swing over in San Francisco, where the 2014 Goodreads Reading Challenge goes from strength to strength to strength. More than 240,000 of Goodreads' 25 million members have already committed to reading more than 14m books this year, pledging to get through them at an average of more than a book a week. And many fans of books will say hurrah for that. I reckon I'm pretty much in favour of books and literature, too, but the Goodreads Reading Challenge just sets my teeth on edge.

It starts right there in the name. Since when was reading any kind of challenge? Isn't it supposed to be fun? Maybe not for children still learning to differentiate their Perfect Peters from their Horrid Henrys, or for the one in six UK adults who still struggle with literacy, but Goodreads is a site for people who are already "readers" . I don't think they have schoolchildren in mind when they suggest you should "raise your reading ambitions" and it certainly doesn't look like a scheme designed to help adult learners "make it to the final chapter". All this talk of pledging, of targets, of tracking your progress, is just another step in the marketisation of the reading experience, another stage in the commodification of literary culture.

We know that literacy correlates with better social outcomes, that literary fiction can improve our understanding of others, but despite the best efforts of the boffins, literature is one of the few areas of modern life where it's not all about the numbers. Of course figures matter to bookshops, publishers, writers and even libraries, but if we enjoy reading – if reading is in some sense good – it doesn't make any sense for the reader to say that if you double the number of books you manage to get through in a year, it will be worth twice as much.

The strange, collaborative process which happens when you sit down in front of the page, that old magic which forges an intimate connection with the thoughts of someone someplace else is all the more valuable in this frenetic age. Surrounded by information, advertising and commercial opportunities of every stripe as we are, this immersion in another world becomes all the more vital to defend. But whether you're grappling with the effects of immigration, or investigating a safe deposit box left on the Moon, it's not the quantity that matters, it's the quality – the depth of engagement.

The tickbox, cross-it-off-the-list mindset of the Goodreads Reading Challenge points right in the other direction. I'm all for books, for writers and for literary discussion, but if books become just another form of bookkeeping, if we start notching them off on the wall of our literary cell, we may find our "reads" aren't so "good" after all.

PublishingRichard Lea
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1984: the romantic film. Love the idea?

George Orwell's novel is being re-tooled as a heartstring-plucker. Don't despair – share your dystopian visions of how bad it will be

The literary world is agog, reeling, aghast, at the news that Kristen Stewart is going to star in a romantic remake of 1984. You read that right. Romantic. Remake. 1984.

I've had to check to make sure it isn't 1 April. It isn't. This is happening, people. "Equals is an adaptation of the 1956 film 1984, which itself was based on George Orwell's classic novel about rebellion in a futuristic society," runs the story. Stewart told the AP that the remake is "a love story of epic, epic, epic proportion", where "things go wrong because you can't deny the humanity in everyone". "It's the most devastating story," she said. "I'm terrified of it. Though it's a movie with a really basic concept, it's overtly ambitious."

Indeed.

Anyway, the news has sent literary types into a flat spin. "THIS IS MY ROOM 101," bellowed Chocolat author Joanne Harris on Twitter. "This is more chilling than ANYTHING actually in 1984," said publisher Gollancz, adding: "Ministry of Truth announces 'romantic adaptation' of 1984. Then announces its own closure as there is nothing left for it to do." And "just to finish my terrible mood off, I read this about one of my favourite books. *head implodes*," tweeted author Sarah Pinborough.

Pinborough managed to find a bright spot, however - "I'm quite entertained by the thought of a million Twilight fans rushing out to buy 1984 after it". Let's hope she's right – and literary Twitter has been cheering itself up by imaging how, exactly, this Orwellian romance will play out. Will Big Brother be overthrown? Will Winston and Julia's love conquer all? And what about the rats – what place do they have in a love story of epic, epic, epic proportion?

A game of #romantic1984 soon kicked off. 'We'll always have room 101, won't we, Winston? We'll always have that, at least?" tweeted author Lavie Tidhar. "The glittery clock struck thirteen," might work well, decided writer Jon Courtenay Grimwood. "You had me at DOUBLEPLUSGOOD," wrote children's author Louie Stowell. And my favourite, from Gollancz: "Imagine a Jimmy Choo's stiletto on a red carpet stamping on a human face. FOREVER."

It's silly but fun, and might help lift us – just a little – out of the pit of despair into which anyone with any sense will have sunk at the news of Equals. "Big Brother is watching you … undress." Or is that more stalkerish than romantic? I've lost all perspective. Over to you.

George OrwellFictionKristen StewartAlison Flood
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Siegfried Sassoon's double vision of war and peace

Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man brilliantly anticipates the coming horrors of war even amid its gorgeous Edwardian idyll

Until recently, most of what I knew about Siegfried Sassoon could be summed up in the following few words:

'Good-morning; good-morning!' the General said 
When we met him last week on our way to the line. 
Now the soldiers he smiled at are most of 'em dead, 
And we're cursing his staff for incompetent swine. 
'He's a cheery old card,' grunted Harry to Jack
As they slogged up to Arras with rifle and pack.

But he did for them both by his plan of attack.

This version of Sassoon is not one Michael Gove would find easy to accept, given his recent comments about left-wing academics and comedians trying to skew the narrative about the first world war. Gove's argument that soldiers believed the war a "noble cause" would produce a bitter laugh from this Sassoon. He is a poet who doesn't mince his words about the reality of war, the pity of war, the folly of war. He is angry, he is anti-establishment, he is caustic, he is brilliant and he pulls no punches. In fact, he kicks you in the guts, especially in his last lines:

Attack
At dawn the ridge emerges massed and dun
In the wild purple of the glowering sun,
Smouldering through spouts of drifting smoke that shroud
The menacing scarred slope; and, one by one,
Tanks creep and topple forward to the wire.
The barrage roars and lifts. Then, clumsily bowed
With bombs and guns and shovels and battle-gear,
Men jostle and climb to meet the bristling fire.
Lines of grey, muttering faces, masked with fear,
They leave their trenches, going over the top,
While time ticks blank and busy on their wrists,
And hope, with furtive eyes and grappling fists,
Flounders in mud. O Jesus, make it stop!

He is also left-wing. His sympathies are with the "simple soldier", and against the "Majors at the Base" who "speed glum heroes up the line to death". He publishes poems in magazines like the Nation (which nowadays trades as the New Statesman). Poems scarlet with rage:

I stood with the Dead, so forsaken and still:
When dawn was grey I stood with the Dead.
And my slow heart said, 'You must kill, you must kill:
'Soldier, soldier, morning is red'.

On the shapes of the slain in their crumpled disgrace
I stared for a while through the thin cold rain …
'O lad that I loved, there is rain on your face,
'And your eyes are blurred and sick like the plain.'

I stood with the Dead … They were dead; they were dead;
My heart and my head beat a march of dismay:
And gusts of the wind came dulled by the guns.
'Fall in!' I shouted; 'Fall in for your pay!'

This version of Sassoon is the one for which he is rightly famous. Time has hardly cooled the scald of those poems. But this version is only a small part of the picture. Even during the war, he was more complicated than poems like The General might suggest. He has aspects that do fit Gove's counter-narrative. This also was a man who signed up voluntarily – eagerly. Who earned the nickname "Mad Jack" in the early days of the war, thanks to his bravery in battle. Who also wrote poems like Absolution:

The anguish of the earth absolves our eyes
Till beauty shines in all that we can see.
War is our scourge; yet war has made us wise,
And, fighting for our freedom, we are free.

Horror of wounds and anger at the foe,
And loss of things desired; all these must pass.
We are the happy legion, for we know
Time's but a golden wind that shakes the grass.

There was an hour when we were loth to part
From life we longed to share no less than others.
Now, having claimed this heritage of heart,
What need we more, my comrades and my brothers?

Absolution was Sassoon's first complete war poem, and until recently, it's been possible to explain it as an early work, written before he had really experienced horror. Thanks to a batch of poems recently unearthed by Jean Moorcroft Wilson, we know it wasn't so simple. Even after long months in the trenches he could still praise aspects of the war. He wrote the following in his 1916 trench diary:

You and the winds ride out together;
Your company, the world's great weather,
The clouds your plume, the glittering sky
A host of swords and harmony,
With the whole loveliness of light
Flung forth to lead you through the fight.

In 1917, famously, Sassoon was supposed to have thrown a Military Cross he won for "conspicuous gallantry" into the River Mersey. But even this wasn't such a simple thing. He later explained: "Weighted with significance though this action was, it would have felt more conclusive had the ribbon been heavier. As it was, the poor little thing fell weakly on to the water and floated away as though aware of its own futility … Watching a big boat which was steaming along the horizon, I realised that protesting against the prolongation of the war was about as much use as shouting at the people on board that ship." Talking of weight, it turns out he only actually lobbed the ribbon. The medal was found in an attic in 2007.

In short, he was a complicated, three-dimensional man. Even so, the England-loving lyricism of Memoirs Of A Fox-hunting Man is initially unsettling. Sassoon writes of his longing for a lost innocence and a world before the great fall of the war – and this world is one that might well appeal to Gove. The narrator's Auntie is a big-C Conservative and loved as such. Of course, that makes sense from a man who would become an officer in the class-rigid world of the trenches. It even fits that he should have George, his mainly autobiographical narrator, say that "poverty was a thing I hated to look in the face; it was like the thought of illness and bad smells". He would do his learning later.

Possibly more surprising is the fact that Sassoon should write with such loveliness. It takes some getting used to, after those poems. Sassoon, who dwelt so long on grey mud, bleached sand bags and ashen-faced soldiers, on the stench of death, on screams and on the sound of wind "dulled by guns", can also describe sensory perceptions with all the sensual relish of Proust (of whom he was clearly a fan):

"I remember too the smell of strawberry jam being made; and Aunt Evelyn, with a green bee-veil over her head … The large rambling garden, with its Irish yews and sloping paths and wind-buffeted rose arches, remains to haunt my sleep. The quince tree which grew beside the little pond was the only quince tree in the world. With a sense of abiding strangeness I see myself looking down from an upper window on a confusion of green branches shaken by the summer breeze."

Where the war verses are bayonet-hard and sharp, this prose is soft and gentle as the "river mist" George lovingly describes, down in a valley, where "a goods train whistled as it puffed steadily away from the station with a distinctly heard clanking of buffers. How little I knew of the enormous world beyond the valley and those low green hills."

At the same time, in that passage, it's hard not to think of what George would discover when he eventually marched out into that world. Deeper into the book, the Sassoon of the war poetry appears more and more often. You can see him in the boy who will go hunting for a fox and (in a scene of exquisite humiliation) feel "spontaneously alarmed" for its "future" and cry out with fear that "they'll catch him!" You can see him, and his satirical rage, in his hilarious descriptions of the hunt-bore and bully Jaggett. Most of all, you can see the broken soldier in numerous heart-wrenching moments. Amid the prelapsarian sunshine, there are sudden plunges into darkness. Here he describes a horse owner watching a younger man set off to race his favourite horse:

"And as I see it now, in the light of my knowledge of after-events, there was a premonition in his momentarily forsaken air. Elderly people used to look like that during the War, when they had said goodbye to someone and the train had left them on the platform."

The war is never really that far away. And this is most true when George claims the opposite. When he sees a butcher's calendar featuring a picture of the relief of Ladysmith during the Boer War, he says: "I never could make my mind up what it was all about that Boer War, and it seemed such a long way off … " And by saying as much, he makes the 1914 war seem all the closer.

In fact, the deeper I've dived into in this peaceful, golden life of cricket, jam, village shows, horse-riding and unspoilt countryside, the more I've felt the current dragging towards war – and horror. In truth, I should perhaps have expected as much. It's the opposite and equal feeling to that produced by another of Sassoon's masterful poems, A Subaltern:

He turned to me with his kind, sleepy gaze
And fresh face slowly brightening to the grin
That sets my memory back to summer days,
With twenty runs to make, and last man in.
He told me he'd been having a bloody time
In trenches, crouching for the crumps to burst,
While squeaking rats scampered across the slime
And the grey palsied weather did its worst.

But as he stamped and shivered in the rain,
My stale philosophies had served him well;
Dreaming about his girl had sent his brain
Blanker than ever – she'd no place in Hell –
'Good God!' he laughed, and slowly filled his pipe,
Wondering 'why he always talked such tripe'.

Michael Gove would probably find plenty to unsettle his ideas in Memoirs Of A Fox-Hunting Man, just as I have. It's a wonderful book.

Siegfried SassoonFictionFirst world warSam Jordison
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