The Guardian's Blog, page 149

The best books on the Philippines: start your reading here

Our literary tour of the Philippines embraces colonialism, the Marcos dictatorship and a smattering of multi-layered mystery

Dusk by F Sionil José

Dusk is the first novel in José's acclaimed Rosales Saga, five books that follow the fortunes of one family through 100 years of Philippine history.

The story begins during the last days of Spanish rule and ends with the entry of America as the new colonial master. It recounts the lives and hardships of the Samsons as Spanish rough justice drives them off their land and forces them to flee their village.

On their long and arduous journey to find new land to farm, the extended family are harried by other ethnic groups, bandits and the colonial Guardia Civil. They finally settle in what becomes Rosales.

The main character, Eustaquio (Istak) Samson, although a farmer's son, is taken under the wing of a liberal Spanish priest for a time and learns Spanish and Latin. Eventually, his educated status obliges him to play a role in the struggle for independence, transforming him from poor farmer and would-be seminarian into rebel fighter.

José's engaging and sympathetic storytelling puts the reader right alongside the protagonists as they struggle for a better life. The novel vividly captures the oppression and smouldering discontent of Filipinos under colonial rule, showing how the unifying struggle against imperialism forges Philippine identity.

José is one of the most widely read Filipino authors. The Rosales novels, set in his home town, are bestsellers in the Philippines.

Illustrado by Miguel Syjuco

Syjuco's exuberant debut novel begins with the suspicious death in New York's Hudson river of a self-exiled Philippine literary legend, Crispin Salvador. A controversial figure at home, Salvador attracts as many enemies as fans. The manuscript of his final work – an expose of corruption among the Filipino ruling elite, which is also an attempt to settle scores with his critics – has vanished.

His acolyte, Miguel, decides to find out what really happened to his literary mentor and to track down the missing manuscript. The quest takes him back to his home town, Manila – also home to Salvador's greatest triumphs and tragedies.

Syjuco's evocative tale of modern Manila, spiced with philosophical musings and wry humour, leaps around Philippine culture, history and politics. The story is told through a multi-layered and dizzying array of sources: blogs, newspaper cuttings, extracts from Salvador's books, Miguel's own writings, and jokes.

The sprawling structure and style is sometimes overwhelming, but those who persevere will find the trip worthwhile.

Syjuco, born and raised in the Philippines, now lives in Canada. Illustrado won the Man Asian literary prize in 2008 while it was still an unpublished manuscript.

America's Boy: The Marcoses and the Philippines by James Hamilton-Paterson

After its long stretch under two foreign powers – 300 years in a Spanish convent and 50 years of Hollywood, as the adage goes – post-independence Philippines emerges as a flawed democracy. Hamilton-Paterson contends it's a system run by oligarchs and defined by corruption and cronyism; "goons, guns and gold" play their part. The US, meanwhile, continues to wield its clout.

In this biography of the Marcos dictatorship, although no apologist for Ferdinand and Imelda, he controversially claims the regime is not an aberration, but represents Filipino political practices that preceded it and continue to this day.

Ferdinand, "America's boy", has "practically unconditional US backing" as Washington, seeing him as a bulwark against the "communist threat", turns a blind eye to his kleptomania and authoritarianism. Growing local opposition and a thaw in the cold war sees the US finally withdraw support in 1986, leading to Marcos's ousting. But, says Hamilton-Paterson, with the "saintly" Cory Aquino replacing Marcos after the "people's revolution", only the players change, not the system.

The author elicits information from Marcos's friends, foes and family (including Imelda), and his mix of personalities and politics delivers an entertaining and insightful history.

British writer Hamilton-Paterson, having lived on and off in the Philippines for three decades, brings an insider's knowledge to the story.

PhilippinesFictionPushpinder Khaneka
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The rise of the marriage thriller

As a suspense writer, I can see a number of reasons behind the trend for nail-biting tales of couples' untold secrets

A glance at the bookshop tables in Heathrow and JFK airports over Christmas was enough to confirm it: there's a new genre taking over bookshelves across the world.

In the Evening Standard, Rosamund Urwin noted the publishing world's current enthusiasm for "chick noir", a new wave of psychological thrillers aimed at a female readership. Unlike chick lit, she wrote, these books have "no happy ending, no wedding dress or pram, just plot twists and tortured souls. These are thrillers thrown into the domestic sphere, tales of intimate betrayal and mistrust."

As she points out, common among them is a fear of other people's – specifically a partner's – unknowability, "the idea that our nearest and dearest may harbour the nastiest and darkest secrets". Gone Girl, Gillian Flynn's smash hit about the poisonous relationship of unlikeable Nick and psychopathic Amy, soon to be a film starring Ben Affleck and Rosamund Pike, is widely acknowledged as the book that launched the trend, though I think Before I Go to Sleep by SJ Watson was also key.

What the Standard piece missed, however, was the centrality not of relationships but marriage to many of the most successful and highest-profile of this new wave of women's suspense writing. Nick and Amy are married, and so are the protagonists of The Husband's Secret by Liane Moriarty, the global bestseller in which a wife discovers a letter from her husband marked with the instruction that it should be opened only after his death.

Last year's impressive debut How to Be A Good Wife by Emma Chapman turned a decades-long marriage into a horror story, while the main characters in ASA Harrison's bestseller The Silent Wife are married in all but name. Not released in the UK until March but already highly-anticipated is Jean Hanff Korelitz's You Should Have Known, the story of a therapist who publishes a book excoriating women for not trusting their intuition about men only to find that she doesn't know her own husband at all. A marriage gone (extremely) bad is at the heart of Natalie Young's Season to Taste, a novel about a woman who murders and then eats her husband.

"Chick noir" suggests chick lit gone to the dark side – a lethal cocktail sipped by a heroine in a pair of death-dealing Manolos, perhaps. But it is the exploration of the potential dangers of marriage – committed, complex relationships entered into by mature adult women - that really makes these books a distinct trend.

Lovers of psychological suspense writing by and for women have been spoiled over the past 10 ir 15 years. Maggie O'Farrell, Rebecca Stott (her Ghostwalk is one of my favourites), Sophie Hannah, Nicci French, Rosamund Lupton, Elizabeth Haynes – all these and more have produced unputdownable novels across the literary spectrum. The majority of those books, though, have featured independent single women who are put in jeopardy as a result of their pursuit of sex or a relationship.

So what lies behind this sudden wave of thrillers about marriage? Cynics, no doubt, will say it's down to writers seeking to emulate Gillian Flynn's huge success, but I think there's more to it. After all, as Flynn herself has pointed out, her own first two novels featured characters who were aggressively alone. Liane Moriarty has written four quite different earlier books; while in her latest, Broken Harbour, the brilliant Irish crime writer Tana French also examined a marriage in crisis.

Perhaps it's down to the writers' stage of life: Flynn, French and I, for example, are all married with children. That doesn't feel like the whole story, though, either. I have two theories about this sudden interest.

First, as we marry later and later, women go into marriage with more to lose. Many of us are afraid of what we might hazard by marrying and having children: our careers; our independence, financial and otherwise; our sense, even, of who we are. Marriage is the most intimate of relationships and that can be frightening for people who are used to being self-contained.

Second, we are living in the age of exposure. Every day, across every form of media – Facebook, Twitter, reality TV – we are bombarded with other people's personal information as never before. While people feel increasingly free to share their own personal details, however, for many, divulging secrets about a marriage is the one thing that remains off-limits: if a marriage is good, for reasons of loyalty; if bad, for embarrassment or shame. Marriage deals in the two things most frequently dissembled about, sex and money, and no one apart from the two people involved really knows the truth. For a psychological suspense writer, that's pretty irresistible stuff.

• Lucie Whitehouse's Before We Met is published by Bloomsbury.

ThrillersFictionGillian FlynnNicci French
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AK Nawaz | Black pudding brutality - in praise of northern English crime novels

Scottish crime fiction - aka Tartan Noir - and Scandic detective stories are enjoying acres of space on bookshops shelves and crime blogs the world over. Yet the genre of 'Northern crime' has never taken off internationally. Why not, asks Manc author AK Nawaz?

"On this waterlogged landscape are scattered palaces and hovels... It is here that civilisation produces its marvels and that civilised man returns to the savage."
Alexis de Toqueville, 1840, somewhere near Manchester

Welcome to the north. A land where kidnapped policemen are brutalised with medieval devices (Val McDermid's The Mermaids Singing), drugged journalists shoot paedophile business moguls (David Peace's Red Riding), and single-mum private eyes challenge the criminal underworld (Cath Staincliffe's Sal Kilkenny series).

Truly it's grim - but for some reason not grim enough for international audiences.

Scottish crime fiction (aka Tartan Noir) and the current line up of Scandic detective stories are enjoying acres of space on bookshops shelves and crime blogs the world over. Yet the genre of "northern crime" - where it's recognised at all - has never enjoyed the same traction with audiences.

Of course, the writers above and countless others from the North have sold books by the bucket-load - indeed Peace's bloody Yorkshire trilogy may soon be brought to cinema screens by Hollywood's Ridley Scott (himself a northerner, from South Shields).

Yet it's surprising that their individual literary successes hasn't led to a distinctive genre being coined or bookshops setting up "northern crime" shelves in the same way that they might do for Scandic or Scots-based crime.

As someone who's recently published a Manchester-based novel drawing heavily on the city's industrial past and shady present, it's disappointing to find black pudding brutality doesn't share the same marketing cache as haggis horror. I wonder what the missing ingredient could be.

The success of our near neighbour - in the guise of Tartan Noir - has been long in the making. Ever since William McIlvaney evoked a crumbling Glasgow with its tough docks and even tougher tenements, Scotland's bleak cityscapes have been populated by the imaginative talents of Stuart McBride, Ian Rankin, and Denise Mina to name but a few.

Scotland - or indeed any small country - provides plentiful dramatic opportunities. Protagonists can be interconnected in unexpected ways, for example.

Likewise, the fictional murders in sparsely-populated Nordic states also have their own unique flavour. The Martin Beck novels by Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö blend crime fiction with broader social issues, such as the changing sensibilities of swinging 70s Sweden, setting a template for Jo Nesbø and Stieg Larsson to follow.

Liverpudlians, Geordies, Yorkshiremen and Mancunians are in many ways unique and will always play on their differences. But I do think there is an argument for a common and marketable 'Northernness' - if not an identity, then perhaps a literary state of mind.

Two hundred years ago there wasn't much more to M62 corridor than a collection of market towns and fishing villages. But then factories, canals, coal mines, railways, and Satanic mills arrived. The rest is GCSE history.

Arguably the first crime novel of the Victorian period belongs to the north in the form of Elizabeth Gaskell's Mary Barton; a roaring melodrama which set many conventions of detective fiction as its heroine hunts for a clue to save a wrongly-accused artisan from the gallows.

But it also carefully imparts some of the psychological shock of industrialisation - which so disproportionately shook the north and which continues to this day. Just think about the upbeat pessimism (or gloomy optimism, if you'd prefer to see it that way) of our music, TV, and football teams. You only have to listen to a few fleeting bars of Morrissey or an exchange in the Rovers Return to realise we're still railing against modernity.

In literature, too, many Northern writers are touched by the same intangible geist, the echoes of post-industrialisation, the employment vacuum left by heavy industry, and the ever-present - if sometimes unspoken - dislike of anyone London-based.

In my novel, The Cotton Harvest, the peculiarly northern mix of Asian and white families living parallel lives in old mill towns such as Bradford, Oldham, Rochdale, and the uneasy tensions which sometimes exist, comes to the fore, as well as the failure of mass regeneration projects to live up to the hype of the noughties.

Distinctive themes such as these along with the melancholic mindset, and the gloomy docks, overgrown canal paths, and dank ginnells of our streets - all make a strong case for bookshops carving out space on their shelves for Northern Noir writers. The Girl with the Pie Tattoo, anyone?

AK Nawaz [@nawazcrimehack] is a journalist in Manchester. His novel The Cotton Harvest is available from Amazon [http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Cotton-Ha...] priced £1.99

ManchesterCrime fiction
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Tips, links and suggestions: What are you reading this week?

Your space to discuss the books you are reading and what you think of them

Guardian readersHannah Freeman

Will Gone Girl gain from a new ending?

Gillian Flynn has rewritten the ending of her thriller for the film version. I wonder which other books could do with a rethink

I am in two minds about the news that Gillian Flynn has rewritten the ending to Gone Girl, her thriller about Nick and Amy Dunne's horribly dark marriage, and Amy's disappearance, for David Fincher's film version (which is out in October – can't wait). I loved the book, and I loved the ending ; I wasn't entirely sure about the slightly odd section before the conclusion (I'm trying not to give anything away), so I'm intrigued as to what Flynn might have done.

"There was something thrilling about taking this piece of work that I'd spent about two years painstakingly putting together with all its eight million Lego pieces and take a hammer to it and bash it apart and reassemble it into a movie," she told Entertainment Weekly (revealing precisely nothing about her changes). She is also quoted as saying that Ben Affleck, who is playing Nick Dunne, "was so shocked by it … He would say, 'This is a whole new third act! She literally threw that third act out and started from scratch.'"

Well, how tantalising. I like Flynn's refreshing lack of reverence towards her novel, and I wouldn't mind if she'd ditched a certain bizarre character, who I don't think adds much to her sophisticated thriller. I'd be disappointed if she'd Hollywoodised her ending, but I'd also be very surprised; that's not her style.

Roll on October, anyway – I want to see how she's reconstructed her Lego pieces. And I'm wondering which other stories could benefit from a rewrite. Gone Girl's director David Fincher obviously thinks a few changes wouldn't have harmed Stieg Larsson's The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, telling Entertainment Weekly that the lesson he learned from filming the novel in 2011 was that "we may have been too beholden to the source material". Take that, Larsson.

Now, if only JRR Tolkien were still around to be convinced that what The Hobbit really needs is a bit of romance between an elf and a dwarf – actually, Peter Jackson's already sorted that one out . I might set my sights instead on trying to railroad Louisa May Alcott's estate into accepting that Jo shouldn't have said no to Laurie, and that she certainly shouldn't have married that boring old professor… What endings would you change if you could?

Gillian FlynnThrillersFictionThrillerDavid Fincher
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Poem of the week: Outsider by James Berry

Contending with others' misperceptions and his own isolation, the narrator of these verses reaches a hard-won integration

Outsider, by the Jamaican-born poet James Berry, first appeared in his 1979 debut collection, Fractured Circles. Re-published in A Story I am In: Selected Poems (Bloodaxe 2011), it reads as freshly as if written just the other day. Almost prophetically, it connects with his most recent work, Windrush Songs (2007) – a fine, late collection by a poet now in his 80s, and well-represented by the new book.

Berry emigrated first to the USA in the early 1940s and, later, to Britain. He confronts racial prejudice directly in such poems as In-a Brixtan Markit, a protest against the use of random "Stop and Search" which is illuminatingly read alongside Outsider. He also explores the bittersweet dilemmas of homecoming. Through a vibrant range of voices, settings and moods, over a lifetime's work, Berry has found in poetry, as he says, both "a form of cultural assessment" and a way "to disentangle things and understand them… "

His two languages work together in Outsider, where although standard English predominates, there's a strong, speech-based, minimally punctuated syntax underlying it, with just a hint of the "call and response" structure of oral tradition.

Each stanza addresses the reader directly, always with the same opening phrase in the conditional mood ("If you see me… "). The indicative statements which follow are first negative, denials concerned with correcting misunderstanding ("I'm not… "), and then gently assertive ("It's that… "). The tone is questing and confiding, the structure reassuringly symmetrical. But the descriptive material it brings and holds together is mysterious. Surreal images, or realistic images held in surreal connection, occupy the circles of its narrative. The antitheses presented are not always clear-cut. We sense that, by announcing what he's not, the speaker's aware of exposing further facets of himself.

In the first stanza, his positive qualities, the "dazzle" and "sun-stain of skin", disintegrate in a sophisticated joke against himself (his not-self wittily exposed as a naked figure in shades). The Outsider faces a kind of spiritual drought: "barren ground has no oasis" and he is "cracked up by extremes". In the next stanza, too, the wilderness ("neglected/ woods") is located inside as well as outside. Others ludicrously suspect him of being a thief planning to rob the trees of their "stability". But he admits to being possessed by ungovernable voices, "firmer than skills", and de-humanised by "hurts" which emerge like "wild dogs", angry beyond control. "Stability" in fact would save his life.

Each stanza finds the Outsider "lost" in different locations, perhaps reflecting the different, miserable stages of attempted integration: "busy streets", "neglected woods", "forbidding wastelands", "long footpaths", "sparse room". Except for the first ("busy streets") there's a line-break between adjective and noun, which seems to emphasise the the speaker's isolation and dislocation. Those adjectives cast long shadows. The situations that unfurl in their shade are strange and dreamlike (or nightmarish), yet they seem more than symbolic. Outsiders and immigrants do work where insiders fear to tread. They may literally end up "on forbidding wastelands", "scraping a tunnel/ in mountain rocks".

The short fourth stanza confirms the Outsider's powerlessness. He explains his disconnection to local systems of knowledge and ownership. Instead, he must feel his way like a water diviner, using up nature, exhausting his own resources and those of the trees. This stanza may mark an upward turn, however, in that it brings a non-exploitative access to land and tradition.

After so much restless movement, the "sparse room" of the last stanza seems not only to immobilise and imprison the Outsider but to take him inside himself towards crucial insight. He now knows he needs to be wary of claiming insider knowledge, or making judgments about another society's hypocrisies. Reflected in the complexity of those ideas about prisons and prisoners, this wariness contrasts with the certainty and openness of the last three lines. Their concise and powerful ideogram, the "circle" salvaged from "ruins", represents personal as well as cultural coherence. Stanza by stanza, the poem has enumerated the psychological cost of an exile's self-restoration, working from the external self, and the false, imposed image, to the inner reality, truly communicated. The trajectory as the speaker tries to define what he is and isn't, how he's viewed and how he views himself, gradually forms a coherence built on exchange. Those insiders who were blind to his reality are also salvaged. The circle is re-made.

Outsider

If you see me lost on busy streets,
my dazzle is sun-stain of skin,
I'm not naked with dark glasses on
saying barren ground has no oasis:
it's that cracked up by extremes
I must hold self
together with extreme pride.

If you see me lost in neglected
woods, I'm no thief eyeing trees
to plunder their stability
or a moaner shouting at air:
it's that voices in me rule
firmer than my skills, and sometimes
among men my stubborn hurts
leave me like wild dogs.

If you see me lost on forbidding
wastelands, watching dry flowers
nod, or scraping a tunnel
in mountain rocks, I don't open
a trail back into time:
it's that a monotony
like the Sahara seals my enchantment.

If you see me lost on long
footpaths, I don't set traps
or map out arable acres:
it's that I must exhaust twigs
like limbs with water divining.

If you see me lost in my sparse
room, I don't ruminate
on prisoners and falsify
their jokes, and go on about
prisons having been perfected
like a common smokescreen of mind:
it's that I moved
my circle from ruins
and I search to remake it whole.

PoetryCarol Rumens
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Snow – a brilliant white canvas for fiction

A big freeze is a drama in itself, and provides a compelling setting for novelists to play out their stories

Bliss it is for me when the snow falls on New York City. I love waking up to the music of shovels on concrete. When I was a kid it meant you could snuggle back up in bed because it was a snow day. OK, OK, this year, it's been a big one, but they call that Winter. In New York, mayors have been destroyed by snow; our new one, Bill de Blasio, made sure that practically his first photo-op showed him shovelling snow on the front steps of his Brooklyn home.

I seem to have spent many snow days and nights in local Soho Bars. What better way to pass the icy hours than over a glass of bourbon or a burger and beer? You come out and the snow-spangled city is never more private or more beautiful. But best of all is a freezing snow-veiled night when you can curl up and read stories of icy winters in the comfort of a cosy room.

Edith Wharton's Age of Innocence, my favourite New York novel, is largely a winter book. It begins in the early 1870s on a January night at the opera, where society has been "transported through the slippery snow streets", their "cold-and-gin congested coachmen waiting under the portico of the theater". In Wharton's world, people wear "overflowing furs"; as Newland Archer, the hero, saunters out into "the wintry night, New York again became vast and imminent". Out on a walk with May Welland, his fiancée, he sees "the bare vaulting of trees along the Mall [...] arched above snow that shone like splintered crystals. It was the weather to call out May's radiance, and she burned like a young maple in the frost." This is a novel about high Victorian lives: the houses heavily furnished, secrets passed in closed coaches. .

A Winter's Tale, Mark Helprin's soon-to-be-filmed 1983 novel, is set against a brilliantly inventive mythical New York caught in a blizzard. In the story, New York is all ice winds, black nights, white lights. "Far to the south in the black ice-choked waters of the Narrows, a sparkling light marked the ferry on its way up to Manhattan …"

Going a little further afield, for snow, you can't beat Snow Falling on Cedars, David Guterson's amazing 1994 thriller set in the islands around Puget Sound. "The world was silent and cold and bare … in this lay its terrible beauty," Guterson writes. This is a book about secrets and lies set out in the Pacific, and Guterson's description of the bare frozen trees and sea are spectacular.

Winter is a great piece of machinery for the thriller writer. I've set two of my own thrillers in winter – Disturbed Earth, in which the boardwalk in Coney Island is bleached white from snow and salt, and Blood Count, where a blizzard socks the city and Detective Artie Cohen finds himself stranded in a Harlem apartment building.

In extreme cold, trains and planes are grounded; cell phones fail; detectives are on their own. Big freezes can be as useful to the writer as they are atmospheric.

• Reggie Nadelson's Blood Count is published by Atlantic.

FictionEdith Wharton
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Has Twitter given birth to a new literary genre?

Fiction takes flight on Twitter when stories take the social network's connectivity seriously

As the second #TwitterFiction festival opens for submissions, it's time to ask if the social networking site has given birth to a new, 140-character genre.

Maybe we should call it the storyella – Penguin US has already snaffled the term twitterature, assembling an anthology of "humorous reworkings of literary classics for the twenty-first century intellect, in digestible portions of 20 tweets or fewer" which perkily promises to provide "everything you need to master the literature of the civilised world, while relieving you of the burdensome task of reading it."

So far so stocking-filler, but what of more serious projects? Those whose memories have not yet been reduced to 140 characters may remember one of the star turns of the first #TwitterFiction festival, back in the mists of 2012. In what could be seen as a nifty piece of marketing for an earlier book, the children's writer Lucy Coats told 100 Greek myths in 100 tweets, including:

'Nobody sees me naked!' Angry Artemis chases speechless stagboy in fatal hunt! Hounds tear Actaeon apart for pervy peeking

Snakes in Cradle Mystery! Baby Heracles strangles serpents with own tiny fists! Chief suspect Hera says 'No effin' comment'

Coats' myths series was funny and smart, but whether any of this year's projects can rise to more than self-promotion will be seen on Twitter from March 12-16 when the selected stories unfurl.

Whether by accident or design, the writer Teju Cole also chose this week for his own latest fictional initiative: a short story called "Hafiz". This 35-tweet tale unfolded over the course of a day, with Cole retweeting texts he had previously asked other users to tweet for him. It tells the story of the eponymous middle-aged man, who suffers a heart attack on the pavement of an unnamed city.

"His right hand was inside his shirt. He clutched at his heart and winced..." To reveal any more would be to strew spoilers before a story which Cole professes to take very seriously indeed. As he explained to the New York Times: "My story … is a creative cousin to works like Shelley Jackson's 'Skin,' a 2,095-word story that was told one tattooed word at a time on the bodies of 2,095 volunteers".

Overblown as that claim might seem, Cole has a point: the best fictions on twitter are forged from connectivity. They don't, however, necessarily involve narrative in a conventional sense. One gem last summer purported to link great writers of past and present into a daisy-chain of literary association. The giveaway was that each name ended with "LPS".

I was reminded of it when I heard about the death of the late, great Amiri Baraka. Among the 19 "people" followed by his avatar, @BaraksterLPS, are Herman Melville ‏ (@HERMELVILLElps), and Louisa May Alcott ‏ (@LouisaAlcottLPS).

What fangirl's heart would not flutter to read the following from @mayaangeloulps: "Currently sitting with my new and dear friends :) @BeecherStoweLPS @EdithWhartonLPS @KateChopinLPS."

It's a network which offers an alternative to the sometimes mystifying connections of the interactive Literature-map, which has Angelou consorting with writers as diverse as Dante and James Herriot. LPS is arguably neither as original, nor as fantastical as Literature-map (Maya Angelou and James Herriot? Perlease!), but it is fun to leap eras and cultures through a fictional string of follows, and the quotations you encounter along the way chime pleasingly with each other.

Perhaps the last word should go to the twictional Robert Frost, quoting himself: "In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life; it goes on." Now that's what I call a storyella.

TwitterClaire Armitstead
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Dear diary, how did you become part of our literary culture? | Moira Redmond

From Pamela to Bridget Jones, fictional diaries enthral us. What is it that so appeals both to writers and their readers?

Diaries: you get one as a Christmas present, start writing it, and continue for, oh, a few days more or less than you go to the gym for the new year. Then you give it up, along with that new dietary regime.

Fictional characters, however – forced by their authors to carry the story, slaves to the process of narrative – tend to be much more reliable. And there's good reason for the format's popularity in novels. At the most basic level, it means you can have a first-person narration without the protagonist knowing what's going to happen (although going out on a dangerous adventure is slightly less exciting, because the diarist definitely got back safely to write it up).

Fictional diaries have been amusing and entertaining us since the modern novel's early days. Here are some favourite examples.

Pamela

Samuel Richardson's Pamela (1740) is usually described as an epistolary novel. But our heroine also writes a journal, and then sews it into her underwear for secrecy (she describes it as "in my undercoat, next my linen"), so she is wearing it at all times. It is hard to imagine a better metaphor for the history of women and their writing – and, perhaps, women's diaries – over the past 250 years.

Wuthering Heights

It's easily forgotten, but Wuthering Heights (1847) by Emily Brontë has a skeletal framework of a diary: "I have just returned from a visit to my landlord … Yesterday afternoon set in misty and cold". Mr Lockwood will learn about true emotion day by day as he finds out and writes down the story of Heathcliff and the Earnshaws.

What Katy Did

Susan Coolidge's 1872 book What Katy Did, beloved by generations of children, contains a scene where the older siblings laugh at young Dorry's diary, with its repeated entry: "Forgit what did." Many of us could empathise with that, though we can't hope to inspire, of all unlikely things, a Philip Larkin poem about unkept diaries called Forget What Did, the title taken from Dorry.

Diary of a Nobody

George and Weedon Grossmith's Diary of a Nobody, 1892, first appeared in the humour magazine Punch – but is better than that makes it sound. It has never been out of print, and is full of fascinating details of daily life as well as excruciating class warfare and British embarrassment tropes. Maybe not a book to be translated around the world, but the jokes have lasted longer than the currency: "I am a poor man, but I would gladly give ten shillings to find out who sent me the insulting Christmas card I received this morning." True fans are laughing after the first few words of Charles Pooter's expressive complaint.

Dracula and 1984

Diaries form a key part of books that aren't automatically associated with them: three different diaries are used for the narrative of Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897). In a recent Guardian piece I was looking for anti-anachronisms, book references that seem out of their time but are unimpeachable, and a reader splendidly pointed out that a key character is busy taking photos of Dracula's future home with his Kodak, just to jolt you into the late 1890s. And in George Orwell's 1984, Winston Smith starts his rebellion by writing a diary, even though he's not sure what date it is.

The Man in a Brown Suit

Diaries are very handy for murder story writers, and the record of the day's activities might be hiding as much as it reveals with a careful use of words – "I did what little had to be done" is a well-known euphemistic entry, but we'll keep the name of the book hidden for fear of spoilers. And a word for Agatha Christie's The Man in a Brown Suit, where part of the book is the diary of MP Sir Eustace Pedler, a very entertaining slice of his life amid the rather Peg's Paper adventures of the heroine, and laugh-out-loud funny in places.

Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and Diary of a Provincial Lady

Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1925), the diary of the beautiful Lorelei Lee, was written by a brunette – Anita Loos – who was annoyed not about silly or gold-digging ladies, but about men's stupidity about women. It's still very funny and clever, and still has points to make about relations between the sexes. And EM Delafield's Diary of a Provincial Lady (published 1930) seems artless and real but is actually a very careful and enduring work of fiction.

Bridget Jones's Diary

The same could be said about Helen Fielding's Bridget Jones. Bridget Jones's Diary (1996) is well known to be based on the plot of Pride and Prejudice, but in fact reminds me more of The House of Mirth, Edith Wharton's 1905 classic of singleton life and problems, with Lily Bart transported to a kinder and funnier time. Like most of the books mentioned, Bridget Jones's Diary contains wonderful social observation: if the world were to end, you could recreate the Britain of the 1980s and 1990s from the Fielding books, Sue Townsend's Adrian Mole, and Posy Simmonds' Mrs Weber's Diary, the marvellous cartoon strip that first appeared in the Guardian.

I Capture the Castle

Dodie Smith's I Capture the Castle (1948) is the iconic diary book for young women, from its beginnings in the sixpenny notebook to the last desperate words scribbled in the margins of Cassandra's two-guinea book (more outdated currency). The diary format is very popular in books for teens – Diary of a Wimpy Kid is the bestselling example of the moment, and there's also Meg Cabot's The Princess Diaries, Louise Rennison's Angus/snogging/thongs books, all those fictional diaries of historical figures, the Spud books of John van de Ruit, and many others. Young people like reading the details of others' lives, and get something more from diaries. As my son put it to me: "We take black joy in other people's misery; it's good if the diarist is slightly worse off than readers, we find it encouraging. Diaries are meant to be truthful, so writers reveal that they are not as pleased with themselves as they appear on the surface."

Some of these diarists – looking at you, Mr Lockwood – are forgotten. But others are standout characters, people whose names are part of the national culture. Everyone knows what being a bit Bridget Jones means; historian David Starkey compared Edward VI to Adrian Mole; Pooterish is a widely understood adjective. Which other fictional diarists have become part of our lives?

FictionHelen FieldingAgatha ChristieBram StokerSue TownsendEmily BrontëGeorge OrwellMoira Redmond
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