The Guardian's Blog, page 194

George Orwell's critique of internet English

The concerns of Orwells's 1946 essay remain notably relevant to the changes in written language wrought by the digital age

Some while ago, with reference to Orwell's essay on "Politics and the English language", I addressed the language of the internet, an issue that stubbornly refuses to go away. Perhaps now, more than ever, we need to consider afresh what's happening to English prose in cyberspace.

To paraphrase Orwell, the English of the world wide web – loose, informal, and distressingly dyspeptic – is not really the kind people want to read in a book, a magazine, or even a newspaper. But there's an assumption that that, because it's part of the all-conquering internet, we cannot do a thing about it. Twenty-first century civilisation has been transformed in a way without precedent since the invention of moveable type. English prose, so one argument runs, must adapt to the new lexicon with all its grammatical violations and banality. Language is normative; it has – some will say – no choice. The violence the internet does to the English language is simply the cost of doing business in the digital age.

From this, any struggle against the abuse and impoverishment of English online (notably, in blogs and emails) becomes what Orwell called "a sentimental archaism". Behind this belief lies the recognition that language is a natural growth and not an instrument we can police for better self-expression. To argue differently is to line up behind Jonathan Swift and the prescriptivists (see Swift's essay "A Proposal for Correcting, Improving and Ascertaining the English Tongue").

If you refer to "Politics and the English Language" (a famous essay actually commissioned for in-house consumption by Orwell's boss, the Observer editor David Astor) you will find that I have basically adapted his more general concerns about language to the machinations of cyberspace and the ebb and flow of language on the internet.

And why not? First, he puts it very well. Second, among Orwell's heirs (the writers, bloggers and journalists of today), there's still a subconscious, half-admitted anxiety about what's happening to English prose in the unpoliced cyber-wilderness. This, too, is a recurrent theme with deep roots. As long ago as 1946, Orwell said that English was "in a bad way". Look it up: the examples he cited are both amusingly archaic, but also appropriately gruesome.

Sixty-something years on, in 2013, quite a lot of people would probably concede a similar anxiety: or at least some mild dismay at the overall crassness of English prose in the age of global communications.

Orwell's polemical reach runs out, appropriately, soon after the 1980s. Then, the biggest paradigm shift since Gutenberg and Caxton took us into uncharted waters, on which we are now, very slowly, orienting ourselves. Until very recently, we were so lost (and at sea) in the fog of digital transformation that very few were willing to get to grips with the problem of online literary standards. Or, to put it another way, we became so exhilarated by the freedom of the new media that we weren't willing to grapple with the responsibilities that came with liberation.

Not any more. Those first, heady days are done. It's time for a new covenant. Yes, it's one that can take inspiration from Orwell's celebrated polemic. It's also good to set his call to arms next to the practices of online English prose because, among the guardians of contemporary culture (cyber and otherwise), the author of Nineteen Eighty-Four remains a talisman. Those who assert the "democratic" and "free" qualities of the worldwide web would probably cite his famous essay with approval in any discussion of English usage today.

George OrwellRobert McCrum
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Poem of the week: Sonnet 30 by Robert Sidney

A lover's lament to personified 'Absence', the melancholy here is contained by a remarkably elegant rhetorical technique

This week's poem comes from a collection of sonnets, songs, pastorals, elegies and epigrams by the newly-rediscovered Elizabethan poet, Robert Sidney. It's untitled, but numbered "Sonnet 30", and begins, aptly for a re-emergent poet, "Absence, I cannot say thou hid'st my light … "

Sidney's poems, handwritten in a notebook, with a leather binding added in the 19th century, came to notice in the 1960s, when the contents of the library of Warwick Castle were dispersed. The collection had been misattributed, but Sidney's spiky italic handwriting was identified by the Cambridge scholar Peter Croft, who went on to become the poet's first editor. Croft's magnificent edition of The Poems of Robert Sidney is essential reading, not only for students of Elizabethan literature but for anyone generally interested in poetry and poetics.

There must have been a certain amount of sibling rivalry in the Sidney establishment. Philip was Robert's elder brother by nine years: there was also the talented younger sister, Mary, Countess of Pembroke, the dedicatee of Robert's collection. Their achievements might help explain why Robert confined himself to the private circulation of his work. Exhorted constantly by his father to follow Philip's example, he may well have lacked complete confidence in his own writing projects. At court, as well, his career seems to have been overshadowed by the brilliant elder brother.

After Philip was mortally wounded, he was cared for by Robert until his death. Robert succeeded him as Governor of Flushing, a post he seems not to have relished. Melancholy as most of the sonnets are, Robert for many years was happily married to the Welsh heiress, Barbara Gamage. Another distinguished poet was among their children: Mary Wroth.

As Peter Croft's illuminating Introduction makes clear, courtly love was still a potent influence on the Elizabethan poets, and Neoplatonic idealism informs much of Sidney's work. Robert's sonnet-sequence is not the narrative of a love affair, actual or imaginary. The sonnets separately explore different aspects of love and rejection, and the female beauty which is praised may often be more ideal than real.

Sidney's sonnets [PDF] are carefully wrought Petrarchan structures, showing a gift for what I would call "deep embroidery". This is not embroidery in the sense of trivial embellishment, but the delicate stitching of the syntax into various rhetorical patterns. The cross-stitch of chiasmus is particularly favoured in Sonnet 30. These devices, properly used, do so much more than proclaim the author's wit: they sharpen both sense and sentiment.

The thought in the first quatrain is complex. Absence, addressed directly in the opening line, might almost be an allegorical figure rather than an abstract noun. The speaker's claims are deliberately paradoxical. We'd expect a lover's absence from his beloved to hide his light, and prevent his day's dawning. Not so, he says, and yet his sun has set for ever. The fourth line begins to shed a little more illumination on the matter: he is "absent" when present because, although visible, he remains unseen.

"Nothing but I do parallel the night" is an odd construction. Because of the earlier reference to the permanently set sun, I read it as meaning "I resemble nothing other than the night". It's almost as if the tortuous grammar were a mask, keeping self-revelation at bay. The verse continues more artfully, with a play on the meaning of "done" as both "finished" and "accomplished" ("all act of heat and light is done"). "She that did all in me all hath undone" admits, for the first time, the presence of the sadly impossible She. The near-homographic rhyme (done/undone) brings home the entirely negative connotations of "all … undone."

Antithesis reaches its climax in the metaphor of the eighth line: "I was love's cradle once, now love's grave right." Again, the construction is hardly straightforward. It seems possible that "grave" is not simply a noun, the easy antonym of "cradle", but does service as an adjective, whilst "right" becomes a noun: "grave right" or even, to stretch a pun, "grave rite". If "right" is intended simply as an adjective, placed after the noun "grave", perhaps it could be read as a synonym for "rightful".

Polyptoton, the device which repeats the same word in a different grammatical case, continues to enliven the emotional interplay in the sestet. "Absence", once more denoting an addressee, is echoed by "Absent" as an adjective, the subject of which is "I". Similarly, there's the double sense of "care" - a verb with a loving undertone in "all what I care to see" and a plural noun that suggests pain and effort in "my cares avail me not".

This sestet is sharpened by Robert's characteristic division of the six lines into two separate triplets, a structure favoured by Philip Sidney in Astrophil and Stella. Both triplets of Sonnet 30 conclude with a powerful rhyming couplet.

The night remorselessly darkens. Happiness was possible when the end of absence could be anticipated, but now the speaker "cannot say mine" of any "joys". Notice the emotional loss is expressed in a comment about grammatical usage. The annihilation in the last line is total: "Present not hearkened to, absent forgot." The speaker has himself become the absence. Perhaps earlier, when he wasn't seen, he was simply overlooked. Not being heard is surely worse. It implies he has spoken directly to the object of his desire, and has wilfully been ignored. The psychological plight of a younger brother perhaps informs the subconscious feelings here.

As lovers' complaints go, this one is stark but composed: the loss described is so comprehensive it almost negates the loser, but the tone is never exaggerated or self-pitying. There are no showy gestures, simply the quiet, intricate stabbing and looping of that rhetorical needle, and perhaps the glint of a melancholy smile.

Sonnet 30

Absence, I cannot say thou hid'st my light,
Not darkened, but for ay sett is my sun;
No day sees me, not when night's glass is run;
I present, absent am; unseen in sight.

Nothing but I do parallel the night
In whom all act of light and heat is done:
She that did all in me, all hath undone;
I was love's cradle once, now love's grave right.

Absence, I used to make my moan to thee;
When thy clouds stayed, my joys they did not shine;
But now I may say joys, cannot say mine.

Absent, I want all what I care to see,
Present, I see my cares avail me not:
Present not hearkened to, absent forgot.

PoetryCarol Rumens
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Reader reviews roundup

Concrete fiction from Stephen Marche and a Martian adventure with Ken Kalfus are among this week's books under review

This week's reviews included a new discovery for me. He is Stephen Marche, whose Love and the Mess We're In is intriguingly reviewed by Robert Nathan. He opens:

Love and the Mess We're In is like nothing you've ever read. I don't mean that as the usual figurative praise on how good a book it is, but as simple fact. This is different. What makes this work unusual – and I don't know what to call it if not a 'work' – is its application of concrete poetic techniques in fiction.

So unusual does it sound that I went on the trail of its publishers: Gaspereau Press, it turns out, is an award-winning Canadian indie outfit which prides itself on "the originality of its authors, the beauty of its books and the quality of its productions. Its books – Smyth-sewn trade paperback, cloth-bound hardcovers, and a letterpress-printed limited edition – are produced in Gaspereau's own printing works, located in the sleepy shiretown of Kentville, Nova Scotia."

The book itself sounds rather like a latterday version of Tristram Shandy, offering a great showcase for the typographer's art. Robert Nathan writes:

These creative structures generate interesting possibilities that Marche explores to great effect. (And it's not just Marche that deserves the credit — the book was designed and typeset by Gaspereau's own Andrew Steeves, whose blood, sweat, and tears must be in here nearly as much as Stephen's.) Particularly in the extended sex scene, "Life of Flesh," that makes up chapter 3 of 5. When you're used to book pages carrying 300 words and then you're hit with a tiny 12-point "No" and a vast sheet of white space followed by a massive "Yes" that claims the entire next page, it's striking. There's really something there, something that gets at the feeling Marche tries to put across (in this case an orgasm) in a manner rarely achieved by conventional means.

A different sort of kooky was being investigated elsewhere, with JuliaWagner demonstrating the effectiveness of economy in her short review Ken Kalfus's Equilateral:

The plot is quirky, resulting from the belief that Mars (the planet) was populated, owing to the straight lines discernible when telescopes were finally powerful enough to provide such details. Kalfus exaggerates this notion, making it the basis for a scientist's carefully developed project to communicate with the advanced race of Martians (which he bases on the belief that it would take a more evolved civilization to surmount the difficulties posed by the super-arid Martian climate). Never mind that his project foresees an equilateral triangle excavated in the north African desert, by locals which he (and all the other Europeans – oh, sorry to say, Englishmen and -women) look down upon with the biases typical of the 19th century. This is the central irony, but just how to develop it? Either the author doesn't seem to know, or handles it with a sublety that is lost on me, or it has disappeared under the weight of the heavy editing (the book seems too short for its subject, or I just don't get, or – all of the above?

And that's it for this week, as ever if I've mentioned your review, drop me a line at claire.armitstead@guardian.co.uk, and I will send you a book from our cupboards.

FictionClaire Armitstead
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How do you write about life when it's lived on computers?

Fiction writers face a challenge in depicting the ubiquitous 21st-century experience of virtual existence

We live more and more of our life through the screens of laptops and smartphones, but how do we represent this on the page? In his 2004 novel Eastern Standard Tribe, science fiction author Cory Doctorow explored what it meant to live in a world where our relationships were scattered around the globe, and our lives lived through computers. Doctorow's novel was published just two years before the release of the iPhone in 2006, and the explosion in smartphone and tablet computer usage which has moved millions of real people are living the kinds of life Doctorow predicted.

Walk in to any public space today, from a waiting room to a coffee shop, and note the disturbing absence of voices. We are there, and we are elsewhere. Our discussions are mediated via social networks, and conducted through touchscreen interfaces. Can we call them friends, this network of professional and social contacts we interact with through computers?

Journalist and chronicler of hacker culture Quinn Norton describes an aesthetic crisis in writing "(H)ow do we write emotionally of scenes involving computers? How do we make concrete, or at least reconstructable in the minds of our readers, the terrible, true passions that cross telephony lines?" In a digital world do falling in love, going to war and filling out tax forms all look the same? Do they all look like typing? And is capturing them on paper, as Robin Sloan claims, the great challenge for writers today?

You by Austin Grossman is a novel that depicts scenes involving computers with emotion. It is also, arguably, the first literary product of gamer culture, and a significant addition to the canon of geek lit. The novel delves in to the world of Black Arts, a successful game design studio in the late 1990s, and into the virtual worlds they create. Russell grew up with video games, but chose to abandon his geek identity and become a hot shot lawyer. With his imploded career behind him, Russell rejoins his adolescent friends who have made their fortunes making games at Black Arts.

Themes of adolescent friendships haunting our adult life are shared with Grossman's debut Soon I Will Be Invincible, a postmodern superhero yarn. You is a more subdued, less bombastic follow-up, and a more thoughtful and significant one. The bookturns on the attempt by Russell and his friends to build the ultimate game, a simulation so real they could enter into it like life itself, a goal that Grossman spins as the gamer generation's equivalent to the counterculture. "This was our rebellion. We could walk out on reality itself and the raw deal it gives even the luckiest of us. Fucking leave it and go on an adventure."

The desire to escape reality. To construct our own reality in the games of childhood, and say F* you to the artifice of the adult world. The desire to be the hero of the adventure. These are the emblems of geek culture. It's why the escapist potential of fantasy, and of video games to fulfil those fantasies, are so central to it. And it's the same desire for escape driving millions of us to our iPhones, to chat with our online friends, and be at the heart of a world of our own making in place of whatever adult situations in which we're physically present.

But the digital world is really no escape at all. When Paul Miller left the internet a year ago, he was expressing the same desire to "unplug" that many of us feel when faced with 800 unanswered emails and as many angry status updates on Facebook. But all Miller discovered was that the fantasy of a de-digitalled world revealing a deeper and richer reality was just that; a fantasy.

William Gibson described cyberspace in Neuromancer as "a consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions". Gibson's cyberspace was inspired by early video games, but 30 years after it was written remains the most potent description of lives lived via computers. As Gibson has since argued, cyberspace isn't another space, it isn't inside computers. It is reality, but with the dreamlike, hallucinatory quality that now we can talk to anyone and everyone, in any place.

The challenge of writing about lives lived via computers might become redundant, as the illusory barriers between real life and digital life come tumbling down. Sergey Brin called the smartphone "emasculating" when launching Google Glass, which promises to project our digital lives directly in to our eyes. Once sending a tweet around the world becomes the same act as talking to a friend across a coffee shop table, how will we distinguish one from the other in life, let alone in writing?

Science fictionFictionInternetSmartphonesMobile phonesDamien Walter
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Is this the end of fiction's genre wars?

Has the question of genre in fiction become 'a flimsy irrelevence' or will the mores of the book trade maintain the distinctions?

This week, the chair of this year's Man Booker prize, Robert Macfarlane, published an introduction to a new edition of M John Harrison's Climbers. In it, he says "let me try to express a little of the amazement I feel when standing in front of the work of Harrison, who is best known as one of the restless fathers of modern SF but who is to my mind among the most brilliant novelists writing today, and with regard to whom the question of genre is a flimsy irrelevance". Are we witnessing the end of the genre wars? Macfarlane has written introductions as enthusiastically to the (genre) work of John Christopher and the (literary) work Edward Thomas and Charles Dickens. Before starting on this year's submissions for the Man Booker (I am also a judge), I was among those who selected the Granta Best of Young British Novelists, a list which featured a number of genre-inflected writers (Steven Hall, Naomi Alderman, Joanna Kavenna, Ned Beauman, Xiaolu Guo, Helen Oyeyemi, Jenni Fagan and Sarah Hall). Is genre, as Macfarlane says "a flimsy irrelevance"?

Well, not to publishers and booksellers, who seem the section of the literary world most wedded to genre distinctions: you'll still find China Miéville and Lauren Beukes in fantasy, Ken MacLeod and Iain M Banks in sci-fi, Sophie Hannah and Ruth Rendell in crime, Brian Evenson and Kathe Koja in horror. We critics can praise them to the high heavens, but it doesn't change where they end up in a bookshop. It does seem odd that historical fiction isn't segregated in the same way (and "literary" historicals – yes, Wolf Hall et al – sit next to "genre" historicals such as those by Robyn Young or Simon Scarrow).

There are those who argue that "literary" is just another genre. This doesn't seem to me to be a particularly useful line of enquiry, as the "literary" covers a plethora of styles and registers. Will Self, or Salman Rushdie, or Nicola Barker have more in common with non-realist genre writers (such as Christopher Priest or Lydia Millet) than they do with Ian McEwan or Howard Jacobson or Rose Tremain. In fact, if there is a major shift it probably has more to do with the waning of the FR Leavis idea of what constitutes the canon. Leavis's 1948 "Great Tradition" was singularly social realist (Austen, Eliot, James, Conrad) and omitted writers like Sterne, Melville and Dickens, let alone Bram Stoker, Wilkie Collins or Shelley. Although the Man Booker awarded the prize to John Berger's experimental G in 1972, most of the winners in the first half of the prize's life tended to be social realist in outlook (Stanley Middleton, Paul Scott, Bernice Rubens, Penelope Fitzgerald and suchlike).

Naive realism is no longer the default setting for literary fiction. That's not to say it is impossible to write a literary novel like this (the serialist composer Schoenberg once opined that there was still plenty of great music to be written in C major). But many of the pillars that support it seem fatally compromised. The idea of character as psychoanalysable, intact "self", of narrative as a sequence of events, or the liberal assumption that people are, deep down, identical (CS Lewis's unchanging human heart) have all been thrown into disarray, and rightly so. Literature – in whatever form – ought to make the world more complex, not less.

I don't know of a single serious critic nowadays who would dismiss genre writing solely on the basis that it is genre writing. To that extent, the "genre wars" are over. Could more be done? Of course: book festivals, for example, still tend to pair up genre writers; publishers spend more time marketing already successful genre books than other novels – the crime writer Denise Mina told me the Man Booker should go to a "literary" writer as they need all the help they can get. In the world of the safe "classics", it's unexceptional to see Zane Grey, Shirley Jackson, HP Lovecraft and John Le Carré all marketed as "modern classics" alongside Woolf, Joyce, Musil and Proust. And, given that the Nobel Prize Committee is yet to recognise a writer such as Thomas Pynchon (who seems to revel in every genre), I won't be holding my breath for Stephen King to get the call from Oslo.

Science fictionFictionCrime fictionThrillersStuart Kelly
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Tips, links and suggestions: What are you reading today?

The space to talk about the books you are reading, and find out which ones we are reviewing

One conversation in last week's thread was particularly pleasing to the books team: it was about the relative merits of Mohammed Hanif's The Case of Exploding Mangoes (which was longlisted for the Guardian first book prize) and Aravind Adiga's Booker winning White Tiger (which was not). Both Goodyorkshirelass and TimHannigan felt that itthe Guardian got it right, much to the delight of C1aireA. Trevor Edward Walder chipped in that Hanif's follow-up, Alice Bhatti, was even better. "Go for it," he advised.

Here are some of your other tips:

broger:

I'm 100 pp into Javier Marias vol 2, Dance and Dream, of Your Face Tomorrow. It should be boring, but isn't - it's compelling. Lengthy digressions (should one give alms to beggars? Where do dreams come from? What is death?) slow an already glacier-paced narrative that's sort of about spies; a young leggy colleague visits the cerebral narrator's flat in London with her wet dog and he spends a couple of pages noting the incipient ladder in her tights... Marias is surely one of the best modern European writers.

Sara Richards:

I read American Gods by Neil Gaiman this week. I didn't expect to enjoy it as it was left behind by my son, but - I did. It is so imaginative, and the stories that Gaiman tells as the novel progresses are strange and wonderful. It is about the gods that all the immigrant to America brought with them and the new gods and the battle between them. Of course - we are introduced to these gods in various guises and some of their stories are heartbreaking and some are very funny.

FlipH:

I'm about 20 or so pages into Knut Hamsun's Hunger, I'm not really sure whats going on however the book won the noble prize in literature so I'm expecting big things.

Vishweshwer:

I am at the end of Wallace Stegner's "All The Little Live Things"- a follow up to his award winning "The Spectator Bird" and have to say that it is a well written book. His ability to portray the spirit of 60's America is outstanding. It is said that what F. Scott Fitzgerald is for the 20's Stegner is for 60's. To concur or differ with that statement I need to read "Great Gatsby"... one more addition to my to reading list

AFictionHabit:

Probably like a lot of readers, I'm re-reading The Great Gatsby at the moment. I haven't plans to see the film, I might get around to it, but felt like I was missing out on the current buzz, so picked it up again. Only on chapter 2, but I'm already (re)admiring FSF's ability to pack so much information into a few sentences.

And here's what we'll be reviewing this week:

Non-fiction

• Intuition Pumps by Daniel C Dennett
• Our Cheating Hearts by Kate Figes
• A303: A Highway to the Sun by Tom Fort
• Children of the Days: A Calendar of Human History by Eduardo Galleano
• A Sting in the Tale by Dave Goulson
• Clampdown by Rhian E Jones
• Falling Upwards by Richard Holmes
• Guardian Angel by Melanie Phillip

Fiction

• Inferno by Dan Brown
• The Pre War House by Alison Moore
• My Criminal World by Henry Sutton
• And The Mountains Echoed by Khaled Hosseini
• The Humans by Matt Haig
• The Round House by Louise Erdrich

Children's

• Rooftoppers by Katherine Blundell

If you have any suggestions about what you'd like to see us cover on the site, do let us know either here or via our Twitter account @guardianbooks.

Hannah FreemanGuardian readers
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Bestselling writers know that image counts

Robert Langdon, Harry Potter, Lisbeth Salander – you can picture them instantly. Visually memorable characters are making a welcome comeback to crime and thriller novels

The Harris Tweed jacket of Dan Brown's protagonist Robert Langdon has understandably been mentioned in most reviews of Inferno, with critics noting how often Brown refers to it (not to mention its label: "Harris Tweed's iconic orb adorned with 13 buttonlike jewels and topped by a Maltese cross") and its elevation into playing a part in the plot – everything starts with the Harvard professor of "symbology" discovering a titanium case stitched into its lining.

Yet there's a jeering tone whenever reviewers pick up on what Langdon wears – invariably a turtleneck, khaki trousers and loafers with the jacket, whatever the context – that suggests a lack of appreciation of what Brown is doing, and of the subtle but significant role of clothing in thrillers and crime novels in general.

It's no accident that you can usually summon up an image of their protagonists (from Sherlock Holmes's pipe to Sarah Lund's Faroese jumper), because the writers strive to imprint in our minds a simple visual idea of the hero or heroine, often a single item of clothing or prop. And what they're eager to get across is both the garment's and the character's unsuitability, the one a metaphor for the other. Sleuths and spies are themselves compilations of symbols, as well as readers of them.

Langdon's taste for tweed in all weathers – mirroring, of all people, Agatha Christie's Jane Marple, as Brown is probably wryly aware – says several things about him: that he's a don, and a little stuffy and old-fashioned; more European than American in his interests and ways. Though not a conscious disguise, the outfit is deceptive: he resembles "Harrison Ford in Harris Tweed", The Da Vinci Code said, and can morph into an action hero who never falls short when required to prevent catastrophes.

Usually too old, too foppish, too bookish, too bohemian, or the wrong sex or nationality, classic crime-busters likewise tend to look all wrong. Poirot is a fussy "dandified" throwback to pre-1914 with patent-leather shoes; Marple wears sturdy skirts and likes to knit; Lord Peter Wimsey favours a Bertie Woosterish monocle, top hat and spats (all "jolly useful", he says, in order "to look like a bally fool").

Later, tougher types make seemingly misguided choices, too. Raymond Chandler called Philip Marlowe his "white knight in a trenchcoat", but a trenchcoat in California is as out of place as tweed in Tuscany. James Bond's Savile Row suits are right for a playboy diplomat but hopeless for fighting. Often, this misconceived garb ought to cause embarrassment but doesn't: Maigret's hefty, woolly overcoat is always getting soaked yet he never learns, George Smiley keeps on buying expensive but "really bad" clothes that are too big ("like skin on a shrunken toad").

With his habit of wiping his glasses on his tie, Smiley also epitomises another emblem of unsuitability. As with Len Deighton's Harry Palmer, another 60s spy meant to contrast with Bond, specs suggest someone too scholarly or nerdy for derring-do, let alone tangling with world-class evil-doers. But, by then, authors were starting to forget the importance of clothing. If you can visualise another protagonist between the 60s and the 90s (eg Morse, Adam Dalgliesh or VI Warshawski), it's probably the actor's face from a screen version, with what they wore making no impression.

That trend, however, has recently been reversed, with a slew of global bestsellers that (just coincidence?) all feature characters made visually memorable: Harry Potter in Hogwarts uniform and round glasses; Langdon saving the planet in his Harvard don costume; Lisbeth Salander in punky-goth outfits, with piercings and tattoos; giant Jack Reacher in workman's clothes he throws away after one use. It was an indication of how far the pendulum has swung back when Lee Child, Reacher's creator, recently devoted an entire article to how his macho hero dresses.

Crime fictionThrillersFictionJohn Dugdale
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When horror stopped being supernatural

How afraid should we be for scary reading now that fiction's monsters are being reinvented as worldly threats?

It's a cliché to say that Author W does for Subject X what Author Y did for Subject Z. But it was one I found unavoidable when I turned the final page of Benjamin Percy's excellent Red Moon, released last week.

For it has to be said that Benjamin Percy does for werewolves what Justin Cronin did for vampires and, before that, Max Brooks did for zombies. This century the monsters of old have been taken out of the shadows. Where once a single, terrifying creature sparked supernatural terror, now monsters have become the product of science, of viruses, of very human meddling. They have multiplied and been recast from the night into bright sunlight on a global scale. The horror is now the prospect of monsters supplanting humanity … but does that make them any more scary?

Vampires, werewolves and the revenant dead have been the unholy trinity at the heart of modern horror since the days of folk tale. But their journey from archetype to ubiquity has, I feel, been brought to an almost inevitable conclusion.

Red Moon posits a world where werewolves – lycans, in the book – exist alongside mankind. But they aren't supernatural creatures, rather the unfortunate victims of a prion-based, BSE-style infection. Percy's werewolves are analogues for various bogeyman that have haunted Conservative America for decades – Black Power activists, Islamists, Aids carriers. They even have their own Palestine-like country in inhospitable land between Finland and Russia, where US troops maintain martial law and American power companies mine uranium. The lycans can transform at will, but their animal nature is largely kept in check by regular doses of soporific medication called Lupex. But now militant lycans are determined to take the fight for civil liberties direct to the heart of America …

Percy writes in an assured, cool, sexy style: there are shocks aplenty and suspense in spades, but no scares in the traditional horror novel sense. By situating his werewolves firmly in a post-9/11 world, he takes the old horror staple out of the shadows and shines a very contemporary spotlight on it.

This is precisely what Max Brooks did with his 2006 novel World War Z. This take on the zombie apocalypse dropped the standard narrative of a handful of plucky survivors waking up to find the world gone to hell in a handcart overnight. Using a style of "eyewitness interviews" popularised by documentary television, Brooks described a pandemic sweeping the world from a Patient Zero in China, informed by real-world international crises. Thus, as well as people running away from shambling animated corpses, we also get the military and political response to the apocalyptic event. The terror of Brooks's novel – which, sadly, doesn't look as though it's going to be replicated in the upcoming Brad Pitt movie version – comes from how horribly real it all feels.

The vampires in Justin Cronin's 2010 novel The Passage are the result of a military experiment on a dozen death row inmates, who are genetically modified to become super-soldiers. After detailing the initial outbreak as the blood-hungry and highly infectious dozen escape and spread the virus, Cronin jumps forward almost a century to a ravaged America where scattered colonies struggle to hold out against the hordes of vampires. Perhaps the most traditional horror of the trio, with shades of Stephen King, The Passage nonetheless removes vampirism from the realm of the supernatural and portrays it as science fiction.

The old folk tales of vampires, werewolves and zombies were reanimated in 19th-century literature. Bram Stoker's Dracula, of course, is the most famous vampire ever. I raised the idea on Twitter (and was largely shouted down) that Mary Shelley's Frankenstein was the first zombie. The rampaging, infectious undead of latter years are largely a George Romero invention but I think Frankenstein's monster, made from the reanimated parts of corpses, is a sufficient literary base from which the unquiet dead later evolved. There doesn't seem to be a quintessential werewolf novel from the period, though there were many – among them Wagner the Wehr-Wolf by GWM Reynolds (1847) and The Wolf Leader by Alexandre Dumas a decade later.

Dracula, Frankenstein's Monster and the Wolf-Man reached the silver screen in the 1930s and were embedded in the public consciousness. The trio have appeared in everything from Scooby-Doo cartoons to Abbott and Costello movies, and today are standard Halloween costumes for children who have never read the source material nor watched the classic movies.

Max Brooks, Justin Cronin and now Benjamin Percy have tested these tropes to destruction, expanding the singular prescences of folk tales into world-threatening hordes born of mankind's meddling with science. And, as such, I feel they have effectively taken the werewolf, the vampire and the zombie/revenant to their natural, epic, widescreen conclusion.

Which raises the question: When the old monsters have become so big that they have outgrown the terror of a snapped twig in a dark forest, from where are we now going to get our literary chills? Any thoughts?

HorrorFictionDavid Barnett
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Which books make you laugh? - Open thread

This year's Wodehouse prize for comic fiction has been awarded to Howard Jacobson - again. But what makes you laugh?

For the second time, Howard Jacobson has won the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse prize for comic fiction, this year for his novel Zoo Time. The prize, named after the creator of Jeeves and Wooster and the Blandings, is awarded to the book that best captures the spirit of PG Wodehouse.

Most literary awards give their winners cash, but not this one; instead of money Jacobson will be given a pig. A Gloucester old spot, to be precise, as pictured above with last year's winner, Terry Pratchett. Champagne and books complete the prize, but I'm sure you'll agree that the pig is the best part of the haul.

The announcement prompted members of the books desk to name their favourite comic novels. Skippy Dies was mentioned, as were old favourites A Confederacy of Dunces, Love in a Cold Climate and Bridget Jones's Diary. But which books - old or new - tickle you?

Best bookshopsHannah Freeman
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The Great Gatsby on film: the Reading group's view

Baz Luhrmann's new version is the latest attempt to adapt a book notoriously hard to bring to the screen

I'm writing this a few days before the UK premiere of Baz Luhrmann's new film of The Great Gatsby – at which stage the broad consensus seems to be that the novel can't be filmed. Aside from a few midway-convincing theories about the impossibility of matching the beauty of Fitzgerald's line-by-line writing, most of this agreement is based on the fact that all previous attempts to bring the book to life have emerged stillborn.

Sadly, the very first effort, a 1926 silent movie directed by Herbert Brenon, is almost entirely lost. Or perhaps, not so sadly. When F Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald went to see the film in Los Angeles, they walked out. Zelda wrote to her son Scottie: "We saw 'The Great Gatsby' in the movies. It's ROTTEN and awful and terrible and we left." (The capitals are Zelda's.) The New York Times reviewer presumably sat through the whole thing, but noted that the neither the director "nor the players have succeeded in fully developing the characters". Only one minute of the film – its trailer - now survives, which you can see for yourself:

Yes, they actually did run with the tagline: "The Great Gatsby is great!" I can't imagine that impressed anyone even back in 1926.

The next film version was a 1949 film noir, starring Alan Ladd and Betty Field. This one survived. Should you wish, you can currently watch the entire thing on YouTube:

I managed a painful nine minutes of clumsy exposition and verbose dialogue before I just couldn't take any more. Hardier souls than me have watched the entire thing and apparently it turns the story into a straightforward love story – between Jordan Baker and Nick Carraway!

Not the most dedicated criticism, I know. I have at least watched the entire 1974 version. Starring Robert Redford and Mia Farrow, written by Francis Ford Coppola and directed by the reliable Jack Clayton (now probably best remembered for his 1959 version of Room At The Top), this film certainly looks good on paper. On screen, however, it looks decidedly pastel. The weak, blanched colour scheme permeates everything. The parties, while lavish, are muted and bloodless. The action is slow and stilted. The actors … Well, Robert Redford is certainly handsome enough to play Gatsby. Bruce Dern has plenty of the thoughtless aggression necessary to play Tom. Sam Waterston is an excellent, quietly compassionate Nick Carraway. But none of them – not even Redford – sets the screen alight. Mia Farrow, meanwhile, is a disaster as Daisy. She seems hysterical, over-excited and her voice, which in the novel seems to Gatsby to be "full of money", is here just shrill.

As well as an uncharacteristically awful performance from Farrow, the film also produced one of Francis Ford Coppola's lowest moments in the 1970s. The 1949 version seems absurd because it so recklessly abandons Fitzgerald's sublime blueprint – but sticking to it doesn't seem to work either. Coppola's script treats the source novel with a kind of nervous awe. It doesn't just avoid altering small details, it includes many that just don't work on film. That famous scene at the end of the first chapter, where Nick sees Gatsby staring out to the green light by Daisy's house, is strange and haunting in the book, and passes in a flash: "But I didn't call to him for he gave a sudden intimation that he was content to be alone – he stretched out his arm towards the dark water in a curious way, and, far as I was from him, I could have sworn he was trembling." In the film, it requires a long static shot – and an absurd moment where Redford does indeed move his hand in a weird way.

Similarly, we meet Daisy and Jordan in almost the exact same position in the film as in the book. Fitzgerald says:

"We walked through a high hallway into a bright rosy-colored space, fragilely bound into the house by French windows at either end. The windows were ajar and gleaming white against the fresh grass outside that seemed to grow a little way into the house. A breeze blew through the room, blew curtains in at one end and out the other like pale flags, twisting them up toward the frosted wedding cake of the ceiling—and then rippled over the wine-colored rug, making a shadow on it as wind does on the sea.

"The only completely stationary object in the room was an enormous couch on which two young women were buoyed up as though upon an anchored balloon."

Sadly, the film makers couldn't quite manage the breeze (it blows the curtains in several directions). Nor do the windows look particularly like pale flags. Nor do the women float. In other words, the details are there, but none of the magic. Fitzgerald's prose just cannot be recreated on camera and attempts to do so (of which this film contains too many) are doomed to failure.

Even so, the 1974 version isn't quite as boring as plenty of critics have suggested. A few of the jokes are delivered well, there are some successful visual realisations (the cars, the valley of ashes, and TJ Eckleburg's famous eyes all look good), and odd scenes – notably that claustrophobic party in Myrtle's flat – are done well. But the resulting film is dry, slow and sterile, as the trailer ably demonstrates:

(In the 1974 film's defence, it is also worth registering Tennessee Williams' opinion, as recorded in his book Memoirs: "It seems to me that quite a few of my stories, as well as my one acts, would provide interesting and profitable material for the contemporary cinema, if committed to … such cinematic masters of direction as Jack Clayton, who made of The Great Gatsby a film that even surpassed, I think, the novel by Scott Fitzgerald." Erm … )

Finally, I did another 10-minute special on the 2000 TV version. This too struggled to recreate the French windows scene – and this too failed. No floating, no flags, no magic. The rest wasn't half so painful as the 1949 version, even if Daisy appeared oddly wooden, but it did still drag. Most offensive to my eye was that awful cleanness that blights many costume dramas. All the vintage clothes look brand new, the chairs have never been sat in and there's no grease or muck in poor old Wilson's garage. It doesn't look like life. You can see for yourself here.

In spite of these failures, and in spite of Australia, I haven't given up all hope for Luhrmann's version. I'm going to see it on Monday 20 May, and will provide some thoughts as quickly as possible after that. I promise to stay for longer than 10 minutes – and longer, in fact, than Scott and Zelda did when they went the 1926 film.

Until then, there is at least one reproduction of Gatsby that is definitely worth more of your time. This very silly Super Nintendo emulating version has already clocked up more than a million page visits, thanks to its winning combination of Fitzgerald's dialogue, killer flappers, dangerous chandeliers, and the ability to kill waiters by chucking your hat at them. Who says it can't be adapted?

F Scott FitzgeraldFictionSam Jordison
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