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Open Thread: New year's resolutions in fiction

Has a novel ever changed the way you see things, or a character shown you the way to go?

It's that time again when we examine what went wrong in the old year and try to put it all right in the new. Yes, it's the season of resolutions. And like asparagus or strawberry seasons of summer, it usually doesn't usually very long.

One year, under the influence of Louise Rennison's Georgia Nicholson series, I decided to take up jogging. It was Georgia's fault for setting off on a health jag in Luuurve is a Many Trousered Thing. I bought myself some jogging bottoms and ran up and down my street twice but the visions of the new, improved, healthier version of myself soon faded - unlike the flush of shame as I walked home in defeat. I have not jogged since.

It set me thinking about what impact other fictional characters have had on my decision-making. Bridget Jones is a prime example of someone who carries the flag for New Year's resolutions, but her willpower is almost as feeble as my jogging. Perhaps her purpose is to reassure us all that we're not alone.

I'm not talking about the how-to scoldings of the self-help industry but the less pushy influence of a good novel. One person on the children's books team recalls being spurred on by Jane Austen's Emma to be less bossy around her friends. But sometimes they can have the opposite effect, especially the really angelic ones. Beth, in Little Women, for example inspired another to be more rebellious than saintly.

Have any fictional characters influenced the way you live your life? Let us know by emailing us at childrens.books@guardian.co.uk

Teen books
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Darkness in literature: Beyond Black by Hilary Mantel

This black-as-pitch tale of a psychic haunted by her own childhood traumas is deeply disturbing, excruciatingly funny, and darker than dark

"Travelling: the dank oily days after christmas." So begins the novel which, with humble apologies to Thomas Cromwell, I believe is Hilary Mantel's masterpiece. Beyond Black is a darkly comic account of clairvoyancy plied in the grim new towns of England's motorway wastes; a ghost story that is also a beyond-black account of the adult mind's struggles to live with childhood trauma.

The adult in question is Alison - a voluminous psychic forced to live with the spirit of a perverted circus clown who follows her into the loo and masturbates in corners as she tries to fight through the night-sweats and daymares to a halfway normal life. As her assistant Colette points out: "If Morris were earthside and you and he were married, you could get rid of him easily enough; you could divorce him. Then if he pestered you, you could see a solicitor, take out an injunction." Colette knows this, having rid herself of her own husband for "hardly more than it would cost to put an animal down".

Colette cannot see the appalling Morris - she knows him only by the faint smell of sewage - but she joined up with Alison after a spooky telephone conversation with her newly dead mother-in-law (another abusive relationship, if only at the level of filial estrangement). There is an ambivalence in Colette's attitude that reflects the strange, shivering ambivalence of Mantel herself towards her central character: on stage, Alison is a huckster who queens it in her lucky opals as she works the petty neuroses and hot griefs of her audiences. "Prediction, though she protested against it, had become a lucrative part of her business".

But prediction is only the business end for a "sensitive", who can "see straight through the living, to their ambitions and secret sorrows", and for whom the tacky newbuilds of England's brownfill colonies heave with buried horrors. Morris isn't a ghost to Alison; he is the incarnation of her injuries, as the child of a prostitute whose first abuse of many was to try to abort her with knitting needles.

The vocation of a story-teller is to exhume just such hidden histories – and there is a sense of Mantel using this story to dig beneath the floorboards of her own mind. Writers are a sort of psychic huckster, she seems to be saying, but they also have a responsibility to find forms and words for experiences that for most of us are beyond articulation, beyond belief. The pain and complexity they intuit can be deflected by comedy, sanitised by euphemism, distanced by metaphor but it can never be divorced.

Different readers of Beyond Black read it differently: one of its strengths is to provoke argument. Like the earth- and airside realities that Alison is condemned to straddle, this deeply disturbing, excruciatingly funny novel exists in many dimensions - all of them darker than dark.

Claire Armitstead
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Darkness in literature: The Snow Child by Eowyn Ivey

In this story of Alaskan winter, the long nights' darkness brings both fear and comfort

Based on a Russian fairy tale, The Snow Child is a tale of the shoring up of defences, psychological and literal, against the cold and dark. Set in the 1920s, the novel follows the move of middle-aged Jack and Mabel from 'back east' America to a remote homestead in Alpine, Alaska. Heavy with the loss of their firstborn and only child many years earlier, they seek to change the pattern of their lives in a context of icy ravines and wild silence.

Dusk hovers at the edge of the writing from the outset. "The leaden sky seemed to hold its breath," while against forests of pine and black spruce "winter comes hard and fast ... by December the sun would rise just before noon and skirt the mountain tops for a few hours of twilight". As the days diminish, Mabel seems, with her washing, cooking, sewing and the lighting of oil lamps, to enact a constant preparation for the night.

Yet the role of darkness is sometimes reversed in this tale of enchantment, so entwined does it become with the appearance of the child. Symbolic, by turns, of both good and ill, it brings Mabel anguished dreams of "snowflakes and naked babies tumbled through her nights", yet summons up the time she first fell in love with her husband, which she remembers as "flying above the warm inky black night". And it is on the first night of winter, when "through the window, the night appeared dense, each snowflake slowed in its long, tumbling fall through the black", that the couple, momentarily carefree, build a girl out of snow. The red cranberry of the girl's lips, on the white, is brighter against the night sky. The child, Faina, who emerges from the snow, seems in part to be forged from the darkness; the long nights give Faina to Mabel and Jack, while the spring, when darkness recedes and the snow melts, takes her from them.

With the passing years, the coming of each spring heralds the loss of the snow child, little by little. As if perishing in the exposure to the light, Faina, now a young woman with her own child, is drawn to the mountains, "where the spring never comes and the snow never melts". It is when the evenings takes on a thinner quality that she is found, sickening, lying atop her wedding quilt in a "night that was cool and pale blue".

Childless and full of longing, Mabel carries her own darkness, one in which it is easy to find a resonance. But in the last moments of the novel, light and darkness combine in a moment of hope. Jack and Mabel, gazing through their window, see past the reflection of their two old faces "to make out the figures in the night". Jack's eyes becoming accustomed to the darkness and alight upon Faina's own child, the child of the snow child, dancing in the falling snow.

Keren Levy
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Darkness in literature: Darkness at Noon by Arthur Koestler

Koestler's black indictment of Stalin's police state helped to alter the 20th century's intellectual climate. Sadly it's all too relevant today

My Penguin Modern Classics edition of Darkness at Noon has on its cover a detail from Francis Bacon's terrifying canvas Man in Blue V 1954. The whole image is pervaded with a blue so dark it's practically black. A suited man is sitting at a table. The vertical lines of the curtains behind him seem to be the bars of a cell – he is perhaps a prisoner facing interrogation. Most shockingly, his face is scratched out, erased; what he is, has stood for, has been obliterated.

It's a superb image to accompany Arthur Koestler's tale of a seasoned Bolshevik who is arrested and tried by the authorities, eventually "confesses" and is killed. In a note at the beginning of what is one of the most celebrated political novels of the 20th century, Koestler wrote that the Bolshevik, Rubashov, "is a synthesis of the lives of a number of men who were victims of the so-called Moscow Trials". Cheery holiday fare this isn't, but it's one of those books you really have to read.

Though Stalin is not named – the leader whose portrait looks down from so many walls is called 'No.1' – Darkness at Noon characterises the betrayal by the Stalin-era USSR of the socialist utopian dream. What was going to be wonderful has turned bad. As Orwell wrote, Koestler "is writing about darkness, but it is darkness at what ought to be noon." Even if you skim the pages, the words "dark" and "darkness" announce their presence. In the opening, when Rubashov is arrested in the middle of the night by the secret police, we are told he is enduring a nightmare of a "dark cell"; that it "was cold, dark and very quiet in the staircase"; that as the car drives him away it "was still dark" and the moon hangs above them "pale and cold".

Even more strikingly, in the final two pages, as the broken Rubashov walks down into a cellar to his death, the "stairs were narrow and badly lit", "He was now nearly blind". Asking "where was the Promised Land", he reflects that "he, Nicolas Salmanovich Rubashov, had not been taken to the top of a mountain; and wherever his eye looked, he saw nothing but desert and the darkness of night." After he is hit with a dull blow to the head, "It got dark, the sea carried him rocking on its nocturnal surface." And as he catches the odour of a leather revolver belt, and sees a shapeless figure above him, he asks, just before all becomes quiet, "in whose name did it raise the dark pistol barrel?"

Koestler had himself been a signed-up devotee of Marxism-Leninism. In 1931, a Hungarian journalist in Germany, he applied for membership of the Communist Party and, impressed by the achievements of the Soviet Union during a spell there in the early 1930s, began to write Comintern propaganda. After Franco's rebellion he went to Spain during the Civil War as a Soviet agent (he met WH Auden at a "crazy party" in Valencia). Having been exposed, he was imprisoned: like Rubashov he was put in solitary confinement and fully expected to be shot. (He was released following an international campaign.) His retreat from the communist cause wasn't immediate – he left the Party at the time of Stalin's purges in 1938, and lost much of what was left of his faith on the signing of the Nazi-Soviet pact. "Brilliant as this book is as a novel, and a piece of prison literature," Orwell wrote of Darkness at Noon, "it is probably most valuable as an interpretation of the Moscow 'confessions' by someone with an inner knowledge of totalitarian methods." That early note in the book on the grandee Bolsheviks who inspired the character of Rubashov continues: "Several of them were personally known to the author. This book is dedicated to their memory."

Koestler wrote the novel in German while living in Paris, from where he escaped in 1940 just before the Nazi troops arrived. The text was lost. Darkness at Noon owes its publication to the decision of his lover in Paris, the sculptor Daphne Hardy, to translate it into English before she herself escaped. Koestler, having deserted from the French Foreign Legion, fled to Portugal, where he heard a bogus report that the ship on which Hardy – and his manuscript – were travelling to Britain had been sunk. He attempted suicide (with pills purloined from Walter Benjamin).

It's hard not to get distracted by Koestler's utterly astonishing life story, even if you manage to put to one side the disquieting accusation that he was a "serial rapist". To get a sense of it, here's a paragraph from a piece in the New York Review of Books by Anne Applebaum:

"Along the way he had lunch with Thomas Mann, got drunk with Dylan Thomas, made friends with George Orwell, flirted with Mary McCarthy, and lived in Cyril Connolly's London flat. In 1940, Koestler was released from a French detention camp, partly thanks to the intervention of Harold Nicholson and Noël Coward. In the 1950s, he helped found the Congress for Cultural Freedom ... In the 1960s, he took LSD with Timothy Leary. In the 1970s, he was still giving lectures that impressed, among others, the young Salman Rushdie."

Applebaum has long been interested in Darkness at Noon as an anti-communist document, because it was "with Orwell's Animal Farm and Victor Kravchenko's I Chose Freedom … one of the books that helped turn the tide on the intellectual front line, and ensured that the West prevailed". That's a tidy claim to fame and continued significance. And yet, from today's perspective, to recruit the novel so straightforwardly to one side in the Cold War, to freeze it in history, is almost to sell it short. Darkness at Noon still lives as a study of fear and victimhood, of state brutality, of unjust imprisonment, of interrogation and forced confession. The west may have "prevailed" as Applebaum suggests, but Koestler's tale of lies and oppression is all too chillingly contemporary: "Rubashov lay on his bunk and stared into the dark ... He saw enter two uniformed officials ... he only wished to get it over quickly ... If they beat me now, I will sign anything they like."

ClassicsFiction
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Darkness in literature: The Dark is Rising by Susan Cooper

Reading Susan Cooper's gloriously Manichaean exploration of the dark through the life of 11-year-old Will Stanton is a Christmas ritual for me

Susan Cooper's sequence of five children's stories, The Dark Is Rising, is, you'll have guessed, all about the dark. The dark as velvety, blanketing night. The dark as the keeper of mysteries, ineffable and unknowable. Above all, the dark as counterpoint to the light; as one side of the great battle between evil and good.

The Dark Is Rising is a Christmas ritual for me. The story starts on 20 December, and it is on 20 December each year that I start reading it. It is the night before Will Stanton's 11th birthday. All is happy anticipation and the busy, noisy stuff of a family coming together for the Christmas holiday. Will goes to bed with not much on his mind except a hope that his dearest birthday wish might be granted: deep, white, enfolding snow.

He puts out the light. And then the terror comes.

There's something extraordinary in the way Cooper describes this fear of the dark. It is a child's anxiety at the blank blackness redoubled; stretched to its extreme, because it quickly becomes clear that there is something more to Will's terror than can be explained away by an appeal to the everyday. It is, oddly, the moment when Will switches on his bedside lamp that is the most telling (and the most recognisable, perhaps, to any of us who have once been afraid of the dark): "The room was at once a cosy cave of yellow light, and he lay back in shame, feeling stupid." Then: "He switched off the light again, and instantly everything was even worse than before. The fear jumped at him for the third time like a great animal that had been waiting to spring. Will lay terrified, shaking, feeling himself shake, yet unable to move." For years I couldn't read this passage without feeling petrified myself, and making my own cosy cave of yellow light to stave off the terrors wrought by the imagination. It's all the more powerful because nothing really happens, beyond a skylight breaking under the weight of the beautiful, longed-for snow, and a rook's feather drifting in to Will's room ...

As the story goes on, it becomes clear that during this black night of fear some great change has been wrought in Will. But it is never fully explained what this feeling – "as if some huge weight were pushing at his mind, threatening, trying to take him over" – really means, or what, precisely, happens to him that night. What is clear is that when he steps out into the great white brightness of snowfall the next morning, he can work magic, and is one of the Old Ones, a fighter in the age-old battle against the Lords of the Dark. And yet he is still bound up in the warm happiness of carol singing and mince pies, and the bright promise of the tree and its presents. He is a young boy who shifts between high magic and and the utterly, comfortingly ordinary fact of a joyful family Christmas.

Charlotte Higgins
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Darkness in literature: Saul Bellow's Something to Remember Me By

This late short story explores the dark reality of death, which underlies the apparently innocuous events of a single afternoon

"Death," wrote Saul Bellow in his 1975 novel Humboldt's Gift, "is the dark backing a mirror needs if we are to see anything." And though there is a literal darkness to his 1990 short story Something to Remember Me By, it is the figurative darkness of the earlier aphorism the Bellow seems to be exploring over the dozen or so pages that make up this later work.

Set over the course of a single February day in 1933 ("Chicago in winter, armored in gray ice, the sky low, the going heavy"), Something to Remember Me By takes the form of a childhood memory as narrated by an elderly father to his adult son. There is a pervasive melancholy throughout, a sense of encroaching gloom that settles upon the narrative like the coal soot upon the snow piling up in the streets. In 1933 the narrator, Louis, is 17 years old ("an indifferent student, generally unpopular, a background figure"); his mother lies at home dying of cancer ("her eyelids were brown; the color of her face was much lighter"); meanwhile, the growing darkness of the wider world is briefly alluded to in the planned topic for Louis' discussion club that afternoon ("Von Hindenburg's choice of Hitler to form a new government"). On this particular day, however, Louis is unable to attend his club. Instead, he has to deliver lilies for a florist to an address across town. What follows is a kind of Short Day's Journey into Night, during which the tragic and the comic work upon Louis in equal measure and "the facts of life [have] their turn".

Upon arriving at his destination, Louis discovers that the lilies are for a young girl's wake. In the dining room he observes the body of the girl laid out in her coffin, before being summoned into the kitchen by the girl's mother:

"On the drainboard of the sink was a baked ham with sliced bread around the platter, a jar of French mustard and wooden tongue depressors to spread it. I saw and I saw and I saw."

By the time Louis leaves the apartment it is early evening. "There wasn't much daylight left. At noon it was poured out; by four it had drained away." Reluctant to return home, Louis pays a visit to his brother-in-law, a dentist. His brother-in-law is out, but in the office of the gynaecologist next door, Louis encounters a beautiful naked woman. At the sight of the woman's breasts, Louis is unable to stop himself picturing "his mother's chest mutilated by cancer surgery". Here, then, is an early glimpse of the mirror's dark backing. Or, as Louis puts it himself a short while later as he excitedly escorts the woman back to her hotel: "I refused absolutely to believe for a moment that people here were doing what they thought they were doing. Beneath the apparent life of these streets was their real life, beneath each face the real face, beneath each voice and its words the true tone and the real message." Ironically, Louis' theory is proved to be true when the woman turns out to be a con-artist who throws his clothes out of the hotel window and leaves him naked and penniless, miles from home.

When Louis finally manages to make it back to his family – hours later, in borrowed, ill-fitting clothes – he finds his father waiting up for him and is struck about the head. However, this blow comes as a relief: had his mother already died, Louis realises, his father would have embraced him instead. And in this moment Louis is made aware of "the hidden work of uneventful days"; that "the measured, reassuring, sleep-inducing turntable of days [had become] a whirlpool, a vortex, darkening toward the bottom".

Bellow is not quite finished, though. Now that Louis has been reminded of his mother's imminent death, the reader is reminded that the narrator's death is imminent also. Of course, the death of the narrator has been present from the very start: the title itself, Something to Remember Me By, providing the dark backing for this particular mirror. But it is easy to forget the present when one is lost in the past. And so the story comes to an abrupt end with a couple of wry, throwaway lines:

"Well, they're all gone now, and I have made my preparations. I haven't left a large estate, and this is why I have written this memoir, a sort of addition to your legacy."

It is almost as if, having made the darkness visible, he quite simply has nothing more left to say.

Saul BellowFictionShort storiesDeath and dyingWayne Gooderham
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Tips, links and suggestions: Merry Christmas

Thanks for all your comments, reviews and ideas. Merry Christmas!

Thank you to everyone who has contributed to TLS this year. Your comments, reviews, recommendations and ideas have made it what it is, so thank you.

This TLS thread will take us over Christmas and into 2013, so instead of our usual review list, this is a space for us all to chat generally about the books we're reading, those we hope to have in our Christmas stocking, and those we actually receive.

Merry Christmas!

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Darkness in literature: James Joyce's Araby

In this short story, a young man's night-time journey to a deserted bazaar marks the end of carefree childhood

James Joyce's short story Araby shows us a Dubliner stumbling over the boggy ground of adolescence. Joyce dimly lights this psychic landscape, and hems it on all sides with a bleak darkness. When the story begins, childhood's summer has passed and the dwindling days of winter have arrived: "The space of sky above us was the colour of ever-changing violet and towards it the lamps of the street lifted their feeble lanterns."

The boy lives with his uncle and aunt in a cul-de-sac – a "blind" street, with which Joyce suggests an idyllic ignorance of the wider world – and is in love with the sister of his friend Mangan. Being adolescent, and educated by Christian Brothers, the boy's feelings of attraction are confusing, bedevilling and painful:

"My eyes were often full of tears (I could not tell why) … I did not know whether I would ever speak to her or not or, if I spoke to her, how I could tell her of my confused adoration. But my body was like a harp and her words and gestures were like fingers running upon the wires."

When Mangan's sister finally notices the boy, she shines from the surrounding darkness: "The light from the lamp opposite our door caught the white curve of her neck, lit up her hair that rested there and, falling, lit up the hand upon the railing." She says she can't go to the Araby bazaar, and the boy promises that if he does then he'll bring her something back. He asks his uncle if he can go the following Saturday. That day his uncle is late home, and it is after nine before the boy departs to cross the dark city. That he sets out at a time unsuitable for children is significant, as the journey will lead the boy from childhood into adulthood. This Joyce characterises as a transition from perennial hope to perennial disappointment.

I was 16 when I first read Araby, and in the autumn of that year I got into what was, at that point, the worst trouble I'd ever been in. The police called my parents, and my parents, in a fury, tracked me down and ordered me home. I was a slow train and a long walk away, and over the course of that endless, anxious journey, night fell. Ever since, I always think of it when I read about the boy travelling to Araby in the "deserted train" that "crept onward among ruinous houses and over the twinkling river". Both journeys led from a carefree childhood into a graver space: towards, in Hugh Kenner's description of Araby, "an echoing and empty humiliation". In symbolic terms, neither journey would have been well served by daylight.

When the boy reaches his destination, most of the stalls are closed and "the greater part of the hall was in darkness. I recognised a silence like that which pervades a church after a service." Here, on the darkening floor of the shabby bazaar, Joyce's story becomes a requiem. The boy sees a young woman flirting with two men, and the sexual atmosphere of their exchange confuses him. When the woman grudgingly serves him he tells her he doesn't want anything. As he leaves the bazaar, empty-handed but possessed of a new and bitter knowledge, he hears a voice "call from one end of the gallery that the light was out. The upper part of the hall was now completely dark."

We are present at the passing of the narrator's childhood, its lights dwindling around him. "Gazing up into the darkness," he tells us: "I saw myself as a creature driven and derided by vanity; and my eyes burned with anguish and anger." Here, at the story's end, we find ourselves thrown back to its beginning, which carries the presentiment of death in its "dark dripping gardens where odours arose from the ashpits".

In an evening the narrator has moved from an innocent boy playing in the last light of childhood, to an anguished young man who has come to realise that maturity is not the realisation of childhood's promise, but its loss. This is an archetypal Joycean epiphany, one of those often small but definitive moments, after which life is never quite the same again. It is so often described as a literary effect that we forget how accurately it can depict the way we experience change, as is true for me in the case of that autumn night 20 years ago. To some extent this is a result of the way we shape our memories, editing as we go as well as simply forgetting vast quantities of detail. Just like the narrator of Araby, a grown man remembering a single night with a mixture of scorn and tenderness, what we come to look back on is a sequence of these significant moments; a thin rail of light tracing our path across a shadowy expanse.

James JoyceFictionShort storiesChris Power
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The Mayan apocalypse: survival tips from literature

Worried about how you'll fare when the Mayan apocalypse hits? Improve your chances by boning up on the best apocalyptic lessons from literature - and increase humanity's chances by sharing your own favourites

Fellow fans of apocalyptic literature - we need your help! In advance of the imminent demise of the world (apparently scheduled for Friday), we thought it wise to compile a list of lessons that can be learned from the best apocalyptic fiction, and we need your suggestions.

Hopefully, together, we'll be able to help the few survivors who remain on 21/12/2012. Providing, I suppose, they've still got access to the internet.

Here's a few suggestions I've come up with, but we need more. More, people! Humanity's future is in your hands!

Literary survival tips

The Day of the Triffids: don't look at the sky

The Road: carry antibiotics

Oryx and Crake: watch out for those dastardly pigeons

Cell: put down your mobile phone

The Postman: hone your acting skills

Over to you ...

Mayan apocalypseAlison Flood
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Jim Hines: imitating the poses on fantasy book covers - so you don't have to

A new superhero has emerged from the fantasy firmament - he's Jim Hines and he's exposing the sexism of book design. The results are not pretty

I have a new hero, and his name is Jim Hines. He's a fantasy author, and he's just posted a blog details his latest adventures in imitating the poses of the worst excesses of cover art. It's fantastic.

Hines made his first foray into modelling back in January, realising that the way women were posed on fantasy jackets was, basically, ridiculous. "Now I could talk about the way women are posed in cover art … or I could show you. I opted for the latter, in part because it helped me to understand it better," he wrote. There's him doing the classic, look-back-over-the-shoulder pose, him tummy out, him swords akimbo, and they are brilliant - although the poses did cause him some problems.

"In all seriousness, I spent the rest of last night with pain running through most of my back. Even the pose in The Shape of Desire, which first struck me as rather low-key, is difficult to imitate and feels really forced. Trying to launch my chest and buttocks in two different directions a la Vicious Grace? Just ow," he wrote.

"To be clear, there's nothing wrong with being sexual ... But posing like these characters drives home exactly what's being emphasised and what's not. My sense is that most of these covers are supposed to convey strong, sexy heroines, but these are not poses that suggest strength. You can't fight from these stances. I could barely even walk."

Hines then decided to check out if it's any better for men - if they're just as objectified on book covers. He's Conan, he's Fabio - and again, it's hilarious. But this time round, he found that while men on book covers are often posed shirtless, "male poses do not generally emphasise sexuality at the expense of all other considerations ... male poses do emphasize the character's power and strength in a way many (most?) female cover poses don't [and] when posed with a woman, the man will usually be in the dominant, more powerful posture." Well, hardly surprising.

Anyway, Hines has now decided to take advantage of the popularity of his cover poses to raise money for charity, and is striking ridiculous positions in return for money for a good cause (so far he's raised over $10,000). There's a gloriously awful Catwoman , and, following a suggestion from Sarah from Smart Bitches Trashy Books (I love that site), there's Johanna Lindsey's Man of my Dreams. Click if you dare - Hines is playing both parts...

FantasyIllustrationAlison Flood
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