What’s Up, Docx?

Edward Docx (right) had a piece in Sunday’s Observer, in which he pointed out that Dan Brown and Stieg Larsson aren’t much cop when compared to literary geniuses. He won’t get much argument about that here, but Docx then went on to trash pretty much all genre fiction, and claim that literary fiction is innately superior to any other kind of fiction, but crime fiction in particular, on the basis that genre fiction is constrained by conventions that must be adhered to by the genre writer, whereas the literary writer is free to write whatever he or she likes.
  Predictably enough, the crime fic spectrum of the blogosphere is up in arms about Docx’s temerity in dissing crime fiction. And, as always, I can’t help but wonder if the virulent reaction to the piece isn’t ever so slightly coloured by some kind of inferiority complex. I mean, it’s not as if we haven’t heard variations on this theme countless times before, and yet every time some self-proclaimed literary writer mounts this particular hobby horse, the peasants are out en masse waving torches and pitchforks. Really, shouldn’t that sore spot, so often rubbed up the wrong way, have developed a callus at this stage?
  It’s only my opinion, of course, but I reckon the only reasonable response to Docx’s piece, and to the next one, and the one after that, etcetera, ad nauseam, is this:

*yawns*
*scratches oxter*
*wonders why literary writers get so het up about crime fiction if it’s so crap*
*thinks about boiling kettle*
*wonders why genre writers don’t get so het up about literary fiction, and if maybe it’s because they’re too busy writing*
*yawns*
*scratches oxter*

THE TWELVE: Did I Mention That This One Goes Up To 11?

As much as I hate a lazy and / or bad reviewer, I love a good reviewer, and a good review, and Stuart Neville picked up a couple of doozies over the weekend, the first being Nicola Barr at The Observer, the gist of her review running thusly:

“THE TWELVE is a brilliant thriller: unbearably tense, stomach-churningly frightening. Fegan and his nemesis, the government double agent Davy Campbell, are magnificent creations: not sympathetic, but never wholly repugnant. And just as haunting as Fegan’s apparitions are Neville’s stunning reimaginings of the darkest atrocities: the bombs, the beatings, the torture, the point-blank murders. Then there’s the farm in south Armagh, setting for the novel’s grisly climax, presided over by the almost mythically violent Bull O’Kane, the last bastion of the old guard, unchanged, impenetrable, rooted in the past.
  “It is impressive indeed to create an entertainment out of such material, but more than that, Neville has boldly exposed post-ceasefire Northern Ireland as a confused, contradictory place, a country trying to carve out a future amid a peace recognised by the populace as hypocritical, but accepted as better than the alternative. This is the best fictional representation of the Troubles I have come across, a future classic of its time. Stuart Neville has finally given Northern Ireland the novel its singular history deserves.” – Nicola Barr, The Observer

  Very nice indeed. And then Matt Benyon Rees weighed in with a review on his interweb malarkey, which finishes up like this:

“Neville’s masterstroke is to take a post-conflict situation where of necessity a lot of former bad guys are converted to good guys -- gunmen made into legislators still running corrupt business sidelines -- and to show the price paid by those who can’t shrug off their past … Neville’s book is a thrilling record of the traces of crime and blood left behind when the politicians command us to move on.” – Matt Benyon Rees

  And then there was The Daily Mail on Monday, to wit: “An astonishing first novel ... Awesomely powerful, fabulously written ... simply unmissable.”
  Terrific stuff, and very well deserved it all is too …

A Meaty Dish? Yep, It’s Irish Stu

Leaving aside for the moment the impact of his windswept and rugged features on the ladies of this parish, Dishy Stuart Neville’s debut THE TWELVE is kicking up quite a lot of dust at the moment, and quite rightly too, given that it is, if I may immodestly paraphrase from the review in last weekend’s Sunday Indo (see post below), “a superb thriller, and one of the first great post-Troubles novels to emerge from Northern Ireland.”
  Anyway, Stuart is being interviewed all over the place right now. To wit:
  Stuart tells The Observer’s Henry McDonald that, “I see this book primarily as a thriller with a paranormal element to it and one that explores the themes of Northern Ireland’s recent past.”
  My own fave, though, is Stuart’s response to the Book Depository’s Mark Thwaite when Mark asks, at the end of the interview, if there’s anything else Stuart would like to add. Quoth Stuart: “Keep buying books! The world economy is in a bad way, but we shouldn’t lose sight of the really valuable things. Books, whether highbrow or lowbrow, whether on paper or on an e-reader, are what made everything we have today possible.”
  Amen, brother …