Thursday, November 09, 2006
If there's one aspect of the job of being a librarian that I find difficult to get people to understand it's that it's not all glamour, it's not all fast cars, loose women and the legal right to torture and kill anyone you don't like. There's boring things you have to do. For example, at the moment I'm having to buy a couple of thousand quidlingtons of what we call 'Family Saga' books. I'm not sure if they exist or sell so well outside of the UK but they follow a basic pattern, they're about 400 pages long, they have a generic cover in which a young girl stands in a working-class street circa 1932 and in the book someone goes through absolute misery in the period of time between the end of the Boer War and the start of WW2.
Normally the main character is a girl. Sometimes at least one of the parents is missing by the time she's born, maybe he went off to fight in the war. If Dad is still around he's usually an alcoholic and Mum is killed by him soon after giving birth. If Dad isn't around then Mum will be the alcoholic and blame the daughter for driving Dad away, until about five minutes before the vicious old bat dies of old age. If the little girl has any brothers and sisters then they'll all die of cholera or the lurgie and leave her alone, unless she has an older brother who's already sixteen, he'll be really nice to her and then go off and die at one of the big slaughters of the First World War. She'll celebrate puberty with a couple of rapes and get chucked out of home by any parental figure still around. The next thirty years will be a number of ill-advised liasons, any nice men will get killed before she has a chance for any real fun, she'll marry someone who'll use her as a punching bag but, if she can last until the Blitz then he'll get killed in a collapsing house that's been bombed by the Frtitz, leaving the way clear for our heroine, now in her forties, to get it on with the emotionally constipated Air Raid Warden. Only at this point she'll get cancer and die in one of those National Health Service hospitals that that nice Mister Attlee gave us.
These books are very popular with women from late-middle-age onwards. I believe this is because they like misery porn and this is why such women are evil.
I'm also impressed that Sheelagh Kelly, one of these writers, can write books with a character called Probyn Kilmaster and get away with it.
Normally the main character is a girl. Sometimes at least one of the parents is missing by the time she's born, maybe he went off to fight in the war. If Dad is still around he's usually an alcoholic and Mum is killed by him soon after giving birth. If Dad isn't around then Mum will be the alcoholic and blame the daughter for driving Dad away, until about five minutes before the vicious old bat dies of old age. If the little girl has any brothers and sisters then they'll all die of cholera or the lurgie and leave her alone, unless she has an older brother who's already sixteen, he'll be really nice to her and then go off and die at one of the big slaughters of the First World War. She'll celebrate puberty with a couple of rapes and get chucked out of home by any parental figure still around. The next thirty years will be a number of ill-advised liasons, any nice men will get killed before she has a chance for any real fun, she'll marry someone who'll use her as a punching bag but, if she can last until the Blitz then he'll get killed in a collapsing house that's been bombed by the Frtitz, leaving the way clear for our heroine, now in her forties, to get it on with the emotionally constipated Air Raid Warden. Only at this point she'll get cancer and die in one of those National Health Service hospitals that that nice Mister Attlee gave us.
These books are very popular with women from late-middle-age onwards. I believe this is because they like misery porn and this is why such women are evil.
I'm also impressed that Sheelagh Kelly, one of these writers, can write books with a character called Probyn Kilmaster and get away with it.
