Men who only read blokes’ books are really missing out
Hardeep Singh Kohli
LAST week I was on the wireless with the lovely Ed Byrne being quizzed by the peerless Harriet Gilbert about books we all would describe as “a good read”. Somehow I seem to have inveigled my way into the world of all things literary, having judged a book competition some years ago. Ed chose Chris Brookmyre’s scintillating debut novel, Quite Ugly One Morning. My choice, coincidentally, was also penned by a Scottish writer. The Prime Of Miss Jean Brodie is probably Muriel Spark’s most celebrated work. It has a certain resonance for me. It is said to have been set at Mary Erskine School for Girls, where my exwife was a pupil. I consciously chose a female writer writing about predominantly female characters. This positive discrimination has become something I feel increasingly compelled to exercise these days. During my schooldays, I’m not sure I read a single book written by a woman or with a female protagonist; not a single play that wasn’t penned by a man or written with a man at the centre of drama. Apart from a handful of poems, my literary education, the foundation upon which I was to build my critical, cultural and comparative faculties, was predicated almost exclusively through the prism of the patriarchy. And if that male monopoly, passed down from generation to generation, must narrow the growing minds of mento-be, imagine how it feels for girls. Half of the population spend time in school, seldom seeing women writers, dramatists or poets. I had to redress this gender balance myself, later in life – and much improved my literary life has been for it. Reading the writing of women and following leading characters that are women has broadened my horizons. That’s exactly what books should do.
I would have hoped that in the intervening decades this overwhelming gender gap might have tightened. But alas, not …
According to the newly appointed Children’s Laureate, Lauren Child, boys still don’t like to read books that have girls as the leading character.
“I don’t know if it’s just in our culture, or whether it’s a boy thing, that they find it very hard to pick up a book or go to a film if a girl is the central character,” the children’s author said last week. “[This] makes it harder for girls to be equal.”
Child was in Hull having been appointed as the 10th laureate for weans, tasked with championing all books for children. Lauren is an old friend of mine from my early London days; I couldn’t be happier for her success. She has had a rather stunning career since she published her debut book, Clarice Bean, That’s Me, at the turn of the millennium. That was followed by Charlie And Lola and numerous awards, with book sales that, in the following decade, saw her out-selling Nigella Lawson and Charles Dickens.
Since 2009, Child has been writing books about Ruby Redfort, undercover agent, tenacious detective and solver of all manner of mysteries. This 13-yearold jeans and T-shirt wearer leads a double life – her wealthy socialite parents have no idea that Ruby works for a secret organisation called Spectrum. I have yet to read a Ruby Redfort book but I have to say, she sounds kinda cool. Yet still, her creator, Lauren Child, finds that “parents will come up to me and say, ‘Do you write books for boys as well?’ This is a book for boys. We do still have those problems. It does concern me.”
Imagine if, when you went to buy a book, there was a section at the back of the shop called Blokes’ Books, full of random titles defined solely by the single unifying factor that all the writers were male. That would be singularly daft. Yet we seem to accept the purely gender-based genre of “chick lit”, which literary academic Caroline J Smith defined as “heroine-centred narratives that focus on the trials and tribulations of their individual protagonists”. Think about that definition for a moment. Isn’t it applicable to almost any work of fiction? And how many men have read the greats?