Book banning bemusing given what is online
There is an allure in banned books. They become coveted trophies of audacious openmindedness. Rules are made to be broken, after all.
I know about that allure because my never-married, never-even-boyfriended aunt, who wouldn’t give a man the time of day, smuggled a copy of Lady Chatterley’s Lover into my grandmother’s house, where it sat meekly in her bookcase until I found it. She was a nurse. Maybe she thought it would reveal something of academic interest.
I was probably 10 when I pulled that Penguin paperback off the shelf, and naturally read it from cover to cover.
I won’t say it didn’t affect me, because it did. It gave me the impression that men had two penises, one small and the other large. That wasn’t useful knowledge, so I shelved it for years.
It told me that adults may be secretly prone to decorating each other’s pubes with flowers in the outdoors, which I thought was weird. What if people caught you running around in the nuddy, and wouldn’t you get cold? I was always made to put on a cardigan.
Gamekeepers, I gathered as I read on, were prone to sermonising. Women, if the heroine in this story was any example, listened in passive adoration because men were so wise. Precisely what they were up to together in their wordy assignations was unclear. In fact I was bored. It is a boring book. D.H. Lawrence is a tedious writer. But I stuck with it to the end. I felt it had to be done.
And then came a flood of banned books, suddenly cleared by the censor’s office. For a few weeks buying was feverish in the left-wing bookshop where I worked. It might even have made a profit.
People were mad to lay their hands on The Perfumed Garden and The Kama Sutra, exotic sex manuals that came delivered in boxloads, in bright yellow and black covers. They had been banned, possibly because they describe contortions that would give you cramp in the worst places.
I guess Don Mathieson, president of the Film and Literature Board of Review, would disapprove. He has shut down sales of a book aimed at teenagers that can’t now be supplied, displayed or distributed, though it is an award-winning book, at least until October 2. Libraries and bookshops have to hide their copies of Into the River until a final decision on its fate. In the meantime curiosity will ensure that lots more people will read it than ever would have done before. People love to be shocked. I guess they hope that it’s still possible.
Dr Mathieson is an active Christian and a Queens Counsel. He has had a distinguished legal career and is the author of Faith at Work, a book that canvasses the relevance of Christianity in the workplace – and all of that is to his credit. But I do wonder how someone with such a minority perspective came to be chairman of the review board, able to effectively ban a book he dislikes for a time without consulting other members. The book may be released again after the current process plays itself out, but the board has been compromised, surely, by this action. Such a gesture suggests capture by complainants Family First and its followers, numerically a tiny minority in this country.
I mention numbers because I am unimpressed by they way they counted words they deemed naughty in the book. The c-word, Family First’s head Bob McCroskie says, is used nine times in the text, the f-word 17 times, and ‘‘s-h-i-t’’ 16 times. It uses, then, the language of the real world, where people live.
What harm can one book, judged to be of literary merit, even, do in a world where kids can access every form of indecency or violence anyone ever imagined on their computers and mobile phones? What harm can a book dealing with drug use do when kids can buy drugs as easily as meat pies? And how sinister could any book possibly be compared with what kids get up to on Facebook?
My old mum used to say, ‘‘To the pure all things are pure.’’
She had a point. This looks like more of a hunt for smut by the bewildered than a credible attempt to turn back time.
What harm can one book, judged to be of literary merit, even, do in a world where kids can access every form of indecency or violence anyone ever imagined on their computers and mobile phones? What harm can a book dealing with drug use do when kids can buy drugs as easily as meat pies?