I know I promised not to mention The Da Vinci Code again, but I just stumbled across a reference to this line from Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum and can’t help myself:

The lunatic is easily recognised. Sooner or later he brings up the Knights Templar.

The Times reports that Enid Blyton’s biographer has accused publishers of bowing to political correctness by sanitising some of the children’s author’s best known books.

I have to admit it’s the cookies thing that annoys me the most. The Sun’s headline screeched “Five Go And Do Ironing”. Hilarious.
If this is true (Hodder denies it) then my feeling is that the greatest crime is in not crediting children with enough intelligence to know when they are reading stuff that is clearly from “the olden days” – which it was even when I were a lass.
On the other hand, over at the good old Guardian, Guy Dammon argues that:

I’m just not sure. I feel that young readers see the past as one reality (maybe not their own, but grounded) and still take flight into the Faraway Tree. I certainly don’t think the argument applies to the adventure stories like the Secret Seven books.
I hate arguments about so-called political correctness, but let’s put that to one side for the moment. The critical questions, really, as with any kind of cultural censorship, are “where does it end?” and also, “who decides?”.

I have a new hero: UK food writer Nigel Slater. I’m reading and reviewing his Kitchen Diaries, which are splendid (although the recipes are as yet not trialled in the Waiheke Island Test Kitchens, since we can’t eat ever again after the Slow Food weekend in Matakana). A sensible message – the right food at the right time – charmingly conveyed, and beautifully produced on lovely thick stock. I shall have to move straight on to his autobiography, Toast.
Over the weekend, I reignited my faith in the favourites of my childhood, after last week’s disappointments, with Cue For Treason by Geoffrey Trease. He was way ahead of his time in constructing equally interesting male and female lead characters, and very good at the dollops of history. And adventure. Not too much depth in the adults, but you can’t have everything.
Regular readers of this blog know better than to start me on the hilarious Da Vinci Code. Well. I don’t usually read mysteries, but I picked up one of Iain Pears’s art world crime novels for $2 somewhere because I read The Dream of Scipio last year and it is still dancing about in my head.
There’s no real similarity in style or intent between that and The Last Judgement, but I still vote we take away all Dan Brown’s money, and give it instead to Iain Pears, who actually knows how to write and wrote several books much more deserving of global domination than that pathetic drivel in Da Vinci Code, years before Dan Brown could even afford one of those infernal black turtlenecks.
Then Mr Pears can buy lots of beautiful paintings and write anything he wants; and nobody would ever sue him, except possibly Dan Brown – but who cares?
Now I’m onto Simon Schama’s The Embarrassment of Riches (on Holland’s Golden Age) for research purposes, but as it’s too heavy to lug into town on the ferry I will have to alternate it with a new kids’ swashbuckler, Secrets of the Fearless. (I hate people who get to thank “the staff of the National Maritime Museum … and the Musee National des Douanes in Bordeaux”. I’d just kill for a couple of hours in either.)

We wuz robbed.

It is a great pity that every human being does not, at an early stage of his life, have to write a historical work. He would then realize that the human race is in quite a jam about truth.
~ Rebecca West

I may have to rethink my staunch Republican stance, after the Queen threw a garden party at the Palace for a couple of thousand kids and invited everyone from Toad of Toad Hall to JK Rowling along for fairy bread.
You can do that kind of thing when you’re 80. And when you’re the Queen.
“British children’s literature has been for many years an extraordinary success story,” she told the crowd, which sang Happy Birthday to her.
The ABC reports that the biggest reception was given to JK Rowling, who was mobbed by children desperate for an autograph. The stars of the Potter movies were also in attendance.
“I think it is a wonderful idea to celebrate the Queen’s 80th birthday by celebrating children’s literature,” Rowling said. “I really do think it is a golden age at the moment.”

History begins in novel and ends in essay.
~ Macaulay

I’m off for a Slow Food weekend up around Matakana: log fires, long large meals, winter beaches, farmers’ market on Saturday morning, ploughing through the reading list, rummaging through shops crammed with old things, coffee and cake, hat and gloves and gum boots.
Although I may never eat again after salt and pepper squid and lamb shanks (with green pea cappuccino) last night at the sublime French Cafe.

Well, there you go. Roger McDonald has won the Miles Franklin award, for The Ballad of Desmond Kale, chosen from a shortlist of five out of a field of more than 50 nominated books.
Good on ‘im. I haven’t read Desmond Kale yet, but I could never see what all the fuss was about over 1915 – on the other hand, the main character, in particular, in Mr Darwin’s Shooter was really very finely drawn.
Also on the shortlist were Kate Grenville’s The Secret River (she’s won every other prize, so thank goodness someone else got a go), Carrie Tiffany’s Orange Prize-nominated Everyman’s Rules for Scientific Living, Brian Castro’s The Garden Book and The Wing of the Night by Brenda Walker.
But never mind the kulcha. The Socceroos are through to the next round of the World Cup.

The Miles Franklin Award, one of Australia’ most prestigious and also most controversial, is announced today. My money’s on Kate Grenville. But that, as is often the case with this award, is beside the point.
This year, several commentators have again raised the central issue of the framework of the award, and its criterion that novels must represent Australia. Not the Australian experience, but the country itself, usually taken to mean that the novel should be set in Australia:

“Without an indigenous literature people can remain alien in their own soil. An unsung country does not fully exist or enjoy adequate international exchange of the inner life. Further, a country must be portrayed by those who hate it or love it as their dwelling place, familiarly, or remain dumb among its contemporaries.”

Bless ‘er. And her brilliant career. In her will, Miles Franklin left £8996 (almost all she had) for an annual prize to a novel “which is of the highest literary merit and must present Australian life in any of its phases”.
But over the years, works by some of our finest authors have been ruled ineligible:

This year, Geraldine Brooks’ March, which in April won the US Pulitzer Prize, and Delia Falconer’s The Lost Thoughts of Soldiers, are among those novels by Australian writers not considered for our top literary prize.
Jane Sullivan has recently argued in The Age that any novel written by an Australian is in fact ‘part of Australian life’ and should be eligible to win the Miles Franklin. Sullivan contends that, since the award’s establishment in 1954, ‘times have changed in a good way for our books’. She suggests that Australian literature is no longer ‘an endangered species’ needing ‘all the nurturing, protection and encouragement’ it can get, and that if Franklin herself ‘were alive today … I’m sure she would celebrate the fact that Australian writers feel free to take anything and anywhere and anyone in the world as their subject, and still expect their work to be seen as Australian’. If the situation remains as it stands, Sullivan states, ‘we will have to look elsewhere for a prize that will take over as the top award for our fiction writers’. (The Age, 18 June)

Perhaps. But it’s a minefield. Define an Australian writer: A resident? A part-time resident (like Brooks)? An Australian citizen living elsewhere? Australian-born but living in a tax haven in the Caribbean for the past 40 years? Recently arrived and still incarcerated? All of the above?
There’s something less readily definable which creates a novel about the Australian experience and perspective that can’t be bound by award rules: a perspective on the world; cultural influences and literary heritage that all go into creating Australian writers, even if they are writing about the US Civil War or New York art dealers or the League of Nations – or even my humble pirates (I’m not suggesting they’re in the same league). It might be seen from the inside, by a writer steeped in the experience, or from the outside, as it were; from eyes new to the country and the people and the literature. It most certainly might be set anywhere in the world, at any time.
Of course, we need books that engage with Australia’s history and help to explicate its present – and future – character. But most of all we need generations of writers willing to engage with the world, with humanity, wherever it may be found and however it may be portrayed. In that lies a cultural maturity of which Miles Franklin could only dream.