Brookmyre's Bias

Christopher Brookmyre is one of my favourite authors and I have read his books many times. I am currently re-reading them all again and thoroughly enjoying them! He writes with biting wit, creative violence and true humanity. Some of his characters are truly memorable, in particular Angelique de Xavia and Jack Parlabane. He hits many themes and takes no prisoners in his satirical plots: politicians, the Catholic church, the arms trade and many other targets. 

It is clear from many of his characters' utterances that Brookmyre has a catholic background but has since rejected the teachings of the church and come to be very anti-religion. There is quite a theme of this running through his books, in particular Not The End of The World and Attack of The Unsinkable Rubber Ducks. 

My views on Christianity are very different to Brookmyre's. Or indeed to many authors and I am certainly not one of those christians who only reads christian books or listens to christian music.  However, I do find some of Brookmyre's descriptions of christians oddly misinformed.

When his plots include what might be termed Bible-believing christians, he tends to have them behave and speak in a way more suited to someone from the Westboro Baptist Church than any of the christians I know... Extremely hateful about gay people, judgmental of everyone who doesn't share their views and not really able to participate in normal society. Louis Theroux did a couple of documentaries about this group - I call myself a christian but would no more relate to anyone from the Westboro Baptist Church than I would to a Nazi.

In Unsinkable Rubber Ducks he really gets it wrong and links being pro christianity to also being well disposed to the occult - to communicating with the dead and 'woo' generally. It's truly bizarre to think of Bible-believing christians (a clunky term, but I can't think of a better one...) engaging with anything of that kind. There are of course people who believe in God who do also believe in angels communicating with them, communications from beyond the grave and who would visit fortune tellers.  But I would call them people who are interested in spirituality as opposed to people who follow Jesus as christians and believe that the Bible is God's word. It is very clear in the Bible that anything in the area of magic, witchcraft and divination is absolutely not of God and on no account is a christian to get mixed up with any of these things.  I certainly don't know any christians who would be into any of this stuff. 

So I found it a very odd connection that Brookmyre made.
He is also very anti homeopathy so my best guess is that Brookmyre simply lumps christianity, homeopathy and spiritualism together as unscientific and therefore more or less the same thing. (NB: I have no particular opinion on homeopathy.) I admire him for grappling with some of these issues and will continue to read and enjoy his books as they are original, funny and gripping, every time.  But he really does have a blind spot on this and I have considered writing to him.  But I am not sure what I would say! To give him credit, I am not suggesting that he is ignorant, merely that his own experiences have left their marks and he has come to his own conclusions about the merits of christianity without, I would suggest, an encounter with the truth of the gospel. 

How Many Times?

Came across this on Pinterest yesterday and, apart from the dubious use of the word 'awesome', I completely agree.  Except I think that '5th time' is quite a conservative number to choose!  50th?

I have a friend who absolutely cannot get her head around the fact that I reread books.  She very very rarely revisits a book she has read.  She tends not even to keep them - well, why would you?  She and her sisters give them to each other and then pass them on.  She is totally baffled by the idea that you would read a book again, once you already know what happens.

I can't fully understand why this is so odd to her.  I have never NOT reread!  All kids read their favourite books over and over again - usually they know them off by heart!  In fact my parents have a recording of me 'reading' the Christmas Story to my Dad when I was about 2 and a half.  It was my absolute favourite and I demanded it every night apparently.  Maybe that's where it started!

I find when I first read a new book, I fly through it - especially if it is gripping and the plot unfolds unexpectedly.  I expect I do read too quickly that first time around, just to find out what happens.  So re reading makes sense in that context and I go back and rediscover or notice new things the second time around.

The bit that my friend really finds odd is that I have several authors or books that I reread endlessly, probably annually if not more often.  These are the 3 authors I probably read most frequently: Brookmyre, Heyer and Rowling.

The 3 couldn't be more different really. Georgette Heyer writes historical fiction, mostly set in the Regency in London or Bath  Her plots don't tend to be terribly complex, but her use of language and her historical accuracy and detail are just spellbinding.  Her characters are also generally very likeable and I love sinking into her books.  These really are comfort reads and I know them so well!  When a new Arrow edition was released of them, I spotted several errors in one book and wrote to the publishers.  They sent me the corrected version and a load of free books too!  One reviewer wrote: 'I have read her books to ragged shreds' - I have too, as evidenced below.  Many of the books were my Mums, but most of them are now falling to bits, by sheer overuse. I feel as though you could set me down in Bath in 1815 and I would know exactly how to speak, dress, where to go etc. It's a wonderful world to fall into and my ultimate comfort read is These Old Shades.  

 Brookmyre on the other hand writes stinging Scottish satire - full of biting one liners, blood, gore and no-holds-barred language. Some of his books can be quite political - they are always funny, full of cliff hangers and quite outrageous. The thing he does actually have in common with Heyer is his characters.  He has been compared to Carl Hiassen in terms of his satirical writing, but I have always found Hiassen's characters to be slightly too bizarre to relate to or really root for. Brookmyre on the other hand paints portraits of people who are real, conflicted, flawed and loving. The best example of this comes in the first Brookmyre I read: A Big Boy Did It And Ran Away; the books starts with Simon Darcourt's contemptuous dismissal of all things suburban and middle class.  Reading this can make you feel a bit defensive and, well, suburban and middle class.  But as the book progresses, the character of Raymond Ash comes into it and his relationship with his family is warm and feels true and realistic.  Before this sounds too slushy, this is to the background of a terrorist plot to blow up a hydroelectric power station, foiled by 2 school boys, an English teacher and a female police officer.

Hilarious in places, biting in others and with a cute twist at the end. 

 Harry Potter  was the third series in that picture of books I reread often.  I genuinely do read all 7 HP books at least once a year.  I LOVE them. They are just so clever and satisfying in their construction.  I love the way insignificant events in book 2 come back to have huge repercussions in book 6, or the details of the magical world.  I remember reading each new book as it came out, almost worried that it wouldn't live up to the previous ones - but this was never the case.  Take away the magic, the spells, the broomsticks and you are left with a boy who wants a family and I find that JK Rowling never lets the setting of the books overpower the characters. So I am always happy to return to the world of Hogwarts and never find the stories getting old.  In the words of alan Rickman: "When I’m 80 years old and sitting in my rocking chair, I’ll be reading Harry Potter. And my family will say to me, 'After all this time?' And I will say, 'Always.'" If he's not sick of it, after starring in all 7 films then clearly I have barely scraped the surface of my potential enjoyment of it...

A new contender for rereading is the Hunger Games Trilogy.  Very compelling, quite dark and violent, but powerful.  Another 'different world',which reminded me of Nazism, North Korea and Rome all at once.  Sounds very gloomy, but, again, it's the characters that add the warmth.


The final group of books I would add to thisis Steig Larsson's Trilogy, The Girl With...   Those books blew me away and I love the fact that one was a thriller, one was more of a detective novel and the third was a spy novel. Yet all with the same characters and the unfolding story of Lisbeth Salander. Brilliant...


In writing this it seems as though it's not so much revisiting the plots as meeting with favourite characters that pulls me into these books time and again. I don't see why I would ever stop wanting to come back to them over the years ahead. 
If you haven't read these books: do!  And then read them again.