Hilary's done it again - bravo!

Hilary’s at it again. The woman’s a genius. Her parents must have been two of the world’s greatest brain surgeons. In fact, it was probably Mr and Mrs Mantel who came up with The Theory Of Relativity, and not Einstein. Our Hilary is up there with the Hilary Duffs, the Hilary Deveys and the Hilary Swanks of the world. She’s a smart Hilary.

I couldn’t help but feel a little jealous when I heard Hilary had won this year’s Man Booker prize with Bring Up The Bodies. And she received a princely sum too. I wonder what she’ll spend it on. Didn’t Anne Enright say she would use her winnings to install a new kitchen? I wonder will Hilary go for a Poggenpohl or will she take a trip to her local Ikea.

Hilary’s the first British woman to have won it twice, which is a wonderful achievement. Having blogged about the issue of age and the fact that at 37 I think I’m too old to be a novelist, I wondered if Hilary just recently taken up the quill. When I read a bit more about her, I learned that her first book had been published in the 80s, and I calculated roughly (very roughly, as I am officially rubbish at maths) that she was in her early thirties when her first book came out. I now take comfort in the fact that she’s been penning books for some time and only now is she being truly recognised for her talent. Long may it continue.

I haven’t read any of her work, simply because I’m not that into Tudor novels. In fact I’m not into them at all, if truth be told. The accolade is set to encourage people to snap up the novel, have them running into Waterstones or logging onto Amazon, quicker than you can shout ‘Cheryl Cole’s autobiography.’

I secretly wonder what those smart Booker winning type people like to read in their spare time. I bet she’s read Fifty Shades of Grey, just to see what all the hype’s about. I have this image of Hilary Mantel in her pyjamas, sitting propped up in bed, glasses perched on the end of her nose, reading a bit of Twilight. And I bet she has secret bookcases, similar to those in Scooby Doo, that spin round to reveal a completely new bookcase when people call for tea. Is she envious of E L James’ new found wealth or is she planning to write a cookery book, using a range of repulsive Tudor ingredients like pig’s navels? I realise I’m getting carried away here, so I’ll just read Hilary’s offerings for myself. The Booker people say they’re very, very good indeed.

Sexing up the classics - should we care?

OK, I admit it: I'm one of the 15 people in the English-speaking world who hasn't read 50 Shades of Grey. I wasn't averse to the idea - I'm actually quite partial to the odd bit of well-written erotica. But as even its staunchest defenders would probably admit that ‘well-written' isn't a phrase that's often attached to Ms James' series, I was inevitably disappointed: the clunky prose and grating style felled me long before I could make it to any of the rude (or ideologically questionable) bits. 

The subsequent flooding of the bestseller lists with so called 'mummy porn' has left me unmoved but also un-outraged - most of it looks utter rubbish, true, but then the bestseller lists are often rubbish, and frankly I'd rather see some jobbing writer coin it in than some reality TV star who sees fit to write a biography at the grand old age of 24. In fact, the author in me is actually quite chuffed for all those erotic novelists who have spent years churning out titles to little appreciation and now find their backlist given a 50 Shades makeover and being promoted on the shelves of WH Smith.

Spicing up the classics

So I was amused rather than outraged when publisher Clandestine Classics announced it planned to release digital versions of sexed up classic (and, importantly, out of copyright) titles such as Wuthering Heights – and they weren’t the only ones with that idea. Cue inevitable backlash on debasing the originals, the dumbing down / sexing up of society, the death of creativity and dearth of original ideas... But, honestly, why get your bloomers in such a twist? It's not exactly new: authors have been writing sequels for years, and recently there has been a whole trend for supernatural takes on familiar titles, whether you want to see Elizabeth Bennett go all Twilight in Mr Darcy, Vampyre (only one of several Darcy-as-vampire books) or all Walking Dead in Pride & Prejudice & Zombies (surely even if you hate the trend, you can admire the idea of Jane Slayre? No? Come on!). Nor is it the first time that someone has sexed them up: the P & P sequel Mr Darcy Takes A Wife is, I am reliably informed, a Jilly Cooper style bonkbuster in which Mr Darcy, ahem, takes his wife. Repeatedly. 

Michael Fassbender and Mia Wasikowska steamed up the screen as Jane and Rochester

In the spirit of pure research - honest, officer - I decided to download a couple of these titles and see what the fuss was about. Pan’s Jane Eyre Laid Bare was choice number 1: swayed by its elegant cover and the fact that, yes, it was only 99p. (I haven't read it yet, but will report back. Am I good to you, or what?) The second was the slightly more questionable looking Hemlock Bones: A Stud in Scarlet. No, seriously - presumably due to the restrictions of the Conan Doyle estate, the publishers didn't use the characters' names, so instead you have the puntastic Hemlock Bones and his trusty (and, it turns out, lusty) assistant Doctor Hotson in their nice little flat on Laker Street. Having whetted my appetite for some Holmesian fun with the enormously entertaining Robert Downey Jr film Sherlock Holmes: Game of Shadows on Saturday night, on Sunday I decided to give it a try. And it... wasn't actually bad. I mean, the prose quality of the added bits wouldn't give Ian McEwan sleepless nights, but... it wasn't that bad.

I'm not such an aficionado that I could tell if they'd just tweaked the original text and added bits, or just rewritten it in the style of Conan Doyle (it's decades since I read A Study in Scarlet), but it certainly felt authentic - and despite the rather Carry On feeling of the title, it was played straight (so to speak) as a crime thriller meets romance, even including the lengthy flashback to the killer's history which I vaguely remember finding tedious the first time round.   Obviously, if one man swooning over another isn't your cup of Earl Grey (and be warned, there's quite a lot of swooning) or (fairly graphic) gay sex offends you or leaves you cold, this isn't a book you should be buying, but I found it actually quite charming and sweet, no more offensive to the characters than I did the RDJ film - which, let's face it, slathers the homoeroticism on with a trowel. Frankly, the often shonky formatting was the most offensive thing in the book. 

Classics become classics because they have a high degree of robustness; in the same way Shakespeare can take pretty much anything we throw at him, so can these stories and characters. Sure, you could argue it's just fan fiction with an editor and a marketing budget - but so what? Nobody is stealing the originals and locking them away - this isn't the Chapman Brothers defacing Goya paintings and ruining them from future generations. This is writers putting their own spin on stories that will outlive us all. I, for one, have no problem with that.