Nightshade - lettrici americane di letteratura soprannaturale YA

Nightshade, a detta delle lettrici americane di letteratura soprannaturale YA, si distacca dalla media dei romanzi appartenenti al genere per ricchezza e originalità del world-building e della mitologia e per complessità della storia. Esso racconta, con un gran bel ritmo narrativo, la storia della determinata diciassettenne Calla Tor, un lupo mannaro Alpha (aspetto assai raro nei personaggi femminili paranormal romance). Calla appartiene al branco Nightshade, composto, come il vicino, non da semplici lupi mannari, ma da tostissimi guardiani che hanno il compito di proteggere i misteriosi maghi “buoni” - che governano i mannari -, dai maghi “cattivi” (Keepers e Searcherers in inglese). Ogni guardiano deve conformarsi al proprio ruolo e rispettare precise regole, alcune delle quali a base di sangue.

Nightshade, di Andrea Cremer, è il primo volume di una serie paranormal romance YA in corso di pubblicazione in 25 Paesi e l’apprezzato romanzo d’esordio dell’autrice statunitense.

Calla “kick-ass” Tor è destinata, sin dalla nascita, a Ren Laroche, affascinante lupo-guardiano di un altro branco. I due ragazzi si uniranno al loro diciottesimo compleanno e creeranno un terzo branco locale. Così fu deciso dai maghi a suo tempo e così sarà. Ma un giorno la ragazza s’imbatte in un umano, Shay Doran, nuovo della città e della scuola che frequenta, e qualcosa di assolutamente imprevisto e inaccettabile scatta (d’altronde gli ormoni adolescenziali…). Di lì a poco nascerà un triangolo amoroso che, a differenza dei molti di cui abbiamo letto, sarà ben costruito e ricco di “vibrazioni”. Attraverso Shay - che, si scoprirà, non è un ragazzo qualsiasi (i maghi “cattivi”, infatti, cercheranno di rapirlo) - la ragazza comincerà a capire che qualcosa, nel tipo di vita imposto dai maghi, davvero non va.

50 Cent, multimillion-selling rapper

Either way, 50 Cent might take comfort from the fact that he's not alone. Just last week – on this very blog, ladies and gentleman – our own John Dugdale brought the current rash of recycled titles to our attention. Apparently they're all doing it: Richard Holmes, Jeremy Paxman, the lot. As John says, "the sheer number of titles now layered in the collective memory makes novelty ever harder". Perhaps Mr Achebe might therefore be a little more forgiving next time.This week saw the conclusion of what it pleases me to term an unexpected title-fight.

In the red corner: 50 Cent, multimillion-selling rapper, actor, and entrepreneur. In the blue corner: Chinua Achebe, Nigerian novelist, poet and critic, widely hailed as the father of modern African literature. 50 Cent spent much of the last year making a film about an American football player diagnosed with cancer, entitled Things Fall Apart. At least it was – until Achebe got wind of it and instructed his legal team to contest it. According to Nigerian news website Naijan.com, 50 Cent offered Achebe $1m for the right to use the title, only to have his offer firmly declined. "The novel ... was produced in 1958 (17 years before rapper 50 Cent was born)," a spokesperson said. "[It is] listed as the most-read book in modern African literature, and won't be sold for even $1bn". K.O.!

It's a neat story, but in the end, I confess, I can't help feeling Mr Cent has been a little hard done by. Achebe, after all, lifted the phrase from the astonishing opening stanza of WB Yeats' evisceration of the post-first world war socio-political landscape, The Second Coming ("Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; / Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, / The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere / The ceremony of innocence is drowned ..." ). It seems hawkish, at best, to hound someone else for using a phrase you yourself borrowed (going back further, as one smart cookie on Facebook pointed out, "Come to think of it, did Yeats have to pay Jesus for use of the phrase "The Second Coming"?)

Roald Dahl’s 95th birthday

Today would have been Roald Dahl’s 95th birthday had he not died at the age of 74 in 1990. This year also marks the birthday of one of his most beloved books, "James and the Giant Peach," which was published in the United States 50 years ago. (Interestingly, it wasn’t published in Britain, Mr. Dahl’s home until six years later.)

 

"James and the Giant Peach," which was adapted into an animated film in 1996 (featuring Susan Sarandon, in an especially cunning casting move, as Miss Spider), has sold over 12 million copies worldwide and been translated into 34 languages. The story of James Henry Trotter, whose parents are viciously devoured by a rhinoceros on the streets of London and who then moves in with two cruel aunts only to relocate to a giant peach, has entertained generations of children with its parable of fantasy and escape.

 

Mr. Dahl was intimate with the particulars of cruel childhood through personal experience, the details of which he laid out in "Boy," his memoir of early life. The book rivals George Orwell’s celebrated essay, "Such, Such Were the Joys," in its depiction of the arbitrary ruthlessness of English boarding school life. An episode involving the removal of his adenoids in Norway is no more pleasant.

Matters work out much more cheerfully for James Henry Trotter, who, at the end of "James and the Giant Peach," is welcomed as a hero by the Mayor of New York. Similar satisfactions await the protagonists of Mr. Dahl’s other children’s books, even as a harsher fate is delivered to the Veruca Salts of the world.

Roald Dahl Museum and Story Centre

　　

Shed loads of controversy: Roald Dahl's writing hut - £500,000 or your nearest offer. Photograph: Guardian/Eamonn McCabe

It has become increasingly clear, as today has trundled on its merry way, that I wasn't the only person listening to the radio this morning to feel profoundly bemused by the item on the Today programme in which Sophie Dahl apparently asked the public to help raise £500,000 to move her grandfather's famous writing hut from the Dahls' back garden, where it is gently rotting, into the Roald Dahl Museum and Story Centre.

I'm not quibbling over the significance of the shed itself, nor even the half-a-million-quid price tag: never having personally attempted to move and/or archive the contents of a garden shed, after all, who am I to argue? No: the real question, posed by countless listeners on Twitter, Andrew M Brown blogging over at the Telegraph and about 98% of the commenters on his article, is why, given the extensive wealth the Dahl family has presumably accrued off the back of the sales of his books (not to mention all the related merchandising, film rights and so forth), can its members not fork out for the shed move themselves?

Such was the avalanche of irritated emails received by the Today producers in the wake of the item, that they had to haul Amelia Foster, director of the Dahl Museum, on to the programme to explain what was going on. As well as flannelling on about the importance of Dahl in general, the shed in particular, and reading, across the board (none of which, as far as I was aware, was under dispute) she mounted a mild defence of the Dahl family, who have apparently "given significantly to this project already" and said that the Museum wasn't asking the public for the cash, per se; rather, it was approaching the far less emotive "trusts and foundations".

The master spy novelists

1. The Secret Agent by Joseph Conrad

Verloc is the first double-agent of the 20th century (he's working for an unnamed "foreign power", as well as being an informer reporting to Scotland Yard). Conrad's tragic protagonist is quintessentially seedy (his cover is a shop in Soho), the first in a long line of morally threadbare anti-heroes. Equally modern, in imagination and sensibility, is the terrorist "Professor", wired to his own bomb, and Verloc's wife Winnie's simple-minded brother, Stevie, who gets blown to pieces by the device. Verloc's lack of remorse for his complicity in Stevie's death finds echoes in the works of Graham Greene, confirming The Secret Agent's place in the pantheon of spy fiction.

3. The Riddle of the Sands by Erskine Childers

This is often described as the first 20th-century spy novel, but it's really the best of a pre-first world war genre of "invasion thriller" whose masters include William Le Queux and E Phillips Oppenheim, both now deservedly forgotten. An unputdownable tale of two British amateur sailors, one named Carruthers, who foil a German invasion plot in the slate-grey waters of the Baltic, The Riddle of the Sands is a classic British adventure story, influencing both John Buchan and Ken Follett. In a twist stranger than fiction, its author, a one-time clerk to the House of Commons, later became an ardent Irish Republican, and was eventually court-martialed, then executed, in 1922 for his part in the Easter uprising.

4. The Thirty-Nine Steps by John Buchan

Richard Hannay was one of the great inter-war spies, a recently returned South African who gets caught up in a plot by the infamous Black Stone to assassinate the Greek premier Karolides and thereby precipitate a European war. Buchan wrote this "shocker" while convalescing from a duodenal ulcer in a matter of weeks. In keeping with a popular genre, he has the United Kingdom in danger of invasion by Germany while never letting the headlong momentum of the plot flag from one page to the next, sustained by headlong cross-country chases across well-known English and Scottish landscapes. Clean-cut, square-jawed Hannay would become the protagonist of several later Buchan thrillers, including The Island of Sheep, Greenmantle and Mr Standfast.

5. Ashenden by W Somerset Maugham

When war broke out in 1914, Maugham was sent by the British secret service to Switzerland on the pretext of completing a new play. As a celebrated writer with a gift for languages, Maugham had the perfect cover, and his assignment combined the romance as well as the absurdity of much British intelligence work. Maugham revelled in his posting. He created Ashenden as an alter ego, and used many of his own experiences in a collection of spy stories that demonstrate the ruthlessness, tedium and brutality of espionage. The essential drabness of the Ashenden stories was later influential in the spy writing of Len Deighton and John le Carré.

6. Our Man in Havana by Graham Greene

Graham Greene worked just briefly for the British Secret Service during the second world war, but it was enough. One province of "Greeneland" would always be populated by various kinds of secret agent, culminating in the sad figure of Maurice Castle in The Human Factor. Perhaps more memorable is Greene's portrait of the accidental spy, Wormold, in his black comedy Our Man In Havana. Set in the last days of the corrupt Batista regime, Greene complained that the adventures of his vacuum cleaner salesman "did me little good" with Castro. "Those who suffered during the years of dictatorship," Greene wrote, "could hardly be expected to appreciate that my real subject was the absurdity of the British agent."

7. Casino Royale by Ian Fleming

Thanks to Hollywood, James Bond, 007, Licensed to Kill, has become the archetype of the 20th-century British spy, though, from an operational point of view, he is in all the ways that matter as exotic and improbable as Beau Brummell. Fleming had served in Naval Intelligence during the second world war, and translated many of his most madcap ruses de guerre to the pages of Casino Royale and its successors, every one of which was written in the tropical paradise of "Goldeneye", Fleming's Jamaican villa. It would be easy to attribute Bond's appeal to a successful formula of spooks, sadomasochism, and snobbery, mixed with sultry locations, but Fleming was a popular writer of genius. His prose is often as overheated as his plots, but it remains fresh, intoxicating and fun - a perfect fictional cocktail for jaded palates.