Malcolm Muggeridge (an old English literateur) once said that George Orwell “was no good as a novelist, because he didn’t have the interest in character.” Well, I didn’t need to tell you who George Orwell was, so you may doubt the judgment of the largely forgotten Muggeridge. But I think he was very close to an important factor for the novelist.

Here’s why: Character creates empathy in a novel. It puts the reader in a relationship with the work. Muggeridge’s point was that politics were more interesting to Orwell than the people on whom he hung them. In “1984” we feel for Winston Smith because we imagine what it’d be like to be him – but we don’t really care that much for him as a character. In other words, if Orwell hadn’t had such a fabulous idea behind that novel, it would’ve failed because Winston was too much of an everyman.

Nonetheless, so much contemporary fiction fails the character test. Read the short stories in The New Yorker – which are fairly representative of today’s “literary” fiction – and you’ll generally see an authorial voice greatly distanced from the emotions of the characters. You’re not in a relationship with the characters, and you wouldn’t want to be in a relationship with the smart-ass authorial voice.

The same is true on the other side of the Atlantic. Ian McEwan’s distance and restraint makes me feel…distant and restrained. Which isn’t why I read a novel, no matter how “critically acclaimed” it is.

<a href=”“>Read the rest of this post on Matt Beynon Rees’s blog The Man of Twists and Turns.

General Władysław Sikorski, Prime Minister of Poland, in Exile, 1939-1943.

NABLUS, West Bank — During the Palestinian intifada, I sat on a dusty hilltop overlooking this most violent of West Bank towns with a dozen of the top Israeli officers in the area. The brigade commanders told their regional chiefs that all the police work and house-to-house fighting of the intifada had made their troops ill-prepared for a real war. “If we had to fight in Lebanon, my men wouldn’t know what they were doing,” shouted one. Read the rest of this entry »

I often receive emails from book stores, amazon.com, Barnes and Noble, and online literary sites telling me how much I’d like the novels of Matt Beynon Rees. I’m delighted to see these emails, which are based on my other purchases and interests, as only I can truly know just how much the novels of Matt Beynon Rees have changed my life. (Try them. They were good enough to be published by Soho, so I’m sure you’ll agree on the life change front.)

Of course, I also get the occasional email informing me that if I like Matt Beynon Rees, I might also enjoy another author named in the email. Well, they’re half-way there, because of course I DO like Matt Beynon Rees. No ifs. So I always have to look to see if they’re right about the second part.

The links are sometimes obvious – “if you like Matt Beynon Rees, try [insert crime novelist’s name here]” – and occasionally baffling though thought-provoking. I had one a few weeks back suggesting fans of Matt Beynon Rees’s Palestinian crime series would really dig a nonfiction book about a cyclone that hit Burma in 2008.

The latest of these connections was no doubt the most bizarre. I clicked on an email from an online book blog a few days ago: “If you like Matt Beynon Rees, we think you’ll enjoy Jimmy Carter.”

It could be that this was the result of the review of the paperback version of my third Palestinian crime novel THE SAMARITAN’S SECRET in The New York Times—it was featured in the same column as a review of the softcover edition of the 39th President’s ultra-controversial 2006 work of nonfiction “Palestine – Peace Not Apartheid.”

Now here’s where I part with the “If you like Matt Beynon Rees, we think you’ll enjoy Jimmy Carter” email. Of you like Matt Beynon Rees, you’ll probably enjoy crime fiction. Or just fiction. Rather than “Palestine – Peace Not Apartheid,” in which the loveable old peanut farmer from Georgia accuses Israel of the worst kind of discrimination against Palestinians in the West Bank.

I don’t have an opinion on Jimmy’s book. I never read it. It has “Palestine” in the title and, as Graham Greene wrote, once one has lived in a place for a while one ceases to read about it.

Also it has “Apartheid” in the title. I have an opinion about what Israel does in the West Bank. I’m not going to get into it here, but in a (pea)nutshell, I think it’s a mistake to compare Israeli policy to apartheid, because then the debate shifts to the similarities and differences between South Africa’s old regime and Israel’s occupation – instead of talking simply about what Israel does and what’s wrong with it.

As soon as Smiling Jim put “apartheid” in his title, his book’s content was largely ignored. Pro-Israel mouthpieces could condemn him as an anti-Semite simply for comparing Israel to the unlamented and certifiably pariah regime in Pretoria. Game over. Jimmy even issued an apology a couple of years ago to all Jews on Yom Kippur. As though saying something critical of Israel is somehow a criticism of all Jews. As though there weren’t any Jews who agreed with him about Israel’s policy toward the Palestinians. Game over with a slamdown.

For me, as for many others, Carter has been a mildly useful voice for decency in the world. Though he also represents something a little pitiful, as one might witness in the song “Jimmy Carter” by my favorite band, Detroit whacksters Electric Six:

“Like Jimmy Carter,

Like electric underwear,

Like any idea that never had a chance of going anywhere….”

However, the decisive element in the question “If you like Matt Beynon Rees, we think you’ll enjoy Jimmy Carter” is a matter of personal animus. In fact, it’s a family insult suffered by the Rees’s of 32 Neath Road, Maesteg, Mid-Glamorgan, Wales, at the hands of James Earl Carter Jr., 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington, D.C.

My grandfather Tom Rees read in the Western Mail that then-President Carter was suffering from hemorrhoids. Tom had faced the same ailment some years before and had found nothing eased the feeling of defecating broken glass, until he switched to Allinson’s wholewheat bread. He wrote a letter to the White House in his careful cursive script, letting the leader of the Free World know what he needed to do to poop painlessly.

He didn’t expect any public recognition. But he assumed he’d get a polite note.

Perhaps Carter’s people knew that my grandfather was a former Communist Party member and figured the brown bread was a plot of some sort to keep the Commander-in-Chief on the can and away from the nuclear button, while the Reds swarmed Capitol Hill. In any case, the President never wrote back. Not even a “President Carter has read your inquiry with interest, but regrets that he will not be able to make it part of United States planning and policy at this time, though he is sympathetic to your cause.”

My grandfather continued to consume wholewheat bread, even at a time (the 1970s) when those around him considered it to be a strange fad akin to today’s no-nightshades tomato-free diets.

That’s why I don’t like Carter. Not because of apartheid. Because of hemorrhoids.

I wonder if Jimmy ever got them cured. Maybe he mentions it in his book. Perhaps I ought to read it after all…

I was at Oxford University at the same time as Britain’s new prime minister. But while I spent all my free time at a famous old pub opposite the historic Bodleian Library with a pint of Guinness in the company of some old Irish porters, I never saw David Cameron there. Which makes me doubt his suitability for office.

That’s not because I think the prime minister should be overfond of alcohol (at Oxford, Cameron was a member of a very upper-crust private drinking club famed for smashing places up). Rather, it’s because Cameron is the wrong man to unite the pub-drinkers and the rowdy aristocrats — and all the other splinters of a society still shattered by Margaret Thatcher’s destruction of the old identity of Empire.

The coalition Cameron will lead reflects an identity crisis among the English that has developed in the two decades since Thatcher’s reign. It’s much deeper than mere political divisions, and I don’t think he’s equipped to resolve it.

Read the rest of my article on AOL News.

“Exotic” crime fiction has taken off in the last decade. People want to read about detectives in far-off places, even if they don’t want to wade through learned histories of those distant lands.

Many of the biggest selling novels of the last decade have been “exotic crime.” You’ll find a detective novel set almost everywhere in the world, from the “Number One Ladies Detective Agency” in Botswana through Camilleri’s Sicily to dour old Henning Mankell in the gloomy south of Sweden.

The success of my co-bloggers at International Crime Authors – with their detectives plying their trade in Thailand, Laos, and Turkey, alongside my Palestinian sleuth Omar Yussef – is also proof that this taste for international crime is more than just a publishing fad. The novels aren’t just Los Angeles gumshoe stuff transported to colder or poorer climes. Read the rest of this entry »

Since I’m so new to Soho, I’ve been making my best effort to catch up on Soho’s list–both back list classics and newer front list titles. I’ll share my thoughts here as I go along.

For the most part, this plan has been going well, until this morning. As excellent as my new job at Soho has been thus far, I was EXTREMELY resentful that I had to come to work because it meant I would have to tear myself away from ALCESTIS.

I’m only 2/3 of the way through, so I won’t say more now, but this retelling of the Greek myth of Alcestis (the woman who agreed to die in place of her husband, and descended to Hades as a heroine of wifely virtue) is so lush and so surprising that I’m really glad I don’t have plans after work–I’m just going home to read.

More later :)

Dear Soho Press,

It’s me here, Juliet Grames, your new editor. You know, the one who just started. So I know it’s not exactly elegant for me to come out and say, but I’d better just put it out there, lest it nag at our blossoming relationship. So here goes.

I have a big crush on you.

There, I said it.

It’s true–I’ve had a crush on you for a while, ever since I read my first Soho book (it was, FYI, was Ruthanne Lum McCunn’s God of Luck; I read the PW review, was intrigued by the story of a young Chinese man captured and shipped as a slave to Peru’s guano mines, and pre-ordered the book immediately). Once I’d discovered the list, it was fun to realize how many other cool books of yours I already knew and loved–you discovered the amazing Edwidge Danticat, and your excellent literary crime imprint featured Henry Chang’s Chinatown Beat and Stuart Neville’s The Ghosts of Belfast. It turns out different people in my life knew Soho for different reasons–my mom was excited I’d be working at the house that publishes the crime series of Peter Lovesey; meanwhile, Connie Santisteban, the editor who mentored me back when I was an editorial assistant, was like, “You’re working at Soho? They publish The Elfish Gene!”

So, Soho Press, you are many things to many people. Any wonder why I have a crush on you? An independent press, quiet and unassuming and yet widely known for its quality literary fiction and literary crime? And especially for its commitment to international and multicultural literature? Oh yes, that sounds like a recipe for infatuation. But having a crush on a press’s book list and then getting to acquire and edit for that list? That’s my definition of getting lucky.

It’s weird to have a crush, right? Now that I work here, the mystique should have worn off. But I kind of feel like a particularly dorky yearbook band geek who inexplicably finds herself dating her best friend’s foxy older brother with whom she’s been secretly in love for four and a half years. You know, as a rough approximation. Kind of an “Oh crap, does he realize how lucky I think I am? Play it cool, sister, play it cool!” kind of feeling. Unfortunately, I’ve always excelled at playing the dork; playing it cool, not so much excelling happening there. But it’s ok–you make me feel cool by association.

Ok, I got that off my chest. We can move forward now. I can’t wait to see how our relationship blossoms. I think it could be love.

Sincerely,

Juliet
–
Juliet Grames, New Editor
Desk Over by the Air Conditioner
Soho Press

Hamas is steadily rebuilding its power in the West Bank, stockpiling weapons and material underground, biding its time for a renewal of the conflict with its Fatah rivals.

Palestinian security officials have been telling me this for some time, and they are frankly filled with fear and foreboding. Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas mentioned it again in an interview with the Arabic newspaper al-Sharq al-Awsat during the week, accusing Hamas of smuggling weapons to the West Bank. Read the rest of this entry »

A friend of mine was lunching with a Scandinavian author a while back. At one point, the writer joked: “But that’s enough of me talking about myself. What do YOU think of me?”

Unlike that writer, I don’t really care what you think of me. Don’t be offended – I don’t have much interest in what I think about other people, either. The more I write, the more I’m aware that I’m interested in myself alone.

That, I believe, is the necessary focus of all art – even if its final aim is to turn that inward look out toward the reader, the viewer, the listener. Art is flawed unless it focuses on the artist’s relationship with the world around him – through the narrator’s voice, in the case of a novelist. Read the rest of this entry »