Glenda Larke

Exploring the byways of Langkawi by boat

Years ago, when I first arrived in Vienna to live, I was unsettled to see quite a few swastikas spray-painted on to public structures, along with some anti-Jewish sentiments that were as vicious as they were puerile. Geez, I thought, am I coming to live in a land where everyone hankers back to the glories of the Anschluss?

Then I realised that was an unfair thought. Every single one of those graffiti might well have been painted by a single idiot. Modern technology – in the form of a good transport system and a few cans of spray paint, and a modern economic system that gives us disposable excess income, had made indeed made it perfectly possible for one person to do irreparable damage to the good name of a whole city.

I was struck by several things just lately that illustrate that thought all over again.

An irate Australian from the Islamic Council of Western Australia remarked (about a series of video lectures made by a racist-religious bigot calling children to martyrdom and jihad): “Some lousy guy stands up and calls himself a leader of the Muslims, calls himself a cleric because he can read the Quran. Why do people like me have to sit here and give an interview because every Tom, Dick and Harry gets up and makes some studid comments – and then we are called to account?” (From yesterday’s “The New Straits Times”)

And I wonder if anyone called the Pope to account, every time a Catholic bombed someone in Ireland…hmmm.

Then, over on Dec 29th’s Baghdad’s Burning, (a blog by a young Iraqui woman who has had her life ruined by the invasion), outlining a situation I predicted way, way back at the beginning of the Iraq war:

Al Qaeda? That’s laughable. Bush has effectively created more terrorists in Iraq these last 4 years than Osama could have created in 10 different terrorist camps in the distant hills of Afghanistan. Our children now play games of ‘sniper’ and ‘jihadi’, pretending that one hit an American soldier between the eyes and this one overturned a Humvee.

And I think: all it takes nowadays is a few young men with a bomb instead of a spray can. So very few can make life hell on earth for all of us. Or if you want to go a bit further back: all it takes is a few irresponsible or moronic politicians to make a mess of things, and we all suffer.

And when will humanity learn the difference between being strong and being violent?

Sure, building a good fence can keep the peace. But build a wall and lob bombs over the top, and you end up with a lot of angry people and a lot more than a spray can in mind…

I saw this so clearly back at the beginning of the war. I am still flummoxed as to why it has taken so many people so long to see what I saw so long ago.

Another photo from the Langkawi holiday
I had a radio interview with Grant Stone on Faster Than Light today. (That’s in Western Australia). I don’t think I was very coherent on one question he asked, which arose out of my portrayal of the main protagonist in Heart of Mirage as a strong, powerful woman.

The point I was trying to make is this, that if a writer wants to portray a society where women have equal opportunity (not a particular accurate definition of a “feminist” society, I realise), and the work is a fantasy set in a pre-industrial world, they said author is going to run into problems of believability.

I’m not saying it can’t be done – but the writer has to understand the dynamics of such a world and adjust their plot accordingly.

Think about a pre-industrial world and this:

• Muscular power is exceedingly important in any non-industrial world (as anyone who has tried to mend something without proper tools knows)
• Physical protection probably involves physical strength to a large degree.
• You have to have some kind of birth control. Women can’t be equal if they are forever pregnant or lactating or child caring. They find it hard to be the explorers and adventurers, too, if they have a toddler clinging to their skirts – yeah, I just got reintroduced to the curtailing effect of a two-year-old.
• If she doesn’t have access to really good health care, a woman is at a disadvantage because she is childbearing and often dying as a consequence.
• If there is any basic inequality in a society, who is usually the loser – the group that is the inherently physically stronger? Not in my book…

Probably the only way you could achieve a truly equal opportunity land, would be to develop the magic to even things up.

Of course, women did achieve power in non-technological societies, but they were the exceptions, not the rules.

And women often did achieve a certain level of cultural and social and even financial clout in some societies, for a variety of reasons – sometimes religious, sometimes because of the way men worked or warred (when men marched away to fight, they could be gone for years). It’s an interesting exercise to consider just why women achieved high status. (Often it was at the expense of other women – i.e. the servants or slaves.)

And interestingly enough, my husband was born into a matriarchal society. That’s right, even in today’s Muslim world such things exist. Property is passed down the female line. A man moved
into his wife’s house, not the other way around. Just to make it even more curious, the head of the clan, of which my husband’s family is a part, is always a man. In fact, it would have passed to my husband, except he didn’t want it.

Ok, so we established the other day that we writers are totally pathetic, and we look at our Amazon reviews with obsessive regularity to glean whatever drops of approbation we can find to feed our voracious egos…

But I am wondering: just how much notice do READERS actually take of those reviews? Now I know this is probably an extreme case, but just consider this example:

A book, Danse Macabre by Laurell K. Hamilton, sits at 3,590 on the Amazon.com rankings after publication in June 2006. That’s over 6 months ago, it’s a hardcover and the paperback is not out till March 2007, so that’s a pretty good ranking. It has 533 reviews. Wow. But it has been almost universally rubbished by those reviewers – it has 2 stars.
WTF? People are still snapping up the book, reading it, and then writing a review about how lousy they think it is. There are already 9 reviews for January. Don’t any of them read the reviews first, and wonder whether they really ought to buy it in the first place? Apparently not. Or not enough to give the author a lousy ranking.

Interesting, eh?
From a writer’s point of view, I guess the moral is: if you get a bad review, don’t worry. Perversely, it might even sell more books…

Langkawi Islands

(This post is for you, E. Be warned…)

When the Noramlys travel, you can almost guarantee that things will not go as planned. Over the years, we have, between us:

had a passport stolen in a foreign country (daughter and me on separate occasions), been in a traffic accident that totalled a 4WD (me), broken a collarbone (me), missed planes and trains (lots of us), been robbed and dragged behind a car (me), narrowly escaped arrest for immigration violations (me), been involved in a massive airline strike and stranded for hours at airports and spent days trying to get home (all of us), been booked on a flight out of Beijing that didn’t exist and consequently had to commuter hop across China to Ulan Bator (husband), arrived without luggage (all of us, but particularly husband who actually rarely arrives with his luggage), been on a plane that turned back twice over the Pacific for mechanical failure (husband; on the third try he was almost the only passenger on a huge PanAm jet), been refused entry to Italy and narrowly escaped deportation (daughter), been caught in the middle of revolutions (husband and me, several times in different countries), been turned back by floods (husband and me), been on a plane that suddenly aborted a landing into Caracas in a rainstorm at the last moment, without explanation (husband and me), had someone take her bag by mistake at the airport and take it to his hotel (daughter), have a bag stolen at the airport (me), had numerous bags rifled by airport employees (all of us), spent a holiday in the Sahara in December on the only days of the year it rained (husband and me), been lost trekking in the Sahara (daughter), had the boat we were on start to sink (husband and me). I could go on and on.

So how did my daughter’s visit compare this time? Here’s the list:

Luggage didn’t arrive, even though they were arriving on different flights from different places.
Luggage had been broken into and camera memory stolen.
On way back, a sculpture was broken.
Daughter – bad cough and not up to par for the first week.
Son-in-law – very bad food poisoning.
Grandson – broke his forearm.
Sis-in-law who came with us to Langkawi broke blood vessel in foot and couldn’t walk.
Daughter suddenly realised that her passport contained a stamp that said she couldn’t use it again, just before she was due to leave for Australia. This necessitated frantic gathering of necessary documentation, waiting in queues etc, only to be told that she needed a new Identity Card first, which meant more frantic scurrying around and waiting – great way to spend a holiday. And don’t forget, there’s a two year old involved here.

Yep, we all had a great time.

But if you ever travel with the Noramlys, be careful. Be very careful.

What’s that greyish thing on the tree trunk that looks like a bit of curled-up rabbit skin? (Taken outside our chalet on Langkawi.)
Clue: It’s about 24″ or 600mm long.

Answer tomorrow…