Glenda Larke

On the entry for Sept 2nd, I wrote about people wanting to strangle one of my characters.

So today I thought I’d write about strangling a tree. (Ok, give me a good reason why not.)

If you look at the first photo, you will see that an enormous rainforest tree – with huge buttresses a la medieval cathedral, for exactly the same reason as a cathedral – so it doesn’t fall down. It has something else clinging to it besides my daughter. A ficus tree – commonly called a strangler fig – is using it as a support. Not having to grow a thick trunk itself means the ficus can reach the sunlight quickly. Once there, it spreads out its canopy and puts down roots growing against the tree into the soil far below.

Eventually it surrounds the original tree, uses all its sunlight and nutrients from the soil and starves it to death. And you are left with a hollow ficus, and no “parent” tree – it has been killed. Starved, actually, rather than strangled.

A slow way to go. The forest is sometimes not a pleasant place in the survival game.

The information in today’s blog (and the pix!) comes from here, (look at the index) – an excellent blog on literary matters by Sharon Bakar, with a heavy bias to things Malaysian. The opinions expressed here are mine, though I suspect Sharon would agree…

Malaysian government book censors have a lovely system going that makes no sense to anyone except themselves. They must be ashamed of what they do, I think, because they appear to try not to actually tell anyone what books they are banning, or why, and they apparently make it very hard for anyone to find out. They don’t even call it censorship, books are just “restricted”. Presumably because you can apply to import a copy for the purposes of research if you have sufficient reason? Aha, perhaps university professors are less inclined to be corrupted by what they read!

The way it often works is like this. A bookseller puts in an order, and then finds out he can’t import the book when the consignment gets stopped at the border.

And what kind of books are they banning? Well, the one pictured above was stopped at the border just recently. Things Fall Apart by Achebe, about Nigeria just before independence in the 1950s. Why? Can anyone guess? I am a bit flummoxed, to be quite honest. Maybe because Christian missionaries are not drawn in a very flattering light?

But then, it is perfectly possible to buy Henry Ford’s bigotted rant against a religious group which is not only much, much nastier but is also dishonest and misleading; The International Jew: the World’s Foremost Problem is often prominently on display at KLIA airport, which surely gives intelligent visitors an unflattering message about Malaysian literary preferences.

The really, really weird thing, though, is that the Achebe work was a school exam textbook here in Malaysia for many many years, up to at least 2001. So five years ago it was considered a proper text for study by young Malaysians. Obviously we have been exposing a group of young Malaysians to damaging influences within our school system. Disgraceful!!

Other books that are restricted include The Malayan Trilogy by Burgess, and Karen Armstrong’s classic scholarly and balanced text The Battle for God: Fundamentalism in Judaism, Islam and Christianity. Oh, and Lady Chatterly’s Lover too – but not, say the Booker Prize winner of a few years ago, The Line of Beauty, which had scenes in it which would have made Lawrence blush.

In fact, most of the banned books are on religious issues. Apparently we mustn’t think about religious matters too much, it’s corrupting. Or maybe the bureaucrats think religion itself is corrupting? Which brings me to the real problem with censorship, and it is this. The moment you start down the road to deciding what people can and cannot read, you end up looking like a right proper idiot. Especially in this day and age where people just order through the internet – or indeed download it.

Censorship? What a waste of taxpayers’ money.

We spent five days snorkelling last week on islands off the Sabah coast. The worst thing that happened was that we stung by the tiny jellyfish called stingers. More a nuisance than anything else. We did see one small shark and some stingrays.

When we were on Snake Island, someone made a remark about the place being the ideal sort of place for Steve Irwin – the TV “Crocodile Hunter”, with all those snakes about for him to tackle. Not, I must admit, my ideal show as I always thought there was far too much harrassment of wild animals. I guess I just don’t like seeing wild animals filmed in a way which indicates they are stressed. And now Irwin is dead, in Queensland, stung by a stingray that felt threatened by his too-close presence and lashed out with its tail to pierce his chest. Such a silly, tragic way to die.

It reminds me of an even more bizarre death that occurred back in the 1960s in the Straits of Melaka. The Malaysian coastguard or navy was towing an open boat with several Indonesian soldiers on board who had been caught trying to enter Malaysia. (Remember the so-called “Confrontation”? Such a ridiculous, small-scale business no one wanted to call it a war or an invasion, even though some soldiers were sent to “invade” Malaysia.)
Anyway, one of the soldiers keeled over, mysteriously dead. All that could be found was a small wound, on his neck, if I remember correctly.

It took an autopsy to discover what had happened. It seemed that a small flying fish with a pointed snout had hit the man as his boat was being towed – the snout had broken off and the rest of the fish disappeared overboard, leaving a dead man. Killed by a small flying fish.

On another forum, there has been a discussion about characters you would like to strangle. And two people mentioned Ligea from my Heart of the Mirage.

I created Ligea as a tough woman of 28 who was deliberately raised to be an instrument of revenge. I don’t want to give away too much of the plot here, but the idea for the character came from the tragedy of the Lost Generation of Australians, and the children of the Disappeared Ones of Argentina: in both cases, children were raised to reject their heritage – in fact, to despise their own origins in general, and in particular to be unaware of the specifics of it. As a mother myself, I found their fate utterly tragic.

One of my first readers made the comment that Ligea was not as bad as she thought she was, which was exactly what I was trying to achieve: someone who seems hard, uncaring, even brutal – and yet….
So I thought I had nailed it. I was heartened, too, when my UK editor remarked that he thought I did an excellent job with the evolution of Ligea. I thought I’d kept her sympathetic, by portraying a woman who had been dealt a tough hand by life.

And yet a couple of readers wanted to strangle her!

My point? Not everyone sees characters the same way as the author does, or as other readers do, any more than we all agree about real live people. Everyone brings their own preferences to the feast. I console myself with the thought that I wrote the character well enough to make readers exasperated enough to want to strangle her – in other words, she is real. No reader wants to strangle a cardboard character after all.

There is no “right” or “wrong” way to feel about a fictional character. Once the book is released into the world, a writer loses control. Ligea is out there on her own, and you are free to feel however you want about her.

Deadlines are remarkable things. They have the power to make you take your computer on holidays and write just about anywhere.

My proofs of The Shadow of Tyr are due in tomorrow and I received such a lovely reminder in an email today, just in case I had forgotten.

No, I hadn’t forgotten, really.

Here’s the proof I worked on the proofs…
I took my daughter and her friend to climb Kinabalu last week, right?
We stayed in this building (day and night shots).

And while the two of them climbed, I sat at the desk with the rainforest intruding over the balcony, binoculars nearby in case any interesting birds flew by, and worked.

So, if there are any typos, blame it on a flyby at the critical time… 🙂