25 May 2017
My Nobel Prize
Thank goodness for the ban on cultural appropriation.
By Chin Chin
I spent Saturday afternoon dusting; not the whole of my house, you will understand, but a patch on the mantelpiece in the front room where the medal for the Nobel prize is going to go. Just how big is the medal? I don’t really know, not having won one before, but presumably it will be in some sort of case and I am a little concerned about whether there will still be room for that nice plastic model of the Colosseum which I bought in Rome. I believe that the Queen has an exactly similar one at Sandringham – anyway that’s what the vendor told me. Then there is the beer mat which I won in a “yard of ale” competition last year. I certainly wouldn’t want to hide that away and anyway it would be bad for my mental health. If I am to enter the pantheon of literary laureates, I will need these little mementos from past trips and triumphs, just to remind me how ordinary I once was. According to the second century writer Tertullian, successful Roman Generals parading in triumph had someone riding behind them reminding them that they too would die, just to stop them getting carried away with themselves. Well, in their case a slave riding pillion: in mine a beer mat. It is all the same really.
So far I haven’t told you much about the prize itself. It’s going to be for literature, the reward for the book which I am about to write. Yes, that is quite correct, I haven’t started the book yet but I soon will and when I looked at this morning’s news I realised what a success it is sure to be.
You see I have tried to write books in the past and the one thing I have found really difficult is characterisation. “He catches the exact tone of his characters” say the reviewers about some jumped up novelist from South London. They never say that about me, though, because that is the bit I am not very good at. The problem has always been that all my characters sound rather alike.
Imagine my delight, then, when I read that an editor had told Anthony Horowitz, by any measure one of our most distinguished authors, that he should not put black characters in his books because that would be patronising. Clearly that is absolutely bang-on ethically – it is surprising how often those in the arts spot cultural appropriation which the rest of us might miss – and what is more it will enable me to write books which are quite as good as those written by everyone else. Horowitz himself seems to have seen the possibilities by saying that, if he is not going to write books about people from other races and in different circumstances, he will be restricted to books about 62-year-old white Jewish men living in London. Well, I don’t want to prejudge matters but if that is true he will be dropping out of the race just at the time when I, no longer constrained by my weakness in characterisation, will be realising my potential.
If the new rule is that you can only write about people from the basis of your own experience, the quality of your tale is likely to depend upon how wide that experience is and how much you can remember of it. In my story, for example, a traveller returning from Italy with a tasteful plastic model of the Colosseum, not unlike one which happens to be owned by the Queen, will come across a young man who has a collection of beer mats won in competitions for drinking yards of ale. They will become friends and have adventures, meeting, for example, a features writer for an online newspaper with a Chinese sounding name. The villain could be a man who collects dirty postcards (no, no, that was when I was very young and I have long thrown them away) and he could own a handsome cat – rather like the one in Goldfinger, but in this case ginger with a label round its neck giving a North London address. It is beginning to sound thrilling already, isn’t it?
You may of course be wondering what is going to make my book so much better than those of others. After all they too will be permitted characters who reflect their own life experience and, in some cases, that experience may be very wide. The answer to that is my diary. Because I have always kept a careful record of the minutiae of life, I will have lots more material available for my characters than most people who, good though their memories may be, will lack the detail. A lengthy diary will be the only springboard to literary success.
Oh no, I have had a horrible thought. What if a group of people get together to write a book? Then you might get quite a mix of characters without any wicked cultural appropriation whatsoever. A black 23-year-old would write the black youth, a 30-year-old blonde could write the love interest and they could dig some awful pervert out of the gutter to write the villain. How could one possibly compete with a syndicate like that?
The answer must be to have a bigger syndicate, of course. Writing a successful book no longer requires dexterity with a pen but rather success in attracting a syndicate of writers with the right characteristics. It will require a great deal of foresight. Suppose that the plot requires someone to recognise a rare wine in chapter 5. There is no wine connoisseur among the existing syndicate so to avoid cultural appropriation you need to advertise for another writer in “decanter” magazine. Still, provided I keep organised, I cannot see why the next prize for literature should not be mine. Or should I say “theirs”? Suppose a syndicate of 10 writers produces a book and it wins the Nobel Prize. What happens? Do you get one medal which you have to cut up into bits or 10 smaller ones? I will have to write to the committee and find out. Still, either way, it should be smaller than the full thing so I should be able to keep the plastic Colosseum and the beer mat on my mantelpiece.
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