'Joseph's Box' has had some wonderful reviews - in The Sunday Herald, The Herald, Scotland-on-Sunday and the British Journal of General Practice, to name but three. Then there have been some which have seemed puzzled but fair - Libas magazine, for example. Of course, as predicted on the Homepage of the 'Joseph's Box' website (www.josephsbox.co.uk), there have been a few reviewers who really haven't got it, who, like William Jefferson Clinton, perhaps never actually inhaled. But there is a deeper dynamic here.
It's interesting that when I wrote 'Psychoraag', no-one in literary
London was the least bit interested. Now, suddenly, it's a symbol of my
literary prowess and along with the works of Scottish writers, James Kelman, Alasdair Gray and Janice Galloway - writers whom I know and respect - is used
against me in relation to 'Joseph's Box'! Then, people complained that they
couldn't understand the Scots-Asian neologisms, etc. and why hadn't I
written the book in Standard English? Now, when I write a novel in Standard
English, it is said that all the characters have the same world-view
because of it - as though all those haute-bourgeois novels with characters with names like 'Emma'
and 'Joshua' and 'Emily' and 'Sarah' and 'Julian' published across
England don't?! There's an argument which would've run that I was
patronising and caricaturing the working-class character by giving him phonetic/
demotic/ colloquialisms, etc. if I'd done that in a systematic way in the context of this particular
novel, which was one of the main reasons why I avoided doing it.
Also, I constantly am singled-out as a scientist, a Dr
Strangelove-Mengele, one of those awful doctors who patronises patients
- it's like, so what that I'm a physician, get over it, for God's sake! Everybody watches ER/ Casualty/ Skins/ CSI, etc, etc. Every time I turn on the
TV, it's got a pathologist cutting up a cadaver, talking about bits of
the anatomy or physiology. 'Cops-and-docs' is the mainstay of TV drama
and always has been - not to mention the ubiquity of crime fiction. People know, or easily can guess, what many
medical terms mean. I cannot simultaneously be taking readers on a
challenging linguistic journey and patronising them. In fact, it is these
challenged reviewers who are patronising readers.
It's also just more
trendy right-wing/ left-wing populist doctor-bashing, and, to be frank,
betrays a resentment that I - a 'cornershop multicultural' GP, who
jolly well should have known his place, what, and that's way outside of the
sacred temple of the High Arts - have dared to muscle-in on territory
occupied by the likes of the celebrated David Mitchell et al. and attempted to expand the medium of the novel.
The
fact that, unlike many, I am able to write erotic scenes effectively is referred to as the novel containing a lot of 'human
meat', as though I were depicting an abbatoir! In this typical manner,
all the positives are negated, made repulsive or minimised, while the perceived
negatives are inflated. If one of the gilded, feted writers had penned
this novel (or Psychoraag), the work would not have been treated in
this way, I am convinced.
Furthermore, there are so many
novels penned by black, white and brown writers in this country (the UK) which are very obvious, boring and straightforward anti-racist tracts
- though not entirely without merit or need - yet these texts are praised to the hilt, not derided as
'self-conscious multicultural fantasies'. My novel is much less obvious
and more inclusive and complex than those, in this respect.
I feel a speech coming on...
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