So far, my character guides (see Augustine, George, Fea) have focussed on some of the more dramatic and powerful characters in the series. But today, I’m bringing the human element back with a quick run-through the principles and inspirations behind a selection of Harriet’s closest friends.

***

One of the first lines in Oxford Blood is: “She’d applied to Oxford University not only for the intellectual challenge and the doors it could eventually open, but also in the hope of meeting the man of her overheated teenage dreams.”

Like so much in the series (and the first book in particular) this was based on my own experiences. Sitting at home in the Summer of 05 desperately waiting for October and the first day of term, I did allow my mind to wander more than once to the charming, handsome men who were inevitably lying in wait at Oxford, just waiting to seduce or be seduced by a nice northern girl.

What I don’t remember consciously thinking about was the friends I’d make – all those guys and girls who wouldn’t capture my heart but would capture my imagination. But in reality, despite the fact that I did meet the man of my teenage dreams (and married him), one of the best things about Oxford was the friends I made. Nothing bonds people like living and working together under situations of extreme academic pressure and even more extreme beauty, and the majority of my close friends today are ones I met at university. Despite the fact that there’s no mention of a pre-Oxford Harriet daydreaming about her potential pals, based on the “five years later” epilogue to Ivory Terrors, I suspect she’d say the same thing.

This is a generic ” big group photo of friends at Oxford” photo and in no way meant to imply that anyone pictured here is any sort of inspiration for Cavaliers characters!

When I was plotting Oxford Blood, however, I have to admit that I sketched out the heroine and the love interests and the villains long before I started thinking properly about the friends. When I think of the books I love, it tends to be these sorts of characters that jump to mind. But when I think about it more closely, I’d say that most of the books and films I really love have a strong supporting cast too. The best example of a well-developed friendship group in a paranormal context has to be Buffy, and I think it sums up everything that’s wrong with Twilight that the heroine seems to abandon her already fairly tenuous friendships the moment she gets a nice vampire boyfriend, and never bothers to discuss the situations she finds herself in with them.

Josh

Josh grew out of a dual frustration. The fact that so many paranormal heroines seem utterly irresistible to every man, and the fact that it seems surprisingly rare in fiction for women to have platonic, straight male friends. People talk of the Bechdel test – does a book or film contain a scene where two named women talk to each other about something other than a man. But actually, particularly in the romance genre, I suspect that books where a man and a woman talk to each other with no sexual tension or romantic undercurrent are even rarer.

I play with this in the scene in OB where Harriet accuses Josh of having a crush on her and is immediately (and honestly) corrected:

“Come on, one more dance. I hardly see you nowadays.”

Harriet frowned. “Josh, no. We’re having fun. I liked dancing with you, but I can’t cope with the way you’ve got to either hit on me or cause a scene every time we spend time together.”

Josh turned red. “Bloody hell Harriet, I think all the attention you’ve been getting has gone to your head. You don’t have to worry. I don’t fancy you, okay.”

Harriet took a step back. “But you’re always trying to spend time with me alone. And you’re so hostile towards Tom and so ridiculously over-protective of me.”

“It’s called being a good friend,” Josh said, shaking his head. “I’m worried about those posh bastards you insist on hanging around with, and maybe it does make me a bit over-protective, but you’re just not my type. If you really want to know, there’s someone else I’ve got my eye on.”

Later, in Ivory Terrors, Harriet refers to Josh as, “her gay best friend who just happens to be attracted to women.”

I have loads of male friends, and I find it odd, in fiction and reality, when people don’t. Josh is based heavily around a strange combination of three of the ones I was closest to at Oxford, (although his physical description is actually based on a fourth person, who was more of an acquaintance).  Several of his scenes – from the one in which he comes round to check that his piano-playing wasn’t disturbing Harriet only to be offended when she claims to have found it soothing, to the one where he lectures her on the evils of “posh boys” – are almost word for word based on real Oxford conversations with one inspiration or the other that I noted down in my diary at the time.

The other important aspect of Josh is his (relative) ordinariness, compared to the members of the Cavaliers. Mostly, readers see things through Harriet’s eyes, and she’s utterly fascinated with the Society and more than a little in love with at least two of the Members. She’s by no means utterly blinded to the problems with the society, buts she has a tendency to excuse their worst excesses and glorify some of their more morally ambiguous ones. Sometimes, Josh goes too far in the opposite direction, but he at least provides a counter-balance to this – long before he knows the Cavaliers are vampires or murderers, he hates them on principle for their clothes, their accent and their attitude to life.  I think my most liked quotation on Goodreads is Josh’s response to Harriet, after that crazy night when she’s gone to the Cavaliers Winter Party with George, found out they are all vampires, and then slept with Tom for the first time. Harriet (and I’d hope the reader) is in a frenzy of lust and excitement and drama, and it’s easy for her and us to forget about the problems with the society. At least until Josh brings everything back down to earth: “So, did you spend the night with the blond rich wanker or the dark haired posh twat?”  That one’s not an exact quote from any of my male friends, but given the right circumstances, I can just about imagine it being.

Caroline and Olamide

Harriet’s other two closest friends can’t really be discussed in isolation from each other. They were deliberately written to reflect the two sides of friendship – the friend that wants to party and the friend that wants to talk (or the fun one and the sympathetic one) – and the two sides of Oxford: the work and the play.

Harriet’s been torn between two women her whole life – between the dangerous glamour of the mother who abandoned her and the loving dullness of the aunt who brought her up. Caroline and Ola continue this dynamic, though unlike the older generation, these two very different girls end up getting on just as well with each other as with Harriet, despite the way that on almost every issues – from class to sociability to glamour to work ethic – she sits somewhere between the two of them.

Perhaps surprisingly, considering that Josh was so heavily compiled from various friends, the two female friends are some of the characters that owe the least to anyone I know in real life. I did have two quite different best female friends at university, but I didn’t consciously bring any of their traits to bear on Ola and Caroline. They were much more “types” – but I wanted to show that the rich, hot girl can be a good friend not just a bitch and a rival, and that the dowdy, quiet girl can both be fun and have her own life.

As the first book progress – and even more so as the series goes on – the friendships evolve and the two girls develop. Clearly, Harriet is my main protagonist, but to some degree, I wanted the books to be the story of a group of friends and the effect that both Oxford and the Cavaliers have on them. I didn’t want a situation where the main character was off growing and having adventures, while her friends stay frozen in a fixed situation and personality. One of my favourite scenes in the series (even if it killed me to write it – however much I mock her and some of her attitudes, I’m basically always rooting for Harriet!) is the one where Caroline sleeps with George and Harriet pretty much goes into shock at the idea that anyone could interfere in her special little love triangle. If Josh aims to remind the reader that the Cavaliers are problematic, Caroline and Ola aim to remind us that Harriet isn’t actually at the centre of the universe. And the companion piece to Josh’s quote above is Caroline’s, “When you say he’s your soulmate, I think what you actually mean is that he’s utterly gorgeous and you’d really like to get him naked. Let’s not get too melodramatic here.”

Katie

I don’t want to linger too long on Katie, as there’s not that much to say. Fundamentally, if Caroline was intended to show that the heroine can become genuine friends with the sort of rich, glamorous female characters who so often belittle them in books like this, Katie twisted this in a slightly more complex way. She can be a bit arrogant and bitchy and competitive, but she’s basically a decent person. But we’re mostly seeing her through Harriet’s eyes – and Harriet is seeing her as a rival for Tom’s  affections and mistaking her self-confidence for snobbery and disdain. As  a result, for most of Oxford Blood, she’s portrayed as a mean girl, whereas in reality, Harriet is pretty much in the wrong on all counts, from dismissing her warnings about George as being based on jealousy, to going home with Tom when he’d taken Katie as his date for the Winter Party. I genuinely like the way they start to become friends in Book Two, and how in Three, we finally get a chapter or two from Katie’s perfectly pleasant POV.

If there’s one book that I mention more than an other on this blog (with the obvious exception of The Cavaliers, and possibly LJ Smith’s books) it’s got to be Cloud Atlas. In various Top Ten Tuesday lists, as the prime example of my belief that the best books blur the line between literary and genre fiction, and perhaps most substantively, in this article on film adaptations, which goes into a lot of detail about why I love it so much. I’m not sure I’d say it’s my favourite book – how could anyone who truly loves reading and has genuinely varied tastes ever hope to pick just one? – but it’s definitely in my top five.

David Mitchell wrote two books before Cloud Atlas was published in 2004 (Ghostwritten and Number9Dream) and has written two other books since (Black Swan Green and the Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet). I loved Ghostwritten and I enjoyed the others enough to make me consider David Mitchell as one of my favourite authors rather than merely the author of one of my favourite books. But nothing has caught my imagination in quite the same way.

One of my new year’s resolution, going into 2012, was to review every book I read that year. Not only did I stick to it, I’ve kept it up ever since, and now have a grand total of 84 book reviews. I want to write a proper blog post on the subject soon, but somehow, knowing you’e going to write a review makes you read in a slightly different way. I was therefore very excited when The Bone Clocks was released, not only because it was the first Mitchell book in four years, but because it would be the first one I’d get the chance to review after my first reading (my recent review – 5 stars, obviously – of Cloud Atlas is here, but reviewing something after a re-read just isn’t the same).

THE BONE CLOCKS – 4 STARS

THE BLURB

Following a scalding row with her mother, fifteen-year-old Holly Sykes slams the door on her old life. But Holly is no typical teenage runaway: a sensitive child once contacted by voices she knew only as “the radio people,” Holly is a lightning rod for psychic phenomena. Now, as she wanders deeper into the English countryside, visions and coincidences reorder her reality until they assume the aura of a nightmare brought to life.

For Holly has caught the attention of a cabal of dangerous mystics—and their enemies. But her lost weekend is merely the prelude to a shocking disappearance that leaves her family irrevocably scarred. This unsolved mystery will echo through every decade of Holly’s life, affecting all the people Holly loves—even the ones who are not yet born.

A Cambridge scholarship boy grooming himself for wealth and influence, a conflicted father who feels alive only while reporting from occupied Iraq, a middle-aged writer mourning his exile from the bestseller list—all have a part to play in this surreal, invisible war on the margins of our world. From the medieval Swiss Alps to the nineteenth-century Australian bush, from a hotel in Shanghai to a Manhattan townhouse in the near future, their stories come together in moments of everyday grace and extraordinary wonder.

THE REVIEW

One of the characters in this novel of many narrators is Crispin Hershey, an author whose books clearly owe something of a debt to Mitchell’s own. So when Crispin is constantly offended that everyone thinks his latest offerings aren’t up to the standards of his greatest literary and commercial success, it seems fair to say that it’s something that plays on Mitchell’s mind. It therefore makes me feel slightly guilty to say that if I were going to sum up this book in one sentence (which I’m not – concision was never one of my strong points) it would be: “a lot like Cloud Atlas, but not quite as good.”

There’s something about Mitchell’s way with words and way with a story that makes me enjoy everything he writes, whatever the genre and style. Cloud Atlas is one of my all time favourite novels, but I also enjoyed the relatively straightforward narrative structure of his more recent offerings, Black Swan Green and the Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet. Underneath all the cleverness, he’s fundamentally got a fantastic imagination and an amazing ability to tell a story.

Nonetheless, I was excited to see that here, Mitchell had returned back to the style of his earlier works and to what (I think) he does best: short stories that somehow coalesce into a complete novel, genre-bending and experiments with style, complex structures and narrative devices, and a blurring of the lines between literary and genre fiction.

That said, while you would never exactly describe the Bone Clocks as a conventional novel, it was actually rather lighter on tricksy devices than I had anticipated.

On the positive side, it felt much less like a cleverly linked combination of short stories than some of Mitchell’s books, and more like a coherent plot that happened to have several narrators and go off at a few tangents. Basically, it’s the story of Holly Syke’s life from 16 to 75, mixed with the story of an ancient battle between the Anchorites and the Horologists.  In some sections, Holly was front and centre whereas in others she made little more than a cameo appearance. Similarly, some sections were basically full blown fantasy, while in others, this paranormal war was only hinted at. But the two poles of Holly and Horologists held the novel together as a coherent whole rather more effectively than comet birthmarks or ghosts really managed in earlier works.

On the less positive side, most of the chapters – despite having different first person narrators – felt oddly similar to each other. They were all told using a linear, first person narrative and used a broadly modern literary style. I rather missed the real jumping around between forms – now a diary, now an interview, now letters – and styles that so wowed me in earlier works. Chapter Five, cheerfully abandons the “basically realism but there are a few weird things going on” approach  in favour of just giving into the temptation to write things like, “I can invoke Shaded Way acts without disturbing the Chapel, but the Cathar’ll detect psychosoterica from the far side of the Schism.” But while this chapter shattered the genre divide (and there’s nothing I love more than when serious writers bring a bit of fantasy into their novels), it still stuck to the same approach. This isn’t an attack. They were good stories, the succession of first person narrators had engaging and differentiated voices, the modern literary style was smoothly executed. It’s just that it didn’t amaze me, and I was longing to be amazed.

It’s always something of an inevitability with this sort of book that there are going to be sections you like more than others. Here, I struggled with the overly long and overly self-indulgent section about the author, and even more so with the rather preachy “global warming is a bad thing” end section. But I loved Holly’s working class teenager in the eighties bit and the wonderful noughties section that cut back and forth between a war reporter’s time in Iraq and time at a family wedding as he weighed up the relative importance of family and duty. It’s inevitably going to divide people, but personally, I also loved the hardcore fantasy section. Generally, I find that literary writers are rubbish at this sort of thing, but I thought Mitchell cobbled together an interesting enough mythos.

Oh, and I suspect it goes without saying that I loved the chapter about the posh, handsome and caddish Oxbridge student who seduces our heroine and then joins an evil cult that grants him eternal life. I once claimed that Mitchell could take any writer’s novel and write a better version of it in one chapter.* Now I know how it feels when it happens to you!

Finally, maybe it’s just my imagination or my slight obsession with that book, but at times, I sort of felt that Mitchell was rehashing characters from Cloud Atlas. One of the nicest things about being a Serious Author is that people tend to give you the benefit of the doubt. If a real fantasy author had several characters in his new book that were rather similar to characters in an earlier work, he’d be accused of laziness and predictability. If Mitchell has done so, I can only assume that it’s some clever device. But come on. Was Hugo Lamb not just a 1990s Robert Frobisher?** Wasn’t cynical author Crispin just a tad reminiscent of cynical agent Timothy Cavendish? And brave war reporter Ed seemed to take a similar approach to life as brave crime reporter Luisa. And actually, those three stories come in the same order in both books, which probably means our too clever for his own good author is doing it on purpose.

This may be the longest review I’ve ever written, and I think that’s indicative of both the complexity of the book – which makes it very hard to summarise or reach an overall conclusion on – and my rather conflicted feelings, between admiring what Mitchell has done, and somewhat unfairly wishing that he’d done a little more. I don’t think this book is for everyone – the fantasy element will put some people off, while the unconventional structure will drive others away. But if you can bear a combination of fantasy subplot and state of the world pretensions (to quote a rather self-referential in-novel review of Crispin Hershey’s latest offering), give it a go. There are some flaws and misteps, but there’s also both brilliant storytelling and real literary cleverness waiting inside.

*From my review of Cloud Atlas: “I found the latter story reminded me of Never Let Me Go, which came out at more or less the same time, but I actually found the Cloud Atlas chapter to be better, even though it was only one small part of a much bigger whole.” 

**To be fair, Frobisher is one of my all-time favourite characters in any novel, and Lamb was one of the best characters in this book, so I’m not exactly complaining about a possible rehash, but and as with the book overall, the newer character was just not quite as compelling as his comparator.