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The Riot Club and The Cavaliers – dining societies in fiction and in life

24 Wednesday Sep 2014

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Here’s the trailer for The Riot Club, a film that’s just been released this week. Look at the beautiful Oxford buildings. Look at the handsome but psychotic boys in white tie. Look at the girl with the (dodgy) northern accent. Oh, they are all members of some sort of evil dining society. If you want a synopsis of the Riot Club, think Oxford Blood without the vampires.  Basically, I like to sit back and pretend this is a trailer for the film adaptation of my books. That’s not so wrong, is it? (Seriously, watch and allocate characters to actors. It’s quite astonishing how well they map together- check out Harriet at 0.17 and Augustine at 0.43, for a start!)

I haven’t yet seen the film (it’s so on this weekend’s to do list), but the plot isn’t new to me, and not just because it’s eerily similar to the sorts of plot that tend to flow out of my brain. Before it was a film called the Riot Club, it was a play called Posh. And let me tell you, when I see adverts for a play about an Oxford dining society featuring attractive young actors, nothing and no one is capable of keeping me away from the box office. I went to see this in 2012, when I was busy finalising Book One. As I sort of knew what was coming, just for fun, I dragged Freddie along, we wore black tie, and he walked round in the interval drinking champagne and drawling, like an extra or a piece of interactive performance art.

In between deliberately trying to provoke the rest of the audience, I had mixed feelings about the play, and from what I’ve seen and read so far, I imagine my reaction to the film will be broadly similar. On the positive side, there were the aforementioned formally dressed men. On a less shallow note, the writer had also clearly researched certain aspects of Oxford life rather well, and there were some very clever lines and some very funny comments. On the negative side, it’s probably some of the least subtle satire I’ve come across, and it relies far too much on the idea that posh=bad, and membership of a dining society=outright evil. I also got the distinct impression that 90% of the point of the play was to create a stick to beat the ex-Bullingdon Tories with.

It never ceases to amaze me the extent to which so many people are absolutely fascinated with class, and have such a love-hate relationship with aristocratic trappings. Dining clubs are admittedly a bit of an odd phenomenon, and when I started writing the Cavaliers, I was very much playing up to the media controversy around the Prime Minister, the Mayor and the Chancellor all having been part of the same club (for anyone not familiar with the concept, see my article here – weirdly, it’s consistently one of my most visited web pages).

But do I really think there’s a conspiracy? No. Do I really think that the Bullingdon (or indeed the Piers Gaveston or the Stoics or anything else) is the route of all inequality in our society? No I do not. Yes, it’s a little disturbing that the Government is currently dominated by both a certain type of person and, perhaps more oddly, by what sometimes appears to be a group of old friends and rivals. But unlike in the Cavaliers, in real life, a dining society isn’t a gateway from obscurity into power. Rather, the only people asked to join the big societies are those who are already rich and well-connected. They’d have got on just fine without the club – they really are a symptom, not a cause of the old boys’ network.

In my experience, most dining societies are borne neither from a desire to rule the world nor an urge to smash things up and humiliate “poor people.” Rather, just like football fans, sports teams or political gatherings, they are about two things – getting drunk with likeminded people, and a sort of tribalism that divides the world, at least for one night, into a safe categorisation of them and us. And in the case of dining societies, there’s some extra fun to be had from dressing up and showing off. To the best of my knowledge (based on both personal experience and extensive book-planning research) the smashing places up, while true and abhorrent, is also very rare – a few isolated incidents over decades, not a systematic campaign of violence. The murdering, which we get in both the Riot Club and the Cavaliers (and in it’s American incarnation, in Donna Tartt’s the Secret History) has no basis in fact whatsoever.

When I created my imaginary dining society, I made the members vampires. As a consequence, I made most of them be awful human beings most of the time- I cannot abide overly friendly vampires. My books are paranormal romance/urban fantasy first and foremost, but they also contain a hint of satire – and hopefully, it’s all so exaggerated that everyone can see it’s not a genuine attack on Cameron and Boris and Osborne. In keeping her characters as broadly realistic humans while still having them do and say terrible things, the Riot Club’s writer ultimately sacrifices the clever social commentary of the premise and the opening, for cheap, overblown attacks which hint at a genuine belief that the Prime Minister once entertained himself by beating pub landlords to death.

In conclusion, dining clubs are a bit ridiculous, but not actively evil or a direct cause of any of societies problems. And based on my experience with Posh, the Riot Club is probably worth a watch for the scenery and the eye candy and the wonderful Oxfordyness, but pretty heavy-handed. And most importantly, it would have been much better with vampires.

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Boat Race Day Year Two

06 Sunday Apr 2014

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It’s once again time for that great Oxford tradition – the Varsity Boat Race. I think I said pretty much everything I wanted to say on the subject last year, but I can’t let the event pass unnoticed on my blog, so here’s last year’s entry again (slightly edited to reflect it not being Easter and there being a different team etc) in all its glory. And now I’m off to the river. Go Oxford! 

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In my books and, occasionally, on this blog, I write about all sorts of Oxford traditions, but there’s nothing as high-profile and popular as the annual Varsity Boat Race against Cambridge.

An awful lot of Oxford’s traditions seem to be deliberately complex and odd, almost as if half the point is to confuse outsiders: Merton students running backwards around their quad on the day the clock changes, ultra-prestigious professors at All Souls hunting the ghost of a duck, or the almost pagan-seeming celebration of May Morning at my own old college of Lilith Magdalen. Not to mention the fact that said college is pronounced Maudlin. Now that one I really do think is purely for the purposes of making tourists look stupid.

Even the normal term-time boats race between colleges are pretty complicated if you’re not used to them, based as they are around several boats setting off at once and trying to bump the ones in front of them.

The Varsity Boat Race however is entirely simple. In fact I’d say it’s one of the most straightforward sporting events going. The participants are always the same – one boat of eight men and a cox from Oxford and one from Cambridge. They row along a stretch of the Thames and the first one past the finishing line wins. There’s no offside rule or complicated scoring system to worry about here.

Perhaps because of this, pretty much everyone in Britain seems to at least vaguely like the Boat Race. In some countries, university sport is really popular. In the UK, that isn’t the case and the Boat Race is pretty much the only university sporting event that gets mainstream news and television coverage. And if you go down to the river, you always find the sort of crowds you’d usually only associate with a major national occasion. I think some of the bars near there must be kept afloat almost entirely from their takings on this one day.

The really weird/fun thing is that in my experience, most people with no connection at all to either university seem to have a team they nominally support. I liked the Boat Race long before I ever seriously thought about applying to Oxbridge, and to my eternal shame, when I was very young I randomly supported Cambridge. I think I liked their colours better or something.

There’s lots to admire about the Boat Race. It’s one of the few genuinely big ticket amateur sporting events left. Although in practice both teams nowadays often contain a good few people who row for their country and are doing slightly suspect post-grad degrees, in theory I love the idea of normal students training so incredibly hard for their moment of glory, and you still always get a few rowers who genuinely fit that mould. Looking at last year’s Oxford squad, one is a doctor and one is a vicar – in what other sporting event would that happen?

The other great thing is just how physically demanding it is. With the possible exception of those really long distance cycling races, I think it probably requires some of the highest fitness levels of any sport. They row for 4.2 miles at top speed.

Now, in my first term at Oxford, for some reason best known to myself, I thought it would be fun to give rowing a go. I’m 5’2”, 8 stone and have all my life been reliably rubbish at any sport I’ve attempted. However, I spent most of that term in a bit of a frenzy, wanting to do Oxford properly, so taking up rowing, a sport predominantly based around being very strong and very fit, seemed eminently sensible because IT’S WHAT PEOPLE AT OXFORD DO.

rowing

 

Although I immediately gave it up once that term was over, it actually didn’t go so badly. In fact (and I hasten to add that this was in no way thanks to me), my college’s women’s boat actually won the term’s competition. The point of this story though is that the race I did was over a course about 750 metres long. And afterwards I was absolutely physically exhausted. I literally cannot imagine how tiring rowing for 4.2 miles must be. It actually makes me feel slightly sick when I think about it too hard! So my respect for the people who are fit enough to do this is phenomenally high.

And speaking of being fit, every year at least some of the crew are just gorgeous. And usually the really attractive ones tend to be really quite posh too, which needless to say is a combination I like. Here are this year’s squads – http://theboatrace.org/men/squad-list Though I’m sadly slightly unwhelmed this year on the whole. 😦

Despite all this, when it comes down to it, what I really love is the tribalism. I want Oxford to win to an extent that borders on the irrational. And that’s just the way I like my sport. As a rule, I love sport, but generally only if I have some personal interest in the outcome. Growing up in Sheffield, everyone was into football. You supported either Sheffield Wednesday or Sheffield United, and you did it wholeheartedly. I was (and indeed still am)  firmly in the former camp, because supporting Wednesday was what my family did, going back several generations. On Steel City Derby Days (when the two teams play each other) the city wass like a ghost town. Everyone was watching, at the stadium, in a pub or at home on TV. There is no logical reason to love one group of footballers based in your home town and hate another group of them based in the same place, but there’s something oddly satisfying about doing so. It creates a real sense of belonging. Occasionally, in London, in the middle of a busy street or train, I’ve spotted someone in a Wednesday shirt and I’ve just had to go over and speak to them.

hendersons_wednesdayIn Sheffield, even condiments come in rival team packaging

 

In Sheffield, even the condiments come in team colours! 

The Boat Race gives me a similar feeling and arguably with slightly more reason. I went to Oxford. Oxford made me the person I am today. I owe it my job, my fiancé  an awful lot of my friends, some of my hobbies and interests, and I suppose, my books (I’m not convinced I could have made “UCL Blood” work). So watching those boats speeding down the river, I really feel like the result personally matters for me.

Anyway, the race is on the BBC at 5.55 UK time  (for foreign viewing, see here:http://theboatrace.org/men/tv-and-radio). Whether or not you have any connection with Oxford, Cambridge or any other university, I strongly suggest that you pick a side, get yourself a glass of Pimm’s and settle down 

Top Ten Tuesday – Characters I Would Crush On If I Were Also a Fictional Character

02 Tuesday Apr 2013

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It’s time for Top Ten Tuesday, a weekly feature hosted by the blog, The Broke and the Bookish – http://brokeandbookish.blogspot.co.uk/

Each week they ask people to write a top ten list of something on a literary theme. This week it’s characters you have a crush on. I’ve been waiting for this topic  for weeks. All I can say is that it’s a good job I’m not writing this ten years ago or I’d never have kept it down to ten. In my mid-teens, I just couldn’t read a book without falling in love with someone in it, and I was reading everything from literary classics to the trashiest of the trashy novels.

Now my hormones have calmed down and I’m freshly engaged, I’m not quite so easily impressed, and indeed, I’ve read several books recently with someone who’s meant to be a great romantic hero and felt a bit non-plussed. This list however seems to stand the test of time.

It’s probably worth bearing in mind that I havea  slightly worrying taste in book boyfriends. This lot are nearly universally arrogant/power-mad; a good few of them are outright evil or at least highly amoral , and in one especially worrying case, after reading I found out that a character was meant to be based on George Bush. Oh, and one is about 90% based on my actual boyfriend. You can draw your own conclusions about whether he’s an exception to this rule or not…

Also, at least four are dead by the end of the series they appear in (don’t worry, I wouldn’t dream of spoiling the books by saying which ones). I strongly suspect that two more are going to join this list by the time their series’ are completed. I’m just a glutton for punishment.

 

1 – Julian – LJ Smith – The Forbidden Game

forbidden game

There’s no way I could write a list about book boyfriends and not start with an LJ Smith character. I don’t think any author has so consistently managed to write characters that I felt a wild attraction to. Yes, the fact that I read all her books in my teens helped, but I read lots of similar paranormal romance around the same time and no one had quite the same effect on me. If I let myself, I could quite easily have filled the whole list with her dark romantic leads, filled a back up list with the lighter side of her inevitable love triangles and probably have got a good way through a third on the strength of her random supporting characters.

However, I’m restricting myself to one character per author (except me, because I make my own rules), so there’s really only one choice. Julian from the Forbidden Game. In many ways, Julian is a bit of a stock character, artfully balancing being hot, evil, charming and utterly in love with the heroine. I can’t quite put my finger on why he is so much more memorable than all the other sexy paranormal cads out there, but somehow he is. Partly, it’s just because he has such a good storyline to work with. Partly because he’s such an unusual character, being a Shadow Man, a creature from Norse Mythology, rather than a vampire/werewolf/angel/fairy. Partly it’s because he gets some great lines. And partly, as with really life, I guess sometimes the chemistry is just right.

2)Morpheus/Sandman – Neil Gaiman – Sandman Series

This one scores even higher on the “you really wouldn’t want to go out with him in real life” scale. His girlfriends all seem to end up in hell or cursed or trapped somewhere, which isn’t really what you want. On the plus side, he’s good-looking, romantic, more powerful than any god and a great storyteller. And whileever the ill-fated girlfriends are still in favour, they seem to be utterly adored. I don’t usually go in for graphic novels, but the nice thing about them is that they let me see exactly what he’s supposed to look like and in general, I absolutely approve. Except that the way some of the artists draw him, he looks disturbingly like my brother. (Using a picture to illustrate this fact has been vetoed!).

3) Ned Stark – A Game of Thrones – George RR Martin

I read Game of Thrones and the rest of the series so far before the TV show and adored it. As a good northern lass one of my favourite things about it was the cold frozen north full of grimly self-sufficient men and the way it was initially contrasted with and ultimately plunged into war with the softly indulgent south. I was rooting for the north all the way, especially House Stark and especially their wonderful patriarch Ned.

Unlike most of my selections here, who are basically terrible people once you strip away the glamour and the power, Ned seems like a really nice chap. He has a castle, a private army and huge reserves of power and respect. But he’s also a family man, fiercely loyal and utterly honourable. Plus he’s good at fighting (though by no means the best, which is a touch I like) and the sort of dad who gives his kids giant wolves as a present, but also remembers to tell them they have to look after them properly. He also, in one of my favourite minor scenes, gets up from his overheated bed in the middle of a freezing night and stands by his open window to cool down. I do that all the time. We’d be the perfect match.

The TV series only solidified this for me, because a)I love Sean Bean and b)he played him with a Sheffield accent, which was the way I’d always imagined lovely lovely Ned.

4 Thomas Cromwell – Wolf Hall/Bring up the Bodies – Hilary Mantel

 thomas Cromwell

Even more so than literary characters, I have a tendency to fall head over heels in love with historical characters. That said, despite taking a final paper on Tudor History, I never gave Thomas Cromwell a second thought. But on reading Hilary Mantel’s twin masterpieces, I suddenly thought he was amazing. Much like Ned Stark, he seems to be the only decent man in a world of total dicks. Unlike Ned, he knows when to admit defeat and arrange someone’s execution in order to stay on the king’s side. I like a bit of pragmatism in my men.

What I really love about him though is the way he starts life as the son of a blacksmith and through his own intelligence, ambition and energy becomes one of the most powerful men in England. He supports apprentices. He educates his daughters in Latin and maths. He throws great parties. He tries to set up a proto-welfare state. He’s probably the least physically attractive man on this list but I emphatically do not care. On the basis that you can’t spoil history, I think it’s fair to say he’s going to join my list of horrible deaths in Book Three. I’m not sure I can physically face reading that.

Note – definitely not to be confused with Oliver Cromwell, who I absolutely do not have a crush on as either a historical or fictional character. I didn’t call my series The Cavaliers for nothing.

5 Lord Vetinari – Discworld Series – Terry Pratchett

This is actually Lorenzo de'Medici

This is actually Lorenzo de’Medici

This one’s in a similar vein, only with an extra streak of cunning and evil. I’ve always thought of Terry Pratchett’s (mostly)benevolent dictator as being based on Lorenzo De’Medici, one of my top five history boyfriends and I think that was the author’s intention too. However, writing these two paragraphs side by side has made me realise that’s he’s actually uncannily like Mantel’s version of Cromwell. He’s ruthlessly ambitious, but treats personal power and the good of the country he’s governing roughly equally. He’s startlingly clever, and you know he’s always going to overcome any crisis he faces and beat anyone in a battle of wits. He doesn’t seem to have any kind of family and I’ve always thought he could do with a nice supportive girlfriend to help him run Ankh-Morpork.

6  Robert Frobisher – Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell

 I’ve touched on this in another blog post recently (by touched on I actually mean “stuck pictures of Ben Whishaw playing him in the recent film all over the place”) so I’ll keep this one short. Frobisher’s story is set in the early 1930s. He’s good-looking, well-dressed, a musical genius,  an old Etonian, a Cambridge drop-out, a manic-depressive, a writer of beautiful witty letters, an accomplished seducer and a fan of Nietsche.

That’s not necessarily a universally positive list but the end result is that he’s utterly fascinating. In real life I think I’d end up hitting him within about five minutes of speaking to him (though I did once know someone who massively reminded me of him and who I kept trying to force this book on)but he’s a perfect book crush.

7 Kvothe – The Kingkiller Chronicles – Patrick Rothfuss

Some people say Kvothe’s a bit of a Mary Sue. I say, “Fine, I’ll keep this guy who is: a brilliant musician; an amazing storyteller; pretty much the most naturally talented practitioner of magic in the world; trained in sex by a love goddess and trained in fighting by the world’s best assassins, ALL FOR MYSELF.” Because that’s basically exactly the qualities I look for in a man. On the downside, he has ginger hair, but you can’t have it all.

 8 Charlie Blackwell – American Wife – Curtis Sittenfeld

This one only gets to stay on the list because it wins my “biggest romantic head fuck of all time” award. Alice Lindgren is quiet and prim and proper. Her glamorous friend gets all the men. She goes to a BBQ and Charlie, the richest, best looking, most popular guy at the party falls totally and utterly in love with her. He takes her to his Cape Cod mansion where she meets his glamorous and sprawling family, including his senator father. At this point in the book I wanted to be Alice so much. Charlie seems so lovely. And then the book carries on and suddenly it’s clear that Charlie is based on George W Bush and  I have the horrible realisation that I’d just developed a crush on young George Bush. I couldn’t watch any news featuring American politics for about five years afterwards.

Joint 9 and 10 . The Hon. Tom Flyte and Lord George Stewart – Georgiana Derwent -The Cavaliers Series

Forgive me a moment of self-publicising, but this list honestly wouldn’t be complete if I couldn’t include these two. After all, if there’s one thing better than coming across a character you fall in love with, it’s writing one to your exact specifications. And I know I said I was restricting myself to only one character per author, but it’s all or nothing here, I couldn’t possibly show any favouritism.

George and Tom are both aristocratic vampires, from the English Civil War and the 1920s respectively. As members of the Cavaliers, an elite dining society, they are pretending to be ordinary Oxford University students whilst secretly recruiting promising students that they can turn into vampires and use to run the country.

tom

Tom has floppy dark hair and deep blue eyes. He went to Eton followed by Oxford. He likes indie music, partying and culture. He’s also extremely good at fencing, punting and apparently rowing. Oh, not to mention sex. He’s generally dressed extremely smartly, up to and including white tie. If I were single, you could probably take that description and set an online dating profile up for me. On the downside, he likes seducing people for their blood (including one person he killed) and being only eighty years old isn’t that powerful.

George has long blond hair and was basically brought up to be a soldier, but ended up cultured somewhere along the way. He’s half French and half Scottish (though speaks with a cut glass English accent), Catholic but pretty thoroughly lapsed, and fervently loyal to the monarch of the time  from Charles I onwards. He hates the Roundheads for killing the king, killing his brother (even though that made him the heir to his father’s Dukedom) and for generally being dull and lacking in style. He has a reputation around Oxford as being both exceptionally attractive and charming and a total womaniser, even by the standards of the Cavaliers. As a Senior Member of the Cavaliers, he oversees the creation of the new vampires (who all have to kill someone to be turned) so he has a lot of blood on his hands. He has exceptionally strong mind control powers and tends to solve most problems with mesmerisms or duels.

End 

So, do you like any of these characters or have I just shown what incredibly odd taste I have? And indulge me – if you’ve ever read my books, which of the two characters do you prefer?