On abandoning a series
Sunday, May 27th, 2007I’ve been reading my way through Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City sequence this year and have enjoyed it greatly - as the reviews on this blog will demonstrate. I was able to do this because a very kind Bookcrosser decided to share her copies by making them available as a spiral. This means sending out each one, separated by gaps of approximately a month to the first name on a list (on this occasion, mine). Each book is then posted on to the next person on the list until the spiral is complete and each book is returned, touch wood, to the person who began the spiral. Such is the generous nature of the people taking part in Bookcrossing.
Yesterday I faced up to the inevitable and took the fourth volume, Babycakes, off the shelf where it had been sitting, sealed it up in an envelope and dispatched it off unread to the next person on the list. Then I emailed the kind and generous bookcrosser and asked her not to send me the last two. And I cannot tell you how relieved I felt. But, at the same time, immensely guilty, for reasons I will explain below. If you don ‘t know what happens in Tales of the City in general and Babycakes in particular, and you wish to remain in ignorance, please don’t read any further, since I intend to go into the plot in quite some detail. You have been warned.
It’s been obvious to me for quite a while that I really wasn’t going to enjoy this book. It’s here that I have to admit to a little sleight of hand. Two of us have been reading in this household - absolutely reprehensible if it slowed things down for other people. I hope very much that we are both such quick readers and that these books were so easy to get through that nothing of the sort happened and everyone else was able to detect nothing but normal service. That means, thanks to the good offices of Beloved Other Half who had put his shoulder to the wheel and actually read the damn thing, I had more intelligence about the plot than the back of the jacket was able to offer.
Mind you, the jacket was enough. A large chunk of the story concerns the quest of two recently-married characters to have a baby - not an emotional journey that ever particularly engages me, especially when undertaken by two characters that didn’t particularly engage me in the first place. I’m also generally irritated no end by ‘Britporn’ - ie classic slices of British life such as the Royal Family repackaged for the American market in ways that render them pretty much unrecognisable to inhabitants of these islands. Suffice it to say that several members of The Firm apparently feature as actual characters in this book. (I could also mention another pet hate here, which is that we NEVER actually refer to ourselves as “Brits” - we are English, Irish, Scots, Welsh, and a host of other things depending how far down the regional ladder you want to descend, or how far back up the family tree you want to climb. But Brits? Just doesn’t happen. Pretty much entirely an American term, both in usage and understanding.)
Plus, and this is the most serious by far, I looked at the plot summary on the back of the jacket and saw one word which made my heart sink through the floor: “grieving”. From that I extrapolated that someone was dead and who that someone had to be. If I was right, one of my favourite characters was gone, off-camera and without so much as a final farewell. I consulted with Beloved Other Half who confirmed I was right. The prospects of this book ever being read by me were receding by the second.
So, my objections to Babycakes can be summarised thus: babies, Britporn and tragic death. Seems fair enough, why should I feel guilty? Well, here’s the reason. The six books in the Tales of the City sequence divide neatly into two similarly-themed trilogies and I have just crossed the halfway point. This marks a really significant divide in the subject matter too. Armistead Maupin was not only one of the first authors to deal with gay relationships in fiction. He was also the first to deal with the HIV infection and its terrible consequences, and Babycakes, published I think in 1984, was the book in which he did it. I believe it contains the first recorded instance of a fictional treatment of AIDS - the death mentioned above. And I read in an interview he gave that it was a response to losing a real-life friend very early on in the epidemic.
So, having read and enjoyed the earlier, lighter instalments of this series, is it not a great moral weakness on my part to back out at exactly the point when things get tough? When they are drawn from the author’s personal experiences? Especially since all those people there at the time being written about weren’t exactly able to act in a similar way? And isn’t this going to seriously impair my understanding of the books that I did read? Well the answer to all these questions is probably yes. And enough of an imperative to make me carry on.
Were it not for the babies and the Britporn, which really are two steps too far.
So I’m going on my way feeling somewhat chastened by the above reflections, but basically remembering the maxim that, while we shouldn’t shy away from uncomfortable reading, life really is too short for books you won’t enjoy. Mind you, I’m feeling very complacent about seeing Mary Ann coming. In the earliest pages of the first book, when she drops the old school friend like a hot potato as soon as she ceases to be useful, I was thinking “Hang on a minute, that’s a bit of a nasty thing to do…” How right I was about her… ;- ))
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