Genre, "The Giver", and Ne'er The Twain Shall Meet

It doesn't take a genius to work out the genre is as slippery as a barrel of bamboozled spaghetti (and not half so pleasant to stick your hand into). I reckon more than a few of us gathered here have looked down at our new novel and thought, like a confused midwife in the world of Dr Seuss, "It's lovely ... but how on earth am I going to explain this to the family?"

As the world's paperback population steadily increases, a book's genre becomes more and more important. With a genre in mind, the author knows in what sort of world their nacent plot will take place, know what other great books of its sort it will be up against in the world, know which agents will take it, which publishers will sell it, and - most importantly of all - which readers will carry it home with them from the bookshop at the end of the day.

However, genre is not simply there to fill the needs of a bracketer - it's perfectly capable of being quite revolutionary, too.

Lois Lowry did something incredible with a combination of science fiction, allegory, political novel and children's fiction when she produced The Giver. A short story, simply written, but with a depth and vision to it unlike anything fifteen-year-old Charley had ever seen when she purloined the meagre boarding house library on a long, wet weekend.

Evidently the rest of the world agreed with me. Since its publication in 1993, The Giver has gone on to win prizes in the USA - the Newbery Medal, and a Boston Globe-Horn Book Honour among them - and abroad. It's the most common read-aloud book to year six children in a large constituency of California, and has been placed in the Top lists for both 100 Chapter Books and 100 Books for Children since 2004.

It even managed to work its way over the channel and permeate the shelves of a library that stocked few things younger than The Famous Five.

And then, with a great rattle, bang, clash, and massive abuse of lens flare ... Hollywood appeared.

Readers ... I am not an angry person. I may appear it, at times, when elbow-deep in the sadly metaphorical shredded insides of a poorly-presented literary theory or glaring down the massively inflated price label on the only sandwich left to sate my 4-in-the-afternoon-munchies, but I am not.

I have no problem with the release of a new and exciting dystopia movie. I love dystopias. I love fancy effects and clever direction. I even love Jeff Bridges, in spite of Tron: Legacy.

What I do not love is the re-appropriation of a book to suit a passing craze.

I could spend hours pounding this trailer over the head with a metaphorical mallet the size of Massachussetts for all the things it got wrong. But if I did that, I'd be here forever, and I'd leave a thousand and one spoilers splattered all over the place, and I don't want to do that. Lord knows this trailer can hardly spoil anything for anyone given that it's about as closely based on its source material as Harry Potter is based on The Odyssey (as in both feature a guy who does some stuff and there's a monster with multiple heads in it).

To be honest, this isn't even, entirely, about The Giver. The Giver, sadly, is just another in the long line of great books, TV shows, plays, scripts and even people, whose material has been re-appropriated and parcelled up in a shiny celluloid wrapper and redistributed with complete ignorance not only to its specifics, but also to its genre.

Genre is wide, and that's part of the reason why so many things can end up in the same bracket. Technically, Divergent and The Giver come from the same basket - but you'll never see two more different yolks in all your life. And neither would make a very good omelette.

This is why genre is important. Yes, it can be a little bit of a butt when you're trying to work out which label will fit onto your strangely-proportioned novel - it looks just a little bit too sci-fi to be fantasy, but since when did goblins belong anywhere else? - but it will also give it definition. And it will give you themes to bend, and challenge, and roads down which to innovate.

It will also tell your readers what you are getting. When you pick up The Giver, you will know you are getting The Giver. And not ... whatever that is.

The Giver is an even-handed, complex, philosophical science fiction fable for adults and children, with an ending left open so that, in the words of Lowry herself, "people bring to it their own complicated sense of beliefs and hopes and dreams and fears and all of that. So I don't want to put my own feelings into it, my own beliefs, and ruin that for people who create their own endings in their minds."

This movie, by the all-too-prevalent tone of this trailer is the latest product of a dystopian craze who took success as an indicator of consent, and applied a formula that could not hope to remain remotely true to the spirit of the original.

Perhaps I shall write a more detailled post on this matter when the film in question comes out (and I can muster up the self-will to acknowledge its existence).

Until then, I shall leave you with a question. One can bear in mind the needs and successes of a genre in its time, but what do you make of adaptations like this one? And what about other films that have been given similar treatment? What do you make of this conversion? Leave a comment, and let me know!

~ Charley R

Genre: What's In A Word?

Genre is . . . big. Surprisingly big, actually, for something that fits into a five-letter word. Genre is what people use to discern their favourite books, to describe those books to others, to denote concepts and themes and images. Genre is one of the first things you'll use to describe your own book, when you make those first tentative steps into introducing the topic into the sphere of conversation, and it's what will be give you the 'yea' or 'nay' when you make those first tentative baby steps into the world of querying agents and publishers.

Genre is also a gigantic pain in the butt.

As is often the way with very big things squashed into very small words, some bits of it have become far more trouble than they're worth.

Take the Oscars, for example. It's a well known fact that it's a biased system of voting, and a lot of that bias is based on genre. After all, why else was there so much consternation when The Return of the King ran away with seventeen awards? The clean sweep in itself was stunning enough, but the fact that a fantasy film - a genre against which most film awards, but the Oscars especially, is extremely biased - could do it . . . it was unheard of.

You only have to go and listen to the Tolkien fanbase snarling that a few well-placed wigs and blood splatters snatched this year's Best Costume and Make-Up away from a film that, almost literally, put new faces on the actors to turn them into an entirely different species.

Of course, this is the world of film, which, although a lot of its inspiration comes from books, is a notably different kettle of opinionated fish. Or is it?

Unfortunately, similar issues persist. Fantasy may be one of the most popular and famous brands of literature out there, but I have met so few people who are willing to regard a fantasy as a "great work" simply because it dares to throw in a few dragons and a magic sword. In 1961, Tolkien was nominated for a Nobel Prize for literature, only to be refused on the basis that the The Lord of the Rings "has not in any way measured up to storytelling of the highest quality". Admittedly, critical opinions are as varied as the critics themselves, but it does beg the question; was Tolkien's "bad storytelling" partly down to the critic's apathy for the incredibly detailed, but undeniably fictitious, setting and subject matter?

Fantasy, however, is not alone in being victimised. The romance genre, eternally under fire for some reason or another, has been almost ostracised by some because of its unfortunate encompassing of Mills and Boon romances and their toxic offshoots. Meanwhile, the tentatively titled "young adult" genre has become so notorious for washed out teeny-pop "dark romance" featuring brooding sparklies and heroines with the personalities of Barbie dolls that people are almost embarassed to admit to liking or reading anything they can't exonerate - The Hunger Games being one of the lucky escapees.

Finally, though, we come to the most awkward issue of them all: how, exactly, does one denote a book's genre?

Okay, half of this question is obvious - if it's got flying saucers and someone who looks suspiciously like Spock, it's unlikely to have wandered in from the memoir section, is it? - but, on a deeper level, how useful is genre, really? Books of all types can feature a thousand themes and topics; love and death, courage and fear, war and peace, victory and failure, growing up, growing old . . . can such universal things, such essentially human things, be defined in the same way as an intended age range or style of narrative?

Genre's great for labels and aesthetic description, but should we let it define anything beyond a dustjacket cover?

~ Charley R