#mal peet

Not wanting to pick up another book and brand my 2022 reading a two-for-two of DNFs has meant I haven’t really read in six months. I did not want to finish this book. It sat on my bedside table like a piece of set dressing, collecting dust, seven chapters in and I was loath to pick it up again. But what is it that’s so bad about this book?

Well, let me tell you. It is utterly devoid of heart. It is a book so concerned with cynicism, with belittling others, with being removed and aloof and bitter, that it removes any fun it might have had. I wondered if, perhaps, the use of an ableist slur twelve pages in meant that this book wasn’t for me. Maybe, I thought, trying to be generous, it was from the early 2000s, some time where the R slur got thrown around casually without thought for its actual cruel ramifications. Where the hatred of disabled people was challenged only really by disabled people themselves, where the publicity surrounding not being a fucking monster to minorities was nowhere near what it is today, where the “woke mob” is decried every time someone famous and beloved is revealed to be a fucking monster.

Unfortunately, this book was published in 2014.

And it only got worse from there. Aside from the frankly disgusting way the protagonist talks about women - any women, as often as possible - there’s also the use of transphobic slurs and casual discussion about if a gay man with social power sexually assault the male protagonist, he should just smile and not make a fuss. It’s funny! Queer people existing - trans people, gay people - are actually a way to show off how weird and not like good old Blighty the USA is. Queerness is a side-effect of modern-day image-obsessed celebrity culture, and considering how bitterly and viciously this book rails against the progression of the world through technology and social media, it is distinctly not a positive thing.

Now, I know. Books do not have to be moral. Protagonists can be horrible people, I know. I’ve read books with horrible protagonists, and loved them. This book felt like a gut punch, over and over. How far did I make it into it? Seven and a half chapters. I reached a point where I realised I wasn't enjoying myself, and I did not need to martyr myself to this bitter and dull piece of shit book for the sake of proving that no, I do understand that flawed protagonists exist and can be good to read. I have a Masters degree in literature. I am required to prove nothing to no one, thank you.

BELOW ARE JUST A FEW OF MY “”FAVOURITE”” PASSAGES. THESE WILL BE MISOGYNIST, ABLEIST, RACIST TRANSPHOBIC AND HOMOPHOBIC, AS WELL AS CONTAINING A MENTION OF SEXUAL ASSAULT. IF YOU DO NOT WISH TO READ THEM, PLEASE SKIP TO “FIN”.

“It made Asperger’s cool” (page 11)

“You’ve made that whole area, you know, boys who are inadequate, your own.” (page 11)

“No one wants to publish another book about sensitive retarded boys” (page 12)

“It’s about a sensitive adopted boy of mixed race with learning difficulties who’s good at football and believes his real father might be a Premiership footballer” (page 12)

“He picked at the wrongly hinged boy in the wheelchair whom Minerva had pointed out” (page 71)

“Viscid filaments stretched between his lips” (page 72)

“The boy’s eyes swivelled and his buckled fingers clawed the air” (page 72)

“His teenage son is a tranny” (page 76)

“He’s as gay as bunting, and if he cops a feel of your bum I want you to promise me you won’t make a fuss, OK? It won’t come to anything.” (page 77)

FIN

It was at this point, having slogged through ableism and transphobia and more misogyny than would be practical to list in the above section, but trust me, this protagonist is an incel through and through, than I threw the book down. I had only picked the damn thing up again after months of not touching it because I was waiting for my phone to update and couldn’t be asked to get out of bed on a Sunday morning to go to my laptop. What a vile, sad, disgusting little book. What a waste of ink, what a waste of my time and money.

There is one, final thing I’d like to touch on, before I hurl this mistake of a book to the winds. It’s less…skin crawling, shall we say, than the rest of the above bullshit. But it hurt me very personally, in ways different to how the ableism and homophobia and transphobia hurt me.

I do LARPing. For those who don’t know, that’s Live Action Role Play, like a renfaire or cosplaying your own OC, but with plot and worldbuilding. I run LARPs and I play them. They are tremendous fun, and require a level of unabashed love for what you’re doing, authentic and honest and joyful. I love fantasy in the same way, the way it is so often unabashed that yes, the evil in the text can be defeated and we will come home, the world saved but we irrevocably changed, but we won, we won, we won. Fantasy is a genre of pretending and refusing to allow that to be strangled out of you by common sense or grown up nonsense. Mal Peet does everything he can in this novel to strangle it out of me. He is cruel and dismissive. Murdstone calls Tolkien “pretentious escapist nonsense”, as if The Lord of the Rings was invented out of nowhere so Tolkien could feel clever about himself, as if there isn’t a rich history of fantasy being written in reference and reverence to texts that have come before that goes all the way back to Beowulf and beyond - a history I have personally studied at university. Books, and fantasy, is all capitalistic nightmare foolishness, according to this book. The publishing industry churns out only what sells, and writers write only what sells, and there is no joy or authenticity in it, only cynicism and money.

It’s no wonder I quite literally tossed it aside 77 pages in.

Mal Peet, I’m sorry your protagonist is so much smarter than the rest of the world. I’m sorry that this book was marketed as a fun romp through fantasy tropes, something that I picked up hoping for just that. And I am so, so sorry that it led to me not reading anything for six fucking months because I thought I should at least have the decency to try and finish it.

To the bin with it. I move on to better things.

Verdict: