When I was 10 or 11, I was consumed by a passion for Golden Age detective fiction. I browsed mildew-smelling secondhand bookshops for Dorothy L Sayers and Arthur Conan Doyle, developing secret proto-crushes on both Lord Peter Wimsey and Sherlock Holmes (and wishing I could carry off a monocle). I burned through Margery Allingham’s Albert Campion books, and Agatha Christies by the score and I adored GK Chesterton’s Father Brown.
But recently, rereading the stories of the round-faced, stumpy cleric, with his flapping black cassock and his encyclopedic knowledge of human evil, left me feeling cold rather than cosy. Chesterton’s glorious evocations of light, landscape, and unnerving, lurid strangeness remain compelling. But his frequent use of racial stereotypes now slams me repeatedly out of his text. References to “the yellow man”, “a big white bulk … but with the needless emphasis of a black face”, “the fashionable negro … showing his apish teeth” – even the intrinsic evil of a “Turkey carpet” – leave me feeling that the padre’s much-touted broad-mindedness boils down all too often to mere mistrust of any skin-shade other than white.
Naturally, none of the Golden Agers is perfect in this respect, reflecting the narrow attitudes of the eras in which they wrote – as the original title of Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None can testify. But the peculiar dislike of brown-skinned “otherness” I now detect in Chesterton’s stories has made it impossible for me to relax into the weird beauty of his landscapes. Sherlock Holmes has his distasteful moments, too – the caricature treatment of Steve Dixie, the boxer and former slave in The Adventure of the Three Gables, leaves a particularly nasty taste in the mouth – but Conan Doyle’s humane treatment of the idea of interracial marriage in The Adventure of the Yellow Face at least provides some leavening and balance. I am still fond of Sherlock, but I’ve had to bid farewell to Father Brown.
Later, as a teen sci-fi addict frequently annoyed by the treatment of women as irrational, disposable, decorative or all three, I loved Sheri S Tepper’s The Gate to Women’s Country. This is a post-apocalyptic story set in Marthatown, an ecofeminist utopia, and its environs, including the warriors’ garrison outside its walls. On first reading, I fell in love with the idea of a place where all the inhabitants had a job, an art, and a craft, which they worked on and refined throughout their lives. And the choice at the heart of the story – that boys born in Women’s Country, sent out to the garrison as children, must decide as teenagers whether to return or to renounce their mothers and remain with the warriors – was dramatic enough to grip me from the outset. But my later rereading brought some unsavoury details into focus: the selective breeding practised by the matriarchs of Women’s Country, with its tang of eugenics; the eradication of the “gay syndrome” by this means; the denigration of the heroine’s sister as “coming from an unsatisfactory sire” … I still love the starkness of that irrevocable central choice, and yearn for some elements of the Marthatown municipality, but I can no longer sink blissfully into the book, seeking paradise.
Last year, Katy, Jacqueline Wilson’s masterful re-imagining of What Katy Did, sent me back to Susan Coolidge’s original, searching in vain for the delight it gave me as a child. While I still love the detailed evocation of the large, lovingly chaotic Carr family, the heavy lacing of moral guidance and the “smoothing away” of disability at the end – like the lines of pain that Cousin Helen smooths away from her forehead “with her fingers” – has dated dreadfully. The idea of a wheelchair-using child reading this book, and thinking that if only they were cheerful and dutiful enough, perhaps they might be cured, makes me want to sweep it off the shelves.
