Censorship never goes away

The high school teacher who I remember most fondly was my English teacher and debate team coach who we’ll call Mrs Mac. She was the first teacher I can recall who engaged in a genuine argument with me rather than simply telling me I was wrong and she was right because she was the teacher. Our argument was about the merits of The Grapes of Wrathwhich she loved and I found to be the dullest words in human history. She was also a staunch opponent of censorship of any kind which, as a lay teacher in a Catholic girls high school in the 1980’s, required more than a little backbone. She had on the wall of her office a picture of Gough Whitlam (Australian Prime Minister from 1972-75) for the sole reason that in 1973 the Whitlam Government wiped the list of banned books in Australia. “He may have had his faults” Mrs Mac would say “but he understood the danger of banning things”.  I wonder what Mr Whitlam thinks about the current Labor Government’s proposal which would effectively censor the internet in Australia.

I’m sure I was influenced by Mrs Mac’s arguments but I have given this issue some independent thought in the intervening 25 years and I’ve never been persuaded that banning things has the desired impact (assuming the desired impact is to ‘protect’ society or some subset of it from hearing or seeing things that the censors think they’d be better off not hearing or seeing).

Yet, surprisingly to me, censorship of one kind or another continues. Increasingly, private companies are engaging in censorship of a fairly insidious kind and the latest example would appear to be Amazon.com. In an LA Times blog post Carolyn Kellogg describes how Amazon has effectively censored its website by ‘de-ranking’ certain books. To be clear, this doesn’t mean Amazon won’t sell the book (that at least would suggest some kind of staunch moral stance on their part) but it does mean that the book won’t appear on Amazon’s general or category best-seller lists and won’t appear in general or keyword search results. So you’d have to know the book exists and search by its author or title to find it. Kellogg quotes an author who contacted Amazon about the disappearance of his own book (a young adult novel featuring gay characters) from their lists and he was apparently told by a customer services representative

In consideration of our entire customer base, we exclude “adult” material from appearing in some searches and best seller lists. Since these lists are generated using sales ranks, adult materials must also be excluded from that feature.

Kellogg (and others) have investigated further and discovered that Amazon have a fairly fluid definition of ”adult” material but I don’t really care about that aspect of this. For me the problem with any kind of censorship is that we’re never all going to agree on what should, and what should not, be censored. Some people even wanted to ban Harry Potter books for pity’s sake.

I’m fairly confident that the reason Amazon have introduced this practice is because of some hefty lobbying by ‘concerned parents groups’ who’ve threatened to use their economic muscle against Amazon unless they implement these practices (why else would Amazon incur the extra work?). So all I can do is fight fire with fire and refuse to shop there until they change their policy. Which I’m more than happy to do.

The Norwegian Beacon For Freedom of Expression project has one of the best sites discussing the history of censorship and the issues surrounding the subject that I’ve come across.

 

Sunday Salon 2009-02-15: What kind of book is it?

My job requires me to categorise and classify things. In fact it requires me to be something of a crusader about the joys of classification. But when it comes to books I’m really, really bad at it. This week in a post at one of my favourite book blogs, Crime Scraps, Uriah posed the challenge of coming up with a list of books in these categories that you might use to introduce a newbie to the crime/mystery genre. It sounded like a great idea (and was going to be the subject of my Sunday Salon post this week) until I started going through my reading notes to work out what books I would suggest and realised I couldn’t sensibly categorise about 95% of the books I’ve read.

Even looking back through the reviews I posted this week I struggled to categorise them. State of the Onion is recognisably a ‘cosy’ book but I didn’t know how to classify Sacrifice. It’s more of a thriller in some ways although there are crimes in it and there’s a proper police investigation too. What does that make it? I loved The Three Evangelists and would happily recommend it to friends but I couldn’t put one of the sub-genre labels on it if you paid me. I’m not entirely convinced the book is even crime fiction. I heard Ian McEwan say in an interview once that almost all books, including his Booker Prize short-listed Atonement, could be considered crime fiction in the purest sense as a crime occurs in it and there are consequences of that crime that the characters have to deal with.

Anyway, I gave up trying to prepare a list to meet Uriah’s challenge. Maybe I don’t read widely enough in the genre so my reading notes don’t reflect the variety suggested by the categories in that list. Whatever the reason I’ve stopped trying to meet this challenge and am going to spend the remainder of my Sunday curled up with my current book (Linwood Barclay’s No Time For Goodbye which I would classify as…damn good).

 

It’s Un-Australian

I have been reading crime fiction since I was a kid but until this year I had read crime fiction by only a handful of Australian authors.

Years ago I discovered (and loved) Jennifer Rowe’s series of books featuring television researcher/amateur sleuth Verity Birdwood and immediately looked for more Aussie crime writers. I recall finding a Lindy Cameron mystery commissioned for a museum’s conference in the 90’s and a Gabrielle Lord novel or two popped up at my library but that was about it. I assumed there were not more Australian crime writers because if there were surely I would have heard about them. Right?

Apparently not. Earlier this year I stumbled across a website that changed my reading habits forever. Aust crime fiction listed several hundred Australian writers and almost all of them have written at least one mystery.

How could I not have known?

In Adelaide where I live there are few independent bookstores left and neither these nor the chain stores make much (any?) attempt to promote local authors. Of course there are exceptions, namely Bryce Courtenay novels and the endless parade of biographies by every bloke who ever wore the baggy green or pulled on a pair of footyboots, but crime fiction display stands are full of titles by people from far off places. And if there is an Australian scattered among the Cornwells, Pattersons, Rendells and entire Kellerman family you’d never know it.

Even armed with the names of Aussie authors and the titles of their books it has been a challenge to find Australian authors in Australian bookstores. Sure Michael Robotham got a load of display space this year as the Books Alive ambassador but I had to work hard to find the rest of the books I wanted to read. I have waited impatiently for titles by Garry Disher, Kerry Greenwood, Kathryn Fox, Peter Temple, Katherine Howell and Barry Maitland to be ordered from whatever black hole they are warehoused in and have just about resorted to prayer to locate the PD Martin title I was looking for. The four months it took me to track down a 2005 book by Western Australian author Felicity Young demonstrated that my persistence would be rewarded (read my review) but really should it be this hard?

There’s an Australian Grown sticker on every orange I eat and a Buy Australian label on all of the remaining items manufactured in this country but there’s nary any public indication anywhere that Australia produces great crime fiction. 

In case you’re like me and didn’t know there were so many great local authors head over to aust crime fiction and pick out a title or two of the hundreds listed and track them down. You won’t be disappointed.