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DRAFT LETTER FOR RELEVANT SYNDICATE/S, RE RACISM IN FOOB.
Dear sir/ madam
I am writing to express concern about the racist theme that is currently being promoted within the popular Canadian comic strip For Better or For Worse.
To put it succinctly: blonde blue-eyed Liz Patterson, of Anglo-Scot ancestry, goes north for a temporary adventure/ spot of spiritual tourism in a Native village. While there she has a romantic fling with a handsome mestizo policeman, Paul Wright, whose Dad is Irish and whose mum is Ojibway. I may add that, at least from a reading of L M Montgomery, I long ago gained the impression that for much of Canada’s history the politically dominant white Anglo-Scot group regarded the dark ‘others’ – French, Irish, Native, who frequently intermarried – with suspicion and indeed fear. Liz briefly attempted an encounter with this Other. Not for long, though. Almost at once – as if Johnston panicked at the thought of having to depict cross-cultural/ interracial lovemaking and marriage in any depth – the plot was forcibly manipulated so that Liz had to return to her white suburban milieu and take up again with her fair, freckled, blue-eyed Anglo-[Scot?] ‘first love’ who lived in her parents’ pockets and had never moved more than 100 miles from his birthplace in his entire life. So fixated was the author upon the desirability of this semi-incestuous conclusion that a sexual assault trial was transformed into a nauseous ‘meet cute’ for Liz and Anthony; there was even a strip in which Liz, being one of the witnesses, was told by a legal person that because of the trial she must not leave town [translation: it is the Law that she is not to go visit Paul ]. The way the story is going, I fully expect that we will be shown Liz being cheated on by Paul and marrying Anthony.
In order for us not to notice just how blatantly and cruelly the character of Paul has been used and discarded, both as plot-device (to keep Liz amused until her ‘real love’ Anthony passive-aggressed his unsuitable French wife into cheating on him and leaving) and as a person within the story, Johnston has provided a ‘consolation prize’– a nice Ojibway girl, Susan Dokis, Liz’s replacement in the village school. But this plot-move of course, further reinforces the subliminal message – ‘Natives MUST marry Natives; White MUST marry White’. Seemingly Paul’s ‘native’ ancestry trumps his ‘Irish’ ancestry; Native Susan is a suitable match for him and he for her, but he is NOT a suitable match for lily-white Liz.
If I were a Canadian First Nations person I would be infuriated by the subliminal suggestion of this story arc, that it’s OK for a white girl to screw – and jerk around - a Native guy, but unthinkable and impossible for her to marry him! I would also be infuriated by the explicit representation of the character of Paul – who has probably survived all kinds of racist garbage during his police training and after – as being totally unable/ unwilling to face life in the Big City. Because that perpetuates another deeply racist myth – Real Natives are only found in the wilderness, Real Natives can’t / won’t handle life in the city. Finally, if they break up because Paul is represented as having been a cheat and a liar all along, the implicit message will be a dreadful character assassination of Ojibway guys - "O innocent white girls who visit the north, BEWARE the evil Red Man!"
Reflecting on the Liz-Paul-Anthony story arc I realized that it is not the first time Lynn Johnston has represented ethno-cultural difference as an unbridgeable abyss. Some time ago, in an extended series of strips, Johnston re-invented the gay character, Lawrence Poirier, as the result of his mother’s hot affair with a Latino doctor during a couple of years that she spent on short-term medical mission in South America. The commentary on this affair stressed the impassable cultural and geographical gap between the lovers – Connie couldn’t live in ‘his’ world, he couldn’t live in ‘hers’. In blatant disregard for the proliferation of cross-cultural marriages in today’s globalised world, FBOFW gave us people who sagely took it for granted that a gringo/ Latino match simply COULDN’T have worked.
I may add that in the earliest eugenics texts the mestizo or half-caste was understood as an interspecies hybrid, like a mule, inheriting the worst of both sides. In defiance of all observed facts on the ground, even the viability and fertility of cross-cultural offspring were repeatedly denied by ‘authoritative’ writers. Now – isn’t it strange that Lawrence, the mestizo, is also the homosexual – i.e., symbolically barren? His ‘barrenness’, his homosexuality, comes first; then it is symbolically ‘explained’ by his being a half-caste bastard. And Paul's instability/ duplicity is 'explained' by his dual identity as half-caste. As in a racist novel of the 20s or 30s, his spiritual/ intellectual/ civilised 'white' side is drawn to Liz but is then overwhelmed by the physical/ sensual 'call of the wild' in the shape of the Native girl, Susan Dokis.
I am surprised, too, that there have not been howls of protest from French Canadians at the blatantly negative portrayal of Anthony’s French Canadian ex-wife Therese. She was beautiful, passionate, jealous, a stereotypical evil ambitious career-woman and the complete stereotype of a worldly Frenchwoman who – growing tired of Anthony – took a long-term lover on the side and finally left her husband and child altogether. It doesn’t say much for Lynn’s subconscious perception of the long-term prospects of Anglo-French relations in Canada! (I don’t see why Therese had to be a Quebecoise. To make her one, given the function her character had to perform – bear a child to Anthony, cheat on him and disappear - reads like a gratuitous insult).
So, in the past three years of FBOFW, right in the foreground of the story, we have seen two main characters – Anthony and Liz – engage in cross-cultural relationships that involve the ‘Others’ (as viewed by White Canada). Anthony married black-haired black-eyed Therese the Quebecoise and it was a disaster. Liz fell in love with Paul the darkly beautiful Ojibway-Irish half-caste cop – but…marry him? Oh no! (Much better for him to marry an Ojibway girl like himself…people must stick with their own kind and stay in their pre-ordained places in the world…). Emerging sadder and wiser from their ill-advised and unsuitable temporary cross-cultural flings, Anthony and Liz are now being prepared to fall into one another’s fore-ordained lily-white embrace….
Considered as a cultural/ race-relations paradigm for modern day Canadians this is, to put it mildly, terribly negative. By shunting all the blame for the failed relationships onto Therese and Paul, it represents Quebecoises and Ojibway as cheats and liars seducing and betraying the nice honest blonde blue-eyed WASPS. And millions of English-speaking newspaper readers all across North America and Australia and beyond, are soaking up a subliminal message that harks right back to the eugenicist and racist writers of the 1890s through 1930s.
A final observation: even when Liz was represented as having visited Paul’s family, this visit was not dealt with visually in the strips (almost as if Johnston and her team did not, or could not, imagine how to represent the successful Irish-Ojibway union that had produced Paul in the first place, or didn’t want to represent it). Similarly: Johnston in the past has been OK with representing uninhibited kissing and cuddling – Liz’s teenage makeout sessions with Anthony or her adult kisses and embraces with the sexy sleaze Eric; her brother Michael’s teenage makeout sessions and his passionate embraces with Rhetta or Deanna. But: although implying (in the monthly letters on the official FBOFW site) that Liz and Paul were physically affectionate, Johnston and her team took care never to show them in an outright passionate clinch. There is exactly one panel that could be classified as such – and it’s the one where they’re saying good-bye after he has driven her back to the family home; the same incident is remembered by Liz in a couple of thought-bubbles a bit further on, but that’s it. I’m afraid this reluctance to show blonde Anglo-Scot Liz and dark Ojibway-Irish Paul in a real, adult ‘kiss like we want to go to bed NOW’ embrace, struck me as – squeamish.
In some ways, making Paul a mestizo came across as squeamishness – as if Johnston and/ or her team simply couldn't bring themselves to represent white girl Liz falling for someone who didn’t have any White ancestors. Similarly, at the village of Mtigwaki, initially the relationship between Gary the head teacher and his wife Valerie came across as a cross-cultural match – he was drawn dark and very ‘Native’, Valerie was drawn plump and fair. But presently it was explained that Valerie wasn’t ‘White’, she had Native as well as Scots ancestors, making her ‘Mac-Micmac’.
I used to enjoy, indeed I loved, FBOFW. I possess and have re-read many of the earlier anthologies/ cartoon collections from the 1980s and 1990s. But when I saw what was happening in the Liz story arc – and recognised the continuities with the Anthony-Therese and the ‘Connie’s Latin lover’ story arcs – I became repulsed and indeed angry at the repeated and quite ridiculous overt emphasis on the non-viability and non-desirability of cross-cultural/ inter-ethnic relationships. I speak as a non-indigenous ‘white’ Australian with a Chinese sister-in-law on one side and a Filipina sister-in-law on the other; and in the 1960s my father’s younger sister married a Chinese man so I have a Chinese uncle and Eurasian cousins. It would have been nice had a popular cartoon strip 'owned up' to this 21st century reality - that cross-cultural inter-ethnic relationships, including indigenous/non-indigenous matches in countries like Australia or Canada, are reasonably common, perfectly possible and can succeed magnificently.
Yours faithfully
[name]
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I joined Livejournal primarily in order to take part in the discussions in the foobiverse community - a lot of intelligent and sometimes funny analysis of where Lynn Johnston's FBOFW strip is going in its declining months. These reflections (not final, still being edited/ added to) are inspired by something I read there a while ago. Someone argued that a Liz’n’Anthony match would be the union of Sloth and Lust. Later, others remarked on the jealousy or envy that April displayed toward her former friend Becky/ Rebecca who was more successful as a singer than April was. This means that FBOFW has displayed to us three of the Seven Deadly Sins: Sloth or Accidia, Lust or Luxuria/ Lussuria (otherwise known as Lechery), and Envy, Invidia. Curiously, in the case of Liz, Anthony, and April, the readers seem to be strongly encouraged to identify with, and approve of, the characters' feelings and actions as being in some way good or justifiable. Since Lynn now seems to be presenting her cartoon strip/ soap opera as a kind of extended morality play, it occurred to me to wonder - how many of the Seven Deadlies can be identified in Lynn’s World? The Seven Deadly Sins comprise the following: Pride (Superbia), Wrath (Ira), Envy (Invidia), Gluttony (Gula – excessive self-indulgence in food and/or drink), Greed (Avaritia or Avarice – Covetousness/ Meanness), Lechery/ Luxuria/ Lust, and Sloth or Accidia (which is viewed as one of the worst, and is associated with Despair). I was able to find foobish examples of most of them. It’s interesting to try to view the various characters in this way - what is their besetting sin or sins? Wrath, Gluttony and Avarice are prominent, but not necessarily openly condemned. Pride is less obvious – Mira Sobinski is perhaps the clearest example, and her character and actions are usually condemned. However, in the retchcons - the monthly letters - Mike's writings exude a self-absorption and self-regard that is truly staggering, yet Lynn seems to want her readers to admire him, and seems unlikely to subject him to the shattering come-uppance that this kind of person normally receives in traditional comedy. I doubt that we will see Our Mike step on a banana skin or the equivalent. (*Update: he went back into his burning apartment to get his 'great Canadian novel' - but within the strip NO-ONE criticised him for it in any truly significant fashion and he got away scot free). Lust appears in various forms: Howard (who sexually harasses Liz), Eric (who essentially seduces a very willing, thoroughly infatuated Liz); the sleazy Dr Ted; and - in the latest strips from 2005 and 2006 - Anthony. Plain honest teenage lust such as Anthony exhibits in the earliest strips is very different from the 'creepy' vibe he gives off as an adult when he is represented as coming onto Liz straight after he's rescued her from Howard, or when (now divorced) he is shown fantasizing about kissing Liz right at the moment when she has just finished making a second deposition to the police concerning Howard's assault. Weirdly, the author seems to want us to think, 'Oh, how sweet', when most intelligent readers are recoiling in horror. Thinking about the seven sins made me think about their counter-qualities, the seven virtues. Traditionally, these comprise the four cardinal or classical virtues - Fortitude, Justice, Temperance and Prudence (or Wisdom); and the three spiritual or theological virtues, Faith, Hope, and Charity. In Dante’s Purgatorio Pride is countered by Humility; Wrath by Gentleness; Envy by Generosity (unthreatened by another’s success, the onlooker cheerfully acknowledges it); Gluttony by Temperance; Avarice by Liberality (the person does not avidly pursue, nor meanly withhold, material goods such as money); Lust by Chastity; and Sloth, by Zeal. (Faith, Hope and Charity are re-stated in the Paradiso). It is rather harder in FBOFW to find characters who clearly and consistently embody and enact any of the seven virtues, whether the usual list or Dante's list. I am not quite sure whether this is because of the genre - a subset of comedy - or because of a certain gap or limitation within Johnston's own vision of the world. II. Seven Sins, Seven Virtues – Heaven and Hell in the world of Foob. Someone, a while ago, argued that a Liz’n’Anthony match would be the union of Sloth and Lust. We have also had seen that April feels Envy toward Becky – envy, Invidia, being not merely jealousy of another’s success, but a desire that that other should be destroyed. That is, we have identified three of the Seven Deadly Sins: Sloth or Accidia, Lust or Luxuria/ Lussuria (otherwise known as Lechery), and Envy, Invidia. Since Lynn now seems to be thinking of her cartoon strip/ soap opera as a kind of extended morality play, here is the challenge: how many of the Seven Deadlies can people identify in Lynn’s World? Here is the complete list: Pride (Superbia), Wrath (Ira), Envy (Invidia), Gluttony (Gula – excessive self-indulgence in food and/or drink), Greed (Avaritia or Avarice – Covetousness/ Meanness), Lechery/ Luxuria/ Lust, and Sloth or Accidia (which is viewed as one of the worst, and is associated with Despair). I was able to find examples of most of them. It’s quite instructive. Wrath, Gluttony and Avarice are prominent. Pride is less obvious – Mira is probably the clearest example. In Dante’s Purgatorio he represents the counter-qualities as Humility; Gentleness; Generosity (unthreatened by another’s success, the onlooker cheerfully rejoices to see it), Temperance, Liberality (the person does not avidly cling to, nor withhold, material goods such as money), Chastity, and Zeal or Energy. The traditional seven virtues comprise the four cardinal or classical virtues – Fortitude or Courage, Justice, Temperance and Wisdom; and the three spiritual/ theological virtues – Faith, Hope and Charity. It is rather harder in foobworld to find clear-cut examples of any of the seven virtues in either the Dantean or the traditional formulation. The Sins and the Virtues (second draft). Liz does come in under Sloth/ Accidia. It’s not surprising that when Paul Wright gets too close to her she flees – he’s probably the best example of Zeal, the counter-virtue, that the strip has to offer. He’s also quite humble – he isn’t particularly bothered by her family’s aggressive interrogation during his visit. Liz is also prone to attacks of Wrath, and her New Year’s Eve partying is excessive enough to leave her with a huge hangover. Write down Gluttony as a distinct possibility. I am not sure whether I can see any one of the seven virtues, in whichever formulation, clearly exhibited in Liz’s conduct in the strip. Chastity doesn’t look like much of a contender...The cardinal virtues aren’t very obvious. And faith and hope, as defined by theologians, are NOT the passive fatalism that Our Liz lives by. Elly – Gluttony and Wrath are her besetting sins. Zeal is exhibited in housework. I guess she’s chaste… at least, she doesn’t cheat on her husband. April – we’ve seen her expressing Jealousy and Envy. As a child she exhibited a good deal of energy and physical courage – the natural qualities that, nurtured properly, can become Zeal and Fortitude. And sometimes she’s been allowed to be a truth-teller. She’s smart enough to develop Wisdom if given a chance. Way back when, in the ‘Jeremy gets hit by a car’ sequence, she exhibited Charity: doing good for someone who is your enemy (and while she was doing it she just – did it, without thinking it was anything special). Michael – Full-on Superbia isn’t his thing – vanity is closer. Lust: Anthony’s obsession with Liz. Not his teenage lust – that seemed to be fairly straightforward. But the ‘mind-rape’ after Howard assaulted Liz, and the fantasizing during the deposition and trial sequences. Howard, of course (lust that ignores the protests of the lusted-after object). Liz and Eric (mutual lust). John’s friend Dr Ted. Chastity: Deanna refusing to shack up with Mike unless they’re married. John rejecting Ted’s suggestion of a night on the town while Elly’s away. It’s difficult to find any behaviour that clearly demonstrates genuine faith, hope, or charity. Auntie Roo showed charity when Liz came to her after the breakup with Eric. To those growing increasingly baffled and even infuriated by Johnston's World of FOOB, I recommend C S Lewis’s devastating satire on modern manners, entitled “Screwtape Proposes a Toast”. The speaker is a senior devil at the graduation of a class of rookies who are about to begin their first assignments as tempters, practising upon the population of post-war England. He makes various remarks about the banquet of damned souls upon which they have just dined – heavy on quantity, but totally devoid of flavour – souls that only barely achieved enough self-awareness in their choices to qualify for damnation rather than Limbo. He explains that this has been brought about by much devilish prompting as to the necessity of pursuing mediocrity and conformity – don’t be different, don’t stand out, don’t pursue or admire excellence - all driven by the encouragement of the sin of envy disguised as democratic principle. “*I’m as good as you* is a useful means for the destruction of democratic societies. But it has a far deeper value as an end in itself, as a state of mind, which necessarily excluding humility, charity, contentment, and all the pleasures of gratitude or admiration, turns a human being away from almost every road which might finally lead him to Heaven”. Tags: for better or for worse, seven deadly sins
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Dear People (especially denizens of the foobiverse) This posting contains the text of two letters. The first is the text of a very long and VERY complimentary - OTT, really - fan letter that I wrote to Lynn Johnston, at a time when I was just beginning to sense that things were going badly awry but when I was also fresh from a reading of many of the earlier anthologies from the period when she was at her genuine best, and was therefore full of gratitude for real pleasure received. (BTW I did get some sort of reply). Along with the extravagant compliments I tried to express as best I could what fantastic potential there was in the Paul-Liz (and Mtigwaki) storyline, how much I liked it, and to articulate that I felt really sad about the clear indications that she was going to trash it, and that in doing so she was passing up the chance to say something that could have been, even given the limits of the comic strip genre, beautiful and politically/ socially relevant. Missing her chance, in other words, at a 'Very Special FBOFW'. If I were doing it today I would have been a lot less gentle about making that point. On reflection I think I totally wasted my time with all the quotes since I doubt Ms Johnston would 'get' words longer than two syllables or concepts that require some serious intellectual effort. I have added editorial/ hindsight comments in < > brackets. The second letter has been drafted but not sent. It discusses the race aspect of the Paul-Liz story, and I fully intend to mail to the relevant syndicates as and when Lynn gives Liz her 'Paul and Susan SURPRISE'. I probably should have sent it earlier so as to let them know which way the wind was blowing, reader-wise - too late now. "September 2006 Dear Lynn For some years now my husband and I and our 4 kids have followed your FBFW serio-comic examination of family life and Canadian society. At times it has made us laugh out loud – e.g. the startling post-death adventures of Mr B the rabbit. At times you’ve made me cry (Sunshine and Shadow). My 13 year old daughter has a bad case of the ABCs – Attitude, ‘Boring!’, Cool –but your strip is one of the few things that she and I can still enjoy together. Here in Australia we can’t buy the books in the shops – we get them off eBay and then pass them around our extended family. Thank God for the internet! Will you be offended if I say (speaking as a one-time English Lit major who sometimes writes poetry) that with the Liz/ Paul thread I think you are facing probably your biggest narrative challenge so far? Because it exposes the deepest and most painful historical ‘fault-line’ in Canadian society – the gap between ‘Us’ (the politically dominant portion of the settler society, substantially Anglo) and ‘The Others’ (native Indian, often intermarried with the [not-quite-trusted] Irish and French). How feasible, in the past, was a serious liaison between a woman of the dominant society and a man of the subjugated society? Here in Australia, until the 1950s such unions were unthinkable and indeed at times illegal - politically and socially threatening to the highest degree. (The reverse, as ever, was accepted – though few Euro-Australian men in the early days ever married their aboriginal concubines). Since then, here and - I gather - in Canada, there have been surface changes to society - but what of people’s deep assumptions, fears and fantasies? The fact that you included a sequence in which Gary asks Liz what her parents think about her dating a part-Indian guy, suggests that it is still an issue, for some. Yet, the way you’ve written him, Paul, the embodiment of the Other, appears to Liz as a bearer of grace. Difference becomes, suddenly and unexpectedly, beauty - the occasion and invitation of desire. I recently read a magnificent and challenging book – The Beauty of the Infinite, by David Bentley Hart. He’s an Eastern Orthodox theologian – but please don’t dismiss him because of that, the man can write like an angel. Much of what Hart says about beauty, difference, ‘otherness’ and love, resonates strongly with elements of Elizabeth’s latest love affair. I quote - “Beauty crosses every boundary, traverses every series and so manifests the God who transcends every division” –21. “It is in the delighted vision of what is other than oneself – difference, created by the God who differentiates, pleasing in the eyes of the God who takes pleasure – that one is moved to affirm that otherness, to cherish and respond to it” – 21. “Placed within musical reach of one another, all the limits of creaturely being – physical, temporal, linguistic, and so forth…mark the places where transitions are possible, where charity can be enacted and the gift imparted” – 286. “All true otherness appears only under the form of an analogical difference, this though does not mean a difference simply dissoluble within the abstraction of resemblance, but rather one sustained in proffering itself and so becoming itself according to a shared dwelling in the light that gives being. This allows the other to be, and be other, to shine, to vary me in my recognition of his or her otherness’ – 143. You got this in one: Paul and Elizabeth meet at the star-gazing party – they are revealed to one another in the midst of ‘the light that gives being’, under the gaze of the ancestral spirits/ the stars that declare the divine Glory. Given that Paul is a mestizo, born from his parents’ crossing of boundaries, it is beautifully right (if one also understands language as a means of ‘crossing distance’) that you have made him perhaps the most eloquent of all the men who have loved or lusted after Elizabeth. Ellie’s words (together with the photograph of Liz) first awaken his interest; then not long after he has met Elizabeth he offers her an extravagant, transparent ‘rhetoric without reserve’ that exactly contrasts with Eric’s smooth duplicity and with Warren’s and even Anthony’s reticence. “The other arises in the very excess of being’s rhetoric and has the shape of a rhetorical appeal. The other is known as other not in the silence of immediacy or identity nor in the darkness of infinite alterity but in the free and boundlessly beautiful rhetoric of a shared infinite” – Hart, p. 300. This is the only way I can fully account for why the relationship with Paul seems to carry so much imaginative weight, despite taking up so little actual visible ‘strip-space’ compared to what was taken up by any of Liz’s other relationships. Liz and Paul invite each other beyond the ‘safety zone’, across the boundaries, out of the closed circles that each has hitherto inhabited. But now, having gone so far, you have backed off – preparing, it seems, for a re-assertion of ‘worldly wisdom’. [ Error: Irreparable invalid markup ('<frankly,>') in entry. Owner must fix manually. Raw contents below.] Dear People (especially denizens of the foobiverse)
This posting contains the text of two letters.
The first is the text of a very long and VERY complimentary - OTT, really - fan letter that I wrote to Lynn Johnston, at a time when I was just beginning to sense that things were going badly awry but when I was also fresh from a reading of many of the earlier anthologies from the period when she was at her genuine best, and was therefore full of gratitude for real pleasure received.
(BTW I did get some sort of reply). Along with the extravagant compliments I tried to express as best I could what fantastic potential there was in the Paul-Liz (and Mtigwaki) storyline, how much I liked it, and to articulate that I felt really sad about the clear indications that she was going to trash it, and that in doing so she was passing up the chance to say something that could have been, even given the limits of the comic strip genre, beautiful and politically/ socially relevant. Missing her chance, in other words, at a 'Very Special FBOFW'. If I were doing it today I would have been a lot less gentle about making that point.
On reflection I think I totally wasted my time with all the quotes since I doubt Ms Johnston would 'get' words longer than two syllables or concepts that require some serious intellectual effort.
I have added editorial/ hindsight comments in < > brackets.
The second letter has been drafted but not sent. It discusses the race aspect of the Paul-Liz story, and I fully intend to mail to the relevant syndicates as and when Lynn gives Liz her 'Paul and Susan SURPRISE'. I probably should have sent it earlier so as to let them know which way the wind was blowing, reader-wise - too late now.
"September 2006
Dear Lynn
For some years now my husband and I and our 4 kids have followed your FBFW serio-comic examination of family life and Canadian society. At times it has made us laugh out loud – e.g. the startling post-death adventures of Mr B the rabbit. At times you’ve made me cry (Sunshine and Shadow). My 13 year old daughter has a bad case of the ABCs – Attitude, ‘Boring!’, Cool –but your strip is one of the few things that she and I can still enjoy together.
Here in Australia we can’t buy the books in the shops – we get them off eBay and then pass them around our extended family. Thank God for the internet!
Will you be offended if I say (speaking as a one-time English Lit major who sometimes writes poetry) that with the Liz/ Paul thread I think you are facing probably your biggest narrative challenge so far?
Because it exposes the deepest and most painful historical ‘fault-line’ in Canadian society – the gap between ‘Us’ (the politically dominant portion of the settler society, substantially Anglo) and ‘The Others’ (native Indian, often intermarried with the [not-quite-trusted] Irish and French). How feasible, in the past, was a serious liaison between a woman of the dominant society and a man of the subjugated society? Here in Australia, until the 1950s such unions were unthinkable and indeed at times illegal - politically and socially threatening to the highest degree. (The reverse, as ever, was accepted – though few Euro-Australian men in the early days ever married their aboriginal concubines). Since then, here and - I gather - in Canada, there have been surface changes to society - but what of people’s deep assumptions, fears and fantasies? The fact that you included a sequence in which Gary asks Liz what her parents think about her dating a part-Indian guy, suggests that it is still an issue, for some.
Yet, the way you’ve written him, Paul, the embodiment of the Other, appears to Liz as a bearer of grace. Difference becomes, suddenly and unexpectedly, beauty - the occasion and invitation of desire.
I recently read a magnificent and challenging book – The Beauty of the Infinite, by David Bentley Hart. He’s an Eastern Orthodox theologian – but please don’t dismiss him because of that, the man can write like an angel. Much of what Hart says about beauty, difference, ‘otherness’ and love, resonates strongly with elements of Elizabeth’s latest love affair.
I quote -
“Beauty crosses every boundary, traverses every series and so manifests the God who transcends every division” –21.
“It is in the delighted vision of what is other than oneself – difference, created by the God who differentiates, pleasing in the eyes of the God who takes pleasure – that one is moved to affirm that otherness, to cherish and respond to it” – 21.
“Placed within musical reach of one another, all the limits of creaturely being – physical, temporal, linguistic, and so forth…mark the places where transitions are possible, where charity can be enacted and the gift imparted” – 286.
“All true otherness appears only under the form of an analogical difference, this though does not mean a difference simply dissoluble within the abstraction of resemblance, but rather one sustained in proffering itself and so becoming itself according to a shared dwelling in the light that gives being. This allows the other to be, and be other, to shine, to vary me in my recognition of his or her otherness’ – 143.
You got this in one: Paul and Elizabeth meet at the star-gazing party – they are revealed to one another in the midst of ‘the light that gives being’, under the gaze of the ancestral spirits/ the stars that declare the divine Glory.
Given that Paul is a mestizo, born from his parents’ crossing of boundaries, it is beautifully right (if one also understands language as a means of ‘crossing distance’) that you have made him perhaps the most eloquent of all the men who have loved or lusted after Elizabeth. Ellie’s words (together with the photograph of Liz) first awaken his interest; then not long after he has met Elizabeth he offers her an extravagant, transparent ‘rhetoric without reserve’ that exactly contrasts with Eric’s smooth duplicity and with Warren’s and even Anthony’s reticence.
“The other arises in the very excess of being’s rhetoric and has the shape of a rhetorical appeal. The other is known as other not in the silence of immediacy or identity nor in the darkness of infinite alterity but in the free and boundlessly beautiful rhetoric of a shared infinite” – Hart, p. 300.
This is the only way I can fully account for why the relationship with Paul seems to carry so much imaginative weight, despite taking up so little actual visible ‘strip-space’ compared to what was taken up by any of Liz’s other relationships. Liz and Paul invite each other beyond the ‘safety zone’, across the boundaries, out of the closed circles that each has hitherto inhabited.
But now, having gone so far, you have backed off – preparing, it seems, for a re-assertion of ‘worldly wisdom’. <frankly, I should have been tougher here and said 'panicked' instead of 'backed off'> Liz has left Mtigwaki forever (the call of home is too strong); Paul, shattered, is afraid of the big city and hesitating to follow her. It looks as though their relationship will submit to the pattern already laid down by Connie’s Latin love affair years before, and Anthony’s disastrous French-Anglo marriage. Anthony is waiting in the wings (now that Liz has got that hankering for adventure and that flirtation with Native culture safely out of her system); Susan Dokis is neatly in place at Mtigwaki to be Paul’s consolation prize. Now the Law has intervened, by way of the Howard Bunt trial, to set up a ‘meet cute’ for Liz and Anthony and push Liz firmly back into her box. The story seems likely to finish with both Anglos and Natives submitting to the counsels of prudent, even tragic, resignation - ‘it’s fine to date one of Them – but make sure you marry one of Us’.
It seems a bit of a pity. <understatement of the year! I should have said: "I am bitterly disappointed, nay, furious with this missed opportunity"> With the current conservative government in Canada busy winding back Canadian support for the UN declaration on indigenous rights, you might have stirred up some interesting reader reactions if people had had to contemplate the possibility of a marriage between a dark Ojib-Irish mestizo and the blonde, blue-eyed Anglo daughter of North America’s favourite fictional family. I don’t know modern Canadian culture well enough to know whether it has produced very many convincing artistic representations of that kind of match – native/ part-native guy, Euro-Canadian girl. <I have the horrible thought that she or her letter-secretary read this the opposite way to the way I intended - i.e. that the Great North American Public would react badly and therefore should not be challenged with such a radical concept as a marriage between a half-caste Native guy and a white Anglo-Scot Canuck girl ; whereas of course I was trying to hint broadly that such a challenge would be a REALLY GOOD THING >
Any good marriage is, of course, a ‘dwelling-with’ and enjoyment of difference; that is, not the absorption or consumption of either partner by the other, but a perpetual creative counterpoint. We can, however, overlook that truth, if the partners appear very similar to begin with – if, as I heard said at one wedding I attended, ‘they look so much alike that it seems almost incestuous’. By contrast, the peculiar beauty of a successful cross-cultural relationship is that it makes the unity-in-difference so completely visible, defying the common assumption that peace and love are only possible where there is homogeneity.
Good luck with the storytelling – I’ll be fascinated to see which way it goes.
A few final observations and a question. One - the name ‘Elizabeth’ is from Hebrew and means ‘Oath of God’ or ‘God has sworn’, probably referring to the Covenant. It isn’t only Native names that carry powerful, even dangerous, spirit meanings. She had better be careful about promises. Two: in receiving a ‘spirit name’ Liz has been literally ‘translated’ into Ojibway - as the migratory bird that travels north in summer, south in winter, back and forth across distance forever. She has now a double, not a singular persona. (By the way, how did Jesse get onto her hated nick-name Lizard-Breath? Was he pulling her leg when he said he dreamed it?).
It’s a lovely ‘opening out’ move in the story, that Liz should receive the gift of a new name, indeed a new self, from Jesse and his community.
“…there is no reason why it is more correct to say that the gift forces a return, than to say that the gift allows or even liberates a response, and so is the occasion of communion. One’s self is perhaps nothing but the gift of the other’s otherness, defined by what one receives from the other, and by what style of receiving one adopts…in the priority of the gift a giver is born into the measure of charity, and a recipient is born into the measure of delight and gratitude” (Hart, p. 263).
<what I was seeing here is that in being given a Native name Liz receives a 'new self' that should be able to relate to Paul on a deeper level (since he, too, is 'double', both white and Native). A case of Lynn's artistic subconscious opening a door that - tragically - she is absolutely refusing either to see or to walk through>
Thank you once more, anyway, for the laughs you’ve given my family so abundantly, so far, through such loving attention to the beauty and comedy (as well as the pains) of the particular and the everyday. Your storytelling techniques, extended over time in successive moments, only so many frames a strip, seven strips a week, sometimes remind me of Seurat’s paintings. (I do like the counterpoint that now exists, between the mostly visual storytelling in the strips and the different characters’ verbal narratives in the ‘monthly letters’). <I stand by this, despite myself recently in absolute disgust coining the phrase "the retchcons" - in and of itself, in the internet age, the basic idea of character letters (= commentary/ POV) + published visual story is an interesting one and would have been good had it been better coordinated. Plot should have been carried by the strips; commentary/ response/ non-plot filler in the letters. Nevertheless we could argue that the 'confessional' aspect of the letters has 'worked' unexpectedly and devastatingly to expose many of the characters' worst flaws - they betray themselves with shocking regularity and shattering effectiveness>
In a way, time itself has become your subject. You were so right to allow your characters to grow and change across time, for although violence and death are terrible, change as such is not. Eastern Orthodox theologians speak of ‘the flight of desire’ – onward into the beautiful forever. So I will quote Hart again: that the Biblical, Christian vision of the restoration of all things (everything implied in ‘the resurrection of the body’, that is, the rebellion against tragedy, the refusal of ‘resignation’ or kismet, the wildly revolutionary assurance that nothing beautiful and beloved will, in the end, be finally lost or destroyed, that the gift will be given again ‘as light, and flesh, and form’) “liberates time from the burden of ‘history’, allows time a purely aesthetic character, an unnecessary, free, rhetorical graciousness; time is seen to be a declaration of divine glory...The eschaton shows that eternity for creatures is futurity and that existence is ‘repetition’, and so shows time to be a fabric of glory, and makes its surface shine”.
<I find it immensely sad that Lynn is now trying in various ways to regress the characters, 'return to start', close the circle, etc., thus destroying the very thing that gave her series its edge in the first place! And she is doing it BECAUSE her theology/ philosophy is not strong enough to handle the Last Enemy. I guess you can see why I am in favour of open endings....It's us Christians - and the Jews whom we got it from - who are the world's real flaming romantics and revolutionarie. Why? - because we DON'T have faith in 'faith' or in fate. Because we rebel insanely and passionately even against death, not by trying to pretend it's a miracle, or denying it, or submitting to 'circles of life' and fate and all that stuff, but by faith in a future that overcomes all endings. And so, hoping against hope, I force myself to keep on reading the terrible thing that FBOFW has become, charting day by day a slow motion descent into hell...It's almost as bad as watching Peter Weir's The Mosquito Coast.>
In sequences like the one where you had Mike rescuing a hummingbird that had accidentally come inside, and then writing ‘today I held a humming-bird in my hand’, you showed us just such a thread of the fabric of glory. <I stand by this. That particular strip, a Sunday strip, was beautiful - it captured perfectly the sense of an unexpected glory encountered in the every day, in the small beauties of the earth>
This has been a long letter but I hope you don’t mind…
Wishing you every blessing.
[my name]
PS – Does Liz know Paul’s spirit name? And will we readers ever be told what it is?".
DRAFT LETTER FOR RELEVANT SYNDICATE/S, RE RACISM IN FOOB.
Dear sir/ madam
I am writing to express concern about the racist theme that is currently being promoted within the popular Canadian comic strip For Better or For Worse.
To put it succinctly: blonde blue-eyed Liz Patterson, of Anglo-Scot ancestry, goes north for a temporary adventure/ spot of spiritual tourism in a Native village. While there she has a romantic fling with a handsome mestizo policeman, Paul Wright, whose Dad is Irish and whose mum is Ojibway. I may add that, at least from a reading of L M Montgomery, I long ago gained the impression that for much of Canada’s history the politically dominant white Anglo-Scot group regarded the dark ‘others’ – French, Irish, Native, who frequently intermarried – with suspicion and indeed fear. Liz briefly attempted an encounter with this Other. Not for long, though. Almost at once – as if Johnston panicked at the thought of having to depict cross-cultural/ interracial lovemaking and marriage in any depth – the plot was forcibly manipulated so that Liz had to return to her white suburban milieu and take up again with her fair, freckled, blue-eyed Anglo-[Scot?] ‘first love’ who lived in her parents’ pockets and had never moved more than 100 miles from his birthplace in his entire life. So fixated was the author upon the desirability of this semi-incestuous conclusion that a sexual assault trial was transformed into a nauseous ‘meet cute’ for Liz and Anthony; there was even a strip in which Liz, being one of the witnesses, was told by a legal person that because of the trial she must not leave town [translation: it is the Law that she is not to go visit Paul ]. The way the story is going, I fully expect that we will be shown Liz being cheated on by Paul and marrying Anthony.
In order for us not to notice just how blatantly and cruelly the character of Paul has been used and discarded, both as plot-device (to keep Liz amused until her ‘real love’ Anthony passive-aggressed his unsuitable French wife into cheating on him and leaving) and as a person within the story, Johnston has provided a ‘consolation prize’– a nice Ojibway girl, Susan Dokis, Liz’s replacement in the village school. But this plot-move of course, further reinforces the subliminal message – ‘Natives MUST marry Natives; White MUST marry White’. Seemingly Paul’s ‘native’ ancestry trumps his ‘Irish’ ancestry; Native Susan is a suitable match for him and he for her, but he is NOT a suitable match for lily-white Liz.
If I were a Canadian First Nations person I would be infuriated by the subliminal suggestion of this story arc, that it’s OK for a white girl to screw – and jerk around - a Native guy, but unthinkable and impossible for her to marry him! I would also be infuriated by the explicit representation of the character of Paul – who has probably survived all kinds of racist garbage during his police training and after – as being totally unable/ unwilling to face life in the Big City. Because that perpetuates another deeply racist myth – Real Natives are only found in the wilderness, Real Natives can’t / won’t handle life in the city. Again, if Paul is represented as cheating on Liz all the time and being found out, the implicit message will be a dreadful character assassination of Ojibway guys - "O innocent white girls who visit the north, BEWARE the evil Red Man!"
Reflecting on the Liz-Paul-Anthony story arc I realized that it is not the first time Lynn Johnston has represented ethno-cultural difference as an unbridgeable abyss. Some time ago, in an extended series of strips, Johnston re-invented the gay character, Lawrence Poirier, as the result of his mother’s hot affair with a Latino doctor during a couple of years that she spent on short-term medical mission in South America. The commentary on this affair stressed the impassable cultural and geographical gap between the lovers – Connie couldn’t live in ‘his’ world, he couldn’t live in ‘hers’. In blatant disregard for the proliferation of cross-cultural marriages in today’s globalised world, FBOFW gave us people who sagely took it for granted that a gringo/ Latino match simply COULDN’T have worked. I may add that in the earliest eugenics texts the mestizo or half-caste was understood as an interspecies hybrid, like a mule, inheriting the worst of both sides. In defiance of all observed facts on the ground, even the viability and fertility of cross-cultural offspring were repeatedly denied by ‘authoritative’ writers. Now – isn’t it strange that Lawrence, the mestizo, is also the homosexual – i.e., symbolically barren? His ‘barrenness’, his homosexuality, comes first; it is then symbolically ‘explained’ by his being a half-caste bastard.
I am surprised, too, that there have not been howls of protest from French Canadians at the blatantly negative portrayal of Anthony’s French Canadian ex-wife Therese. She was beautiful, passionate, jealous, a stereotypical evil ambitious career-woman and the complete stereotype of a worldly Frenchwoman who – growing tired of Anthony – took a long-term lover on the side and finally left her husband and child altogether. It doesn’t say much for Lynn’s subconscious perception of the long-term prospects of Anglo-French relations in Canada! (I don’t see why Therese had to be a Quebecoise. To make her one, given the function her character had to perform – bear a child to Anthony, cheat on him and disappear - reads like a gratuitous insult).
So, in the past three years of FBOFW, right in the foreground of the story, we have seen two main characters – Anthony and Liz – engage in cross-cultural relationships that involve the ‘Others’ (as viewed by White Canada). Anthony married black-haired black-eyed Therese the Quebecoise and it was a disaster. Liz fell in love with Paul the darkly beautiful Ojibway-Irish half-caste cop – but…marry him? Oh no! (Much better for him to marry an Ojibway girl like himself…people must stick with their own kind and stay in their pre-ordained places in the world…). Emerging sadder and wiser from their ill-advised and unsuitable temporary cross-cultural flings, Anthony and Liz are now being prepared to fall into one another’s fore-ordained lily-white embrace….
Considered as a cultural/ race-relations paradigm for modern day Canadians this is, to put it mildly, terribly negative. And millions of English-speaking newspaper readers all across North America and Australia and beyond, are soaking up a subliminal message that harks right back to the eugenicist and racist writers of the 1890s through 1930s.
A final observation: even when Liz was represented as having visited Paul’s family, this visit was not dealt with visually in the strips (almost as if Johnston and her team did not, or could not, imagine how to represent the successful Irish-Ojibway union that had produced Paul in the first place, or didn’t want to represent it). Similarly: Johnston in the past has been OK with representing uninhibited kissing and cuddling – Liz’s teenage makeout sessions with Anthony or her adult kisses and embraces with the sexy sleaze Eric; her brother Michael’s teenage makeout sessions and his passionate embraces with Rhetta or Deanna. But: although implying (in the monthly letters on the official FBOFW site) that Liz and Paul were physically affectionate, Johnston and her team took care never to show them in an outright passionate clinch. There is exactly one panel that could be classified as such – and it’s the one where they’re saying good-bye after he has driven her back to the family home; the same incident is remembered by Liz in a couple of thought-bubbles a bit further on, but that’s it. I’m afraid this reluctance to show blonde Anglo-Scot Liz and dark Ojibway-Irish Paul in a real, adult ‘kiss like we want to go to bed NOW’ embrace, struck me as – squeamish.
In some ways, making Paul a mestizo came across as an expression of squeamishness – as if Johnston and/ or her team didn’t dare go so far as to represent white girl Liz falling for someone who didn’t have any White ancestors. Similarly, at the village of Mtigwaki, initially the relationship between Gary the head teacher and his wife Valerie came across as a cross-cultural match – he was drawn dark and very ‘Native’, Valerie was drawn as plump and fair. But presently it was explained that Valerie wasn’t ‘White’, she had Native as well as Scots ancestors on both sides - ‘Mac-Micmac’.
I used to enjoy, indeed I loved, FBOFW. I possess and have re-read many of the earlier anthologies/ cartoon collections from the 1980s and 1990s. But when I saw what was happening in the Liz story arc – and recognised the continuities with the Anthony-Therese and the ‘Connie’s Latin lover’ story arcs – I became repulsed and indeed angry at the repeated and quite ridiculous overt emphasis on the non-viability and non-desirability of cross-cultural/ inter-ethnic relationships. I speak as a non-indigenous ‘white’ Australian with a Chinese sister-in-law on one side and a Filipina sister-in-law on the other; and in the 1960s my father’s younger sister married a Chinese man so I have a Chinese uncle and Eurasian cousins. It would have been nice had a popular cartoon strip 'owned up' to this 21st century reality - that cross-cultural inter-ethnic relationships, including indigenous/non-indigenous matches in countries like Australia or Canada, are reasonably common, perfectly possible and can succeed magnificently.
Yours faithfully
[name] Tags: letters about foob
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Foobs under the Sorting Hat Here’s a different ‘classification’ challenge. Some of us have read the ‘Harry Potter’ books. I freely confess that I enjoy them. Rowlings is much, much better at puns than the Lynnions. The four Hogwarts Houses with their founders and heraldic emblems comprise the following: Slytherin, founded by Salazar Slytherin and represented by the Snake; Ravenclaw, founded by Rowena Ravenclaw, and represented by the Raven; Hufflepuff, founded by Helga Hufflepuff, and represented by the Badger; and Griffindor, founded by Godric Griffindor, and represented by the lion – symbolic object is a silver sword set with rubies. Griffindor stands both for courage and faithfulness 'brave and loyal'; Ravenclaw for wisdom; Hufflepuff for humility; Slytherin – ambition/ pride. Which of the characters in the foob world belong in which House? 1. Ravenclaw: Candace Halloran. Weed, maybe. 2. Slytherin: Liz - I would have placed Liz in Hufflepuff until the latest story arc reveals her as a closet Slytherin (not all Slytherins are ambitious and not all Slytherins are smart – but all Slytherins are self-seeking and manipulative). Lynn would put Becky in Slytherin but if ‘redeemed’ (though not in the foob sense) she might do in Griffindor – she’s got chutzpah. Kortney. Mike, I’m afraid. Anthony too –in the early years of the series he was a natural Hufflepuff, but by this stage he’s become a Slytherin. Therese – Lynn would place her as a Slytherin but when she was young she was probably a Ravenclaw. She’s one of the few characters that is SMART enough to be a Ravenclaw. Mira Sobinski. Eric. 3. Hufflepuff: Lawrence. Shannon. Tracy. Deanna. Iris. Anne. 4. Griffindor: Paul could walk into either Griffindor or Hufflepuff and be perfectly at home. There are very few possible Griffindors – which tells us a LOT about foobworld, and the limits of Lynn’s imagination. April under-twelve. Warren? Jesse Mukwa? Grandpa Jim before his recent decline –RCAF veteran, loves music, loved to dance, a romantic. I'm afraid I simply cannot 'place' Elly or John in any one of the four Houses. Tags: sorting foobs
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The author, the plot and the characters – wisdom from D L Sayers Dorothy L Sayers in The Mind of the Maker (1941) has some things to say which may throw some light on the foobish goings-on that provoke so much snarking – and sometimes screams of rage – in the foobiverse journal. She states: “the judgement of the natural law is not without its bearing on the writer’s claim to autocratic control over the characters he invents…these do not possess free will to the same extent that a child’s will is free from parental control. But all possess this measure of freedom, namely, that unless the author permits them to develop in conformity with their proper nature, they will cease to be true and living creatures./ Too much attention should not be paid to those writers who say (holding one the while with a fixed and hypnotic gaze) ‘I don’t really invent the plot, you know – I just let the characters come into my mind and let them take charge of it’…Writers who work in this way do not, as a matter of brutal fact, usually produce very good books… [which disposes of Our Mike ; and...Lynn, too, if she claims her characters write the story all by themselves].” On forcing the characters to fit the Plot: “Nevertheless, the free will of a genuinely created character has a certain reality, which the writer will defy at his peril. It does sometimes happen that the plot requires from its characters certain behaviour, which, when it comes to the point, no ingenuity on the author’s part can force them into, except at the cost of destroying them’ [e.g. what will happen if Paul is written as cheating on Liz with Susan]. It may be that the Activity has chosen an unsuitable plot, or…has imagined an unsuitable set of characters for working that particular plot out. / In such dilemmas the simplest and worst thing the author can do is to behave like an autocratic deity and compel the characters to do his [or her!] will whether or not…a notorious instance is, of course, that open-hearted and generous-minded young lover whom we so frequently see thrown into consternation by the discovery of his beloved embracing a total stranger in the conservatory. If the lover were to behave in conformity with his character as laid down for him, he would trust the girl and await the very obvious and proper explanation, viz., that the stranger is her long-lost brother suddenly returned home. But since any such natural conduct would bring the story to a premature end, he is forced to deny his nature, believe the worst, and depart hot-foot for a distant country.” [I guess LJ has given us a twist on this one – it’s the girl (Liz) who sees the guy (Paul) embracing a stranger – but in this case the girl is the suspicious one and her departure for a far country has already been decided on …. The unbelievable part of LJ’s storytelling was to make Paul so intensely erotically focused on Liz and then make him embrace Susan after the manner that he does – such a sudden and bizarre shift in the character’s representation left me totally at a loss]. Sayers on the ‘rescue plot’: “where the heroine, after treating the hero for interminable chapters as though he were something the cat had brought in, is rescued by him under peculiarly humiliating circumstances and immediately falls into his arms in a passion of gratitude and affection. Knowledge of the very ephemeral nature of gratitude in proud and vain persons, and of its irritating effect upon the character, prompt the reader to wonder what the married life of the couple is likely to be, after thus starting from a false situation”. LJ has obviously NOT read Sayers anytime lately (probably never) and seemed perfectly content to trot out the ancient chestnut of the ‘rescue plot’ to resolve the Liz/ Anthony plotline. Indeed by mid-2005 Liz and Anthony seemed to have diverged sufficiently that it was going to require brute force for Johnston to achieve the match on which she appeared to have set her heart: and brute force, not to mention full force of Law, was duly employed. Had Johnston allowed the characters to develop naturally they would have continued to diverge as they had in fact begun to do from the moment of Liz’s choice of a different university from Anthony. I would have liked a slightly different scenario: Liz stays well away and chooses Paul; Paul’s wise and level-headed parents start re-parenting Liz with tough love whilst encouraging their son as he painfully finds out the difference between ideal vision and mundane reality. (oddly enough, since this would have meant Liz living a LONG way from Pattersons senior, it would have reflected at least some aspect of LJ’s actual situation vis a vis her daughter – distance and severed apron strings). On forcing the plot to fit the characters: Conversely: ‘another forcible deformation of natural character occurs when the author has allowed a character to develop along its natural lines without noticing that it has grown right away from the part it is called on to play in the plot…The humanistic and sensitive author may prefer to take the course of sticking to his characters and altering the plot to suit their development. This will result in a less violent shock to the reader’s sense of reality, but also in an alarming incoherence of structure. Actions adumbrated at the beginning will fail to materialise; causes will be left without consequences, or with irrational consequences; the balance of the unity will be upset; and the book will trail away into disorder…At the worst, the theme (or bodily shape of the Idea) will disappear along with the plot”. If we are to go with Sayers’ diagnosis and the analyses I have read from many different posters in the foobiverse community, LJ seems to be taking the first option (playing god, forcing the characters to fit the plot despite their mute resistance – to the extent of invoking full force of law to confine Liz to Milborough and compel her into proximity with Anthony), but she is producing exactly the ‘alarming incoherence of structure’ that Sayers identifies as the results of forcing the plot to fit the characters. What do you think, everyone? Is it the plot or the characters? Or both… “Things fall apart”, indeed. Tags: dorothy sayers foob
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aussiereader's journal
