Jelly-tot pasta

 

My daughter, Jenny, completed a practice weekend for her Duke of Edinburgh silver medal this weekend.  The threatened rain, thank goodness, held off, and my beloved child had a great time with her friends, camping, walking and cooking for herself.  Now, I must admit most of the cooking involved not such much rubbing sticks together to produce a flame to toast sausages as ripping the tops off ready-meals from Tescos.  Toasted sausages are all very well, but the chances are most of the camp would go down with food-poisoning.  She did, however, get to grips with pasta. 

It’s a miracle pasta ever caught on in Britain.  Pasta needs to be cooked in briskly boiling water.  Most Britons, presented with a boiling pan, start back in horror and turn down the heat. Traditional British cooking means stewing things. For hours and hours.  A stew boiled, as the saying goes, is a stew spoiled.  Boiling things, we think, deep in our unconscious, is Wrong. 

Well, there wasn’t much chance of boiling this pasta. Not on an open camping stove in the middle of the Pennines.  No way.  There was a sort of gloopy mess which Jenny and her team ate anyway – they’d cooked it after all -  and, to make it a bit more fun, they mixed it up with jelly-tots. It was, she said, interesting. Bless. Those kids must have the digestion of an ostrich.

There was a touch of the jelly-tot pasta about some advice I read in a writing magazine. It was a column designed to liven up the would-be writer, to get them thinking about not only what they could write, but also about what would sell.  The columnist advised genre-busting. Pasta and jelly-tots, in fact.

You know the sort of thing – yes, it’s a crime story but it also has supernatural elements.  Yes, it’s a Western, but it’s a crime story too. Okay, why not? The farming soap and British institution The Archers could be tied up with the Silence of the Lambs, for instance   (after all, there’s sheep in both!)  and Five on a Treasure Island would take an unexpected turn if Julian, Dick, George, Anne and Timmy the dog were abducted by aliens. 

 

Now, I don’t know as I can blame the columnist particularly; after all, we all have to live and to dispense immortal wisdom, pithy remarks and sound advice at the rate of 300 words a month come rain or shine must be a taxing prospect, but I’m not at all sure about genre-busting.

 Some years ago, I read a breathlessly excited piece about a crime story, set in the 1920’s, which would “Blow the genre apart”.  It more or boiled down to putting a very hard-edged serial killer into an Agatha Christie-type story.  That seems to me a version of neither having your cake or eating it.  If you want to read about serial killers, with the emphasis on the killing, then you don’t pick up an Agatha Christie and Agatha Christie’s talents of fiendish plotting and wry charm aren’t best served if we’re close-up on the crook and not only know Whodunnit but watch them in the act.

More than that though, it’s a question of mood.  Agatha Christie brings a certain sort of pleasure which is not the sort of pleasure obtained from the sort of books where body-parts are collected in bin-bags and jigsawed together.  And, in this case, the Vice is not versa. 

What can be productive, though, is using the strengths of one genre to compliment another.  Harry Potter, for instance, gains enormously because it’s a traditional school-story, with all the form and conventions of all the boarding-school stories from Jennings to Billy Bunter and a million variants in between.  A school story gets rid of the parents – always a plus in children’s stories because it means the hero or heroine has to take decisions – and replaces them with an institution which can be flouted at will without running the risk of your youthful hero/ine being seen as a juvenile delinquent. There’s a group of friends, a firm, restraining structure (the school) and fixed conventions such as prep, nutty teachers, bells, tuckboxes and uniforms.  Now, this is such an old-fashioned genre that it’s probably not possible to catch an editor’s interest with Mallory Towers 2009.   But make it a story about Magic…. Well, then the very old-fashioned nature of Hogwarts becomes a plus. We expect a school for young wizards to be old-fashioned and JK Rowling has enormous fun with how Hogwarts works.  

The columnist waxed lyrical about a genre-buster he’d come across which was a Regency Romance.  There were, as far as I could make out, all the elements; Jane Austen meets Georgette Heyer and they all get together with the Scarlet Pimpernel.  Only – and he liked this – the hero was gay and the young ladies he rescued fluttered their eyelashes at him in vain.

 For heavens sake!!!  It’s a Romance, for God’s sake, designed to be brought and read by girls, not blokes. It’s meant to take you out of everyday life, to whisk you away to a place which is slightly more enjoyable than our own two-up-two-down or semi-detached lives.  There are times – this is in the real world around us – where every dashing, personable, good-mannered, well-groomed and deeply, deeply attractive bloke seems to be ruddy well gay.  (If they wear Regency spray-on trousers, you can sort of get an idea from that, too.) If you can find a dashing, personable, good-mannered, well-groomed and deeply, deeply attractive bloke who’s straight, then for pete’s sake, don’t tell anyone but move in fast.  They’re like hen’s teeth. 

So yes, mix up the genres if the story calls for it.  But arbitrarily putting one genre with another won’t necessarily produce a good story; unless you’re careful you’re more liable to get jelly-tot pasta than spag bol.