Ah, but - counter-example - what about Here Lies Arthur? If the relevance to Bush-Blair-Iraq War had been made any clearer, it would have had to grab the reader by the hair and slam his/her head into the book! And yet it was done without any of the type of thing I've described here.
True. What I was thinking about, in my tangle of parentheses, was that 'relevance' might be attempted in two different ways: either a) by trying to show historical experience as directly similar to modern experience, which is what Hooper seems to have done by giving her heroine a chick-lit sensibility; or b) by making it seem similar indirectly, by way of analogy or metaphor, which is what Philip Reeve does (though he's doing a lot more besides) in Here Lies Arthur. Neither approach excludes the other, and either can be executed skilfully or the reverse, but there is a real distinction there, I think - if not a clear-cut one.
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Date: 2007-09-24 08:26 am (UTC)True. What I was thinking about, in my tangle of parentheses, was that 'relevance' might be attempted in two different ways: either a) by trying to show historical experience as directly similar to modern experience, which is what Hooper seems to have done by giving her heroine a chick-lit sensibility; or b) by making it seem similar indirectly, by way of analogy or metaphor, which is what Philip Reeve does (though he's doing a lot more besides) in Here Lies Arthur. Neither approach excludes the other, and either can be executed skilfully or the reverse, but there is a real distinction there, I think - if not a clear-cut one.