Culture, Democracy and the Pursuit of Love

You've all heard it, one way and another: romance rots the brain. Emma Bovary ruined her nice husband because she'd read too much of it. Maybe the late Princess of Wales could have managed her sad life better if she hadn't had all those unrealistic expectations implanted by her teenage reading of Barbara Cartland. You know the accusation.

You've heard it from Society of Authors pundits - but you still pay your subscription and keep smiling. Everyone's entitled to his own opinion! You've heard it from critics and columnists - you may write a Disgusted of Suburbiton letter but you don't cancel your subscription. You're grown up. You can take criticism. You've even heard it from short listed authors on the RNA Award List, for Heaven's sake. You laugh (or sigh, or kick the cat) and go back to the word processor, right? But a bit of the poison sticks. Always.

The latest (well, the latest I've come across. You may well have clocked a few more since March 20th) is by Paul Gray in Time Magazine. He seems to have read the most recent Nora Roberts, a how-to book by Jayne Anne Krentz and Linda Barlow, plus the first page of the Romance Writers of America's website. On the basis of this thorough research, he asserts, 'romance writers labor under, and romance readers demand, a formula of childlike restrictions and simplicity'. And - which really had me grinding my teeth - 'It is impossible for contemporary romance writers to subvert or extend their genre …'

So my cats have prudently retreated to the broom cupboard and I'm trying to work out why the only time romance becomes visible it is reviled. Why?

One answer, horribly, is because the genre is mainly by and for women - and the comments are not. I don't like or believe in the sort of sexual apartheid that some journalists get a good living out of. But sometimes I remember with a little chill Germaine Greer's dictum of twenty five years ago, 'Women have no idea how much men hate them.' I don't believe it, of course I don't. And yet . . .

Gray does actually say that in romances ' the spirited heroine must bring the male of her choice to heel - "civilize" or "tame" him as romance authors like to put it'. Do we? I don't. I don't remember any romance author I've read doing it either. (Do the blurb writers? I haven't seen it but maybe they do, God forgive them.) But that's not the point. The point is that poor old Paul Gray, wincing away at the thought of being tamed, has locked into that sexual apartheid thing again. And brought his paranoia with him.

Well, one thing I have to tell Gray is that no woman I know, reader or writer, wants a tame hero. We're talking Darwinian survival here. Heroes are supposed to go on killing woolly mammoths and seeing off the opposition even after they've carried the heroine off to their cave. The baby - and we're getting plenty of babies in genre romance, these days, Heaven help us - has to be fed. Our heroine doesn't beat Alpha Man at his own game. She reaches an accommodation with him. To their mutual benefit.

But maybe romance is bad for Beta man, to say nothing of Delta Man and Gamma Man. Maybe all this disdain comes in the first place from a bunch of literary gents (writing think pieces for magazines probably doesn't put you high in the woolly mammoth slayer league) who find romance unsettling because they don't like the clues it contains to the answer to Freud's great question. If women want capable, grown up men who aren't afraid of emotion and think commitment could be fun, they're WRONG. And silly. And dangerous to rational thought. No, it doesn't look very impressive put like that, does it? I think I feel a bit better.

Still there must be a better reason for the universal disrespect accorded romance than the fact that a bunch of male critics don't fancy their chances in a straight fight with Rhett Butler. I think there are three - suspicion of democracy (anything that popular must be bad); suspicion of feeling (anything that can't be arrived at by binary deduction isn't real); and the cringe factor.

First there's it popularity. The next time you're tempted to apologise, remember that 40mn women read at least one romance a year in the USA. In the UK Mills & Boon claim 3.2mn regular readers. If you look at the UK Public Lending Right statistics for last year (ended June 99), you find that 'Light Romance' (primarily Mills and Boon and Silhouette novellas) was 10.5% of all books borrowed. But the general fiction category, at 22.2% included everything else we think of romance. Of the one hundred most borrowed books, 62 are probably what you and I would think of as romance, including Catherine Cookson, Danielle Steel, Maeve Binchy, Josephine Cox, Harry Bowling, Barbara Taylor Bradford, Emma Blair and Rosamund Pilcher. So, if we assume that the whole of general fiction breaks down in roughly the same proportion as the top 100 titles, you've got an overall romance block of 13.8% plus the 10.5% or 24.3% of all books borrowed. That's way ahead of any other adult category.

I know, there are lies, damn lies and statistics. I know there's probably double counting between mystery and romance on people like Mary Higgins Clark. I know Catherine Cookson didn't want to be called a romance writer. It's an indication, it's not gospel. If I were a literary editor of a newspaper I would still look at that indication and say, 'Surely something this big is worthy of study? Real study, not another columnist reading a couple of books and aiming for a cheap laugh.' If for no other reason, than that there must be a strong presumption that a significant proportion of my readership will read romance as well as newspapers. So why don't they?

Here's where the democracy thing kicks in. Columnists are oligarchs by temperament, not democrats. There's no fun being in a club if everyone can join. From their point of view, too many people read romance - and probably know more about it, too.

Then there's the suspicion of feeling. As a genre romance is about feeling. Intense sexual emotion is the engine of the story. A lot of people (primarily, but not exclusively men) think that's the road to anarchy. I have some sympathy with them. As E M Forster pointed out, life is a lot more complicated than the wish of two people to be united. If the story doesn't take those complications into account somehow, then there is a real risk of those unrealistic expectations creeping in.

I remember RNA Associate Vice President, the late Brenda McDougall, once saying tartly that it was quite important not to suggest that rapists made good husbands. Most romance novels I read don't come anywhere near running that risk. But there is a sub set - written in a sort of verbal chiaroscuro - where the heightened style is the clue to the reader that this is the universe of dreams. I would still argue that the feelings are real. (Pretty uncontrollable things, feelings, and they can be extreme.) The trappings, though, are pure fantasy. Critics who don't understand that use it to beat the genre as a whole. But the readers understand it.

Which brings us to embarrassment. The mating dance is fraught with it. Romance novels have always been full of it. Indeed, Fanny Burney's Evelina sometimes seem to be more about embarrassment than about romantic love. One of the points of a happy ending is that having love returned frees the main characters from the horrible suspicion that their love is a) self deluding b) unwanted. But that doesn't stop genuine male recoil that such issues should be aired at all. That's a subject all on its own and one I won't go into here, except to say that I think the recoilers won the field some time after the War. Before that, men were reading The Scarlet Pimpernel, Scaramouche and The Prisoner of Zenda with as much enthusiasm as women were. And if those books aren't romance, what is? What's more, if you listen to the lyrics of popular songs right up to the present day, male writers and performers have not been unaware of the power of intense sexually-inspired emotion. There's no cringe if it comes with a heavy back beat.

The worst thing about the cringe factor is that some women have felt that they need to endorse the 'male' reaction in order to prove they are serious people. Now that really hurts. For that sad sector which holds that bearing children, nurturing a family (and in many cases financing it too) is a fluffy frivolous thing to do, it is still a new idea that women can be "Serious People". But we can play that game too, if we want to, and we don't have to rent a binary brain to do it. In my other job, I have heard the chimes at midnight in Almaty, sitting round with a coffee and a multinational collection of women, discussing Harlequin Mills & Boon and whither the nuclear family. The media use that publisher's name as a synonym for all that is crass and worthless but their books are published in 26 languages all round the world. Their books are a bridge on which people who don't think their lives have anything in common can meet. In other words, genre romance recognises our common humanity, not only in what it says but how it says it. How many tired interpreters go home and curl up with a Martin Amis?

The point is that romance readers are hugely various, probably (look at those statistics) more various than those of any other genre. They read other genres too, fiction and non-fiction, sometimes very widely. A lot of them read Martin Amis, all right. Just not as a soak-away-the-day, forget-the-war, pat-myself-on-the-back-I-taught-Kevin-to-write-today indulgence. What they get from romance is an electrical charge straight to gut. Not 'childlike simplicity and restriction', Mr Gray; basic uncomfortable human need - not deplored, not reasoned away, just satisfied.

Romance is genuinely popular culture. It crosses national borders. It crosses generation barriers. And who knows, in the twenty first century, maybe it might wave a flag of truce at the other half of the human race. Let us value it.

All right, cats. You can come out now.