A Slap in Time...

Have you ever wanted a really big, wet, cold fish to slap someone around the gills with?

I find that I need a ready supply of such fish to get slap-happy with, especially when it comes to fictional characters.

Inveterate readers will know what I mean. You feel compelled to finish the book, but the spineless hero or wilting heroine makes you want to slit your wrists with their dithering and mewling and general inability to get things right. You scream at the pages, you toss the book aside and stomp off, you return in the hope that they have taken heed and changed their ways, but no, there they are still, half an hour after you delivered your heated diatribe, wringing their hands and wondering what to do! At times like this, you want to give them a good shake and a resounding slap and send them on their way (in the right direction for a change) with a flea in their ear.

Take, for example, the book I finished yesterday-I won’t mention the title because books get passed around my family of rabid readers and this one hasn't yet-the author of this novel has generously endowed the book with two simpering heroines instead of one. As if that wasn’t enough to satisfy what she imagined was the readers’ hunger for doormats, she has also thrown in some listless men who suffer from the same inertia as her heroines. The book is well written so I finished it but towards the end I was restlessly moving from room to room, willing the characters to get on with their lives, hoping my show of energy might rub off! Rub off it did, but alas, they hadn’t listened to a word I’d said, and made quite a mess of things.

Imagine, I told my husband last night over a delicious melon and salami starter, you are a pale and elegant woman standing on a bridge over a fast flowing river, holding a gun. He said he felt rather more like a hungry man eager to get on with his nice melon and salami starter, but I digress. This woman is being approached from either side of the bridge by her lover and her sister (the sister thought this lover was her's, if that’s not too confusing) both of whom want that gun to kill the other. If you were the elegant alabaster woman on the bridge clutching this gun, what would you do?

You would drop the gun into the fast flowing river and say bye-bye. Problem solved- gosh, what a no-brainer! But the author obviously thought this lacked drama and what her silly addled heroine really needed was a terrible dilemma that would tear her apart; she needed to decide whether to kill her lover or her sister, so she could swan about tragically thereafter, when all she was required to do was play Pooh-sticks with her firearm!

Can you imagine my frustration? Do you remember wanting to tear your hair out when luckless, steadfast Melanie continued to stand by her man despite his mooning around Scarlett O’ Hara in ‘Gone with the Wind’ or the feeling of unalloyed irritation with Mary Boleyn when she moped around every royal palace in England because her sister Anne wouldn’t let her see her own children in ‘The Other Boleyn Girl’? Now, orders from the Queen or not, I would have just grabbed my kiddies and skedaddled, wouldn’t you?

I’m sure you can think of countless examples of such idiocy. And why is it that it is more often the lot of women characters than men- this burden of folly, the lack of good sense or ability to make a decision or stand up for themselves, when in real life we are strong and determined and usually get our man/job/last chocolate in the box?

Perhaps they are masochistic, perhaps they enjoy being trampled on. I say, sisters, we could all do with a big store of wet, cold fish to slap some sense into them, 1920’s comic reel style, as they deserve (soon as we’ve figured out how to cross the fact-fiction divide)!

And a large order of rotten tomatoes for their authors when they come to town.


P.S. Yes, yes, I know Margaret Mitchell is dead, please don’t point that out.
P.P.S. Pooh-sticks: not a scatological stunt but a game invented by Winnie the Pooh