How to write a memoir

 I should clarify something before I get started: I’m not a fan of misery memoirs. Anything that involves a cover with a sepia photo of a miserable-looking child with big eyes is not for me. That said I’m interested in lives that are a bit different, particularly if they take place alongside the familiar culture of the modern world. I’m also interested in narcissists and psychopaths so I tend to gravitate towards books about them.

I thought I’d turn this into an entry about memoirs because I’ve read two recently and one was very good and one was very bad. The good one was “Unorthodox: the Scandalous Rejection of my Hasidic Roots” by Deborah Feldman. The bad one was “Web of Lies: My Life With a Narcissist” by Sarah Tate. Here’s an overview of each.

“Unorthodox” is the story of Feldman’s life up to her early twenties. Feldman was raised by her grandparents in the Williamsburg area of New York, in a community of Satmar Hasidic Jews. The community – still suffering a great deal from shock and loss – has come to believe that the Holocaust was God’s punishment for Jews assimilating too much into gentile society. The community in Williamsburg was set up after World War II to be as Orthodox as humanly possible. So Feldman grows up with a family who regard English as a Satanic language, bans all secular books and forbids any mixing of men and women outside of family. Not only do women cover their hair after marriage: they shave it off entirely. Their lives are dominated by purity laws and the requirement that they have as many children as possible in order to build the Jewish population back up again. She enters into an arranged marriage at seventeen, has a son and finally decides she has to leave the community in order to protect him from living his own life in such a rigid environment.

“Web of Lies” is the story of a young woman who falls for a middle aged man who appears to be charming and wonderful. They get married. They have children. Then cracks start to appear and, painfully slowly, she realises that his lavish lifestyle is all paid for with loans and screwing people over (including his two ex wives). Eventually she leaves, after the marriage has fallen apart anyway, and goes off with three children, an arseload of debt and no self esteem. If this doesn’t sound very interesting, then I’m trying my best but it just isn’t very interesting.

The trouble with the kind of “triumph over adversity” memoir which I think Tate thinks she has written is that that if there is no real triumph it just falls apart. Instead it reads as a two hundred page self justification of someone’s really rather stupid life choices. I’m not blaming Tate for getting mixed up with an arsehole. That’s an easy mistake to make. I’m not even blaming her for failing to see the massive red flags that were clearly apparent from early on in the relationship. Those are a learning experience. I’m just saying it doesn’t make a good book to have chapter after chapter of clueless wife having conversations like this -

Her: We received a court summons today for the massive amount of income tax you didn’t pay.

Him: Oh don’t worry about that. I’m going to sort it out. You look after the kids.

Her: Oh okay then.

- followed by a long stream-of-consciousness passage about how she thought she could make it all better by being a better wife and how did she know and oh God the pain. At best it might make a decent article in a women’s magazine but really, it’s the kind of story you should tell your best friend over a massive tub of ice cream. Unfortunately, I think she did this and her friend said “that would make a great book!” and unfortunately she followed this advice. It doesn’t make a good book. However much she wants to snatch some kind of justice out of this fucked up situation, it just doesn’t make a good book. It’s easy to pick up on the typical problems with these self-published kindle books. (I should know better by now – just because a book only costs £1 doesn’t mean that it’s worth spending £1 on it.) It’s easy to note the typos, the errors in punctuation and the hellish lack of understanding of standard book formatting. The real problem is that there just isn’t a book here. The whole thing is a desperate bid for self justification and/or revenge: the kind of impulse that makes people want to write long, stupid letters to their exes in a bid to make them feel bad about what they’ve done. Yes, he’s a bastard. Yes, you are justified in being angry. Now hold your head high and get the fuck away from that keyboard.

How is “Unorthodox” different then? Well, for one thing the author clearly has a great deal more self-awareness. She makes a difficult decision to leave, as opposed to writing a bitter tirade against the man who has basically already dumped her. The scenario is genuinely interesting. The writing is actually good. None of the people in the book are bad people; it’s just that Feldman has such a massive personality clash with the culture she’s grown up in that something has to give. In fact, something that’s almost more interesting than the book itself is the backlash that has hit since it was published. Being a small, insular community, the Williamsburg Satmars are of course very aware of Feldman and very hurt by the book. There has been something of a campaign from them to try and discredit her. Her detractors have made her real name and the real names of her family public knowledge: Feldman herself changed them all in the book.

I’m fascinated by some of the responses because in many respects they say more about the community than the book itself. They tend to say things like: “She was unhappy because she had a dysfunctional family – not because of our way of life! It’s not our fault that her mother decided to go off and be a lesbian instead of a good Jew!” A good many comments go along the line that “Jewish women don’t feel the way she suggests about ritual purity / arranged marriage / large families / limited education! We love it!” as though there was only one possible reaction to each of these things. The thing is that Feldman never suggests that every Jewish woman should feel the same way that she does about each of these things. She only explains how she, personally, feels about them, and this stands in stark contrast to the insistence from her detractors that everyone should feel the same way.

Then again maybe I just like the fact that these days when she sees Hasidic men who’ve snuck off to a bar on a Friday night she likes to scare the crap out of them by wandering over and wishing them a blessed Sabbath in Yiddish. I’d totally do that too.

Jean M. Twenge and W. Keith Campbell: The Narcissism Epidemic: Living in the Age of Entitlement

 Apologise for the lack of blog posts recently. I have read many things but none of them really inspired me to bitch or fawn. Anyway, THIS NOW CHANGES. On to the review.

"The old believe everything. The middle-aged suspect everything. The young know everything." - Oscar Wilde.

You may have done this at some point in your life. You pick up a book thinking "yeah! That's a premise I can get behind!" only to find out that the whole thing is so badly argued that it brings out your FUCK YOU mentality and the next thing you know, you've decided the authors are wrong about everything including what day it is. Then you sit back and try to untangle the gem of truth from the bits that sound like comments on the Daily Mail website.

So let's start from the beginning shall we? The premise of this book is that there's a problem with narcissism today, particularly in the US, and particularly among young people. Said narcissism is the cause of many problems. Said narcissism may, in fact, be the cause of every freaking problem the authors can think of. But take them seriously, people, because they're scientists. It is of course true that they're talking very much about American culture, and they make this clear, so protesting that the UK isn't like that doesn't get you very far - although I don't think the two cultures are all that different. The fact is that when I started reading this book I was quite prepared to accept that there's a real problem with a narcissistic culture. And there may even be. The book doesn't make the case at all well however.

There are two main problems with their argument, and since they're big on their scientific credentials let's look at them from that perspective. The first is in the nature of the evidence that they're presenting. Scientific studies are thrown in without any real detail or analysis as long as they completely back up the authors' tirade. This should set off alarm bells. Science is rarely that cut and dried, and Psychology (a science which is soft to the point of downright mushy) is often full of ambiguous results, tiny sample sizes and experiments so poorly designed that they tell us virtually nothing. Then there are the anecdotes. There's a reason why you don't tend to see journal articles that do a meta-analysis of the available data and follow it up with "and what's more, when I was in the supermarket the other day -" Although the authors are very keen to argue that they are IN NO WAY middle-aged grumps who don't understand youth culture, the kinds of side-swiping at anyone aged under 25 in the manner of a Daily Mail reader does nothing to help their cause. This book hasn't decided whether it wants to be a coolheaded look at the available data or a grumpy OTT opinion piece such as Charlie Brooker might write. Writing something which is mainly the latter and then throwing in "but we're professors!" doesn't work.

Then there's the interpretation of such data. I'm not for one moment disputing that there are some nasty, overly-entitled little shits out there who think the sun shines from their behinds. Nor am I disputing that these people are a reality-TV maker's dream. Of course they are. It's dishonest, however, to make your point by constantly comparing the worst of this decade with the best of previous decades. Does it mean anything to compare the spoilt 16-year-old daughter of a millionaire, who has got on TV by dent of being entertainingly self-obsessed, with your poor grandmother who grew up in the Depression and had nothing? Does that tell you anything meaningful? No, not really. Perhaps if we'd compared a rich, spoilt 16-year old from now with a rich, spoilt 16-year-old from the 1930s it might tell us something, although probably not too much - the world has changed in many other ways, and comparisons of individuals are always fraught with problems. Likewise you can compare the lowrise jeans of today with the frumpy frocks of the 1980s and be scandalised. Or you can consider that the 1980s had their own skimpy outfits, as did other decades, and it is quite possible to dress modestly today if you want to. Today people have spray tans! THE HORROR! They didn't do that in the 1950s. They did, however, wear innard mushing girdles, spend hours curling their hair and plaster on at least as much makeup as we do now. Tastes change. Does it help you to feel smug and superior to younger people? Why yes, I think it might do so. But narcissism is a disease of the young, right?

The fact is I don't really want to accuse the authors of narcissism, despite the fact that they accuse everyone else of it. This brings us on to the second problem with their argument, which basically involves narcissism being the root cause of all evil in the world. Whatever problem you might see, narcissism is the root cause. War? Famine? Environmental destruction? Economic chaos? Caused by narcissism, people. Welcome to the fun merry-go-round of circular reasoning. Narcissism causes all the problems in the world. How do we know? Because we've defined narcissism in such a way that anything bad can be attributed to it. They have basically looked at all the world's problems, and gone and retrofitted their definition of narcissism so that all the bases are covered. Here's a slightly odd case in point on this one. Isn't it a shame that people these days are so fixated on their appearance? Skinny people are all narcissists who fixate on how hot they are in order to demonstrate their superiority over others. If only they could be less fixated on themselves. But not to the point of becoming fat people, because as we all know, fat people are narcissists who have erroneously come to believe that their bodies are acceptable because our culture stresses self-admiration and self-acceptance to such an extreme degree. Apparently. I'm not sure exactly what your BMI has to be in order to avoid being a narcissist, but I'm pretty sure that if you set out to get that BMI that will somehow implicate you.

Moreover, there's something about marking everything with the same brush that leads to a lack of perspective that's almost hilarious. The authors cite the case of a man who murdered his pregnant wife in order to get her out of the way so that he could be with his mistress instead. This, they suggest, is what narcissism can ultimately lead to. My guess is that this case was caused by something more like clinical psychopathy: a pathological lack of conscience. It is true that exaggerated self-worth and entitlement is a feature of psychopathy. This doesn't mean, however, that self-absorption is psychopathy-lite, despite the determination of the authors to link high self-worth with aggression. We've all met people who were so self-obsessed that they were crying out to be stabbed with a spork. Very often they're not really bad people: they just need to grow the hell up a bit. Some of us have been these people when we were younger, and thank God on a daily basis that blogs, Facebook and Youtube didn't exist when we were 15. I wouldn't know about that, being as how I'm a small felt car, but I've been told this is the case. Yes, teenagers are self-absorbed. They always have been. Arguing that they're much more so now because they drivel on about their woes on Facebook rather than drivelling on about their woes on the phone as they did when *you* were a teenager is a little bit disengenous, methinks.

Sometimes the authors will make such a mighty jump in logic or in perception of the world that it'll take your breath away. Apparently, teenagers don't date anymore: they only have casual sex. I'm pretty sure that's not true, but there it is, getting thrown into the book as a fact with nothing to back it up. And then we move on. Sometimes it seems as though the authors are imagining a strange world in which beautiful youths are constantly posing for suggestive pictures for Myspace (always Myspace. And published in 2010 - was anyone still using Myspace then?), having no-strings sex and generally having far more fun than they are. It leaves me on the side of the kids.

Confessions of a GP: Benjamin Daniels

There's a bit of a trend at the moment for books based on blogs based on people's experiences of their jobs. Personally I blame Belle de Jour. At some point, it became very easy for the blog to become an ebook which might then even get a publishing deal. Since then, every teacher, policeman and binman has been regaling the world with their wit and wisdom and tales of the workplace. It's light reading and I've read a few. The quality is variable.

The main faults in this genre are:

a) Drivelling on about bits of your job which nobody gives a shit about. This usually manifests as a prolonged rant about forms, guidelines and accountability. While the red tape stuff may drive you a bit nuts, writing 200 pages on exactly how the system works isn't entertaining, and people are paying you to entertain them. If you think it's boring, I'm not sure why you'd expect readers to find it interesting. This is particularly the case where people have used the original blog as a way to let off steam about whatever it is they most hate in their job. Using a blog to let off steam is a valid way to do it, but again, a letting-off-steam-blog is very different from an entertaining-and-informing blog. The former really doesn't need to be made into a book for others to read.

b) Putting in stuff that you clearly didn't say or do, to make yourself look like "what Oscar Wilde would have been like had he worked as a paramedic." You clearly didn't think of that rejoinder at the time - that was something you came up with two weeks later in the canteen. That's fine, but don't think I can't tell that. Even worse, please don't finish a chapter with that line as a kind of "and I had the final word, bitches" thing. Generally, your witty oneliners wouldn't even be that impressive if you had actually said them.

c) Treating the people with whom you work with such utter disdain that you come across as unlikeable. I once came across the blog of a social worker who clearly hated every single one of his clients. Granted, it must be a frustrating job and some people must drive you nuts, but if you have that level of animosity it's time to find a new job, not write a whiny blog about the one you have.

So that's my general roundup of the genre. This is one of the better books in it, in fact. It's managed to avoid these flaws for the most part, which is a relief. This isn't an overly complicated book. It won't change your life. It is light reading and is mildly entertaining and funny in places. It gives you a little bit of insight into the world of a GP, and the guy is likeable enough. In a couple of places it's even laugh-out-loud funny and (a blessed relief, and very unusual for this kind of book) the author likes his job and doesn't feel hard done by.

Read this whilst lying in bed with flu: this is my recommendation.

The Unicorn Crisis (The Hidden Academy): Jon Rosenburg

Whenever you read about people writing novels and getting published, there are always mutters about the strange new phenomenon of self-publishing, which has only become a feasible marketing option (distinct from the vanity publishing of old) in recent years, with the advent of print-on-demand novels and e-readers. Naturally, there is some suspicion about this kind of publishing, since it involves doing without the paid services of all those fine people who proofread, check quality, support authors, make suggestions, remove rubbish chapters and tell the truly talentless to please abide by the restraining order. Self-published authors have a reputation for being the ones who are just not good enough to be published in a conventional way. I was curious to know if this was indeed the case, and as this book comes with excellent reviews on Amazon, keeps popping up as a recommendation next to books I love, and (perhaps most importantly) costs less than £1 to download, I thought I'd give it a go.

The first thing that hits is that it badly needs proper proofreading and editing. It's not that there are spelling mistakes everywhere but there are errors in punctuation on pretty much every page. There are many stylistic flaws which a decent copy editor would notice: run-on sentences, ambiguous sentences, sentences which throw in a completely redundant repetition of the one before. This kind of thing happens too often:

"After all, my master had been born when Henry VIII was on the throne and by Llewellyn's standards he'd still been fairly young when he'd died, earlier this year, but I wasn't entirely convinced that he was telling the truth about that."

(And by too often, I mean it happens at all.) Okay, I think I can figure out what he means by that sentence, but I do need to figure it out, and that shouldn't be the case. At first glance it looks as though Henry VIII died earlier this year and then had the nerve to come back and lie about it.

It's not formatted as a novel, either: usually in a novel the paragraphs are indented rather than double spaced, unless the author is trying to convey some kind of hiatus in the action which is somewhere between a new paragraph and a new chapter. That's not so much of an issue except it suggests that the author doesn't know how a novel should be formatted. Which in turn suggests that he doesn't know much about novels. Which doesn't inspire much confidence. It also means that the pages start flying by at a speed which becomes annoying whenever there's a lengthy conversation.

The next mistake which is made is throwing in new characters one after another. Each character is given a name, role, and physical description, but I'm pretty sure that most of these characters are not very important. This is just as well, because most are annoying. The thug has to say "fuck" in every sentence, just as the Welsh elf has to say "boyo" in every sentence. And then some historical chappie goes for: "Amorous Christina, it is well that you should so converse with us, perhaps a dalliance as in days gone by?"

OH SHUT UP ALREADY. YOU CAN'T DO REGIONAL VOICES OR HISTORICAL VOICES. PLEASE STOP TRYING.

Amazon reviews are full of people saying things like "I never normally read fantasy but I thought I'd try this one. Whoever thought of Welsh elves? Marvellous!" Well, actually, there's a massive genre out there which does exactly this kind of thing. All the time. Much better than Rosenburg manages. It's difficult to be different from everyone else in this genre, but here's a piece of advice: if you're going for the "silly fantasy" genre, avoid using "The Hidden Academy" as the title for your series, unless you're really fine with every single reader going:

"Hang on, aren't those two words basically synonyms for  'unseen' and 'university'? Haven't I heard of that somewhere?"

In all, I'd say that this author obviously has some creativity in him, but most of what is good in this book has been done better elsewhere, and most of what is bad really shouldn't have made it past the first draft. He needs to go away and read a lot more and study the craft of writing, and come back in a few years. I'd like to say that he's not doing the reputation of self-published authors any favours but by all accounts he's one of the better ones. God help us.

Rivers of London: Ben Aaronovitch

I'm a sucker for the old Amazon recommendations. I read a lot of different stuff, so sometimes they get a bit confused. That said, when someone I've never heard of shows up I generally pay at least some attention. When it's an "if you like X, you'll probably like Y" I pay more attention. And so, faced with "if you like Neil Gaiman, you'll probably like Ben Aaronovitch" I nodded my appreciation and downloaded this little beauty of a book.

"Rivers of London" (which you should read, by the way, so I'll try to avoid too many spoilers) is the first in what may turn out to be a lengthy series following the adventures of Peter Grant, a regular West End policeman. As it opens, he's guarding a police line at the scene of a murder, when he runs into a ghost. This leads to a chance meeting with Detective Chief Inspector Thomas Nightingale, and culminates in Grant becoming an apprentice wizard at The Folly, which is the section of the Met responsible for all things magical and supernatural. In the events that follow, he has to get to the bottom of a series of bloody murders involving many people's faces falling off. He also has to track down and kill a few vampires (of the non sparkly variety) and sort out a long running feud between the god and goddess who are in charge of different bits of the Thames. It's very witty, very creepy in places, and pretty much unputdownable. I attempted to get into two other books after reading this one, before saying "sod it" and downloading the sequel (which is called "Moon Over Soho" - don't go for "Midnight Riot" as this is merely the American title of "Rivers of London". Book 3 to come out next year dammit).

The book is clearly very well researched. Every detail about London is spot on, as far as I know. Most of the places within this book (and even more so in the case of the sequel) do actually exist, in the streets where they are supposed to be, and the interiors are accurate. Aaronovitch can sum up a whole area of London in a few pithy sentences. In "Moon Over Soho" he has some rather unflattering comments to make about Cheam, which were nonethelesss hilarious. Given that this is the case I suspect that his research into the workings of the Met is probably pretty accurate too, although obviously I don't know so much about this, being a small felt car.

The one thing which I don't like (and this is a very minor quibble) is the sometimes desperate self-referential attempts to be very clear that this is Not Like Other Urban Fantasy. It's unecessary, distracting and to be honest simply reminds you of parallels rather than distracting you. Like this (p45)

"So magic is real," I said. "Which makes you a. . . what?"

"A wizard."

"Like Harry Potter?"

Nightingale sighed. "No," he said, "not like Harry Potter."

"In what way?"

"I'm not a fictional character," said Nightingale.

Cringe. Not only is that a lamearse attempt to differentiate the two, put in for the benefit of the reader, but immediately you're set thinking "is this like Harry Potter? Is it a Pottery ripoff?" And the annoying thing is, it really isn't much like Harry Potter at all. It's certainly not a children's book, for one thing, and it has more in common with a regular thriller, but this exchange drags you out of an immersive storyline, reminds you that Nightingale is a fictional character, gets you to run a swift comparison and then when you're thoroughly distracted, lets you jump back in. Like I say, it's a minor quibble, and probably wouldn't annoy me if I didn't like the book so much.

Enough quibbling though. Truly it is an awesome read. Go forth and enjoy.

Watership Down: Richard Adams

It is a well-known fact that all right-thinking people, the world over, love bunnies. And if they don't there's something seriously wrong with them.

The truth is that I put off reading Watership Down for a long time, largely because of the usual OH GOD THAT IS SO SAD YOU WILL CRY which comes up every time it is mentioned. I have no tear ducts, being made entirely out of felt and stuffing, and I thought this might prove problematic. I wouldn't want to accidentally drown myself from the inside. But then again, the prospect of a really good story about bunnies was appealing so off I went.

Here comes the pretentious part then. It's not a book about bunnies, really. Well, it is. But it's really a kind of epic adventure, featuring companionship, brotherhood, love, war, politics, life and death... and freaking BUNNIES. The same species that will kill themselves chewing through your electrical wires.  The same species that gets happier at the sight of cabbage than anyone has any right to be. And it's true to bunnies and bunny behaviour (well I say that. I actually don't know that much about wild bunnies so I may be all wrong. Maybe they actually live on sauerkraut and like to play shuffleball under the full moon). The whole story takes place over a few miles, over a few weeks, and features insights into destiny, folklore, human nature and the horrors of totalitarian rule. Which does rather make you wonder what Adams would have managed with a slightly larger and less stupid species as his protagonists. Plus it teaches you how to say "eat shit" in Lapine.

The main point I want to make, though, is that this raises the bar a touch. All you idiots out there (*cough C. Golden cough*) who set out to write an epic, with a full compliment of humans, orcs, elves, dwarves and so on, in a world with every possible kind of terrain and culture, with a ton of back story - and only manage the kind of dull, cliche-ridden bilge that makes me want to chew my own hubcaps off can hraka silflay as far as I'm concerned.

Warcraft: Lord of the Clans: Christine Golden

Drop by the Fantasy forum during nanowrimo and you’ll find an absolute obsession with clichés and how to avoid them. Thread after thread of “can I do this? Is it okay to have a farm boy becoming king if he’s not very good at it? Yadayadayada.” I have looked on with bemusement. After all, decent writing can turn cliché to archetype. Tell the damn story, I thought. Almost worse than the obsession with clichés is the obsession with (apparently) subverting clichés. Mortal elf underlings! Stupid dragons! Not having elves and dwarves at all – but instead having newly invented races which aren’t elves and dwarves! Except that they kinda are, but they have different names! Tell the damn story I thought. Write well, and it won’t matter. I’m a sucker for a mystical ancient sword and a wizard with a big beard. You can only remove so much of the rich supply of tried and tested fantasy materials before it ceases to be high fantasy at all. Tell the story.

And then I read “Lord of the Clans.”

And now I take it all back. Cram this many clichés into a paragraph and you should be impaled on an ancient elven sword and left in the woods to be raised by a wizard who will send you on an epic quest to discover your true destiny as a checkout assistant, or refuse collector, or frankly anything other than an author. Although anyone who writes a novel with a title which differs in only one word from the title of the best-loved fantasy saga of all time is probably not too hot on originality.

Now, now, Neddy. That is rather mean. What is so bad about this book? Well, I’ll tell you. The first problem boils down to the most basic flaws in writing technique which should be removed by anyone who’s been on a creative writing course or read Stephen King’s On Writing (and if you haven’t read this, and want to write, you should read it so that you never become Christie Golden) or even read a lot of books. Lazy similes jump from the page like a cloud of exploding green marmots. First rule of the simile: don’t ever use one you’ve seen before. If you’re tempted to say something idiotic like, oh I don’t know, “he picked up a goblet of red wine, red as the blood which was soon to be shed on the arena floor” [Golden, 2003] then drop the laptop (oh, I’m sorry, was that expensive?) and put your hands in the air. Not only is this simile more overused than random bad flute solos in the middle of Mamas and Papas songs, but red wine doesn’t look a fucking thing like blood anyway.

Golden is a rent-an-author. She writes for various sci-fi and fantasy tie-ins (including Star Trek apparently) and so her creations are not her own. She writes about characters people know. This is the story of THRALL, SON OF DUROTAN, HEIR TO LEADERSHIP OF THE FROSTWOLF CLAN, ULTIMATE EPIC WARCHIEF OF EPIC EVERYTHING GRRRRRRRRRRRR!!!!!oneoneelevenone!!111! In other words, a Big Damn Hero. You may recognise the traits of the Big Damn Hero species from other fantasy books. There are also a handful in this one: Grom Hellscream is also a Big Damn Hero, and therefore the two of them agree on everything because they have no other personality, much to the chagrin of all the other, stupid and cowardly individuals who surround them. You know exactly what Thrall is going to do, for two reasons. Firstly, he is a completely unrealistic character with no flaws of any kind who can always be relied upon to act like a Big Damn Hero, and secondly the entire storyline revolves around setting up scenes in which Thrall can be a Big Damn Hero. Golden couldn’t do much about the cliché ridden background story (you mean, “a baby has noble parents who get killed for standing up for what they believe in, leading to the baby being raised by utter bastards who mistreat him until the day he escapes and fulfils his destiny” has been done before? Say it ain’t so!) which was given to her by Blizzard. Fair enough. But one contrived situation after another pops up:

Thrall: No! I will not kill this helpless human child you have placed before me! I believe in mercy, apparently!

Stupid, cowardly orcs: Then we will kill you, for no apparent reason!

Thrall: So be it! I know no fear of being killed for no apparent reason! I am also happy to go with the fact that you think you can kill me after I have just beaten up all four of the best warriors in this camp at once, even though they jumped me, with full weapons and armour, and I was only armed with this piece of mouldy lettuce!  

Stupid cowardly orcs: Yes, and then you refused to kill them. Which makes us angry, because apparently we want all our best soldiers killed off.

Grom Hellscream: What is going on here? Can’t you see that this guy is a Big Damn Hero, like me? I set up this situation so that we could see this is true. You idiots! Release the human child!

(I paraphrase). Thrall can’t even eat meat without there being some wounded animal who desperately wants to die being provided to him and happily offering up its succulent body as a yummy flame-grilled sacrifice. He kicks ass at the right time, is humble at the right time, and then we learn it was all set up by the boss to demonstrate how epic Thrall is. Over and over and bloody over. You can’t have any sympathy for Thrall because you know he’s going to be fine even if the plot has to tie itself in knots to make this happen. In his career (forced upon him by the Evil Bastard Blackmoore) as an arena fighter, he loses one fight. Fair enough – no athlete wins all the time. Ahem. He loses the fight because he’s just won seven other battles, back to back, is tired, and has to fight an ogre twice his size who is far more heavily armed than him. And then we are told, very firmly, that he would have won if it had only been his sixth fight of the day.

Blackmoore is of course the evil bastard who has to do evil things all the time, even if they make no sense, because he’s the Evil Guy. Other writers might like to have a more complex character who is brutal to slaves but kind to his children, or has a mistress but really cares about her happiness. Lesser authors might deem this necessary. Not Golden. There are four personalities here: Big Damn Hero, Evil Bastard, Stupid Cowardly People Who Exist To Make The Big Damn Hero Look Heroic, and of course one Sacrificial Virgin in the form of Tareha, who has to go around being beautiful and tragic and good. I only got 70% through the book but I’m pretty damn sure something very bad is going to happen to her, possibly with a massive cry of NOOOOOOOOOOOOO from Thrall. Perhaps I’m wrong: maybe there’s a twist. I’m willing to bet that Golden doesn’t have it in her though.