As a non-sports person par excellence, I'm far from being the best person to comment on the Olympics, winter or summer. However, bug-eyed and open-mouthed at astonishing feats of athleticism, I've been hypnotised by several transmissions from Beijing over the past week. How do they do it? Aren't they scared? The skiers and snowboarders flying down packed snow slopes, launching themselves gravity-defying metres into the air, in the ski jumps flattened like caped crusaders, Batman and Superman come to mind, or twirling upside down like perilously hung candelabra on crossed skis or snowboards, landing sure-footedly, then swooping down to the finish and the nervous wait for their scores.
The highly talented finalists are often separated on the medal table by mere hundredths of seconds. How do you split a second into hundredths? A whole second is over in the blink of an eye. Such technological refinement seems akin to splitting the atom.
After a while, though, it can become too much of the same thing, aside from the drama of the occasional accident. The luge and skeleton sliders hurtling down a hollowed ice canyon of sharp twists and turns at well over 120 kilometres an hour are differentiated only by the colour of their gear. Lying prone and rigid like Lego figures or futuristic aliens, garbed for speed, helmeted for safety, they apparently steer by twitching their calf muscles. Not that as a mere spectator you would notice. The paired luge teams bemuse me. Apparently, the heavier competitor lies on top for aerodynamic reasons. What must that feel like?
At the time of writing, there are no medals yet for Team GB, not even for our Scots curlers – and we invented the sport back in the early 16th century. The intense concentration on their faces as each competitor slides forward like skimming swans to release their granite stones is something to watch. The progress of the stones, the restless brushing of the ice by their team mates, the cacophony of the skips' shouted instructions in all the languages of the day echoing around the Ice Cube as they advance, the final clack as one stone hits another, is mesmerising.
Apparently, the rattle of the stones contrasted with the swishing of the brushes is caused by frozen water drops sprinkled on the surface of the ice. They create 'pebbles' to restrain the speed of the stones, which might otherwise never stay on course.
So far, only a dozen or so of the 91 competing nations has qualified for a medal. What of the Nigerians, the Saudis, and that brave bare-chested man from the South Pacific? Does it matter? All the training, the expense, the distances travelled to arrive, and trying not to mind the disappointments and disasters? Not to mention the political background and Thomas Bach at the opening ceremony reminding Putin, sitting half-slumped in enigmatic boredom, to give peace a chance.
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I remember years back when the likes of Ian Rankin were making their pitch for crime writers to be taken as seriously as their literary brethren who were put up for the Booker and similar prizes. Much has changed since then and quality crime writers are taken more seriously than they used to be. Universities even run courses in crime writing. Are F R and Queenie Leavis turning in their graves?
Well, it seems romance writers are gearing up to be taken more seriously now too. Last week
The Guardian interviewed the best-selling Irish writer, Marian Keyes, and the BBC's
Imagine programme saw her being interviewed by Alan Yentob, who is no slouch when it comes to culture. From a small, deeply Catholic Irish town and a Dublin law degree she couldn't use, Keyes arrived as a young woman in central London with no job and not much money, intent on having as good a secular time as she could. Anyone who didn't drink or take drugs was too boring to spend time with. But things eventually went from bad to worse. An overdose and a hospital detox began the process of rehabilitation that kick-started her writing career.
The experiences she writes about resonate with a wide female readership and she found an Englishman with more patience than St Patrick, whom she married. He became her rock and is now her main support, though not her manager, she insists. So the mess of her early rebellious life was turned around by the most traditional happiest of happy endings.
It may seem surprising how many of the greatest literary classics of all time can be seen as genre fiction. From Shakespeare to Dostoyevsky and Robert Louis Stevenson, via Jane Austen, the Brontës. George Eliot and Dickens, the list is endless. But these great works are not simply crime stories or romances. I have to confess to an innate snobbery myself. I've seen stacks of Marian Keyes in bookshops and walked on by. Now I'm more interested. Not that she might stand in comparison with the classics, but because her books are obviously much more than Mills and Boon and do delve into the more challenging experiences of women, not some frothy fantasy.
At an Edinburgh Book Festival event last summer, the Australian-based author, Evie Wyld, who used to work in a bookshop, recalled a male customer wanting to return a crime novel by M J Hyland he had bought. He had subsequently discovered Hyland is a woman and since he 'never read books by women', and his wife didn't read crime, he wanted to return it. I would have sent him away with a flea in his ear, but I'm not running a business.
In
The Guardian article about Marian Keyes, she said she mainly read books by women because she was more interested in what they were writing about. The trouble is that genre books that are either mainly written by men, or are gender free, like crime, spy, horror, westerns and the like, have their own sub-literary niche. Academics might have looked down on them in the past, but not with the extreme scorn they reserved for romantic fiction, chick lit, sex and shopping, etc. It may be perfectly okay for men not to be interested in romantic fiction, but why sneer at what you don't know? Perhaps it's time to give that despised genre considerably more respect.
Gillean Somerville-Arjat is a writer and critic based in Edinburgh
