The Descent: Part 2 - A Case Study in How to Ruin a Perfectly Good Horror Movie Franchise

I know that the essays on this blog are normally literature related, and don’t normally hone in on reviewing a single piece of work; but after just spending £10.50 on a ticket to see The Descent: Part 2, I feel it is my duty to inform filmmakers everywhere of how to successfully elongate a horror film franchise…or any film franchise for that matter. My Curriculum Vitae on this matter is unimportant, but what is important is that I have a brain.

The first film, The Descent, was actually worthy of a sequel in the first place. There were a number of things which elevated this small British horror movie above the bargain bucket of despair where most of them end up. It cost £3.5M to make and took in nearly $60M. What they did with that £3.5M was create a highly interesting and, in some ways, beautiful movie which developed its own recipe for scares.

1. The first thing to notice is that the entire cast is female. This might seem unimportant, but it actually brings a very interesting dynamic to the script and movie. There is zero testosterone, no chance of a tangled love web developing half way through, and no crass badly-written jokes. This really helped in avoiding the pitfalls of most movies of this ilk, and it was nice to see a change.
2. The scenery was beautiful and more importantly it was shot very well. The cavern system almost worked as a separate character in the movie – a femme fatale. There were beautiful caverns and shiny rocks and wide shots of abyss like drops...all very pretty. But it was in juxtaposition to the tight and confined tunnels that the girls had to squeeze through. The whole thing worked really well.
3. The claustrophobia that the director develops in this movie is, to my mind, unsurpassed. The tunnels look real…and they are really tiny. You instantly imagine what you would feel in there...and it’s a feeling which isn’t good – and I don’t suffer from a fear of confined spaces. If I did, whoa nelly! At the same time, the director doesn’t simply forget that these girls are supposed to be professionals, he doesn’t make it look like a picnic, but they also don’t start screaming as soon as a bit of dust falls in their hair. He has them dirty, sweaty, they look like real cavers – even if they are a bit skinny and shapely.

All of those three things help build up a supreme backdrop and level of tension for what is to come next, and it is only this, which stops it from being too silly. When the monsters show up, their make-up is fairly generic, the idea behind them is a little ludicrous, when they start crawling up the walls like Spiderman you roll your eyes. But, you knew they were coming really, and they did shoot them quite well, keeping them out of the spotlight, not too many jumping in front of the camera, lots of different lighting techniques to keep their make-up mysterious and, less noticeable.

A series of generic horror movie twists occur. The girls are in a different cave system than they thought because the lead nutcase girl thought it would be ‘cool’ to discover it, and she failed to tell anyone so there’s no rescue team coming. Oops, then one of the girls falls down and breaks her ankle, typical, and then they get split up! Oh dear. Although, I will admit, when the girl broke her ankle I muttered ‘shit’ – even generic movie twists can be good if you put the audience in the right mind set.

But they bring it right back with a bit of a fun ending. There has been a recent penchant among horror movie makers to display the violent capability of the hero as well as the killer/monster. The remake of The Hills Have Eyes has an excellent bit where one of the main guys bashes a monsters head in with a wild look on his face not too dissimilar to that of the monster. It’s getting a bit too well used now though, even the tagline for Where the Wild Things Are is, “There's one [a monster] in all of us”. In The Descent they do something a little different, the lead character puts a pick axe in the leg of the girl that got them lost in the first place to give the monsters something to munch on while she makes her escape. Harsh, but good. The whole point about these movies is showing the survivor instincts of the human, what they will go through to survive. The audience was shocked, but they weren’t upset. They were egging her on to run.

So, she gets out. Part 2 on the way.

With all this material and success behind them, with the recipe already written, you would think that making a sequel would be easy. Somehow they fail miserably.

1. The first girl survives and she has amnesia about what has happened to her. The audience is already pissed off that their heroine has forgotten all the lessons she learnt in the first one.
2. The police sheriff, who is such a generic American cop character it makes you pissed off just to look at his beard, forces her to go back into the caves. Can I just say, that wouldn’t happen in a million years! There isn’t a way in hell a doctor would let anyone take an obviously seriously disturbed, probably underfed and dehydrated, patient out of the hospital to go do a bit of caving. Stupid. I know the whole storyline is ludicrous but it is set on planet earth, you can suspend disbelief in the cave because it is almost an alien terrain, but not above ground...messing with the dynamic.
3. They added an annoying male character who makes crass jokes about a female caver. Standard sequel technique, but still, after the all feminine first one, I kind of expected something a little different.
4. They had removed all of the beauty. The caves were dull and unpretty, there were no exciting shots of caverns, and stalagmites (or tites). The first underground scene was a shot of an old mine which was so boring that you expected the Goonies or Indiana Jones to come bounding out of one of the tunnels.
5. There was no claustrophobia! The whole thing hinges on this. Okay, there were two bits, and they both worked really well, I don’t know why they didn’t attempt take it a bit further. At one point, after a roof collapse, one of the cavers is stuck in a gap in the rocks, as the monsters try to dig their way in she has to squeeze through tiny spaces to get out. Its tense, a good scene, but the silly cartoonish death of the monster it finishes with makes everyone in the cinema laugh, ruining the build up. The other bit is where two cavers are travelling through tunnels filled with water, popping up into little spaces to breath. Excellent, brilliant idea, I’d hate to be in that position, you can feel the vulnerability of the characters. What do they do with it? Nothing.
6. Every single time a monster appears, they are jumping in front of the camera. It just gets boring and isn’t particularly scary. You can only really do this once in a movie, twice at the most. They also spent a little more money on the make up but they ended up showing it in full light, once you see these things really up close, they just look like they’re from Dr Who. Should have kept them a little bit in the dark.
7. Characters whose only point is to die. You get the feeling that the writer wrote a script, realised it was only half an hour long, so added a load of character which he could kill off to fill up the time. In one part, there is a desperately elaborate scene where one guy sacrifices himself for a character, only for that character to get eaten the minute she’s back on the ledge. All the suspense build up, the emotion build up, which made the first one scary, was just forgotten.
8. They brought back the character who got the women lost in the first place, the one that the main character sacrificed in the first one to survive. Very annoying, when you pretty much know there was no way she would have survived. It kind of makes the whole thing seem silly, if she can survive down there with no light, no food, little water and be fine, what are the others all worrying about. Stupid, should have left her in the grave, or at least had her tucked away till the final reel.
9. Annoying and needless scenes of emotion. The good thing about the first one was that they didn’t do that. If my best friend was dead and there were monsters chasing me, I’m getting the fuck outta there, I’m not going to hang around holding her body till it gets cold. Cry later for Christ’s sake.

In short, everything that they had hit on the head with the first one they had totally avoided in the second. The franchise could have had real legs, why not. Now, this one will be a flop, if there is a third one it will be straight to DVD.

Filmmakers, take note.

Pride and Pretentiousness

I have a friend who pronounces my name “keeorrr” (she knows who she is). I recently got back in touch with her, and was not surprised to hear that she was in the midst of completing her own magnum opus. I have a few very distinct memories of discussions with her; one of which leads to the subject of this…whatever it is.

We had probably begun the discussion with an argument about spirituality. Most of our discussions either began with this or ended with it; and one time we somehow managed to slip into a debate on literature – that being; ‘what was good literature’.

At the time, I had been reading a lot of Ian McEwan and I think it was his name, although I could be wrong, who sparked off her distaste. I think I said something like, “every single sentence is perfect, it’s like he has chosen every word with precise accuracy and careful thought”. I think she responded with something like, “oh, I hate that pretentious shit.”

What makes literature “pretentious”?

Amazon.com have a list of books to read if “you wish to properly converse with other elitist snobs”. The list includes:

• A Season in Hell and the Drunken Boat (Rimbaud)
• Utopia (More)
• The Stranger (Camus)
• The Catcher in the Rye (Salinger)

A new book, A Reader's Manifesto: An Attack on the Growing Pretentiousness in American Literary Prose, by B.R. Myers, says today's critically acclaimed American writers use complicated language to trick readers into thinking they have something important to say. Examples include:

• The Shipping News author Annie Proulx uses overblown "Evocative Prose" with little punctuation to achieve dramatic effect.
• All the Pretty Horses author Cormac McCarthy uses "Muscular Prose" to inflate the depth of the Wild West.

Myers is annoyed with these writers for taking themselves so seriously -- but his real gripe is with the critics who mock "genre" novels such as Westerns, romances and crime dramas while lavishing praise on "literary" authors. I have read neither of the above, so can not comment (although in the depths of my bones I can’t believe that Cormac McArthy is a simple trickster). I do however see Myer’s point about critics favoring only what has been classed (often prior to release) as “literature”. I love a good piece of ‘horror trash’.

Surely Proulx’s use of “Evocative Prose” is kind of the point. Should writers not heighten the feelings/emotions/effect of their story/characters with carefully structured style? But the pretentiousness of literature, and a reader’s definition of pretentiousness, remains the point of this discussion. Forgetting bad writers for a moment, what about those above who have been classed ‘pretentious’. Camus, because he has won the Nobel Prize? Salinger, because he became the voice of a generation? Is it the reader themselves which has turned this literature into something pretentious?

When my father was at University in the sixties, he told me that students used to carry around the teachings of Chairman Mau, although not many had actually read it. It was more of a statement than good bedtime reading. Do we assume that the readers themselves aren’t pretentious? How many of you have claimed you have read something; but you haven’t really? I have; although to be fair it’s normally because I am arguing something is good/bad without having read it simply because I have a genetic disposition to argumentativeness.

According to a survey, 65 percent of people in the UK have pretended to have read books, and of those, 42 percent singled out "1984," "War and Peace" and "Ulysses". Apparently, most people lied because they wanted to impress those they were talking to.

I suppose writers and readers are both the same really: both subject to the same self-deprecation which makes them reach for the thesaurus or fake reading list in the first place. Sometimes we must remember that being ‘average’ can at times actually be ‘the best’. If you will allow me to be elitist for a moment, I believe it was Richard Bach who said: “the simplest things are often the truest”. I won’t be snobbish or pretentious enough to say that I called that up from memory; I got it by searching for [quote + simplicity] on Google.

Twenty Thousand Words Down the Drain?

A lot of you who read this may be writers yourself - it is likely that at some point in your life you have suffered writers block. The block can come in many shapes and forms; degrees of intent if you will:


Block in the Third Degree - A temporary blankness, brought on by any number of situations. Careful thought and absence from your work can alleviate this.

Block in the Second Degree - A complete blankness resulting from a certain tangent of work; usually resulting in a permanent absence from the work; leading to the 'unfinished'.

Block in the First Degree - The most dangerous of all which writers fear. A total absence of ability to write, to the level of a phobia, just seeing a blank page can set off hyperventilation, nausea and an inordinate fondness for Scotch.


I am lucky enough to have never suffered at the hands of Block in the First Degree, but have been touched by Second and Third - it is likely that most of you have as well. Even the most prolific of writers do.

A famous case is The Stand by Stephen King, who nearly abandoned the project, which many think to be his best, due to writer’s block. He finally came to the conclusion that the good guys in his story were simply making all the same mistakes as the society from which they had survived. He needed an out.

Those of you who have read The Stand may notice the change in tone, when Mr King decided to change the rules of engagement; when he stood in the dock and announced his guilt to Block in the Second Degree. Rather than it leading to the 'unfinished' Mr King decided to remove the road he was on his way down. As well as Block in the Second Degree he committed Murder in the First; he killed off half the characters, blew up the town where the good guys were living and introduced a nuke into the equation. He saved the story, just. Most say it’s his best work, but the block is evident and the results of it always left me with a sour taste.

So whats all this about?

Three weeks ago I wrote the following paragraph; an excerpt from Chapter 4 of my new novel.

A councillor left, tripping over a chair leg as she went; and a patient went mute while labels hung in the air. Prince and damsel are reunited, but marred by the advent of labels (boyfriend of all things!), they become as toneless as the vision of our heroine. So, Titilayo lay in her bed, mouth unmoving, despite the arrival of her saviour and knight. This sour rebirth of their relationship was not what either had expected, but neither were willing to wade through the murky swamp of labels; not just yet. So, to laughter for a stepping stone route over it: “You cut your hair – love what you’ve done with it.” And with Titilayo’s sardonic chuckle in response, labels were forgotten and a relationship rebooted.

This won't mean much in the absence of what comes before it and might not even read like something particularly good even with the preceding text. However, after I had written it, gone back to the beginning and re-read it; I was convinced I had taken a step forward. There are times in a writer’s life, when they are still learning as I am, when the steps forward are so tangible and noticeable that when they occur, they inspire this fervent hope. When so much of it is gradual, after a hundred-thousand words, two hundred thousand, three, four, five; and still that spark you wished you had is missing. When you sit at your desk wishing you could channel the long dead greats who look so 'cool' on your bookshelf. When these steps forward occur, without any causative factor it seems, a madness overcomes you. You look behind at what has come before and the distinction is so clear that you cling to that new paragraph like a life-raft. And in clinging to it; the Block happens.

You don't believe in spirituality, but did you just channel one of the greats? Or half greats? Hell, just someone obviously better than you? You take one hand off the raft, you search out for that ephemeral door which had led to the paragraph; it’s locked. Instead you go back, re-read again, and again - clinging to the raft with frost bitten hands. Perhaps you'll get it back through association. No, that's enough for tonight - just don't drown. Day two, re-read, the door remains locked - salt water all around but not a drop to drink. You move onto a different section, something un-linked. Its awful, drivel, readers poison. Highlight. Delete. Day three: more of the same. You can't even find the door to see whether it’s locked. Hands of stone couldn't release the raft even if they wanted to.

"You are charged with Block in the Second Degree, how do you plead?"
"Guilty your Honour."

Weeks pass, you do nothing. You can't even bring yourself to open the file. You have incarcerated yourself behind television, meaningless phone calls to friends but the fear of the 'unfinished' remains - your only salvation, a nuke? No!

When faced between a nuke and an unfinished manuscript, what do you do? Characters plead with in-human eyes, mouths move in nauseating dialogue of woe, bleak scenery described in tangled adjectives. A tempting detonator in your hand, a large red button - perhaps if you press it, forty virgin words await.

So, did I press it?

I am sat here, writing this essay, instead of nuking Chapter 4. My finger is still hovering over the button, but as long as I write something...perhaps the door will return.

I hope you have enjoyed my procrastination as much as it has depressed me.

On the Road…to Rejection (Part 1)

Dear Mr Black,

I am afraid your novel is unsuitable for us at the present time and herewith return your manuscript. I do hope you’re not disheartened by this rejection.

Best wishes
Barnaby Trusington Howle Foxforth

Dear Mr Trusington Howle Foxforth,

Thank you for returning my manuscript and your enclosed, nasty, miminy-piminy little note. I am afraid your letter is most unsuitable for me at the present time as I've just spent the entire weekend writing the novel that you have summarily rejected. I can only presume it is company policy to reject all manuscripts not submitted in ten-foot high Braille. And yes I am aware that it is traditionally bad form to respond to any kind of criticism or rejection but in this, as with all else, I am an innovator therefore I may freely address you as...piss midget. Still, there's time for you to change your views and I think you will when we meet and meet will most assuredly will - when I suck out your eyes and use them as stoppers for my ears to muffle the screams you'll make as I head-but you into a fine paste. I do hope you will not be disheartened by your sudden, violent death.

Yours faithfully
Bernard Black

Dylan Moran (as Bernard Black)
The Letter

Rejection is a part of everyone's life, none less so than the authors. As I myself begin on the road, my first novel now completed and the second on the way, I must suck in my gut and set my jaw for the torrent of rejection which is surely to come.

Although we expect them and know they are coming, we none the less get a little disheartened with every one (a little bit like losing the lottery every week, despite our best efforts). But we, I, can take solace (as well as a measure of fear) in the droves of those who have come before me.

A rather interesting article (referenced at the end of this post) recently detailed 30 famous authors who received rejections (often rather rude). Here are my 10 favourites (or most astonishing) from the list with some added statistics for context. I can’t back up the article, but even if none of them are true, they are still fun, if not a little disturbing.

Stephen King has sold an estimated 300-350 Million books, is one of the most popular, prolific and richest authors of recent times. His first book, Carrie, sold 13,000 copies in hardback and over 1 million paperback copies in the first year. He received dozens of rejections, one saying: “We are not interested in science fiction which deals with negative utopias. They do not sell.”

King said of Carrie, “I’m not saying that Carrie is shit and I’m not repudiating it. She made me a star, but it was a young book by a young writer. In retrospect it reminds me of a cookie baked by a first grader – tasty enough, but kind of lumpy and burned on the bottom.”

William Golding’s first novel, Lord of the Flies, sold only 3,000 copies in the US before going out of print. By the time a paperback edition was published in 1959 it was beginning to challenge The Catcher in the Rye as the most popular book on American college campuses and by mid-1962 had sold more than 65,000 copies. Before that however, it was rejected by 20 publishers, with one saying “an absurd and uninteresting fantasy which was rubbish and dull.” Golding won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1983 and the Booker Prize in 1980.

John le Carré gained fame from The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, named by Publishers Weekly as the “best spy novel of all-time” in 2006 and selling tens of millions of copies in more than twenty languages. After submitting it, one of the publishers sent it along to a colleague, with the message: “You’re welcome to le Carré – he hasn’t got any future.”

Anne Frank and her Diary (Het Achterhuis), published in 1947, has sold 30 million copies worldwide. It is now considered one of the key texts of the twentieth century…or as one publisher put it: “The girl doesn't, it seems to me, have a special perception or feeling which would lift that book above the 'curiosity' level.” 15 other publishers also rejected the novel.

Joseph Heller’s first novel, Catch-22, is also on the list with Anne Frank as one of the top 100 best selling books of all time, selling 10 million copies. Apparently one publisher wrote of it: “I haven’t the foggiest idea about what the man is trying to say…Apparently the author intends it to be funny – possibly even satire – but it is really not funny on any intellectual level.” Heller did get Simon & Schuster on board though, with a $1500 advance.

Vladimir Nabakov’s Lolita is included in Time Magazine’s 100 Best English-language Novels from 1923 to 2005. Although the first 5,000 copies sold out, it didn’t get the critical acclaim it has today until Graham Greene called it one of the best novels of 1955 in an interview in the Times. It was the first book since Gone with the Wind to sell 100,000 copies in the first three weeks of publication. One publisher said: “overwhelmingly nauseating, even to an enlightened Freudian…the whole thing is an unsure cross between hideous reality and improbable fantasy. It often becomes a wild neurotic daydream…I recommend that it be buried under a stone for a thousand years.”

Sylvia Plath, famed for The Bell Jar and winner of both the Glascock Prize and Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, was no doubt a talented poet to say the least. One publisher reportedly said: “There certainly isn't enough genuine talent for us to take notice.”

Rudyard Kipling, awarded the Nobel Prize in 1907 and noted by George Orwell as a “prophet of British imperialism”, was told: “I’m sorry Mr. Kipling, but you just don’t know how to use the English language.” These were the words used by one of the editors of the San Francisco Examiner newspaper when rejecting one of Mr. Kipling’s short stories.

Jack Kerouac became the voice of the Beat Generation and his novel, On the Road, has become a staple for all youths to read, even today (probably because of the lonely nature of the main character). When it was released, the New York Times hailed it as “the most beautifully executed the clearest and most important utterance” of Kerouac’s generation. The novel was chose by Time as one of the 100 best English-language novels from 1923 to 2005. One publisher said, “His frenetic and scrambled prose perfectly express the feverish travels of the Beat Generation. But is that enough? I don't think so.”

Marcel Proust is hailed by many as the greatest writer who ever lived. Whether you think that or not, you can’t doubt the guy could write…a lot. In Search of Lost Time (previously known as Remembrance of Things Past) spans some 3,200 pages with more than 2,000 literary characters. Graham Greene called Proust the “greatest novelist of the 20th century” and W. Somerset Maugham called the novel the “greatest fiction to date.” A spoken critique from one publisher was: “My dear fellow, I may be dead from the neck up, but rack my brains as I may I can't see why a chap should need thirty pages to describe how he turns over in bed before going to sleep.”

I hope you enjoyed that and, if you are in the same boat, take your own sip from the down to earth cup.

But…there are two sides to every story…which I will save for Part 2.

[You can find the original article at Examiner.com]

The End of the Affidavit (or Our Man in the Dock)

Spring in London, 25th May 1895 and there’s still a whole summer to look forward to; but for the flamboyant Oscar, an important verdict is about to be announced. 87 years later, in 1982, an ageing ex-MI6 spy named Graham puts the finishing touches to his latest work. Nearly Christmas in 2006, and the editor of the The New Republic picks up Michael Crichton’s next book – imaginatively titled, ‘Next’. And in April 2008, The Guardian publishes one of the most important articles on chiropracty ever (have there been any others?).

Simon Singh’s article published in The Guardian on 19th April 2008 as an extension to his recently published book “Trick or Treatment? Alternative Medicine on Trial”, stated, “This organisation [British Chiropractic Organisation] is the respectable face of the chiropractic profession and yet it happily promotes bogus treatments [referencing that the association claims their members can help treat children with problems such as asthma and colic]." The comment resulted in Singh being sued for libel, a case which he has lost (although there is still the appeal).

The comment on the bogusness of chiropractors really isn’t much to make a fuss about. The people who believe in Alternative Medicine (alt-med) believe in it because of faith (leading to the placebo effect), not because of evidence. That’s the whole point about alt-med. If it worked (above and beyond that of a placebo) it would have lost the prefix. However, this debate should be left for Ben Goldacre (please check out his book ‘Bad Science’ and his Blog of the same name, a trillion times better than this one – www.badscience.net). But what about the end result, the following libel case and the loss thereof for Mr Singh?

Problems for author’s with the nuances of the libel laws have existed for some time. In 1895, Lord Alfred Douglas, also known as Bosie (God knows why), was in a relationship with a certain genius male author called Oscar Wilde – then at the height of his career. The Lord’s father, a Marquess no less who was pretty angry about the whole thing, left an obscene message at Oscar’s club accusing him of homosexuality. Oscar sued the Marquess for libel and during the case, Oscar’s penchant for rent boy’s came out, and Oscar was subsequently sentenced to 2 years hard labour.

In 1982, ex-MI6 spy and legendary novelist Graham Greene published a pamphlet entitled, J’Accuse – The Dark Side of Nice, about corruption in the higher echelons of Nice’s civil government. It resulted in a libel case which Greene lost. However, although Greene never got to see it, Jacques Medécin (the ex-mayor of Nice) got his comeuppance. In 1994, he was convicted of several counts of corruption and associated crimes and sentenced to prison.

More recently, in 2006, Michael Crowley wrote an article which criticised Michael Crichton’s book State of Fear. Subsequently, never to rise to provocation, Crichton added a character to his next book (‘Next’), called Mick Crowley – a child molester with a small penis (I kid you not). I can’t find reference to a subsequent libel case but all it really achieved for Crichton was to bring more attention to the original article written by Crowley – and the subsequent article by Crowley where he described the “literary hit-and-run”.

Crichton used a weapon to hide his defamation, one of the few in the writer’s arsenal if he really wishes to make a ludicrous statement obvious to the reader. It was first detailed in The New York Times in 1998 and is known as the ‘small penis rule’. That being that it discourages lawsuits. If you use a character to defame a real life person, and then give that person a small penis, no male is going to come forward and say, “That’s me”!

In all of these cases, the simple fact is that one side is always lying, and it isn’t always the same side. The media are just as guilty at cooking up crap as alt-meds are at cooking up evidence. If we want freedom of speech, we should respect it not abuse it. And if you want privacy, try not to sleep with five prostitutes in black leather outfits where people can photograph you.

Of course, the best position to be in of all is that of the winner – and that doesn’t always involve a lawsuit. As Crowley put it; “let me suppose a corollary to the small penis rule. Call it the small man rule: If someone offers substantive criticism of an author and the author responds by hitting below the belt, as it were, then he’s conceding that the critic has won.”

Well said; small dick.

[Sign up to the petition to keep the libel laws out of science - go to Sense About Science]

Books v. Cigarettes: An Update on the State of the Debate

About two years ago I moved in around the corner from one of George Orwell’s old abodes in Islington. I know because a blue plaque proudly declares this fact. Orwell is responsible for two important things in my literary life. His masterpiece, 1984, was the first proper novel that I read without a teacher or curriculum forcing me to do so. Everyone remembers their first time right? And also, 1984 was the first and only book that while reading I skipped parts of. One part in fact, that bit where Winston is reading from Goldstein’s ‘The Theory and Practise of Oligarchical Collectivism’ to Julia. I’ve always felt a sense of shame about failing to wholly complete it (even though I class it in my read list). Either that or wondered whether there was perhaps something just plain wrong with me. Anyway, little did I know that this writer, one of the greatest in Britain’s canon, was addicted to the two same basic substances as me.

In 1946 Orwell wrote a now well known essay called Books V. Cigarettes about the arguments that people give to their reasoning behind not indulging in literature. That being that it is too expensive. Orwell goes into detail about his own spending habits and concludes that he himself spends “in the neighbourhood of £25 a year” on books. He goes on to compare this to his other pastime, smoking, on which he spends £40 a year. In the end he implores people to “admit that it is because reading is less exciting pastime than going to the dogs, the pictures or the pub, and not because books, whether bought or borrowed, are too expensive”.

Orwell died in 1950, at the age of 46, from a burst artery in his lung - his six ounces of tobacco a week no doubt contributed to this untimely demise. Orwell never really got to see the legacy that perhaps his finest work, 1984, brought him (it being published only six months before his death). Now, the Books V. Cigarettes essay is well known and pops up everywhere in the rather pretty Penguin Paperback edition. Despite Orwell’s often pious and arseholish approach to social issues, in Books V. Cigarettes he has struck a chord.

But what about now, in the intervening 60 years, things have moved on. We like to think that we are brighter than the post-war poverty stricken soot covered masses; better fed, in better health and certainly more literate. I am addicted to the two same substances as Orwell, the one that made him and the one that destroyed him – Books and Cigarettes respectively.

Is it still true, are Books still the cheaper pastime? With the various economic pressures effecting leisure activities and the arrival of new ones how does the Book favour.

I don’t smoke quite the same amount as Orwell, in fact I smoke around 10 a day which is 3 ½ packs per week. My brand is £5.11 per pack, so over a year I spend £930.

Now for the tricky part, the Books. Orwell goes into detail about his approach to obtaining tomes – bought, borrowed, gifted, stolen etc. Orwell’s final table looked a bit like this:

	£	s.	d.
Bought	36	9	0
Gifts	10	10	0
Review Copies etc	25	11	9
Borrowed and not returned*	4	16	9
On Loan	3	10	0
Shelves	2	0	0
Total	82	17	6

*Although these were not at direct cost to Orwell, he argued that those books which he had borrowed from others evened out the missing integers left by those he’d had stolen from him.

This was only half of Orwell’s collection, so he doubled the price and divided it by fifteen, the number of years which his collection spanned, and arrived at his £25 a year figure.

First of all, and similar to Orwell, I have two sets of books in different locations. However, they each comprise a similar number and grade as to those readily available for me to count. So here goes:

	No.
Hardbacks Bought	12
Paperbacks Bought	128
Hardbacks Bought 2nd Hand	4
Paperbacks Bought 2nd Hand	42
Gifted Hardback	6
Gifted Paperback	38
Stolen Paperback	4
Cheap Classics	24
Total	258

The above numbers account for five years worth of buying. So generally I can calculate the following monetary expenditure based on average prices.

	£	p.
Hardbacks Bought	155	88
Paperbacks Bought	894	72
Hardbacks Bought 2nd Hand	40
Paperbacks Bought 2nd Hand	126
Gifted Hardback	77	94
Gifted Paperback	265	62
Stolen Paperback	27	96
Cheap Classics	60
Total	1648	12

This leaves a total expenditure per year of £235, just shy of ten times that in Orwell’s day – and he had more books. So reading is around about a 4 times cheaper addiction than smoking cigarettes. This compared to Book habit being 60% the cost of smoking in Orwell’s day. The odds have got better for the readers or worst for the smokers; depending on how you look at things.

Orwell also looked at that other great British pastime, drinking. Alcoholism was just as popular in the mid-40’s as it is now. He calculated that a pint of beer a day (at 6d.) cost him £9 2s. 6d. Today, at around £2.10 per pint, you are spending £766.50. So, once again, better for the readers or bad for the boozers.

My cinema ticket today cost £9.70 (then of course there’s the addition of ice cream, but I won’t go into that). The movie was 1 hour 40 minutes which translates to £5.82 for an hours worth of entertainment. Orwell calculated 2 shillings an hour for one of the better seats in a cinema and about the same per hour for a book. I calculate, using the same formula as Orwell, the Book entertainment per hour to be (using £6.99 as the average price for a book) £1.75.

DVD’s are even worse (at around £5 and hour for a cheaper DVD), and don’t get me started on BluRay’s, Xbox’s, Playstation’s etc. etc. PC Games, although perhaps the realm of the weak and nerdy (like me), fair slightly better. It takes perhaps 36 hours to complete Max Payne 2. I bought this game new for £20, so works out at 55p per hour. However, when you start taking into account the cost of the PC, the Operating System to run it and the constant battling with machinery and software – perhaps 55p is conservative and more hassle than it’s worth. Holiday’s are far more expensive, although often work in favour of the readers – especially those like me who tend to pack more books than clothes.

Orwell concluded that reading was the least expensive of the lot and if anything things seemed to have gotten better for the readers in the 60 years or so which have past. Of course, less people smoke now than they did then, but do more people buy books. Is this drop in relative price of reading because demand is so high and supply has met it so easily?

Orwell calculated that on average people bought 3 books per year. Last year, the UK trade market for books was worth £2.3 Billion. If you divide that by the 61 million population (which is bad statistics I know, don’t write in), that’s around £40 per head. Which is what, just shy of six books per annum. This is good, but what are they buying?

With the advent of celebrity has come the Celebrity Biography, and how much of that money was spent on single book ‘crazes’, like Twilight. What about the general state of fiction today compared to Orwell’s. Perhaps we read more now, but I conclude that what we are reading might not be what Orwell expected (or wanted).

I have another conclusion though, which is even more important, that my rather appalling analysis gives me. If I were to give up smoking, I could purchase another 310 second hand books a year, or 133 new ones. And, with the extra years I get by not dying while my hair still retains colour, I might actually get a chance to read them.