We went to Sushi Azabu for dinner, my favourite restaurant in KL and on very good form last night, with some entirely new things (firefish with firefish liver), and others that were particularly delicate and delicious (prawns, scallops, fatty tuna etc). A lovely bit of skipjack tuna, which I had not preivously had as sushi. On return we watched the second episode of The Americans which was less all over the place, but still extremely silly. I hope it improves quickly. Among other things, I find it hard to get past the improbably glamorous redheaded wife (long red hair must be the great American fetish) and the husband with the puppydog eyes
I’m reading Nina Allan’s The Rift right now, very soon after finishing The Race I am unsure what I think about either of them. I liked the move between worlds in the first one, and I did grow interested in the characters and the worlds, though not particularly in their stories. I found her way of starting a chapter after something momentous has happened in the plot occasionally effective and occasionally eye-rolling. The second one is harder to get into, even though it has more of a single plot than the previous one, it’s about a girl who disappeared as a teenager and reappeared in her thirties. I am finding it difficult to care about any of it. One of the minor things I’ve latched onto (which also annoyed me in the first book) is about how non-white characters are portrayed. Oh, there are loads of them, and loads of half-white ones as well. What is grating on me is how they all (with some minor exceptions in passing) have very British first names.
In this specific case I suspect I would not have been quite as irritated had I been more engaged with the books (though I wouldn’t be surprised if in the final third or so I find myself really enjoying it and thinking about it afterwards). Beyond this book, it seems to me symptomatic of how diversity in writing is very trendy these days, but it’s so often a surface diversity. Everyone who is good has more or less the same values, the same way of life, the same everything. There are no real cultural differences. I can see that when well-integrated ethnic minorities in Western countries are the ones leading the diversity charge the last thing they want is for their place in the home society to be questioned. But that does make it harder for me not to see the future, or the alternate reality they construct, as quite homogenous. It’s how, as I was complaining a few days ago, Muslim women are represented by stylish young women in hijab.