'Fifty shades of spray'

24 June 2015 - 02:08 By Andrew Donaldson

This week's enormous throbbing book Grey: Fifty Shades of Grey, As Told by Christian, by EL James (Random House) R180An amazon customer helpfully explains that this retelling of the first part in the gazillion-selling trilogy is "going to be the same as the first book for the simple reason that it's the same story". Okay. I rather like The Guardian's take on it: "Fifty shades of spray."The issue"My mother died today. Or maybe yesterday, I don't know." So begins Albert Camus's L'étranger (The Outsider), the existentialist classic about Meursault, a pied-noir, or French settler in Algeria, who randomly kills an Arab in an emotionless act of violence. Meursault's moral insensibility and utter failure to show remorse not only challenges society's norms - here, as one critic put it, is "a powerful image of modern man's impatience before Christian philosophy and conventional social and sexual values" - but it succinctly encapsulates (the novel is little more than 120 pages) Camus's philosophy of the absurd.Given the murder that is L'étranger's pivotal moment, it is noteworthy that the victim is faceless, nameless and voiceless. No Arab speaks in the novel, but there is a silent, threatening presence.Now, more than 70 years later, an Algerian journalist, Kamel Daoud, has given them a voice in a remarkable debut novel that is a sequel to L'étranger. The Meursault Investigation (translated by John Cullen) follows Camus's work rather closely - his opening sentence is "Mama's still alive today" - but its tone is garrulous and energetic, as opposed to the original's laconic listlessness, and takes the form of a monologue in a bar delivered by Harun, the brother of Meursault's victim.Daoud has already won several awards in France for his bold adaptation of a Western literary work to illuminate the post-colonial Algerian mind. It has also attracted unwelcome attention from the fundamentalists. In December a Salafist imam imposed a fatwa on the author because the novel provoked a discussion on religion. (*Sighs deeply*)Crash courseFascinating legal insights in Thomas Grant's biography, Jeremy Hutchinson's Case Histories (John Murray). Hutchinson was a British advocate whose celebrated clients in the 1960s and 1970s included Soviet spy George Blake, art forger Tom Keating, Christine Keeler and drug smuggler Howard Marks. More famously, he defended Penguin for publishing DH Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover uncensored. According to Grant, the strategy here was to laugh the charges out of court. "If the jury once began to think that the prosecution was comic, or absurd, then its prospects of success could be fatally undermined."The bottom line"But history suggests there is always one thing worse than a free press and that is its opposite. Nowhere in the world today is the problem with the media that they are 'too free'." - Trigger Warning: Is the Fear of Being Offensive Killing Free Speech? by Mick Hume (William Collins)..

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