Friday 25 April 2014

REWIND: 'Pretty Things' by Sara Manning


I am always surprised when I realise how old books I read as a teenager are now by the technicality of years. ‘Pretty Things’ by Sara Manning was a book that really changed my perspective at the age of 15, and now I am suddenly realising it was first published in 2005, nearly 10 years ago. This, whilst frightening the hell out of me, also placed the book in a time frame of developing attitudes, and was something that I really hadn’t taken into account when I read it the first time round.
                ‘Pretty Things’ is a really interesting depiction of teenage sexuality, and is still one of the only books (hold on to your hats, this is the book’s crowning glory) that portrays sexuality as a fluid thing, particularly in teenagers, and really highlights how damaging the block labels of gay, straight, and bisexual can be. Centred around Brie, Charlie, Walker and Daisy’s drama group’s production of ‘The Taming of The Shrew’ (described by the hard-core Daisy as “the biggest pile of misogynistic wank”, and as an English student, I support her in this), we see these characters explore their own and each other’s attraction towards each other, in a far more realistic way than I think my older self would like to believe. Looking back at what I knew of teenage life and the importance of who you were attracted to and who you kissed, taking into account the time the book is written, I had to face the fact that the way the characters act is likely more realistic than this cringing reviewer would like to believe. It was when sexuality had only just become an acceptable thing to mention in schools, and though a still pretty homophobic environment, there was a huge amount of dubbing yourself as “gay” being like a celebrity scandal: you were the talk of everyone for a few weeks, you felt like Katy Perry, and then you wrote it off as a mistake and pretended it didn’t happen. It was horrifically disheartening and cruel to those actually suffering crises of their sexuality. Whilst re-reading this book, and, as far as I recall, reading it the first time, I nearly put it down within the first few chapters, as the initial depictions of the characters as gay boy, straight girl, straight boy and lesbian were such incredible stereotypes. But realising that Manning was setting them up to knock them down is only a journey I can appreciate more in a re-read.
                This may the book’s greatest strength and, at the same time, its greatest flaw. I’m lucky and happy to say I made it past the opening character profiles, but this was mainly owing to the humour in the book (their darling drama teacher was edging for my favourite character spot in the first few chapters), and whilst I’m glad I held on, I can’t help but think about those that didn’t. This book really does show the breaking of those stereotypes, and how those stereotypes of sexuality are built into young people, and how they believe that sexuality is a rigid idea, no grey area, just simple categories. The problem was that it doesn’t show this to you until the romantic entanglements start getting a little complicated. This delay really could have put me off the book quite easily, particularly as Brie’s character was very wearing at first, and I wasn’t too pleased about Daisy either. I’ll be honest, portrayal of women is not the strong point of ‘Pretty Things’, but I can at least see where Manning was aiming for with it, even if she didn’t succeed. There are exceptions to this, for example, in a scene where Brie is nearly sexually assaulted towards the end of novel, and the gang come up to save her, Brie is already beginning to fight off her attacker, although this moment is slightly blotted by the need for the boys, Walker and Charlie, to beat the guy up in penance for his actions. “Bizarre macho display” indeed Charlie.
                Overall, I am really glad to have been able to read this book again. It brightened me a little to think of how far teenage (and adult for that matter) thinking on portraying and understand of sexuality in novels, especially YA novels, had come even back in 2005. I do worry a little at the amount of tokenised characters one tends to see in media and literature aimed at children and young people, so it always raises my optimism bar to remind myself it may not all be like that.

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