I need a little diversion from current reads and the pile of books sitting on my shelf. I also have little craving to return to the world of James Bond.
Not to the actual Ian Fleming books, mind you. That’s an itch that reading the books has cured once and for all, I hope.
But I do love me a spy story…
Following the discussion about pastiche and fan fiction a few days ago, I was left wondering what it is about pastiche work that doesn’t work for me, and could only think of one series that obviously heavily borrowed from another original work and which did not have me running for the hills when I read it: And that is Kate Westbrook’s series of The Moneypenny Diaries.
I first read these in 2013, long before the epic buddy read with KnightofAngels of the complete original James Bond series, and my enjoyment of them may have benefited from not being aware of all of the details and background stories provided by Fleming.
By the same token, I can also see how my dislike for many aspects of Fleming’s original writing could help my enjoyment of Westbrook’s books for the simple reason that these are Bond-related stories that are NOT written from Fleming’s perspective.
This is where the experiment comes in: I want to find out whether I still like The Moneypenny Diaries, and if my appreciation for them has changed.
I also want to figure out why people keep putting a label of “chick lit” on this series, and what exactly “chick lit” is.
What does “chick lit” mean to you all?
The great Lois Maxwell as Miss Moneypenny. For all we know, this lipstick could have been issued by Q branch.
Broken Tune's Blog 
I guess chick-lit and romance are often used interchangeably but I don’t think it’s exactly the same. Romance is pretty straightforward: heroine meets hero. Nobody even looks at somebody else. Happily ever after. Chick-lit heroines can have more trial and error in the romantic department and I guess isn’t as focussed on romance alone.
I mean there are also romances where the protagonists fall in love while fighting elections/battling demons/solving crimes but the end is generally marriage or an equivalent. Chick-lit heroines can get married in the first third of the book and then spent the rest navigating their relationship and…stuff.
But I would say some sort of romance plotline is a requirement for chick-lit. At least I’ve never seen one without (but it’s not exactly my area of expertise :D)
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Thank you for your thorough deliberations. The only chic-lit book that I have read, that I know is chic-lit was Bridget Jones. For any other book, I have not even ever considered giving anything a label of chic-lit, but I guess this is why I’m curious to find out what the term actually refers to.
So, the premise is that all chic-lit has an element of romance and have a heroine. Is The Hunger Games chic-lit? Is The Blind Assassin? Where does chic-lit differ from women’s lit? Are cozy mysteries or Miss Marple chic-lit?
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My first instinct was to go ‘fantasy/sci-fi aren’t chick-lit’ without being able to tell you why. So I went and looked what Wikipedia had to say and learned that a) it can have vampires and b) it gets described as ‘humorous stories about mostly heterosexual middle-class women in their 30sand their relationship with friends, family and romance’ which describes a lot of books.
To come back to Hunger Games: I think CL mostly has lower stakes. The heroine wants a job (and if she doesn’t get it she most likely won’t end up on the streets but back with her parents) not save the world. And – here I’m guestimating again because Anita Blake/paranormal romance etc. aren’t quite my genre but I think they aren’t so much ‘we have to stop the ultimate from taking over the world and if we fail we’re doomed’ but ‘humans and vampires live mostly peaceful together and we need to protect this status quo and stop the people who want to disturb it’. In that aspect they are very much like cozy mysteries which also aren’t about eradicating murder once and for all but just solving the ones that come along.
So I guess that also means that there is at least an overlap chick-lit/cozy. If I used the Wikipedia definition I would e.g. put Paige Shelton’s books in the category because in-between solving crimes the protagonist also reconnects with her grandmother and has romantic entanglements but not necessarily Carola Dunn’s Lady Daisy books (she meets her future husband in book 1 and later get married but it’s not a really big deal and her mother only pops up occasionally). But I guess that’s very much a your mileage may vary situation…
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You know, the more I read and think about it, the less I like the idea of the label “chick-lit”. So, basically anything that is about a woman of a certain age and features aspects of that character that involve deliberations of relationships with anyone, could be classed as chick-lit? Why isn’t that just “lit”? And why isn’t there a label for inconsequential novels with a male protagonist ? Or is there?
As for the quality of depth of those stories? Who’s to say what the difference is between a novel labelled as chick-lit and Jane Bowles’ Two Ladies, which, imo, is a totally inconsequential story about two women, but is not considered “chick-lit”?
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Oh definitely. (I mean if you want to back-date you coul easily classify all of Austen as chick-lit but we don’t because…because reasons).
And I guess the male equivalent would be e.g. books like The DaVinci code or any sort of adventure/spy-story about middle-aged guys solving impossible riddles and/or shooting their way through the plot and getting a beautiful young woman as ‘prize’. Nobody suggests these kind of stories have literary merit (which is in itself a loaded term/statement) but then there’s still a huge difference between how people see a woman reading the Da Vinci Code vs. a man reading Bridget Jones’ Diary so the two things are really not the same. (And even paranormal romance which have the heroine stab/stake/shoot her way through the plot and getting a hot guy as prize are still considered ‘girly’)
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That just opens a whole new can of worms, doesn’t it? Not just judging a book by the cover, but judging the reader by the choice of book… Ugh.
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I think there are two main variations of chick-lit, picking between two men, and a kind of “mutual shrew taming” like Pillow Talk. I am interested in anyone’s theories on this, as my girlfriend consumes endless amounts of rom-coms and romance novels. I find myself drawn to novels about the lives of foresters and lumberjacks or, twig-lit as it’s known…
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Twig-lit, … I think I have heard of that. 🙂
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kkkkk
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Looking forward to you comparisons and hope you still enjoy them.
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Thanks . I think I am still enjoying book # 1 so far but from a quite different perspective. Originally, I think I valued the references to the Cond adventures more, now I prefer the parts that are about the secret service and the tie-ins with history.
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I’ll be curious to read your updated reviews of these. I’ve not read them and have zero expectations of what’s in them.
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The first book basically is about Miss M’s niece inheriting her diaries and reading up on how she joined the Foreign Office etc. It is also a run down of events in Bond, but it tries to tie it to relevant events in history – i.e. the Cuban Missile Crisis in this one.
Most of all, tho, this is about spies. Her father may have been one (she’s trying to find out what happened to him and whether he really died in the war), there is Bond’s obviously (tho surprisingly very little romantic interest in or focus on him … for reasons…), but there is also a lot about M and politics, and management of the service, and the issue of trusting people she deals with in and outside of the office – as she’s also classed as an agent and a target for other agents to convert.
It is not action-packed as such, but there is a quiet undercurrent of violence and trauma.
It is not a light and fluffy read. At least not from how I read it.
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So basically the feminist upgrade from secretary to competent agent years before Skyfall. That’s considerably better than what I feared.
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Not a field agent, and decidedly in line with expectations of early 60s “roles”, but her character is written as much more of an administrator than a mere typist – and she gets time on a firing range. I rather like how Bond is not talking down to her – not that he did that in the original novels! – and I liked how Westbrook did not go to the other extreme and wrote Miss M. as some kind of super-agent.
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I’m really liking the sounds of this.
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It’s a really curious book. Not without faults – but the feel of the story is definitely something that makes it stand out, and evidently something that makes me ask questions about genre…
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Asking such questions can lead down interesting rabbit holes. It’s good to question convention.
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Oh, and don’t we know it, Troy!
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Oh yes. We know it well. 🙂
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