Woke book burners should wake up to themselves

Is it time that the “woke” took a little nap? I’m so glad younger generations have woken society up to our many inequalities and hypocrisies but when it comes to literature, I do feel they should hit the snooze button.

Authors from Salman Rushdie to Philip Pullman are aghast at the revelation that Puffin has dipped Roald Dahl’s wickedly rude prose in disinfectant so as not to offend modern readers. In the cleaned-up editions, Augustus Gloop from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is no longer “fat” but “enormous”. Matilda’s terrifying Miss Trunchbull no longer has a “great horsey face” – but just has a “face”. Mrs Twit is no longer “ugly and beastly” but just “beastly”. And oh, the Oompa-Loompas are gender-neutral.

These kinds of corrections are not unusual. Most publishers now employ “sensitivity readers” to nitpick through an author’s work, removing anything deemed disrespectful. This total humour-ectomy and mollycoddling would not have impressed Dr Johnson, who observed: “The true end of literature is to enable the reader better to enjoy life or better to endure it.”

In the current climate, I doubt Puberty Blues, my first novel (co-authored with Gabrielle Carey), would ever have been published. The graphic depictions of sex and racism on Sydney’s beaches would give today’s sensitivity readers a collective cardiac arrest. I just hope our publishers don’t feel the need to subject our ’70s cult classic to a Dahl-like revamp. Imagine “Rack off, you fish-faced moll” revised as “Kindly leave my presence, you aquatically themed erotic adventurer”. And what about a surfie boy’s comment to a passing girl, “Jeez, you’re rootable”? “My loins are stirred by your pulchritudinous properties” doesn’t quite cut the linguistic mustard.

The enduring appeal of Puberty Blues is its raw realism. And isn’t that the whole point of being an author? To probe into dark corners, expose uncomfortable truths and tell it like it is?

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Even if my publishers don’t subject me to the censoriousness of sensitivity readers (censor-tivity readers, surely?), my 15 novels still run the risk of being labelled with trigger warnings. I am triggered by trigger warnings. Authors painstakingly plant plot twists, laying these novelistic landmines in the hope of blowing readers’ minds. Trigger warnings deprive the author of the element of surprise in both plot and character development.

Readers should trust the writer to get them safely from cover to cover with empathy, emotional intelligence and integrity, without having to strap a giant shock absorber to their brains. A book is not a packet of Corn Flakes – it doesn’t need a list of ingredients on the cover, killing all suspense. (A cereal killer, if you will.)

Another new stricture placed on writers is the pressure to be of the same sexual orientation or ethnicity as our protagonists. Despite the fact that Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin helped end slavery, might it struggle to be published today? Booker Prize winners Bernardine Evaristo and Kazuo Ishiguro and Nigerian literary superstar Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie have all expressed their opposition to this grounding of writers’ flights of imagination.