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“Real Men” read Wilbur Smith, says Wilbur Smith, feminist

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Summary of story from the Telegraph, April 9, 2011.

Just who, exactly, reads Wilbur Smith novels, with their rollicking formula of violent lust, lusty violence and gung-ho derring-do?

With sales of more than 120 million they can’t all be hormonal schoolboys, priapic squaddies who never quite made the SAS and London’s (undoubtedly hormonal) mayor, Boris Johnson, who is, apparently, a fan.

“Real men,” asserts Smith. “Real men read my books.”

When I point out that my husband hasn’t read him, nor, as far as I’m aware, has any other chap of my acquaintance, he is unruffled.

“I understand that the water in London has been drunk and passed through four or five people before it reaches your tap,” he says matter-of-factly. “Apparently the only chemicals that can’t be removed are female hormones – so you can draw your own conclusions.”

Smith is in Britain to promote his latest book, Those in Peril, which is his first contemporary novel after a lifetime mining a rich seam of quasi-historical dynasties, feuds featuring the sort of chaps who would much rather slash open the stem of a barrel cactus with a dagger than turn on a tap like an urban sissy. 

Smith’s books are invariably set in remote theatres of combat where he famously prefers to locate his outlandish, swashbuckling plots.

Those in Peril is the most awful book I have ever read.

Really.

And not just the low-flying “she wore a sleekly tailored khaki safari suit with suede desert boots and an Hermes scarf at her throat” clichés.

By page 17 I was wincing at the rather one-sided sex.

 By page 30 I had thrown it on the floor in revulsion and I honestly wish I hadn’t picked it up and discovered what happened on page 100 as I fear it may haunt me for ever.

“I’m a feminist,” says Smith. “The women in my books in recent years have been powerful characters and I love to see a woman with a cute bottom walking past.”

Maybe that’s how the South Africans do feminism, but Smith – pro Mandela, but an old school Colonial at heart – is unconcerned about trampling on anyone’s sensibilities.

And why should he care? He may write books that are the very epitome of escapism and adventure, but he has no need to escape anything (except, obviously, the taxman).

  1. Jane Osmond says:

    I left Wilbur Smith behind years ago – awful. But why should he care?

  2. “I’m a feminist,” says Smith. “The women in my books in recent years have been powerful characters and I love to see a woman with a cute bottom walking past.”

    Funniest thing I’ve read all day. Shame the only put-down Woods can think of is a racist one. Oh, those silly backward colonials, if only they’d let us complete our God-given civilising mission!

    I know the majority of his readers are male, but it’s strange the way he seems to casually marginalise any of his readers who might be female by saying his books are for ‘real men’. I wouldn’t pick up one of his books even if they were the only ones left in the world after a Farenheit 451 style-blitz, but I will defend to my death the right of other women to read whatever trash they like (as a wise man may have once said something a bit like).

    Aaaaand finally, I’m not one for gender stereotypes, but I can’t help remarking that the men who bought Wilbur Smith at the bookshops I’ve worked at tended to be slightly hunched and sheepish-looking older men. I’ll acknowledge that they were at least ‘masculine’ enough to feel awkward in a bookshop – and I can’t remember, but perhaps they were some of the extremely ‘manly’ customers who made sexually inappropriate remarks to me – but they were hardly the paragon of virile, youthful masculinity Smith flatters himself is his audience!

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