Sex and the Death of Chivalry by Pete Brown

Because it often takes me upwards of two years to get round to reading things even when I want to read them, I don’t get sent as many free books to blog about as I used to.

The other reason is that I don’t universally praise things, which is a bit of a faux pas in the literary blogging world (I imagine, I don’t know, as this is a “literary lifestyle blog”, not a “book blog”) and also means it’s a gamble for prospective indie presses and writers to ask me to comment.

I’m not going to say “this is good” just because a book has been published and sent to me.

I’m not even going to say something is fine when it isn’t.

I might look for something complementary to say (e.g. Sex and the Death of Chivalry isn’t hateful towards women), but I won’t leave that statement without any caveats that need to also be included (e.g. I think Sex and the Death of Chivalry may have wanted to appear hateful to women?)

Sex and the Death of Chivalry, then, is a book that is branded as a publication by I_AM Self-Publishing, which is either a logo that Pete Brown has designed and used in a cheeky kinda way on this Amazon KDP publication, or it’s a tiny “publisher” that may well have been paid by Brown in order to format and upload this first draft of a novel into a reasonably well presented format (e.g. the spacing and font use is consistent and the cover design isn’t disgusting).

I’ve got nothing against Self-Publishing, or using Kindle Direct Publishing as a platform – I’ve used it myself for the anthology of works about poo I edited during the pandemic, and also for my collection of full frontal nudes and poems about Flat Earth conspiracy theories that I made with Open Pen’s Sean Preston before it.

I’ve read lots of books published in this format, and some of them – e.g. Fiona Helmsley’s my body would be the kindest of strangers – have been excellent, serious literature and others – e.g. the two Byron Crawford books I’ve read – have something compelling to them even if they’re not quite transcending the expected limits of self-published work.

What I’m saying is that I think what Pete Brown has done is legitimate and fine, in theory, but that you should still fucking re-read the text before you feed it into the machine, which feels like it really really really really really hasn’t happened here…

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Errors abound.

In the first chapter alone, Brown cannot decide whether the action is taking place on a Saturday or a Sunday morning… I – at first – thought this was meant to be (perhaps?) a hungover protagonist losing track of time, but it quickly became clear that, no, the day [of the week] confusion was a non-diagetic error (as in not an error in the context/content of the story, yes, I am using that word like that)….

Also, there are inconsistencies related to the age/age bracket of the main characters and at what point in their lives/careers that they are…

At one point a character is introduced who the main guy had a sexy frisson with while at school but hasn’t seen for – it is clearly stated – four years, since before uni… yet at a later point, one of the characters mentions finishing their undergraduate degree six years ago… One of them also has a university job which would require completing a PhD (never mentioned) and maybe around ten years minimum of lecturing work to be eligible for (my lover is a university lecturer and they have systems and standards for promotions and career progression like you wouldn’t believe!) and – to top this all off – the blurb of the book (which, if this is self-published, must by necessity have also been written by the author) states that the characters are approaching forty… Yet their lives, actions and reactions to the actions that happen mirror the responses and comments of people far, far, younger than fortyish…

Also, the person the main character hasn’t seen for years and years and years also turns out to be the usual bartender in the pub that he goes to almost every day, which is either a new regular spot due to the sexy friend working there (which is not stated in the text) or he’d just never noticed she was there before…

There’s also a recurring bit where women who want to fuck the main character (which is, alas, basically every woman who’s introduced except for his friend’s pregnant girlfriend who he calls “Mum” (in place of her name) in essentially all interactions that follow him learning about her pregnancy) “grab [his] balls” through his trousers.

What the hell kind of material are his trousers made from where it’s possible not only to quickly locate balls without taking the clothes off or putting a hand inside them, and then secondly to grip those balls? I don’t know.

So, in all, it’s a book that feels like it wasn’t really finished.

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There’s one chapter from the perspective of the main character’s best friend, which has an identical cadence and tone to the other voice, and until most of the way through that chapter I just presumed Brown had (like with the day of the week in chapter one) mixed up the key names of his characters.

We never see this perspective again, and it offers no insights or complexity to the characterisation or narrative, so it feels like a flourish with no real… meaning to it?

There’s also a narrative around the main character being threatened at knife point and then shot (shot!) by his ex’s brother who was “trying to teach him a lesson”, but the motivation for this – and the normalisation of hyper violence that would permit a casual and intentional non-fatal gun attack – is absent…

There is also an additional attack (I can’t remember if it’s knife or gun or vehicular etc) that leaves the protagonist potentially dying in the final sentence and and and it feels like this is meant to feel like a cliffhanger, but instead it just feels like an… I dunno, it instead just like feels like like like like not bothering to write an ending????

So, yes, in conclusion, it doesn’t quite feel fair to judge this novel in any serious or careful or considered way, as there has clearly been an absence of care or consideration in its composition.

Pete Brown, if you’re reading this, you can’t just finish something that’s essentially the right length for a novel and just hit publish, not unless you’re like, I dunno, someone who really really really knows how to effortlessly make a perfect novel, which is basically no one in the world.

If you want to make Sex and the Death of Chivalry a legible text, you need to go back to the start of the manuscript and make sure the dates and timings align. Decide if you want to have more than one protagonist-narrator and, if yes, add in some more uses of the second one and find a way to make them sound at least slightly different.

Explain the violence and the way in which people engage with it, or add more violence in and make it clear that the flashes of hyper violence in your novel are part of a pattern of normalised existence in this fictionalised world and….

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I dunno.

What do I fucking know?

I’ve never had a novel published and I haven’t even seriously tried to write one for about a decade.

I’m not a fucking expert.

I’m not fucking anything.

I do, tho, read a lot of novels.

And I think about novels a lot – and if I were to have more of a life (any life at all) I’d probably talk about them a lot, too) – so, I suppose, I know when something is missing something crucial…

And this text, here, is missing something crucial: it’s missing care, it’s missing attention, it’s missing a lot of things that any even remotely engaged re-read of the thing would have established as useful.

This isn’t ready to be sent to strangers you’ve met on the internet, unless they’re a copy editor who’s being paid to offer opinions or they’re part of a writer’s group you’ve joined with a view to sharing rough, incomplete, early drafts of writing projects.

I’m not that, Pete Brown. I’m not that. And time spent reading the first draft of this text is time I won’t get back.

If I was bitchier or wanted to spend even more time thinking about Sex and the Death of Chivalry then I’d quote some of the bad prose here to mock it, like I would do with the work of James Bond novelist John Gardner. But doing that wouldn’t feel fair, as Gardner’s books were signed off by other people, were checked and proof read and finalised and marketed, etc. Gardner may not have been a great writer, but he was a professional one. Brown, alas, hasn’t put the effort in. This isn’t polished enough to teasingly mock: it isn’t finished.

This should not be in my hands. I should not have read this version of this novel.

No one should be reading a draft this rough without getting paid in money or in kind or being the writer who wants to make it into a proper text…

Thank god I feel like life is overlong and neverending and time as precious as dust, otherwise I’d be fucking angry I spent multiple hours of my one and only life reading Pete Brown’s notes towards what maybe one day will become a novel.

Whoops.