måndag 24 januari 2011

Rediscovering history

I used to take a keen interest in history. I even majored in it. During my university studies, I didn't mind ploughing through tomes of less-than-scintillating course material - maybe because it was my main occupation, my job so to speak. But something happened once I had my degree. I had to read up on the social history of 19th-century Prussia for a writing project, and I hated it. It has to be said, German historians aren't known for their gripping prose. Not even Bismarck was enough to inspire them, and as for "everyday" history which isn't that thrilling to begin with - every minute I spent boning up on it felt like a waste not only of time but of quality of life.

It has taken years to get over the shock. Even the history I used to like - "political" history as it's called, i.e. the lives and actions of colourful personalities - lost its charm for me. All I could see when reading a historical article, or a review of a historical book, or the book itself, were the tiresome tics of historians I'd endured during my studies. There it all was: the instinctive distrust of anything resembling a good story; the inability to express a clear opinion on what actually happened; the wooden reasoning which turned the actions of historical personages into an abstract game of money and power, played by lifeless men and women without any feelings, not even noticeable lust for power or greed; and last but not least the dry prose style that could turn the most fascinating life to dust. What didn't help matters was that I still had to browse through some books on "social" history, and found the subject did not grow on me. Some plucky historians - English ones mostly - have tried to make something of it. Instead of showing graphs depicting how much porridge was consumed in average by brick-layers under 37 in Munich on a Thursday, they would jolly things up with little narratives, like, say: "Most days when Franz Müller, a brick-layer approaching his thirty-seventh year, staggered to the breakfast table after having got up at five in the morning, he would find a portion of coarse-grained porridge prepared by his long-suffering wife (and we can only imagine how early she had to get up)" etc. These are brave attempts, but I think Franz Müller (if he had existed) would be the first one to admit that his life was not as fascinating as Bismarck's, or Robespierre's, or Elizabeth I's. Our lives are full enough of boring routines: what's the point of reading about other people's?

Political history is not quite dead, however, and I'm determined to rediscover my interest in it. I'm reading a book on the Habsburgs at the moment by Andrew Wheatcroft which is promising, and full of figures like the wily first Habsburg Emperor, Rudolf, who knew exactly when to be ruthless and when to be gracious; his son, Albert the One-Eyed, a tough egg who was killed by his own nephew; Frederick the Fat who was not exactly the shining hero the Electors hoped he would be but an honest-enough plodder; and the restless Maximilian I who was better at starting projects than at finishing them. Wheatcroft's cover for writing this kind of history, contemptously dismissed by Swedish historians as "kings and wars" (it sounds better in Swedish), is the trend for "cultural" history. Like Peter Burke in his enjoyable "The Fabrication of Louis XIV", Wheatcroft spends a lot of time on his subjects' image-fashioning. It's not so much the kings and emperors themselves that are important, see: it's their "image" and the myths that surround them. Whatever, though I could have done with more political intrigue and less descriptions of Triumphal Arcs etc. Any excuse for writing about the Albert the One-Eyeds of this world is to be welcomed.

I also have high hopes for a documentary series I've started watching on an otherwise quite impossibly high-brow Swedish channel (it normally features things like Russian TV series, classical concerts and analyses of global capitalism). It's about Henry VIII (again) and narrated by David Starkey. Is he for real? Do they still make historians like that? With the exception of the treatment of the Princes in the Tower, which I think even the sainted More would have found slapdash, I liked the first episode a lot, and I hope the series goes on in the same style. Kings and wars (or even better, kings and love affairs), bring them on!

söndag 16 januari 2011

Whatever possessed Richard Curtis? Maybe his inner naughty schoolboy

It was a shock to all of us who loved "Four Weddings and a Funeral", "Notting Hill" and, yes, even the much-maligned "Love, Actually" when Richard Curtis made the commercial for the 10:10 campaign called "No Pressure". The 10:10 people had to take it down from their website in no time, and no wonder - it was spectacularly poor judgement to post it in the first place. In brief, the set-up was this: the short film shows various scenes where someone high up - a teacher, a manager, a football trainer - explains the 10:10 campaign concept (to reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 10 per cent by 10 October 2010) and then asks his/her audience who would like to join the campaign - and who would not. "No pressure", the establishment figure says sweetly to the refuseniks, only to press a red button a moment afterwards that blows them to smithereens. The victims include a plucky French footballer, some hung-over-looking office workers, and two children. The commercial quite rightly caused an outrage, and the scandal was aptly called "Splattergate".

I'm not going to blog at any length about the utter sick-makingness of this short: this has already been done elsewhere. The only thing I believe people have missed out on commenting is that those killed aren't even vocal opponents to the Cause: they just don't feel like joining it. It made me think of the TV film "The Wave" which I watched about a hundred years ago. Not even opting out is an option. As a dystopia, the brave new world of "No Pressure" takes some beating.

The point that puzzled me when I'd stopped shivering at the contents was: where's the joke? Even if you did think, as at least some of the 10:10 campaigners seem to have done, that anyone who didn't embrace their cause was evil and deserved punishment, a revenge wish-fulfilment fantasy isn't the same thing as a joke, is it? If you hire Richard Curtis, it's reasonable to assume that you are looking for something funny. If you want a horror film and/or a cautionary tale, you would probably go somewhere else.

The worrying part about this is that Curtis's last film - "The Boat that Rocked" - was also completely humour-free, and not a little nasty. Frankly, it stank. So is Curtis losing his mojo?

There are those who claim that he didn't have much mojo to start with, but that's unfair. Also, in my opinion, his sentimentality, which is widely criticised, is not such a bad thing. I believe you have to risk falling into the sentimentality trap if you want to be truly moving. Sometimes the result may be mawkish, but at other times you can strike gold. I mistrust the praise "unsentimental" - it can often mean shallow, distant and cynical.

There's another side of Curtis which annoys me, though, and that is what you could call the naughty schoolboy side. I never really warmed to the Blackadder series, in spite of the fact that the main character was a villain, and one of the reasons was that especially the two first series were full of puerile and "bad taste" humour. I suppose that's why some people - in some cases the same ones who get toothache from all the happy endings in "Love Actually" - like it so much. It's probably what's called "anarchic humour". But I confess it does nothing for me, and I believe we have the "anarchic humour" element to blame for "The Boat that Rocked" and "No Pressure".

In the case of the "Boat", it reeked of the playground: here it was again, the old school hierarchy where the "cool" (and perfectly revolting) males rule the roost and can feel free to hurt and ridicule the "nerdy" (sweet-natured) ones at any time. I had hoped I would never see its like again, much less be invited to embrace it. This is also the film that finds it hilarious that one of the Rock Boat's opponents is called Twatt. The non-existent joke in "No Pressure" may, at a guess, have been that the expression "no pressure" often means the exact opposite. Then Curtis's inner schoolboy ran riot with the idea and put a "bang-bang-you're-dead" spin on it.

To sum up, Curtis has always been a bit hit and miss. He can score beautiful bull's-eyes like "Four Weddings" and "Notting Hill" - and if you think it's easy to create a perfect romcom, I suggest you have a try - and part-hits like "Blackadder", "Love Actually" and "The Vicar of Dibley". (The premise of the "Vicar" palls after a while, but the episode where the villagers stage a Nativity play is perfect: highlights include David trying to humanise Herod, Alice as the Virgin Mary reacting suprisingly well to Peter Brook-style directing and giving the vicar's boorish Joseph what for in an improvised rehearsal scene, and Geraldine actually standing up for her faith and explaining why she does think the story of Christ is "The Greatest Story Ever Told".) And then once in a while, Curtis misses the target completely. However, the "Doctor Who" episode "Vincent and the Doctor", which he scripted, shows signs that he is regaining his aim. It was uneven, but the ending, including the scene where the Doctor gently explains to his companion Amy why Vincent van Gogh still chose to kill himself even after they'd shown him that he would be appreciated one day, had me blubbing. It was moving and quite profound, and in its humane message a hundred years from the "No Pressure" disaster.

fredag 7 januari 2011

It's not fair to compare Trollope with Dickens - but who can resist it?

It's not every day you find yourself agreeing with übergrump Simon Heffer in the Daily Telegraph. There are few things he has much time for, including the front figures of his own party, and the negative attitude - even when you suspect he has a point, sometimes especially then - can be tiresome. I was completely on his side the other day, though, when he wrote an article on the time-honoured theme of Trollope vs Dickens, and concluded that though Trollope's novels can be amusing, he can't hold a candle to the inimitable.

You might well think "does it need saying"? Actually it does. There are a lot of smitten Trollopians out there who are convinced that their hero was the greatest writer of the 19th century, and that he compares favourably to just about everyone, but especially to Dickens. That's why I'm thrilled every time a Dickens fan hits back. To be fair, though, Dickens and Trollope have very little in common, and there's no real reason to compare them.

I have read two Trollope novels, "The Way We Live Now" and "Can You Forgive Her?". Now, that's not a very high percentage of the author's work, I agree, but as they are both supposed to be among his best work ("Can You Forgive Her?" is one of the famed Palliser novels), and as I have also sat through the very - er - thorough TV adaptation "Barchester Towers" and the more pacy Andrew Davies adaptation of "He Knew He Was Right", I think I have enough to go on to see a pattern of sorts. Trollope's genre seems to be the comedy of manners, where the author casts a more or less indulgent eye on his characters and chuckles "What fools these mortals be". Dickens, on the other hand, writes epic drama (except perhaps in the case of "The Pickwick Papers"). He digs deeper and is more dramatic and colourful because the genre requires it. To compare Trollope and Dickens novels is a bit like comparing the films "When Harry Met Sally" and "Chariots Of Fire". Trollope is less of a poor man's Dickens than a poor man's Thackeray - if the latter's "Vanity Fair" is anything to go by.

Also, Dickens is one of the giants of English literature. You wouldn't dismiss a modern author because he/she was not as good as Dickens. It's hard on Trollope that he should be dismissed for that reason, only because he happens to have been roughly contemporary with the great man. It's like criticising an Elizabethan playwright for not being as good as Shakespeare. It is possible to be very, very good and still not be able to compare with the author of "Great Expectations", "David Copperfield" and "Bleak House".

Having said all that, Trollope has himself and his fans to blame. Trollope satirised Dickens as "Mr Popular Sentiment", but didn't find it beneath him to imitate a typically Dickensian way of villain-naming, thus very unwisely inviting comparisons. (Obadiah Slope - Old Testament first name and one-syllable, unglamorous family name - geddit?) And I'm still not quite convinced that I think Trollope is particularly good, quite apart from how he compares to Dickens and the other towering writers of the 19th century (though I'm willing to give him a few more tries). His characters are so frightfully ordinary in their preoccupations and ditherings. Maybe this is why so many people like him - you would be more likely to run into a typical Trollopian character in real life than a typical Dickensian one. More's the pity.