söndag 30 december 2012

Matthewgate – the fallout

Well. So he did it after all – Dan Stevens opted out of Downton Abbey. Leaving Fellowes no choice but to kill Matthew off, in an unexotic car accident, and in the Christmas special too. This was almost the unkindest cut of all: couldn’t the blasted man have agreed to be bumped off in episode one of the new series at least, so the otherwise peace-and-goodwill-full special didn’t have to end on a tragic note?

So, one of my wishes for the new year is blown already. I am still concerned how the series will go on without the hero, but the rest of the Downton crew used the special to persuade us that they will do their level best to keep the show on the road, and I’m more hopeful than I was that the hero vacuum will  be filled somehow (probably by Branson, tamest revolutionary on the planet). And at least an heir is born, so there will be no Heir from Outside Mk II coming in – this, I believe, the fans would not have stood for. As for Stevens, I do understand why he may have a yearning to play something else than the decent, somewhat priggish Matthew. But I wonder if it was a wise career move. It’s not as if he was a household name before Downton, so his fans will for the most part be Downton fans, and they will be put out with him for some time to come for jumping ship.

I’m almost starting to feel that there’s a jinx on my Downton blogs. I praise the villain alliance between Miss O’Brien and Thomas – and they fall out. I dare to hope that Matthew won’t be written out – and he is written out. On the upside, it works in a positive way as well. Thomas has braved the Errol Flynn curse and came out of his latest misadventure surprisingly well at the end of series three. In my opinion, Rob James-Collier would have deserved a Golden Globe nod for so believably making the transition from arrogant prat to poor little black baa-lamb. Taking full responsibility  for his latest disaster with quiet dignity; sobbing vulnerably in the rain; in a word, Thomas  completely floored me, and I’m now more than ready to give this particular baddie a dispensation for his lack of brains. At least the ridiculously easily-suggestible darling isn’t thick the way Alfred is: you couldn’t suggest anything to Alfred, as he wouldn’t be able to take the hint.

As for Miss O’Brien, her plots achieved a black grandeur far from petty shirt-pilfering, so we can expect more high-quality villainy in the future. There was a suggestion in the Christmas special that she was longing for a change: well, she can keep on longing. Her talents are needed in Downton. Her nephew, though, should feel free to pursue his dreamed-of career in food.

Scripting a hit show like this must be frustrating, as the characters who leave are not necessarily the ones who would, normally, be the most likely to. Not only the actors, but also the (real or perceived) wishes of the viewers, are far more important than the characters’ own wants. Why Thomas would choose to stay, even as under-butler, in a house where his relationship to just about all the male staff is problematic to say the least is a mystery. Also, you’d expect Daisy to jump at the chance of taking over her father-in-law’s farm rather than stay on slaving in the castle kitchen. Branson wanted to get away, but was hauled back (even at the price of killing off Sybil rather than keeping her on as an invisible off-shore family member). I suspect (though I hesitate to say it and jinx it) these characters are not going anywhere. As long as the actors don’t quit, Downton fans will keep them exactly where they are.          

torsdag 20 december 2012

Wishes for the new year

Today, anything too tiring blog-wise is right out. It's December and my holiday starts tomorrow, which means I'm in my all-too-usual, pre-Christmas, I-don't-want-to-work-anymore grump. But a wish list is fairly easy. All I want (or some of them anyway) for the new year cultural-consumption-wise is:

A new villain (or several) Obviously, always. I'm not complaining, mind. It's not exactly been a villain-free year, though I have sometimes felt like the protagonist in some fin-de-siècle cautionary tale, in search of ever more depraved kicks. I comfort myself with the fact that however far I fall, the low point was already reached years and years ago with Monsieur Lheureux in Madame Bovary (though he was admirably mean to the ghastly Madame, no-one can call him glamorous). The main reason I'm always on the lookout for new villains is I want to be reassured that there are still new ones to discover out there. I can't quite get over  the unhappy suspicion that there will never be another villain-writer like Dickens. Which leads me to point two:

A new Dickens TV adaptation I know, that is never going to happen. They did Great Expectations and The Mystery of Edwin Drood this year and there was all the extra Dickens publicity about the bicentenary, which means the Beeb will probably want to, in the charming phrase of a few years' back, "take a rest from Dickens". There's always ITV, but they'll never risk adapting any of the lesser-known novels. And it's the lesser-known novels I would really like done: Dombey and Son, above all, but also Barnaby Rudge. Imagine what a great Sir John Charles Dance would be! And then he'd have a hat trick in Dickens villains: Tulkinghorn, Ralph Nickleby and Sir John Chester. Ah, what a trio.

If not Dickens, then at least lots and lots of new costume dramas I very much hope that the BBC has learnt its lesson by now, after that disastrous period when they consciously avoided "bonnet dramas". Then ITV's Downton Abbey happened and became a smash hit, and the BBC was left looking rather silly. I see signs that they've thrown in the towel and are now desperately trying to catch up with their commercial rival. There was Parade's End which the critics loved, and The Paradise which they hated. I look forward to watching both and am wishing for more try-to-catch-the-Downton-crowd dramas. And while on this subject:

Dan Stevens signing up for a fourth series of Downton All right, I promised not to Downton-blog until after Christmas, but just a teeny-weeny bit, without giving anything away? And yes, I know Stevens is the one playing Matthew. So, do I suddenly have a thing for Matthew now? Ha, no fear!

The reason for this wish is that I've heard the rumour that Stevens hasn't signed up for series four of Downton Abbey yet, and I'm worried about what this will mean for the future of the series. I can understand if he hesitates. There was only ever talk of three series at the start: I remember it well. But now a fourth series is on the way, and it looks like Downton could run and run, but only if it keeps its act together. And the centre of this act is the main plotline, what could be called The Heir's Tale.

Matthew may not have turned out to be the middle-class champion I'd hoped for when he first came on the scene in series one. The Downton set had him house-trained in a trice. There was much caustic talk among TV reviewers about how little time he spent in the trenches, but at least he's spent more time there than in his lawyer's office - now, the estate appears to be his full-time job, and he is as gentrified as anything, even to the point of being snooty to Sir Richard Carlisle. Having said that, the main plot of Downton, the one all the other plots are latched on to, is how Matthew faces up to his inheritance, and how his romance - now marriage - to the present Earl's daughter Lady Mary will work out. Just because I (normally) don't fall in love with heroes doesn't mean I don't appreciate the way they keep things together. After all, you can't have David Copperfield without David Copperfield. No, you really can't.

New novels by favourite authors This is the up-side of having authors like Morgan and Fforde on one-book-a-year-contracts (well, I assume they are, anyway). From Fforde, what I wish for most - as always - is another Thursday Next novel. It is greedy of me, because we had one this year - The Woman who Died a Lot. Wonderful read as always, but sadly there were no BookWorld outings this time. Not even a visit from the Emperor Zhark. So, next time, some fiction-fun please, preferably not all relating to the Dark Reading Matter - I'd like adventures in/about books that are actually read. I want some more!

More Doctor Who Of course. And stop splitting the series up - send it in one go, so I can get proper whole-series box sets.

Sweden doing really well in the Eurovision Song Contest but not necessarily winning again - I don't think we can afford it. And, naturally, I hope that we put on "a fantastic show".
  
            

torsdag 6 december 2012

And now for the Dark Side - Gashford and Sir John

"[T]his man, who has crawled and crept through life, wounding the hands he licked and biting those he fawned upon"...

Oooh. He licks hands. And then wounds them. Only methaphorically, but even so! What promising representative of the villain fraternity is this? Answer: Mr Gashford (we never learn his first name), the oily and entirely fictional secretary of Lord George Gordon in Barnaby Rudge. As the quote above suggests, he's a great fawner and manipulates his naive employer effortlessly: one of his  tricks is to be "caught out" praising Lord George to himself while supposedly under the impression that the lord was sleeping. He is a hypocrite, who affects mildness while egging the Gordon rioters on, especially his own little band of trusted helpers. Even Maypole Hugh, who is no fool, is taken in by such strategies as Gashford's "nothing" speech, containing gems such as "When one of them was struck down by a daring hand, and I saw confusion and dismay in all their faces, I would have had you do nothing - just what you did, in short". His manner is described by one of his minions as "so awful sly". He foreshadows other Dickensian villains of the same embittered, upwardly-mobile type. Like Carker, he "smiles as if for practice". Like Uriah, he is "angularly made, high-shouldered, bony, and ungraceful". According to his enemy Geoffrey Haredale's account (from which the quote about the hand-licking is taken), Gashford seduced his benefactor's daughter, married her, and then broke her heart "with cruelty and stripes". This is the kind of proceeding both Uriah and Carker would heartily approve of (except for the stripes bit, which is a bit unsubtle when there are more cunning ways of making a girl miserable).

Gashford should, in short, be close to being my ideal baddie. And yet, and yet... He doesn't really come alive. He's more a collection of admirably villainous characteristics than a real character. We never really learn what makes him tick. He's not quite as much of a join-the-dots-villain as Bitzer in Hard Times - once you've made up answers to all the open questions about Bitzer's motivation, chances are you'll have ended up with a completely new character - but all the same, there are mysteries about the way Gashford acts, and not because Dickens means him to be mysterious (like Tulkinghorn), but more, one feels, because Dickens didn't really care that much about him as a human being. Why does Gashford encourage the riots? What has he to gain from them? Why does he hate Haredale so much - is it merely because Haredale humiliates him publicly by denouncing him and striking him down, or has Haredale crossed him in his past (of which he knows so much) as well? Why would Gashford go so far as to try and abduct Haredale's niece Emma, a girl he's most likely never set eyes upon? The author's answer would perhaps be an irritated "Why? Why? Because he's a total bastard!" But that just isn't good enough.

And so, for once, the most enjoyable villain in a Dickens novel is the dandy rather than the social climber. Sir John Chester (Mr Chester until about half-way through the book, but the title suits him) is marvellous fun, and somehow completely different from other Dickensian dandy villains such as Steerforth, Henry Gowan and Harthouse. Yes, Sir John is of high birth, disdainful of those more plebeian than he is and physically lazy, but unlike the often listless gentlemen mentioned above, he keeps his mind active. He has two goals: his own comfort, to be brought about by pimping his son to an heiress, and revenge on Haredale, whom he dislikes (plausibly enough) because he, Sir John, has done Haredale wrong in the past. Sir John pursues these goals with a single-mindedness and cunning that would honour the most diligent bourgeois villain in the Carker mould. And he has great style. Because of the nature of the good characters in Barnaby Rudge and their weakness for moral platitudes, Sir Johns runs rings around them without breaking into a sweat. Haredale's boorishness, Edward Chester's honourable speeches, Gabriel Varden's uprightness - they are all made to look sligthly ridiculous by the worldly and sham-amiable Sir John. When Haredale thunders: "Mark me [...] If any man believes [...] that I , in word or deed, or in the wildest dream, ever entertained remotely the idea of Emma Haredale's favouring the suit of anyone who was akin to you [...] he lies", Sir John responds blithely: "it's extremely manly, and really very generous in you, to meet me in this unreserved and handsome way. Upon my word, those are exactly my sentiments, only expressed with much more force and power than I could use". Try beating the wits of a man who can dress an insult up as praise as well as that. It can't be done - Sir John has to be brought down with violence at the end.

I was going to dwell a little on the likeability of Maypole Hugh - the most sensible rioter you are ever likely to meet, and fond of Barnaby, too - but I see I've already gone on at some length about the Barnaby baddies. Time, I think, for a little lie-down Sir John-style, maybe with a mug of hot chocolate. Too bad I don't have Lord Chesterfield's letters in the house for perusal.            

onsdag 28 november 2012

Sweet Barnaby (shame about the other good guys)

How very vexing. I've seen the whole series three of Downton Abbey now, but because of Swedish Television's scheduling, my fellow Swedes won't be finished watching it until Christmas - which means, for the sake of loyalty, I'll have to postpone any further blogging about it until after the Christmas special (ages away). Maybe it's just as well - a Downton blog post at this stage would probably just turn into a list of twenty-odd more or less good excuses for rooting for a dolt (sterling acting; O'Brienishly manipulative script; hormonal imbalance on part of villain-loving viewer - that's three already). Come the new year, I may be in a more reasonable state of mind. Or not.

So, moving on to something completely different. For the past weeks, I've been rereading Barnaby Rudge. I thought it moved a bit slowly the first time I read it, and I was interested to see whether I'd matured and gained some patience since last time. The answer is, not really. It's a novel that's big on atmosphere but a bit short on pace. The Gordon Riots, which form the backdrop of the second half of the book, slow things down considerably. The truth is a little of angry-crowd-in-fire-scenes go a very long way with me, especially as Dickens insists on embellishing them with long, semicolon-full sentences. Yes, they contain powerful images, but there is only so much of those you can take in, and anyway I can't say I care that much. I want to get on with the story. After all, if I wanted to read up on the Gordon Riots, I'd probably choose a more trustworthy source that the opinionated Dickens.

All the same, even if you're not really into angry-mob scenes as told by a shocked model citizen, there is much in Barnaby Rudge to enjoy. Barnaby himself is an acquaintance worth making. The Wise Fool is one of my least favourite stock characters normally, but with Barnaby the conceit works because he's not such a fool as all that. He's not "wanting" as people used to say; his wits are over-heated rather than slow. A madman with a surfeit of imagination and a certain instinct for what is right - though it leads him astray more than once - he easily engages the reader's sympathy, not least when he's bravely but wrong-headedly fighting for a misguided cause.

A shame the characters who are in their senses aren't always as compelling. I seem to remember an Amazon review complaining that the villains in Barnaby Rudge weren't really up to Dickens's usual standards. In my view, the villains do their job well enough: it's the good characters, aside from Barnaby, who are the problem. The two young heroes are ciphers, especially Edward Chester (Joe Willet shows a little more spirit, but he's not what you'd call a memorable personality). Edward's love Emma Haredale is just as colourless. Dolly Varden, the other heroine, at least has some humanising flaws - she's a flirty piece - but if you are a woman, and straight, it's hard to share Dickens's cooing admiration of her charms. I felt more than a little sympathy with her mother's latently malevolent (and plain) maid, Miss Miggs, who has no time for her young mistress. Emma's gloomy, hard-done-by uncle Geoffrey Haredale stands out by his uningratiating manners; given that he is such a bear it's not so strange that various villains should take against him (especially as they're of the Dickensian, easily-slighted kind). Barnaby's suffering mother is such a model of hand-wringing selflessness it's almost ridiculous. And don't get me started on the awful John Grueby, staunch British-bulldog servant of the deluded Lord George Gordon. One of my main pleasures when I'm in a how-would-I-adapt-this-novel-for-television fantasising mood and am thinking of Barnaby Rudge is to imagine how I would cut out John Grueby completely from the story.

The main good character besides Barnaby, Gabriel Varden, is one of two examples in the book of a tried and tested Dickensian recipe for a character not working out quite as well as it usually does. Varden shares many characteristics with famous good Dickens characters such as Mr Pickwick. He is good-natured; he is generous; he is quick to forgive; he likes to spread good cheer wherever he goes. The phrase P.G. Wodehouse used about Dickensian characters - "yeasty benevolence" - springs to mind. And yet somehow he doesn't quite "take". I couldn't warm to him, and yes, I do warm occasionally to good characters in Dickens as well as the bad ones. Part of the problem is Varden's role in the story. The tale of how a locksmith refused to help the rioting crowd pick the lock to Newgate was what inspired Dickens to the idea of Barnaby Rudge in the first place; the trouble is, once we get to the Newgate bit, we want the prison to be taken. Why, Barnaby's in there! Gabriel Varden's refusal to comply with the mob's demands doesn't inspire the thrill of admiration for his courage which it's probably supposed to.

The other character who follows a Dickensian recipe but isn't a whole-hearted success is Gashford, a typical fawning Dickens villain on the make who somehow does not attain the dizzying heights of Uriah or Carker. But more of him and the other Barnaby Rudge villains some other time.

torsdag 15 november 2012

Tom, Tom, turn around - you can't beat O'Brien

All right, so it's not the most shocking or sad thing to happen in the third series of Downton Abbey. However, I admit that I'm still grieving for the demise of the Old Villain Alliance. Miss O'Brien the spiteful lady's maid and Thomas the wicked valet (formerly footman) have fallen out.

As I've purchased the DVDs, I have been able to cheat and watch ahead of other Swedish fans of Downton. I'm now on episode five while Swedish Television are showing episode three this weekend. I'll be a little careful with spoilers, if not overmuch.

The baddie falling-out already started in episode one, though. Poor old Thomas. Like Errol Flynn (according to a famous quote), you know where you are with him: he lets you down every time. I like the idea of a villainous footman/valet so much that I've always been inclined to cut Thomas a lot more slack than he deserves. But he is an idiot. If you think he could not possibly do anything stupider than not checking the goods he plans to sell as a war racketeer before sinking all of his savings in them, think again. Suddenly, he picks a quarrel with O'Brien, and for what? Because she brings in her nephew to the household as footman and wants him to advance to the position as valet eventually. Thomas is miffed because it took two whole series for him to become a valet proper, and he doesn't want anyone else to manage the jump in just one episode. Is that a good reason to antagonise someone who has been a good friend, and is known to make a formidable enemy? No, I should think not indeed.

Clearly, Fellowes couldn't resist the temptation of manufacturing a quarrel between his two head villains so they can tear each other's throats out. I wish he had resisted. A villain alliance that stands the test of time is a rare and beautiful thing, and I really enjoyed this one, as I've commented on before. What's more, it's an uneven fight. There is absolutely no contest: of course Miss O'Brien is going to win. She was the brains in the Downton villain club from the start, while Thomas followed her orders and quite often messed them up. He is officially toast. Not that he needs O'Brien to get into trouble. I can see the new Thomas Catastrophe on the horizon already, and it ain't gonna be pretty. One can always hope that the accident-prone Tom realises the pickle he's in, gets down on all fours and grovels to O'Brien before it's too late. But I'm not betting on it.

Things aren't helped by the fact that the cause of the unrest - O'Brien's nephew Alfred - is such a clod, the point of whom I still struggle to see. I think Fellowes is trying to set him up as a goodie, but the only worthwhile thing he has done so far is to say a nice thing about Edith at a time when it mattered. He spends most of his time flirting with a pretty new kitchen maid while being oblivious to the obviously yearning Daisy. Somehow, I don't think that will win him many viewers' hearts.

Otherwise, Downton delivers its usual pleasant mix of intrigues up- and downstairs. There are a few mysteries. For instance, why is everyone of the opinion that Sir Anthony Strallan is "too old" for Edith? One, as she herself points out, there aren't that many young fellows left after the war; two, in the first series the Granthams were quite happy at the prospect of marrying off any one of their daughters to Strallan (well, maybe not Sybil); three, he's not that old, is he? He's played by sweet-seeming Robert Bathurst, who was the yuppie in Cold Feet. What, are Helen Baxendale, James Nesbitt and Hermione Norris thought of as ancient too, now? And what happened to the threat of Sir Richard Carlisle? Did he decide not to print the scandalous story about Mary, and in that case, shouldn't someone mention it and give him some credit for his decision?

Well, Downton wouldn't be Downton if you couldn't pick holes in it. It's a pity though, to come back to the theme of villainy, that dastardly plans in Downton tend to be so - well, petty. The corrupt screw and drug-dealing prisoner who are harassing Mr Bates are no better than the baddie servants in this regard. Say what you like about dour Sir Richard, he was at least an adult. He didn't hide his Lordship's shirts, and had he been caught out in a drug racket he wouldn't whine "it's all his doing" about a burly innocent he'd been trying to frame. Come back, Carlisle, all is forgiven.

lördag 10 november 2012

Doctor addiction (contd.)

"I thought you had run out of ways to make me sick. But... hello again. You think hatred is beautiful?"

Yes, the Doctor is back! And facing off the Daleks in the very first episode - whose head bozo calmly points out, as an answer to the comment above, that this strange concept of beauty is probably why they haven't killed off the Doc long ago. This week's highlight has undoubtedly been the first five episodes of Doctor Who series seven, all of which I watched in three nights (I'd have made it in two, only I came home late on Monday).

Much is the same, which is remarkable in itself. I and I think many others had expected the Steven Moffat take-over from Russell T. Davies as head script-writer would mean less plot holes: after all, the Moffat episodes during the Davies years tended to be tightly plotted ("Blink" above all). But no, series five, six and seven have contained as many plot holes the size of the Doctor's lost home planet Gallifrey as the Davies era, if not more. Whereas Davies sensibly had one overall story arc per series which was wound up in a grand finale in the two or three final series episodes, Moffat's has a complicated continuing story-arc where some things, but not everything, are cleared up in the series finale. It is frustrating, because you never know if a puzzling plot-line will be dropped completely or explained maybe twenty episodes later. It's a relief to read an article like this one in the Telegraph, which sums up the questions a poor bewildered viewer might be asking her/himself right now (don't read it unless you've already watched the latest episodes - spoilers...). YES, I wonder about the Clerics too! I'm glad it's not just me.

On the plus side, the wit, cleverness, warmth and sheer madness of the Davies era are still present, too. After having (yet again) rewatched series one to four, I must confess that I'm conventional enough to think that, on the whole, Tennant's stint as the Doctor was probably the best. Not just because of Tennant himself, though he was brilliant - all the Doctors I've seen have been good - but because I like the Tenth Doctor's adventures and, above all, companions the best. I've never really warmed to Amy as much as to Donna and Martha (and, occasionally, Rose). But for all that, series five to seven are full of high points, and few programmes - if any - can match Doctor Who for quality in my book.

So why is it considered to be a TV series for children? I've never really got my head round this. One of the reasons that Amy had a hard time winning my heart is because the youthful Karen Gillan, who plays her, was roped in as new companion at the same time as Matt Smith (still in his twenties back then) became the new Doctor. And why? Because, supposedly, "kids" relate better to younger protagonists, which makes it desirable to pick companions who look like they've just finished school.

Now, for fast-moving, clever dialogue, Doctor Who is only out-done by The West Wing. How is it possible that British kids get all this? Are they all potential Mensa members? Of course, it's wonderful that growing generations watch and enjoy a program as intellectually testing as this. But when the kid audience of Doctor Who is hauled in either to explain a market move, as above, or as an argument when critics try to cut down the series to size, it is a bit annoying if you happen to be a Who-addict in her thirties. "Its just a children's programme after all". No, it's not!

And, incidentally, script-writers have shown precious little consideration for their supposed core audience of "kids" in the past. There are Doctor Who episodes that can be traumatising even for the toughest child. The "The Impossible Planet" two-parter in series two was way, way, way too scary. The "Silence in the Library" two-parter was, in a way, sneakier, because while "The Impossible Planet" tackled a primal fear for children and adults alike, "Silence in The Library" played on childhood-specific fears. Never mind the flesh-eating shadows. Far more disturbing are scenes where a little girl is told that her nightmares are real, while what she thinks of as real life is a lie, and where she accidentally zaps her concerned daddy out of existence in a fit of pique. "Midnight" is a psychological chiller which, with its un-Doctorish pessimistic view on human nature, would have been more at home in a Torchwood series. I could go on at some length. "The God Complex"? "The Girl who Waited"? Strewth, "The Doctor's Wife"? Is this really the kind of stuff you sit your children in front of after they've grown too old for Bob the Builder?

Child-friendly or not, plot-holey or not, morally erratic or not (in one episode, the Doctor cheerfully sends a mass-murdering pirate-merchant to his death, the next - the very next - he agonises during a whole episode about sacrificing a baddie's life to save a small town), I love this series. I sometimes think I love it because I can find things to criticise. I'm reminded of  Streatfeild's two dons in Ballet Shoes, who happily find plenty to disagree with in a mounting of A Midsummer Night's Dream "or they would not have enjoyed themselves at all".

torsdag 1 november 2012

Bond and Snow White

Yes, I know... Not the greatest blog subject in history. But it's been one of those weeks without any particular cultural highlight. Instead, making use of my local DVD rental's rent-more-than-one-film-and keep-them-for-a-week-deal, I rented A Quantum of Solace  - to get up to speed on Bond's development, with a view to possibly watching Skyfall at the cinema - and Snow White and the Huntsman. I'd already seen Mirror, Mirror and was interested to see what another take on the famous fairy-tale would look like.

When it comes to Bond, I know I'm not a connoisseur. Most of the Bond films I've seen are those I watched when I was still a kid or a teenager, which explains why I feel more warmly towards the flippant side of these films than most. I must be the only one in existence who doesn't double up with embarrassment over Jaws's love interest in Moonraker (why shouldn't he have a girlfriend? At least his redemption means Bond doesn't have to bump him off). I've never felt any need for Bond films to be "hard" and "gritty". Suave, non-thuggish, inner-depths-free Roger Moore was the kind of Bond I liked, as was Pierce Brosnan, especially in Goldeneye.

So, to get to the obvious point, Daniel Craig's Bond doesn't work for me. Yes, those icy blue eyes are attractive, but they don't make you forgive him everything. His looks and manner are definitely not the ones of the Bond of my girlhood. He is a grim, weather-beaten, psychologically damaged muscle-man, not a worldly-wise, witty, vodka martini-sipping gentleman spy. The troubling thing is, Craig may very well be closer to the "real" Bond, the one in Ian Fleming's books (which I haven't read), than the tamer version I've grown up with. I recall how shocked I was when Sean Connery's Bond locked a baddie in the sauna and turned up the heat - after said baddie had tried to do the same to him - in the early Bond film Thunderball, and how Bond actually chuckled with sadistic delight. But wait, he's the hero, isn't he supposed to be a bit more decent than the bad guys? I mean, boiling someone to death, who does that? A Quantum of Solace has a corresponding moment towards the end. Yes, the head villain is ultra-creepy (a bit my type, actually) and ruthless and bent on world domination and has killed one of Bond's squeezes etc. etc. Still, the way Bond handles him - again, who does that? I begin to suspect that were it not for the fact that Bond villains are so unbelievably wicked, there would be no reason to root for him at all. I'm in two minds about watching Skyfall on cinema now.

So, from Bond to Snow White. Get this - the evil queen in Snow White and the Huntsman has a nasty, white-haired brother sidekick. And I still thought the film was yawn-inducingly tedious.

I realise that fantasy - which is what most fairy-tale films resemble most nowadays - is a tricky genre. The attempts at humour in fantasy films (Two Towers, anyone?) can be so woeful that I can see why someone would want to dispense with light relief alltogether and go for straight-faced seriousness all the way. But the end result? Rain-soaked characters spouting earnest twaddle instead of getting on with the plot. Blimey, how dull. Character-building scenes are no good  when you really couldn't care less about the characters. It looks like a good idea, on paper, to big up the role of the huntsman a bit - in the original tale, Snow White does owe her life to him, and he takes quite a risk - but here, he is a dreary, wounded-macho specimen without much to recommend him. Snow White drifts around with a dreamlike, destiny-ridden look on her face (for the record, I thought the evil queen was fairer). The Prince (well, dukelet actually) is at a bit of a loose end, and who can blame him, when there's a rival for the hero part knocking about? We don't even get to know which of them Snow White picks, which some reviewers have seen as something very positive and indicative of the fact that she is a Person In Her Own Right. Is she? Could we please stop pretending that this moony girl will ever be the new Elizabeth I?

In the battle of the Snow Whites, Mirror, Mirror wins, though it can be very silly and the script could have been a great deal sharper (it's still Oscar Wilde compared with the Huntsman, though). It's got great costumes and Julia Roberts having a ball as the wicked stepmother. OK, so she doesn't have a nasty brother sidekick, but then one can't have everything.    

torsdag 25 oktober 2012

Toffy delight

Julian Fellowes has delivered again. No, I'm not referring to the third series of Downton Abbey - it doesn't start in Sweden until November - but to his novel Past Imperfect, which I finished a week ago and enjoyed hugely. It dates from the era pre-Downton, like the other Fellowes novel Snobs. I had considered buying one of them for some time, but was held back by bourgeois misgivings. It is no secret that Fellowes is a champion of the English upper class, and he has gone on record saying  (with some justice) that toff-bashing is the only prejudice which is not chastised by society in general. Good for him, but what does a man like that make of the kind of people I admire - the energetic doers of the middle class? Isn't  there a risk that he would - well, sneer?

I don't know if I'm typical of other members of the middle class, but deep down I have a lingering fear that those above me on the social ladder sneer at me, and those below me want to kill me, or at the very least rob me. Above, there's Sir Percy Blakeney, baronet; below, there's the wheezing, bourgeois-girl-throttling miner grandpa from the film Germinal (no, I haven't read the book, nor will I). And while I have to confess that wheezing miner grandpas are probably thin on the ground, my mistrust of aristocrats - and gentry - is harder to shift. I have wondered from time to time if I do toffs an injustice, the English ones at least. There's Josephine Tey's Inspector Grant claiming that the English nobility never looked down their noses at anyone. There's Bertie Wooster and his pals in P.G. Wodehouse's novels, who are delighted with American millionaires and their daughters and never seem to spare a thought for the way they eat their peas. Maybe the picture of the English aristocracy as disdainful dandies conjured up by characters such as Sir Percy, various Regency Romance bucks, even sometimes Lord Peter Wimsey - all, let's not forget, meant to be heroic - is quite simply wrong? Maybe they're all an unaffected and jolly lot who like a hunt now and then but who couldn't care less about what you call the smallest room in the house?

Then on the other hand, no, I don't think it's quite that simple. The upper-crust world described by Fellowes in Past Imperfect does little to dispel my wariness. It's not that Fellowes is in any way mean to his own kind. He is loyal to his caste and fights their corner. His upper-class characters are for the most part well-rounded, often likeable, and a welcome change from Midsomer Murder-like grotesques. You want them to do well. At the same time, not even Fellowes can absolve them from the sin of snobbery (in the modern sense). It is snobbery of the worst kind directed at the middle-class interloper of the '68 Season, Damian Baxter, that embitters him and causes him to lash out against amongst others the novel's hero. It is snobbery that makes his lashing-out as harmful as it is, with the hero feeling resentful over the repercussions forty years down the line. Snobbery (and, it must be said, chippiness) needlessly poison the atmosphere between the book's protagonists, and Fellowes, far from gushing over snobbish behaviour like the baroness Orczy and her ilk, is severely against it. The unnamed hero does his best to fight tendencies of haughtiness in himself, not always with success. You marvel at his attempt to understand why we ordinary non-high-born mortals want to dine "early", that is, sometime before eight or half past eight in the evening. Er, because we're hungry.

All the same, Past Imperfect leaves one feeling quite toff-friendly at the end and willing to extend a conciliating hand. Heck, these are people, not monocled ogres. Even the poised aristo babe mellows on closer acquaintance, much like Lady Mary in Downton. My fear of sneering is still present and correct, though. There are, after all, exchanges such as this:

"Did Damian really say 'pleased to meet you'?"
"Apparently. It just shows how nervous he must have been."

What's wrong with "pleased to meet you"? What? So wrong even a social climber would only say it if he was "nervous"? It's this mindless tabooing of certain phrases, words and gestures just to trip up us who are not in the know and brand us "vulgar" that makes me see red. Maybe I've got more in common with grandpa miner after all?          

torsdag 11 oktober 2012

To care and not to care

When reading The Secret History some time ago, I was as I've mentioned earlier afraid that I'd caught revieweritis and that this was the reason why I didn't lose myself in the book at first. Lately, I've had the opposite problem: I'm reading like a teenager, caring overmuch and engaging myself in the fates of minor characters. It happened with Bring Up the Bodies, and then again when I read Erin Morgenstern's The Night Circus. This seemed the perfect antidote to Bring Up the Bodies to start with. The atmosphere of the said circus (which is more like a mysterious fun fair really, which is fine by me: no clowns and no treacherous dancing horses!) was the main thing, rather than the characters or the fairy-tale-like plot. I initially thought about blogging about the book under the heading "Not quite in love with a fairy-tale".

But then the emotional charge of the novel was ratcheted up. At the end, I really wanted everything to turn out well. Not for the sake of the circus: it sounds like a truly great night out, but everything has its day, and there's little use getting obsessed by even the most magical public entertainment. Nor for the sake of the two protagonists, Celia and Marco, fighting a magic duel on behalf of two scary magicians. Celia is all right, but Marco is a pretty callous piece of work, and they both appear too wrapped up in each other - yes, of course they fall in love eventually - to fully register the unhappiness their manipulations may cause other people. Also, their naïve notion that once their competition is over, all will be well for the loser as well as for the winner and everyone will go out and have cake is irritating (like the scary magicians would let that happen). The reason I wanted things to work out was for the sake of the characters on the sideline whose lives are turned upside down by all the magicking: Marco's hapless ex-but-doesn't-realise-it girlfriend; the farm boy with a crush on a circus girl who gets saddled with a lot of responsibility very fast; and, lastly, the flamboyant circus director Chandresh Christophe Lefèvre who get suckered into hiring Marco as his assistant by magic seduction. I never thought I'd warm to Chandresh as he comes across as rather a pretentious show-off at the beginning, but when a poor chap not only has his creativity halted and his memory shot to pieces at regular intervals but also has to nurse an unrequited passion for years on end, one can't help pitying him. Marco, needless to say, cares even less for his employer's feelings than for his dumped girlfriend's.

Authors have good reason to be miffed at readers who react like this. Minor characters are, as often as not, there to keep the plot moving, and they shouldn't be the reason why one gets disenchanted with the main protagonists. After all, what are Chandresh and Mark Smeaton to me, or I to them, that I should weep for them? One can imagine authors feeling like John Gielgud reportedly did at one time (if I remember the anecdote correctly) when an actor asked him about the "motivation" for his minor role, and he was tempted to answer: "to be a feed for Hamlet". On the other hand, you could see it as a compliment to an author when a minor character of his/hers manages to engage a reader: it should certainly beat the reader not caring at all.

Anyway, it is quite a relief to be reading Past Imperfect by Julian Fellowes (of Downton fame) at the moment, a gentle and amusing read which I don't think is in danger of making me care too much for its characters. Then again, I could be wrong: the plot's driving force (estranged friend of the mildly toffy hero) is after all an embittered social climber, and I do tend to have a weakness for those.                          

torsdag 27 september 2012

"Spoilers..."

There have been a lot of bookish blog entries lately, for the simple reason that there hasn't been much else to blog about. Yes, I've seen a film or two (My Week with Marilyn - but try spinning out the theme "I completely agree with Laurence Olivier" for a whole entry), but telly-wise: practically nothing. Oh, all right, Merlin season four started so unobtrusively three weeks ago that I missed the first part, and it still delivers, though I'm afraid it's starting to run a little out of steam. But otherwise, I've been reduced to casting envying glances in the direction of Great Britain, where they are currently showing or have just shown 1) the third series of Downton Abbey 2) Parade's End, which sounds frightfully upmarket but promising 3) last but not least, the very latest episodes of Doctor Who! The worst thing is that I can't even revel in the reviews, at least not for the last-mentioned show. Doctor Who reviews are, ironically if you think of River Song's tag line, full to bursting with spoilers.

TV reviews generally seem to have a sort of amnesty where plot reveals are concerned. I held back from reading the reviews on the last episode of Downton Abbey series two until I'd seen it, for instance, and that proved to be a smart move, because boy did they go to town on the solving of Matthew's... predicament. Nevertheless, Downton is not a very twist-sensitive series. With Doctor Who, on the other hand, the plot twists are important, and being surprised by them is supposed to be part of the fun. So why, oh why do reviewers have to reveal them, and in such detail too? Time and again I've been seduced into reading a TV feature about a currently running series of Doctor Who and found that the writer has given vital information away. The worst example was a review of the episode "Amy's Choice" with a line going roughly like this: "X (=absolutely vital plot twist) came as a genuine surprise". I'm happy for you mate, but now I won't be genuinely surprised by it, will I? "Amy's Choice" remains a great episode - few actors do understated nastiness so well as Toby Jones - but I'd have liked to have watched it once without knowing the twist.

Otherwise, it's an unwritten rule of reviewing that you shouldn't give too much away. Amazon are hard as nails about it (they didn't publish one of my reviews once because it gave away that the book had a happy ending - duh, it was a novel by Dickens). But with TV, it seems to be another matter, presumably because TV reviewers suppose that everyone has already watched the show they're discussing, so now they can have a good natter about it. Surely, it's not only we foreigners who have reason to feel miffed by this attitude? What about those people who watch the programmes online, or wherever, using the "play" service?

"Pot, meet kettle" you might think. True, I'm not too fussed about giving away plots myself - compare my blabbing about Through A Glass Darkly with the Amazon reviews, where Roger's unorthodox love interest is kept a big secret. And I do see how being secretive restricts you from discussing a book/film/TV programme as freely as you would dearly wish. But this is partly what blogs, web forums, book clubs etc.  are for. There's also the Long Analysing Culture Article which should have free reins to reveal all about the author/phenomenon it's treating with impunity (except, perhaps, who did it in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd). But proper newspaper reviews are a different story. I guess reviewers must be relieved when they are set to write about a classic play/book/film, because they can give away as much as they like about the plot without anyone going: "Wait a minute, Hamlet dies? Lizzy marries Mr Darcy?" Even if you don't know what happens in a classic, it is quietly understood that you shouldn't grumble if reviewers take it as read that you do.

But what about those who read reviews about something they have seen/read, and really would like to know as much as possible about the reviewer's own thoughts on vital plot matters (and I often fall into this category myself)? The Times has an online section I haven't explored yet called The Spoiler Club. If it is what it sounds like then it's a terrific idea - an area where you can read analyses unfettered by the need to keep plot developments secret. Whereas if you haven't seen/read what's discussed there, you are warned to steer well clear. If this is not what this section's about at all, someone else should be giving the idea a try.

But "X came as a genuine surprise"? Surely that's just plain mean?             

onsdag 19 september 2012

The villain as hero

Phew. I've finished Bring Up the Bodies, and I can certainly understand why Hilary Mantel, in the end, decided to break off after the Boleyn affair and save the rest of Cromwell's career for a later novel. You really do need some time to digest his behaviour before you're ready to engage in what happens next to Mantel's hard-hitting protagonist. But at least now we know the excuse he had for (on Henry's orders) sending six people to their death on trumped-up charges.

There isn't any.

It came as quite a shock to me. I was counting on understanding Cromwell's point of view better after reading this book. Instead, the opposite happened. Big baby Henry wants out of his marriage, Cromwell's there to help, and at the same time he wants to get his own back on a couple of courtiers who were mean to the dear departed Wolsey... Is this really it? That's not nearly good enough, and to make things worse, Cromwell allies himself with the Catholic groupings at court to achieve his aims. How clever is that? I can hear the thump of a Master Secretary being dropped by his new mates even now.

What disturbed me even more was my own squeamish reaction to Cromwell's dealings. I found the scenes where he uses mental torture to get a confession out of poor Mark Smeaton deeply unpleasant. Now why? I mean, these scenes are deeply unpleasant even objectively speaking, but I've admired villains who've been up to far worse things than scaring a dandyish lute-player out of his senses. Compared to, say, Scarpia in Tosca, Cromwell's a pussycat. But while I hardly spared a thought for Cavaradossi's cracking ribs on the rack, the stratagem of locking Mark in a room with a "ghost" really gets to me.

I think part of the answer lies in the fact that I've got difficulties with the "villain as hero" wheeze. From the top of my head, I can't think of a single instance where it has actually worked for me. It should be a dream come true, shouldn't it? And it feels desperately shallow only to fancy villains when you're not supposed to, letting your reaction be led by their function in their plot rather than by their wonderfully sinister personality. But somehow, the moment the villain moves to the centre of the plot and the events are filtered entirely through his consciousness, I feel myself backing away. That's why I was never a fan of the Francis Urquhart series, in spite of the late lamented Fouché-lookalike Ian Richardson in the main role. I can't quite explain it - perhaps the lack of a moralising hero or narrator somehow forces the reader, very unwillingly, to do his/her own moralising. You watch the villain behaving very badly indeed without any real sense of compunction, and you wonder: what, am I supposed to cheer? To find it funny? To think "Ha, serves the little squirt right"? But this isn't funny, this is wrong.

It's a sad thing daring to contemplate even for a moment that though villains are often clever, charming, entertaining, uncomfortable-truth-telling, undeniably hard-done by and a myriad of other things they are seldom right. And as long as we don't have full disclosure of their thoughts, we can fondly imagine that they are, somehow, aware of the fact themselves.

This could be the reason why I feel more comfortable with shifty Cromwell in Henry VIII or fanatical monk-bashing Cromwell in The Tudors than with Mantel's somewhat smug Cromwell who's in denial about having done anything villainous whatsoever. Still, he did make sure that Anne's "suitors" got killed cleanly with an axe instead of being hung, drawn and quartered, even commoner Mark, because "when he was under my roof I offered him mercy, and this is all the mercy I can deliver". What a nice man.                 

onsdag 5 september 2012

Bankable good reads

Oversized paperbacks, of the kind that's often published now instead of/at the same time as the hardback, are a bit useless. They are just as heavy and awkward to carry around as a hardback, but they don't have the hardback glamour, the kind that proclaims: "look at me, I'm a real book lover". And yet I've bought two of these oversized monsters lately: the already mentioned The Secret Life of William Shakespeare by Jude Morgan and, in spite of my firm intention of waiting for the (real, packable) paperback, Bring Up the Bodies  by Hilary Mantel.

So why do it? Lack of patience plays a part, of course, but another factor is the longing for a read you know will be good, a sure thing. Morgan is one of the surest things going. I know I've said earlier that I prefer his Regency Romances to his more serious based-on-a-true-story historical fiction, but I'm starting to change my mind. True, in the more serious stuff you sometimes come across a somewhat too deep-seeming passage or a bewildering metaphor, but most of the time the author is spot-on, and he has a convincing quality that makes you think "yes, I bet X (=historical personage) was just like that". I gobbled up Secret Life in no time and wished it had been longer, especially as the action ends a bit abruptly.

I normally approve of Morgan's endings - for instance, he humanely chose to end The Taste of Sorrow with Charlotte Brontë contentedly married to Arthur Bell Nicholls instead of with her death - but here, I would have preferred him to go on, even if it did mean that he had to end at a less harmonious time in his subjects' life. Morgan tells part of the story from Mrs Shakespeare's, Anne's, point of view, and you have a feeling that he has an earnest wish for the Shakespeares' marriage to work out (which might explain why his Will is more than usually uxorious, only playing away after his marriage has broken down, if not quite irretrievably). When the book ends, it looks like the couple will be able to solve their differences, which is sweet in a way, but I mean - Will wasn't even done writing yet! I can't help feeling that there are more important things than his getting on with the little woman, who in spite of Morgan's best efforts still comes across as a bit of a stick-in-the-mud. And what about Ben Jonson, another important character in the book? He's left high and dry after suffering a great personal loss. I can think of more uplifting places to leave off a story, though Morgan's Jonson is so unshakeably self-confident you assume he'll bounce back from anything.

I realise that I, as a reader, may be partly responsible for the fact that Secret Life ends when it does. Morgan is probably one of those authors on a one-book-a-year contract, which means he can't go on spinning a yarn forever. And who demands such a punishing schedule from our favourite authors? We readers, that's who. Still, he could solve the problem by writing a sequel or, if necessary, a trilogy, which is what Mantel is doing with her Cromwell novels.

After Secret Life, I tried a historical novel with a Dickens theme, that turned out to be so flat I gave up in despair after only 50 pages. Then, I tried a novel by Joanna Trollope, The Men and the Girls - this one was well written, but not what you want to curl up with after a stressful day at work. The last thing you want to read about, when trying to forget your mundane but annoying problems, is other peoples' mundande but annoying problems. Fine for the lunch hour, but not for the bedside table. Enter oversized paperback number two, Bring Up the Bodies.

Oh, the bliss of reading something you actively enjoy. So far, I like Bring Up the Bodies even more than Mantel's first Cromwell novel Wolf Hall. Maybe it's because there's less ground to cover - only Anne Boleyn's fall from grace and the period leading up to it. I do miss Wolsey - long dead, but still fondly remembered by Cromwell - but bitchy Anne is always good fun. I can't say, this far, that the novel is as much of a white-wash of Thomas Cromwell as has been claimed. Yes, it does make a good deal of his good points - model father, kind employer, oh, and he has a social conscience too - but you still sense the full extent of his ruthlessness. And on the subject of Wolsey: Cromwell carries a grudge against all sorts of luckless bit-players who had anything to do with the cardinal's disgrace, but in the end, who carries the largest part of the blame? King Henry himself. So where's the seething revenge plot meant to bring him down?

The sweetest character in Bring Up the Bodies is Cromwell's son Gregory, tender and a bit gullible (though not as much as people think). Hm, hard-nosed dad, softie son - is this a family curse or what?                

måndag 20 augusti 2012

Life and works

After having enjoyed a spot of literary tourism during my holiday (one week still to go, thank Heaven) and having started on Jude Morgan’s latest – The Secret Life of William Shakespeare  – I have reason to ask myself: why are we (people in general, and bookish people in particular) so interested in the lives of famous authors? After all, they often lead pretty unremarkable lives. Shakespeare is a case in point. True, his existence in London must have been mildly interesting, what with belonging to a company of players, getting chummy with a reckless earl, creating a character (Falstaff) who is such a hit with the monarch that she actually requests a sequel (royally commanded fan fiction!) etc. But we know next to nothing about his personality, and for all what we know to the contrary, his plays and poems have nothing whatsoever to do with his “real life”. Jane Austen is another example: I’m sure she herself took the fact that she “never met her Mr Darcy” with equanimity (how do we even know that Austen would have fancied a Mr Darcy?), but the lack of romance in her own life does come as a bit of a disappointment to her devoted readers.  Even a flamboyant author like Dickens cannot hope to live a life that matches his novels in incident (or villain-intensity). So why do we insist on exploring our favourite authors’ lives – why can’t we be content with their works?

I think a lot can be explained by what I call the “passage to Narnia” factor. In the film Shadowlands, a small boy comes to visit C.S. Lewis (I believe it was a relative) and at once runs in search of the famous wardrobe. He finds it, but of course no passage to Narnia. Swallowing his disappointment, he reassures the author that he knew that it was just an ordinary wardrobe, really. This, of course, is perfectly true. But like the boy in the film, we can’t help hoping to find a gateway to the imaginary world of our famous authors, and we think getting closer to their lives will help us. After all, authors do sometimes use bits of their own life in their fiction, don’t they? Who’s to say that Viola, or Mr Darcy, or Uriah Heep never walked the Earth?

Because the primary interest is in the author’s creations, not him/herself, there is something melancholy about literary tourism, at least for my part. A chair that Dickens sat on can, sadly, never have the same apppeal for me as a chair belonging to James Carker, and I’ll never come across one of those because he never existed. And so I find myself having a great deal of sympathy with projects that try to link authors’ lives and works as much as possible. Flights of imagination in biodramas – such as making the foreman of the blacking factory in the TV series Dickens of London into an undeniably Heepian figure – are most welcome. But it can get out of hand. Remember the film Becoming Jane (one of the few Austen-related films I have not been able to sit through)? There, it was hinted that Jane Austen couldn’t possibly have written about love and sexual attraction without having experienced it first-hand. So whatever happened to the author’s imagination, then? As someone correctly and acidly pointed out, no-one presumes that Shakespeare had to murder someone in order to write The Scottish Play.

The greatest part of an author’s imaginary world will, I’m afraid, be available through their work only, and literary characters are for the most part figments of imagination. This doesn’t mean we shouldn’t indulge ourselves with a bit of Narnia-chasing (if Morgan doesn’t go to town on Golden Youth-Dark Lady speculations, I, for one, will think it a lost opportunity). Even if we don’t find the passage to a magic kingdom, finding the wardrobe is nice enough in its way.

tisdag 7 augusti 2012

Holiday bubble

You’d think, wouldn’t you, that a proper four-week Swedish holiday would give one more time to blog, instead of less? Not so – the days are just dreamily flowing away, while I attempt to do as little as possible. A long-planned journey to the south of England (I’ll be avoiding London and Heathrow because of the Olympics crowds) suddenly seems a major project. Fortunately, watching The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel put it all in perspective somewhat.

While on the subject of the Olympics – wasn’t the Opening Ceremony great? Ooh, how I loved those Victorian factory-owners/engineers in their smart suits and top hats, headed by a Kenneth Branagh who was obviously having the time of his life. And those chimneys plunging out of the ground! And the molten iron Olympis Rings! “Pandemonium”? Looked more like heaven to me.

Of course, it was a misrepresentation of history to show pre-industrial Britain as an idyllic place where sheep gambolled about and the sweet rustics had all the time in the world for a game of cricket. The population worked from dusk until dawn and starved in pre-industrial times. With friends like me, though, serious champions of the Industrial Revolution hardly need any enemies, because I can’t help being fascinated by the mythical, sinister way – call it “villain chic” – in which the industrial age is depicted by its detractors. It may not be fair to all those 19th-century men and women (tons of them) concerned with making life easier for the Noble Working Man. But it’s a lot more fun than some balanced, complex view. Shut up, Noble Working Man, and put up another chimney.

My reading has hardly been ambitious since the holidays, or even before then. A Weekend with Mr Darcy by Victoria Connelly fulfilled my need of an uncomplicated happy ending after Through a Glass Darkly. I wasn’t sure about Matt Rees’s Mozart’s Last Aria at first – I couldn’t quite warm to the novel’s narrator, Mozart’s sister Nannerl, who’s looking into her brother’s apparently suspicious death. However, things picked up when a love interest and a suitably formidable minister of police made their entrance. The ending was satisfyingly twisty, there was a terrific character-shows-his-true-villainous-colours-scene, and you’ll be glad to know that poor maligned Antonio Salieri did not do it. In fact he wasn’t even in the frame. The most page-turning holiday read so far, though, was Revenger by Toby Clements, a thriller set in Tudor times and featuring decent spy John Shakespeare (brother of William). The baddies (an increasingly alarming hoodlum and a magnificently foul-mouthed arch-enemy) were rougher than I’m used to but contributed to making the book a cracking good read.

Right now I’m half-way through Death Comes to Pemberley by P.D. James, and I must say I’m a bit disappointed this far. I confidently expected the crime plot to be a whodunnit with Pride and Prejudice characters as the suspects; sadly, though, the novel is more of a police procedural. The victim is not, as we are first led to think, George Wickham but his comrade-in-arms Captain Denny, and Wickham is the chief suspect. But apart from him and possibly Colonel Fitzwilliam (whom James plainly does not like), the Pride and Prejudice characters all have comfortable alibis: the coppers won’t be asking Lady Catherine to help with their inquiries any time soon. Thumbnail sketches of the harsh-but-fair magistrate and the medical expert prove more vivid than the Austen characters. A family of servants is introduced and will probably have some bearing on the case, but though I like Upstairs Downstairs-dramas, I must confess to having zilch interest in this plot-line. If Wickham and/or Denny has caused some domestic upset in the servant household and this proves to be the explanation of the murder, then why drag Pemberley into it at all? The book could in that case just as well have been about another regency estate altogether.

As I enjoy James’s usual prose style, I also thought it unnecessary of her to use a vaguely Austenesque style for this novel. It’s elegant but not as pithy as Austen, and I think it sould have been wiser to use the tried-and-true Jamesian psychological-crime-story-style. The crime story seems to take precedent over the sequel element anyway.   

onsdag 25 juli 2012

The pleasures of objectifying

A worrying change has come over me lately: I'm suddenly more sensitive to male beauty than I used to. When I caught myself spending the best part of an old Midsomer Murders episode thinking "Wow, look at that mad scientist's cheekbones" it started to bother me a bit. What's happening to me? One of the pluses with being a villain-lover is surely that it opens your mind and makes you appreciate other things than mere shallow good looks: after all, few villains are conventionally handsome, and the exceptions are often worthless, lazy skirt-chasers. It's not that I've degenerated completely. Brainy is still the new sexy: brains are about the only thing all my villain crushes have in common, besides being up to no good (so far: with my luck, my next crush will be a real dolt). Also, I'm still into the classical villain look as well: leanness, pallor, cold grey eyes, thin lips and generally fox-like demeanour. Only, when it comes to men, classical beauty has become a bonus for me in a way it wasn't before.

Hopefully it's just a phase, triggered by the fact that significant minor baddies - and some of the major ones - in my book and TV diet the last year or so have been decidedly cute, and not just from a villain-loving perspective. But it may - and this is why I worry about it - be a sign that I'm getting older. When you're in your twenties, you tend not to care about appearances that much when contemplating men, and certainly not about youth. Why, you've got it yourself, haven't you? Memories of the unlovely teenagers who harassed you at school are still vivid enough for the term "pretty boy" to sound like an oxymoron. That's at least how it was for me. Now I've acquired the "maturity" I hankered after as a young thing, other characteristics start to gain in importance and attractiveness. Like cheekbones. Not to put too fine a point on it, I'm in danger of becoming a dirty old woman (with time - it's not as if I'm old yet).

"Dirty old woman" is not a phrase you encounter that often, but I have the uneasy feeling it will become more and more common. It started with campaigns against "objectifying" led by angry women who'd had enough of being ogled by drips. There was much talk of such things as "the male gaze". Now, I understand these women's predicament, but really only all-out babes are ogled to such a degree that it becomes oppressive. Because these stunners object so strongly against being "objectified", however, men are intimidated and women like myself, who could do with a bit of objectification now and then, get even less of it than we used to. But the unkindest cut of all is that now men have caught on to the notion. I remember how shocked I was when I first came across the complaint from men (in a newspaper article) that they do not want to be eyed up by women as they feel demeaned by it, poor dears. So, to sum up: not only do I have to forgo any scrap of "male gaze" that might have come my way because better-looking women are incensed by it; I should also please refrain from comfort fantasies that may be demeaning to men? More and more, I feel a serious grievance towards the babes who started all this. If men are not allowed to gaze, and women are not allowed to gaze, how will the human species survive?

Of course, I may be blaming the wrong people. Maybe men are being disingenuous when they claim that they cannot for the life of them determine when a flirtatious glance may be welcome, so therefore they will not flirt at all and expect us to behave with likewise propriety. Is it really that hard to crack the behaviour code? Exchanging smiles at the water-cooler: OK. Pinching your secretary's bottom: should be avoided (if she's your personal secretary, chances are she's not overly fond of you as it is). Concentrating on a woman's legs when she's telling you things of vital importance for the company you work for: downright daft.

Once again, fictional villains come up trumps - not only are they not able to complain against being "objectified", they would never entertaining the notion for a second if they could complain. So I can keep objectifying away. I'll have to watch my new-found interest in good-looking men, however. Slim prettiness is all right and eminently villain-compatible (though an admiration for that kind of looks can lead to difficulties in real life - men have a tendency to snaffle the prettiest of their own sex themselves). But when I start admiring muscles and the tall, sturdy ape-man type, then I'll know that I've gone too far.  

torsdag 12 juli 2012

Warning: Book contains deaths

My so-called bodice-ripper read Through A Glass Darkly has proved a shock to me - by not being a bodice-ripper at all. I doubt that it even qualifies as "historical romance". Not only is the ending in the  "tomorrow is another day" line rather than "they lived happily ever after" - Gone With The Wind survived that and is still considered a romance - but there are simply too many deaths in it. And not just any old periferal deaths; deaths which hit the poor heroine where it hurts the most. Scarlett O'Hara was lucky in comparison. What with one darned thing after another, it is surprising Lady Devane isn't nicknamed Calamity Barbara.

To be fair, Through A Glass Darkly never claimed to be a bodice-ripper, though apparently it did win a prize for "Best Historical Romance" when it came out. I just assumed it was one because Dark Angels was. I should have heeded the warning signs: the blurb of Through A Glass Darkly mentions that Barbara and prize prat Roger are "star-crossed", and the first time someone used that word to describe a couple it wasn't good news. The novel is best seen as historical fiction, pure and simple, with plenty of relationship drama and gossip. Heady romance, however, proves difficult with a male protagonist as insensitive as Roger, who ends up behaving impossibly both as a husband and as an object of villain affection. And then the deaths rain down, accompanied at times by financial ruin.

Not quite the easy read I imagined, then - but still a good read. And yet, I have to face facts. For years I have tried to be mature about books and endings, telling myself that from my point of view - the villain-lover's - 90% of all books end unhappily anyway. I have seriously considered different theories as to what makes a good ending. There was one I read about in an article on Great Expectations which sounded quite persuasive, about "static" and "dynamic" endings. As I understood it, "dynamic" endings made you imagine a continued life for the characters full of ups and downs, just like the novel you'd been reading, while "static" endings froze the picture instead, leaving the characters in a state of happiness or misery for the rest of their lives. The best endings were, of course, the "dynamic" ones.

I have come to realise, though, that I simply prefer happy endings. I really do. I would much rather have a static happy ending than a dynamic one where the main protagonist is knee-deep in corpses. And is that so strange? We are invited to feel for the characters in a book, aren't we? Is it so surprising that we would like them to do well, rather than the opposite? I have grumbled before about sophisticates who like to wallow in endings where everything goes to the dogs, but only now have I fully confessed to myself why they annoy me so much. My name is Georgiana (no, not really), and I'm a happy-ending addict.

Having said all that, I have already ordered the sequel to Through A Glass Darkly, Now Face To Face, though I've understood from Amazon reviews (I've done my homework this time) that the ending isn't completely satisfactory here either. I still hope that the death rate will sink to an acceptable Dark Angels level, and after all, the villain is still alive.

onsdag 4 juli 2012

The uses and hazards of corrective historical fiction

I still remember when I realised that the picture of the French Revolution painted in the Scarlet Pimpernel books may not be the whole truth (in fact not true at all, as it later turned out). It was when, as a young girl, I read a novel called Jacobin's Daughter by Joanne Williamson. It told the story of the Duplay family, with whom Maximilien Robespierre lodged in Paris, and the protagonist is the youngest Duplay daughter Babette. It appealed very much to my girlish romantic mind - Babette's own love story ending with her marriage to Robespierre-chum Philippe Lebas is made much of, naturally, and the author has chosen to depict Babette's sister Eléonore's love for Robespierre as being requited - and made a lasting impression. Where were the blood-thirsty, brutal monsters of the Scarlet Pimpernel books? Suddenly, the revolution's leaders were seen in a new light, as pleasant and well-meaning young men.

Of course the view on Robespierre and the rest is rose-tinted, as you'd expect when the story is told by an idealistic young girl full of sisterly fondness for her family's nice lodger. But for its (mainly young) readers, the book acts as a counterweight to tales of stricken noblemen hounded by dirty revolutionaries. On its own, it is as one-sided as the Scarlet Pimpernel books, but in the context of putting the other guy's case it made my (and I'm guessing many other readers') overall view of the French Revolution more rounded. I've read more balanced accounts of the French Revolution since which counteract the Pimpernel's perfidious influence, but Williamson was first.

What prompted this memory was an unusually sour review of Hilary Mantel's second novel about Thomas Cromwell, Bring Up The Bodies. The reviewer's main quarrel with the novel seems to be that it depicts Cromwell in such a favourable light, and by doing so risks giving readers the wrong idea about Tudor history. In one way, I have sympathy for the reviewer's plight: she is obviously a great admirer of Thomas More, so reading a book told from Cromwell's point of view must be utterly distasteful to her. It's as if I had been forced to read (oh horrid thought) a novel painting a rosy picture of Talleyrand. But surely she is missing the point of Mantel's enterprise, which is to give a historical personage otherwise largely vilified his day in court.

Where else will you find a defence of Thomas Cromwell? In popular fiction and TV dramas like The Tudors and Henry VIII he is depicted, at best as a wily and weaselly courtier, at worst as a queen-murdering monastery-burning bully. Mantel's novels (I haven't read Bring Up The Bodies yet, I'm waiting for the paperback, but I have read Wolf Hall) simply tell the other side of the story. And isn't it about time someone tried to? In my view, the Sainted More has had things his own way for far too long. This humourless, Richard-III-slandering, collective-property-extolling prig certainly can't complain of usually getting a bad press, quite the contrary. Mantel's novels are examples - like Jacobin's Daughter and Gone With The Wind - of "corrective" historical fiction, shining a light on a point in history from an unexpected angle. These accounts, biased as they are, are the answer to other biased accounts which have long held sway over the popular imagination.

Having said that, there is a risk of going too far in this kind of fiction. You can be as biased as you like, but there is a limit to how much you can allow yourself to twist the truth. I did think Gone With The Wind crossed the line at times, quite blatantly - sorry, Ashley and his pals are the members of what? As for Mantel, if she really does try to fudge the issue of how the confessions of Anne Boleyn's supposed lovers were extricated, as the reviewer claims, then she is cheating. Given the fact that they were innocent, and facing charges of high treason which meant death by barbaric means, somehow I don't think they spilled the beans during a friendly chat.

After all, part of the interest of "corrective" fiction is to see how certain compromising events are, as it were, explained away. Its subjects are seldom all-out heroic. Cromwell did make sure, among other things, that a woman and a handful of men were executed on trumped-up charges just because the king felt like getting himself a new wife. The Reign of Terror during the French Revolution was ghastly and led to innocent people (most of them non-aristocratic) having their head chopped off, or worse. And don't get me started on the Old South. But this doesn't mean that history isn't much more complex than various moralists have claimed. Bring up the apologia for Cromwell, and let's hear what he (through Mantel) has to say for himself.        

torsdag 28 juni 2012

A novel without a hero

Finally done with Strindberg, I'm now at liberty to wallow in a superior bodice-ripper, Through A Glass Darkly by Karleen Koen. Yep, the one with Dark Angels and the ace poisoner. I admit I purchased Through a Glass Darkly mainly in the hope that it would contain at least one more attractive villain. When an author has proved a flair for villain-creating, there is often more to be had.

And yes, the villain in Through A Glass Darkly isn't bad at all - when he finally shows up. It's a huge door-stopper of a novel, and there's nothing wrong with that. But door-stopper novels must have pace: the format shouldn't be an excuse for long-windedness. We know that the novel's heroine Barbara Alderley will marry Roger Montgeoffrey, Earl of Devane from early on, and it's with this marriage that the plot thickens and Barbara's troubles really begin. There is no excuse to spin out the preliminaries to the match for 280 pages or so. The endless descriptions of rooms, gardens, London streets etc. also tried my patience. I can understand, if you have had to read up a lot on a period (the novel is set in early 18th-century England and France), that you want your readers to share some of the knowledge which you've laboriously acquired. And reading up on a subject is a labour - never trust an author who insists that it's the most fun part of a writing project. Nevertheless, in my view, historical novels should put the "novel" part first and the "historical" second. The historical background should mainly make itself felt when it is instrumental to the plot. The interior of someone's house is only interesting if it sheds light on the character in question. It's impressive that the author knows just which coffee house you went to in 18th-century London to hear political or financial or legal gossip - but I don't necessarily have to know.

I'm aware that other readers have another opinion, though: which is why, when I read enthusiastic reviews of novels when this-and-that period "is brought throbbingly to life", my heart sinks a bit. It usually means lots and lots of period detail, from elegant velvet hangings to smelling sewers. However, there's plenty of intrigue and gossip in Through A Glass Darkly to help the period-perfect medicine go down. And when the villain finally strides in on page 390, the scene is set for an original plot-twist. The plot where the hero and villain both love  (the concept being very loosely defined in the villain's case) the same girl is well-known. This time around, it's the heroine and villain who are both smitten with the hero!

Though I'm not sure it's correct to call Roger a hero. I don't think I overstate the case when I say that it is hard to retain sympathy for a supposed hero who angrily admonishes his wife's brother for having attacked his (the hero's) male lover. We are told time and again about Roger's "fatal charm", but he seems better at seeming urbane and at ease himself than at putting others at their ease. What remains is his good looks, for what they're worth. But is it really worth trying to capture the heart of someone with such eclectic taste as to prefer a big, hulking, scarred ex-soldier in his forties one minute and a slim, golden-haired, fifteen-year-old girl the next? At this point in the novel, I have no idea whether Barbara and Roger will manage to make a go of it in the end or whether I even want them to. But the big surprise is why Philippe the villain feels he has to bother with an indecisive rosbif. He may not be up to Henri Ange standards, but surely he can do better.              

tisdag 19 juni 2012

Eaton Place bested by World War II

I've finally had the opportunity to watch the second - and, as it turns out, last - series of the new Upstairs Downstairs. It was curiously like the the last one: after a wobbly start, I started to enjoy myself and become at least mildly interested in the characters and their fates. But I'm not inconsolable about the fact that they axed the series. The final episode ends just when World War Two is about to begin, and frankly, I don't care if I ever see another WWII-themed show again.


Admittedly, the last English TV series set during WWII - Foyle's War - I did enjoy very much. It managed to find fresh and interesting angles to life at the English home front, and it very seldom preached (except when the script-writers were having a bad day). Instead, the quiet dignity of Foyle as played by Michael Kitchen won you over, and I found myself caring desperately about his son remaining unscathed - that would be his son, the bomber. However, I don't think Upstairs Downstairs would have managed to bring anything new to a territory already explored by series such as We'll Meet Again and A Family at War. Last time around, the macho but not evil chauffeur Spargo's misguided flirtation with Fascism lent some interest, but this time everyone (always excepting unbelievably wicked Lady Persie) acted with perfect political decorum. Sir Hallam, the master of the house and a diplomat, is against any sort of appeasement from the word go. His eccentric aunt and the Indian servant Mr Amanjit - yes, and Lady Agnes too, on occasion - are busy organising the Kindertransport almost single-handedly. When Chamberlain steps out of that aircraft waving the Munich agreement and promising "peace in our time", only two of the servants are allowed to briefly show relief, before taking their cue from them upstairs, who remain stony-faced. They know, see, that this is Just The Beginning.


One interesting thing about historical dramas tends to be that the characters don't know what we know and view events with which we are familiar in a different way, without - as the political phrase goes - the benefit of hindsight. We know that appeasement turned out to be the wrong call, but it wasn't as easy to be sure about that back in the Thirties, with the horrors of World War One still fresh in most people's minds. I'd like to see at least one character in a WWII show fighting poor old Chamberlain's corner. That show was obviously not going to be Upstairs Downstairs, however, and it would have been pretty dull to have to follow this poster family of Churchillian rectitude through the entire war.


It's a pity, because there was much to enjoy in the series. Granted, we knew long before Sir Hallam and Lady Agnes did that their marriage was in trouble - their chemistry is non-existent - and though Ed Stoppard and Keeley Hawes, both fine actors, do their best, it's not easy to care about this over-polished couple. But other characters, such as the caustic cook Mrs Thackeray and the sweet butler Pritchard, livened things up; the eccentric aunt worked too, though she couldn't quite replace Eileen Atkins's eccentric mother. I was also amused by the way they kept shoe-horning the Duke of Kent into the plot. My theory is that Blake Ritson's melancholy-eyed Duke proved such a scene-stealer the first time round the script-writers crammed as much Kent-time they possibly could into the second series. A good idea, as it turns out - though generally benign, the Duke is puckish and not entirely predictable. In view of the unoriginal spin on pre-WWII events, a bit of unpredictability was sorely needed.               

torsdag 7 juni 2012

Oestrogen shock

Strindberg, at one time, praises his young alter ego for his view on women in a play. They are idealised in their “proper” role as mothers – in all other things women are, according to the crotchety author, inferior to men. How he would have loved Call The Midwife.

This TV series, apparently a smash hit in the UK, has now reached Sweden. It may be a little too soon to pour sarcasm over it: after all, only the first episode has been aired so far. But that episode is an irresistibly easy target, and it raises the question of how such a harmless confection can be so annoying.

First, there is the “womanly woman” aspect. All the women in Call the Midwife are either (of course) midwives or mothers battling bravely in the slums of East End. You’d expect at least one of them to chafe a bit at her lot in life, but no. They are all overwhelmed by the wonder of child-bearing. Even the syphilis-ridden slag does not question for a moment that raising kids (badly) is what she’s for. In one scene, the pretty-as-paint heroine has a conversation with another young midwife who is even neater – her chocolate-boxey good looks made me hope that here we would have the Fish Out of Water, or even better the Posh Bird Who Despite Appearances Does A Good Job In An Unconventional Way (remember that fun upper-class nurse Georgina had her training with in the original Upstairs Downstairs?). No such luck, however: the chocolate box midwife is disappointingly mainstream. She earnestly relates that she has come to realise that it is the East End mothers, not she, who are “heroines”. The main character later feeds the heroine line to the syphilis-ridden slag, who feels no end better. Oh yes, as the song has it, she’s a woman – W-O-M-A-N.

Now, of course there’s nothing wrong with maternal or caring impulses – quite the opposite. We’d be in a fine mess if these qualities didn’t exist. I should also be able to take that they are considered “womanly”, even if I am neither caring nor maternal myself (even the thought of doing as much as emptying someone else’s chamber-pot makes me shudder). After all, I would use the adjective “manly” to describe decisive and daring behaviour, without meditating on how frequent these qualities actually are in the male sex. Similarly, if someone speaks of “womanly” concern, it does not follow that he/she sees every woman as either a ministering angel or as a freaky person who has missed her calling. But I admit that the concentration of ministering angels and uncomplainingly child-popping mothers in Call the Midwife put my back up somewhat. Yes, this is a poor area in Fifties England – I shouldn’t be surprised that there aren’t girls dreaming of a college education around every corner. But is there really a need to be so gushing about it? When the voice-over starts philosophising on love as the fountain of life – or words to that effect  – the womb-centred view of womanhood which connects Strindberg (at one phase of his life, anyway) with “biologist” feminism is not far away.

Second, this is feel-good  television at its most lazy. I like feel-good books/films/TV programmes, I really do, but just because I do I don’t want to be treated as if I were stupid. Call the Midwife is slap-bang in the middle of From Lark Rise to Candleford territory. That series did sometimes try to raise its ambitions a little, but often enough, especially towards the end, it slid back to cosy-quirky plot lines that you would have found embarrassing at the age of twelve. Call the Midwife is based on an autobiography by a real East End midwife, so maybe it’s just bad luck that she encountered so many living clichés on her way. But clichés they are. It’s a pity to see character actresses of such calibre as Judy Parfitt, Pam Ferris and Jenny Agutter wasting their talent in parts like the Dotty Nun, the Battleaxe Nun and the Wise Mother Superior (the midwifery is based in a convent, though laywomen such as the heroine and her chocolate box chum are also employed). As you would expect, the Dotty Nun and the Battleaxe Nun are locked in a Comic Feud. As for the patients, however rose-tinted my glasses are, I couldn’t quite go “aaah” at the story of the beautiful Spanish woman who saved the life of her prematurely born twenty-fifth child – I’m not exaggerating here, twenty-fifth. She was brought over at the age of fourteen. Her husband still doesn’t speak Spanish, and she still doesn’t speak English (no wonder they concentrate on child-producing – what else would they do of an evening?). She lives in a slum and has, I’ll say it again, twenty-five children. But what does it matter, eh? Her hubby still looks her lovingly in the eyes, and after all, love is the fountain of all life.

Which brings me to the final annoying characteristic of Call the Midwife - the mixture of slumming and sugariness. If the series hadn’t been such a success, I’d say it was in great danger of falling between two chairs. Feel-good fans like myself are much more comfortable in, say, Downton Abbey than in the East End of the Fifties, whereas those who are seriously interested in the living conditions of the slums sixty years ago will be disgusted by the treacliness of the story-lines. One of my colleagues, who was hoping for something grittier, called the first episode “namby-pamby”. Somehow, slums don’t go well with a spoonful (or, in this case, bucketfuls) of sugar. If you want to draw more than a select crowd of misery tourists, you have to serve up a strong plot and characters one truly cares about as individuals rather than as Victims of Society. This, judging by the first episode, Call the Midwife fails to do. I will give it another try, but if it doesn’t improve I won’t stick with it and give it second chances out of pure laziness as I did with From Lark Rise to Candleford. There are better things you can do with your time.

onsdag 30 maj 2012

The game's afoot... again

I'm fairly lucky with my "alternative to Strindberg" reading at the moment. The House of Silk by Anthony Horowitz, a sequel to the adventures of Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson that has the stamp of approval of the Arthur Conan Doyle estate, started a bit slow but soon picked up and proved to be an enjoyable read.  The author is faithful to the personalities of the dynamic duo, and Lestrade gets an unusually good press, which is nice. Clearly I'm not the only one with a soft spot for this put-upon policeman (that he was played by weaselly-in-a-cute-way Colin Jeavons in the classic Jeremy Brett TV series helps). The other characters are sharply portrayed as well; the sinister Inspector Harriman, for instance, makes an excellent baddie. I was too worried about the fix Holmes had got himself into to be able to enjoy Harriman's baddiedom completely, however - which is a compliment coming from me, easily distracted as I am whenever there's an accomplished villain on the scene. Speaking of villains, Moriarty makes a guest appearance and is satisfactorily professorial. Holmes and Watson hurtle from one colourful venue to the next in the quest for the truth - an elegant town-house, a children's charity, an opium den, Holloway Prison, an exotic fair... Most things you expect from a crime caper set in Victorian times you will find in The House of Silk.

And this is, in one way, also the main fault of the novel. It surprised me that one of its Big Reveals has in fact been mentioned often in articles published in connection with the book's publication. Horowitz himself has made no secret of it. Why? Maybe it's because the activities of the "House of Silk" don't come as much of a surprise anyway to someone familiar with the Victorian Crime genre. If, by chance, you reach the dénouement without warning of what it will be about, your reaction is more likely to be a jaded "what, again?" rather than a shocked "no, really?". As I mentioned when I grumbled over Mr Timothy, I grow weary of all the "oooh, aren't those Victorians horrid?" hand-wringing of modern novels set in Victorian London. Yes, horrible things happened in Victorian days - as they do in our modern days, let's not forget, though often so far away from our everyday lives that we feel comfortable with pointing a finger at the long-dead instead - but not everywhere, all the time. Also, it seems unlikely that just about every establishment figure, especially if he has a title or is part of the government, should be knee-deep in filthy secrets. Could we maybe give the Victorian Establishment a break, once in a while? There were quite a lot of decent Victorians about who were genuinely concerned about combatting social ills and not the least bit twisted. And I'm guessing a fair proportion of them were Lords and Sirs.

If my criticism sounds a bit woolly, it's because I don't want to give too much away. I liked Horowitz's novel and would recommend it to fans of Holmes and Victorian Crime generally - and if you're not wise to what "The House of Silk" is when you read it, so much the better. Those in the know need not be put off, though - there are more surprises in store when Holmes winds up the case.

torsdag 24 maj 2012

Half-way through...

It feels like a bit of a come-down, this - to go from writing about Donna Tartt to making the obvious point that we risk being beaten in the Eurovision Song Contest by a gang of babuschkas. But what can I do? The week hasn't exactly been full of cultural highlights. And the things I have read/watched, I'm still in the middle of. Some bitty thoughts, then, on the week's events:

Less than half-way through the Eurovision Song Contest: Of course, there is a lot you can be sneering about in connection with this contest: most of all its package which always appears to be the same, irrespective of host country. There seems to be no way around the moment when two or three presenters holler "Hello Europe!" and then engage in leaden banter in more or less accented English. I always thought the script-writers were the ones at fault, but the blame must be shared by the presenters themselves who, as often as not, read their lines rather than say them and have no sense of timing whatsoever. I could see one of the first jokes in the first semi-final coming from miles off, but I was prepared to chuckle good-naturedly over it. But the exaggerated pause before the punch line and unenthusiastic delivery prevented me from doing even that. "You can see we're in for an evening of hilarity", the Swedish commentator quipped drily. While on the subject of timing, the vote-gathering - which mercifully we only get in the final - tends to be the very worst part of the show. We're in for thirty-six variations of the following dialogue:

HOST: Hello Moscow/Paris/Stockholm/wherever!
COUNTRY PRESENTER [Gushingly, after a pause]: Hello X! Thank you for an amazing show! You guys are marvellous!
HOST [Smiling rigidly]: Thank you. [Somewhat sharply, after another pause] May we have your votes, please?
COUNTRY PRESENTER [A bit put out, because he/she had the votes ready all the time, but was waiting for some kind of cue]: Of course. Here are the results of the Y vote...

I know it must be difficult to keep the voting going smoothly - but surely, after all these years, there must be some kind of trick? And then, these latest years, the contest has started to adopt bewildering "mottos". Last year in Germany it was something about heartbeats. This year it's "Light your fire". Er... wait, you mean we should light our own fires? In front of the telly?

One should go easy on the sneering, though. The songs are often not half-bad, and most importantly, sneerers never prosper in Eurovision. It's one thing I love about this contest. It stands up for what it is, and if you don't like it you don't have to watch, or participate. If you do participate, don't expect people to find an arrogant approach hip and admirable. Almost each year, the Brits complain bitterly about not getting more votes. Well, what do they expect? The British comments on Eurovision I've read tend to be a mixture of vitriol and patronising head-patting, as if they were witnessing a distant tribe's picturesque but faintly disturbing sacrificial rites. My guess is that this has caused them no end of damage over the years - that and the admittedly unfairly high expectations we have of British pop groups. Each year, we hope for the new Beatles to turn up.

The reason I think the Russian little old ladies will beat us, in spite of the song not being great and the ladies not being the world's best singers, is the Granny Factor - it's hard not to go "awww" when one beaming babuschka wields a baking-plate of cookies (or maybe wholesome Russian bread). Importantly, though, the number also has a ring of sincerity. Kooky numbers which are engineered to make fun of the whole show are soon weeded out, but if you are sincere, a certain amount of kookiness goes down well with European voters.

I still hope a really good singer will win, though - we're not picking Europe's cuddliest grannies, after all. What about our Loreen and her soaring refrain, now wouldn't she be a worthy winner? Oh, did I mention that Swedes take Eurovision very, very seriously?

Half-way through The Mystery of Edwin Drood (the TV adaptation): Very promising, this, and much closer to its source than the Great Expectations adaptation was. The worst parts of Rosa's pert speeches have been wisely cut, and Tamzin Merchant who plays her makes her as charming as she can. Not quite charming enough for one to understand the amount of male interest she receives, though, but this is Dickens's fault. It would be more understandable if everyone went off the deep end about Edwin. The arrogant youth is played by Freddie Fox, who is strikingly good-looking. Are luminously pretty Dickens heroes becoming a trend? Pip (Douglas Booth) in Great Expectations was such a looker that some reviewers ungallantly complained he unbalanced the narrative by outshining Estella. I'm not sure I should approve of this trend, villain-lover that I am, but I'm prepared to be magnanimous. After all, a Dickens hero is unlikely ever to be the brainiest person in the book, so maybe some kind of compensation is due.

To return to the Mystery, Matthew Rhys is a convincingly torn Jasper, sometimes reeling around tormentedly, sometimes spinning plots with a hard little smile. I was pleased to see he was quite a match for the feral child Deputy (a bit softened in the adaptation, but still a stranger to Dogderish charm). The series is excellently cast all the way: I was particularly impressed by Rory Kinnear as a Reverend Crisparkle whose ears you really didn't feel any urge to box.

More (hooray!) than half-way through The Son of a Servant: Did you ever feel bereft because you are not the trusted friend of a genius? Read Strindberg and you'll feel better. Continuously borrowing money while bombarding his pals with callow salon-radical "sceptical" ideas, he must have been a trying man to spend much time with. When a friend complains of the peasant girls at a country gathering and hankers after the fine ladies in the city, Strindberg's alter ego finds him appallingly snobbish. When the alter ego himself feels ashamed for having briefly loved a simple country girl, he invents a whole questionable evolutionary theory to prove to himself that his shame is quite natural - he compares himself with a thoroughbred stallion who won't mate with a farm mare. Say what? You can never be sure, of course, when Strindberg's tongue is in his cheek as regards the musings of his younger self, but one thing is clear: it's not often enough. Only 130 pages to go.