onsdag 25 april 2012

Giving up on and sticking to books

It's only the last five years or so that I've discovered the advantages of reading more than one book at a time. When I was younger, I used to be more disciplined and doggedly stuck to one book until I'd finished it. (How I survived while plowing through Herman Hesse's The Glass Bead Game I still don't know.) I also rarely gave up on books. Even with ones I didn't like, I "wanted to know how it ended". I still remember the exhilarating feeling when for the first time in my life I - gasp - checked the solution at the end of a crime story so I wouldn't have to read it through. I was seriously out of sympathy with the author's moralising tone, and laying the book aside felt liberating. I've not looked back since. It's still a wrench to give up a book altogether, but when it happens, in most cases, the feeling of relief will tell you you've made the right choice. In order not to give up to easily on tough reads which you suspect will be worth it in the end - Les Mis, say, or Strindberg's The Son of a Servant which I'm trying to get through at the moment - parallel reading of something more lightweight is invaluable.

Parallel reading has its flaws, though. You can have the bad luck to get stuck in both books at roughly the same time. This is what happened to me, which is an explanation why so few blog entries lately have been book-related: besides Strindberg, I decided to read yet another Tudor novel, this time about Lady Jane Grey. However, the book proved plodding and exposition-heavy, so in my spare time I was faced with the alternatives 1) reading Strindberg 2) reading a plodding novel on Lady Jane Grey 3) finding other forms of reading matter or doing something else entirely. Needless to say, I returned again and again to alternative number 3). Finally, last night, after some sneak peeks to make sure it wouldn't suddenly take off and get dramatically better, I took a deep breath and laid the Lady Jane Grey novel aside. Free at last! Now I'll start on the novel several Swedish book bloggers seem most obsessed about instead - Donna Tartt's The Secret History. I bet that whatever it is, it isn't plodding.

But I will get through Strindberg as well. It's not as if he wasn't good. He writes with great verve and deserves his status as a classic author. But - and this is about as original as saying that Thomas Hardy is depressing - he can be very tiresome. It's strange to think that his contemporaries found him tiresome as well, though probably for somewhat different reasons. Strindberg would perhaps have been saddened to know that his ideas, which he himself quite clearly thought of as cutting edge, still have a tendency to provoke - or at least make you roll your eyes - a hundred years after his death. Or else he would have been absolutely thrilled.

The Son of a Servant nearly lost me at the beginning - the first chapter is entitled, in true misery-memoir style, Hungry and Afraid. As Strindberg's alter ego's family get wealthier and the hero himself grows up, however, Strindberg lightens up. What may surprise people who mostly associate him with doom-laden plays about toxic relationships is that he has a sense of humour, and sometimes even enough self-irony to make fun of the grand designs of his alter ego Johan. Though mostly Johan gets off lightly. Quarrels with his family, fallings-out with his friends, academic failures, career changes as frequent as Richard Carstone's: they never seem to be his fault. Other scapegoats are found - mostly good old society, once more taking the rap for a young man's disappointments.

Strindberg has great powers of observation - it's when he starts to analyse his observations and make them into Grand Ideas that the trouble starts. There are enough memorable scenes along the way to make persevering worthwhile (quite apart from the fact that giving up on Strindberg would be a far graver thing than giving up on a historical novel or crime story). Still, I wish I'd picked something a little shorter by Strindberg to read - something about 200 pages long, say. This, unsurprisingly, is how far I've got with The Son of a Servant.          

onsdag 18 april 2012

Sink or swim?

Have I commented on the dearth of costume dramas lately? I have, haven't I? But I shouldn't complain too much - the Beeb did make a second series of the new Upstairs, Downstairs, in spite of the dire predictions of just about everyone (including me), and once it's out on DVD, that will make a few evenings' viewing (and probably a blog post) at least. As for ITV, it has dished up another Julian Fellowes-scripted drama, which Swedish TV has kindly imported: the Titanic.

The problem is, in costume drama terms, I don't think the 20th century quite counts. I never cared much for 20th-century history, and as for epic novels that make good TV series, they were out of fashion by then. Still, I suppose the years before the First World War (before it started to become depressing) just about pass muster. The story about the Titanic is depressing enough, though, and I can't quite see why people are so obsessed with it.

Yes, there is something of a Greek Tragedy feel about a ship which is touted as unsinkable and which then sinks. Yes, it was vast and the tragedy the greater for it. Yes, there were some celebrities on board and doubtless there are many human interest angles. For example, I caught a snippet of a documentary which revealed that one of the main reasons the ship line's owner Ismay was so vilified was that the newspaper mogul Randolph Hearst couldn't stand him. That did fascinate me, and I am now hoping Fellowes will furnish poor Ismay with a perfectly reasonable excuse for the lifeboat seat incident. And one wonders, like Rose in the original Upstairs Downstairs how a "big ship could go down like that... just by hitting a little iceberg" (admittedly, no iceberg is ever "little").

And yet, I don't understand how one can become nerdy about the Titanic. The interest in the minutiae of the ship's construction, the voyage and the disaster itself; the crude class analyses; the polemic, moralising tone and the hunt for scapegoats... these things are so often part and parcel of the Titanic lore, and it's frankly off-putting. A ship sank and people died: this is the simple truth. If people hadn't died, naturally, no-one would be interested. There is a great deal of ghoulishness connected with our obsession with certain historical events (I'm no innocent myself in this regard: of course The Reign of Terror is the most exciting part of The French Revolution). Fine, but please don't let us be sanctimonious ghouls. We weren't there. Human nature is never perfect, especially not in a crisis like a shipwreck, and of course there will be mistakes and undignified scrambles for survival at whatever cost. I know I would behave appallingly and not care a whit about what Hearst or anyone else had to say about it afterwards.

In the end, stories focusing on the Titanic risk becoming little else than disaster movies in fancy dress where we are supposed to be kept guessing who will sink and who will swim. But costume drama beggars can't be choosers, and Fellowes is a reliable yarn-spinner, so I will watch the Titanic TV series in spite of my misgivings. The first episode seemed sketchy, but judging from reviews the series gets better as the bigger picture is filled in later on. The aristocratic family who were the centre of episode one didn't exactly float my boat (sorry), but the tenacious rich youngster from Philadelphia who wooed the daughter seemed a nice chap, and I wonder what will happen to the valet who clumsily tried to catch the attention of a lady's maid and made a mess of it. Guggenheim's stoic waiting for death in the bar was memorable, and so was the other bar guest: Mr Andrews, one of the builders of the ship, who didn't say a word and made no attempt to save himself. You understood exactly why.

tisdag 10 april 2012

Beards galore

In desperate search of something costume drama-ish to watch, I finally tried an old film called Nicholas and Alexandra which I'd bought on video way back. I bought it because Eric Porter was in it, according to the credits: I'm not sure whether it was Soames- Moriarty- or Fagin-related, but I was in an intense Porter phase right then. True enough, he's in it - for about seven minutes (on the plus side, he spends two of them in a 1910-style bathing suit) before he gets shot. Luckily, the rest of the film proved watchable too.

This is the kind of history film they don't make anymore, and I'm not sure I can blame the film execs for that. If I had had to watch this feature all in one go, I'd probably have been bored, but treating it more as a TV series and watching parts of it from time to time worked rather well. It's similar to historical TV dramas of the same time: rather like a play, with dramatic monologues where the different historical players eloquently get to state their case. You sense that the accuracy is pretty high - especially compared to what passes as historical drama nowadays. (There should be a prize for most dementedly history-falsifying film of the year named after Braveheart, and my guess - though I haven't seen it yet - is that Anonymous would win it hands down this year.) Wasn't "amuse and instruct" an old watchword for TV programmes at the some point at the dawn of time? Nicholas and Alexandra is made very much in that kind of vein.

The Nicholas and Alexandra concerned are the last tsar Nicholas II and his wife. Of course, as you would expect from a film named after them, they are sympathetically portrayed (at least he is: she's a bit on the neurotic side, but at least she's loyal). However, thanks to those dramatic monologues, the story is told in an even-handed manner, and it's made plain that Nicholas - though a lovely father and husband and all that - was no great hit as a ruler. There are plenty of poignant what-if moments of the kind appreciated by people like me, who believe individuals rather than "structures" shape history. The biggest what-if is undoubtedly "What if Tsar Nicholas had decided not to mobilise his troops, thus giving his erratic cousin Willy a perfect excuse to declare war?" However, I'm in some doubt about if the tsar could have stopped World War I single-handed, what with so many countries spoiling for a fight. On a far smaller scale, I was shocked to realise that at least a handful of lives - those of the tsar and his family - could have been saved if even one of Russia's allies would have accepted to receive them while there was still time. The Liberals who brought about the first Russian revolution were practically begging among others England to take them on - but no country would, for PR reasons.

I'm afraid, though, I learned few actual names of important Russian politicians while watching the film. It was easier to remember them as the Irascible but Sound Beard, the More or Less Sensible Beard, the Pragmatic Career-Minded Beard (who claimed that "there will always be room for another bureaucrat" or words to that effect - let's hope so, dear) and Eric Porter (with a beard). There are so many beards on display you almost wonder if the few clean-shaven men belong to a secret club where clean-shavenness has a special significance, but it seems unlikely as they have little else in common. The high-minded Liberal (in the classic sense of the word) politician Kerensky is probably clean-shaven in order to signal his enthusiasm for western values. Prince Pretty Boy and his giggling pal are clean-shaven because it's cuter. The colonel in Siberia is quite possibly clean-shaven because he's played by John Wood, and anything else would be a tragic waste of handsomely forbidding countenance. Why the token factory worker is clean-shaven is anyone's guess.