Short Eurovision lowdown - plus scraping the Wilkie Collins barrel

I don't feel up to much Eurovision blogging this time round. I was planning to do a review of the semi-finals and the finals and award prizes like "love triangle of the year" (Azerbaijan - both the crooner and his girl seemed more interested in the dancer in the box than each other), "vampire of the year" (Romania's answer to Farinelli), "stylish V-lizard-inspired fashion statement of the year" (Norway), "bad loser of the year" (guess - I'm not talking about the singer here but about her country's endlessly charming press) etc. However, the party's over now and my enthusiasm for the subject has nearly faded away. But hey, wasn't it an amazing show? I don't care that our boy-singer didn't get a better result: he did a respectable job with a song I personally didn't like much, and we didn't make fools of ourselves. The contests were professionally organised and hosted, and if the humour was a little strained sometimes, it was still P.G. Wodehouse compared to normal Eurovision standards. At last, one of my new year wishes came true!

On the reading front, I have come through one of my impulse-bought family sagas, which turned out to be more of a Catherine Cookson-inspired, heroine-faces-up-to-grim-destiny-and-wins-through-up-north tale. It wasn't a disaster, but neither was it brilliant. I suspect Cooksonish stories are most enjoyable in TV form (but then they are very enjoyable). I needed a safe card after that, and so I picked a fairly early novel by Wilkie Collins, Hide and Seek.

I'm well read-up on Collins by now. I've read his most famous novels (The Woman in White, The Moonstone), the ones experts think should be more famous (Armadale, No Name), the almost-as-famous as the almost-famous ones (Man and Wife, Poor Miss Finch), novels generally considered to be also-rans (The Law and The Lady, The Dead Secret) and some of his shorter fiction, like No Thoroughfare which he co-wrote with Dickens. Enough bragging: the simple reason I keep returning to Collins is that he's such a good writer. Even a Collins also-ran is more interesting and more vivaciously written than many modern authors' best efforts. I have to say, however, that so far Hide and Seek is the weakest of the Collins novels I've read. I even liked The Moonstone more - which is saying something, as that book is a bit of a bug-bear of mine.

Collins's language is lively here as elsewhere: he knows how to freshen up descriptive and getting-from-A-to-B passages with flashes of humour, and he takes care of his secondary characters. The problem is, if Collins can do charming and engaging characters, he can also do very annoying ones. The main characters in Hide and Seek, if not as annoying as, say, Sir Patrick in Man and Wife or just about every protagonist in The Moonstone, are nevetheless on the irritating side. This may be because, for once in Collins, they are dangerously close to being stereotypes. The story of how the Philantropic Painter Valentine Blyth rescues the Beautiful Child Mary aka "Madonna" from a Dastardly Circus Owner reminded me of the melodrama acted by a group of itinerant players in the Lucky Luke adventure The White Knight (I'll probably return to this adventure at a later date, if ever I blog about what I call the "Lucky Luke audience syndrome" - confusing actors with the characters they play). It is such a basic and shamelessly button-pushing plot - good man, bad man, innocent child - as to be ridiculous. Back at home, the Philantropic Painter has a Bravely Long-Suffering Invalid Wife. The Beautiful Child grows up to be a Good and Beautiful Woman and, what do you know, she bears her fate with courage and good humour too (she's deaf and dumb as a result of a riding accident in the circus). She falls in love with a Good-hearted but Wayward Youth. Please, enough!

The other plot strand so far - how the strict upbringing of Mary's object of affection Zack has turned him wayward, in spite of himself - is even less interesting than the saccharine Blyth household. Strange how even plot-lines meaning to show that you shouldn't be too moralistic can stick in your craw if they're over-didactic. I saw from a glance at the Introduction that Hide and Seek is often compared to Dickens's Hard Times. I look forward to reading more about this once I've finished the book (you should never read an Introduction unless you already know what's going to happen in the novel). For all the surface differences - good circus owner versus bad circus owner, taking a circus girl away from the troop as a doubtful project versus taking her away as an unequivocal good thing (even if it means tearing her away from her foster mother), the perils of an over-scientific education versus the perils of an over-evangelical one - the two novels have a fault in common in my view. They are trying to prove their point or points at the expense of character complexity.

I'm not giving up yet, though - I have hopes that Hide and Seek will become more exciting in the second part of the book, the one called "Seeking". The opening chapter of this part is called "The Man with the Black Skull-Cap". Good. I like skull-caps.          

Non-costume-drama watching (yes, really!)

Now, I won't lie: I have not exactly been keeping back when it comes to costume dramas lately. I've rewatched the original Upstairs Downstairs (only the first series yet), the Andrew Davies adaptation of Sense and Sensibility  (not bad, but the film is better) and finally, unsurprisingly, Gosford Park (which had me humming "All kinds of everything remind me of you" for a whole day). But I'm not going to blog about them. Well, not yet, anyway. I couldn't do it without references to the D word, and my blog readers have deserved a break from everything landed-estate-in-Yorkshire-related. After all, there is more to TV life than costume dramas. Like... erm...

Well, like The Newsroom for instance. There are a lot of reasons why I should not like this new (well, fairly) series by The West Wing creator Aaron Sorkin. One, the critics of the series are right: it does glamourise the journalist calling. The ideal journalist, in Aaron Sorkin's world, is a brave and incorruptible truth-seeker. Well, what do I know? There might be lots of journalists driven by their quest for truth. But I have formed the impression - and I don't think I'm being overly cynical here - that chasing a good story (which, of course, should also be true) is rather more important. And what's wrong with that? I think I would be able to understand a newsteam without having to think of them as the Knights of the Round Table.

Two, it is politically dishonest in a way The West Wing wasn't. The West Wing was set in the White House. The whole context was political. You expected the Democrat President and his staff to champion certain political views, and they did: that was, after all, what they were for. In contrast, the program which The Newsroom centres around claims to be about news, not a political agenda: it claims to give all sides a fair hearing and to give the viewers the information they need to make up their own mind. The news anchor Will McAvoy - to balance out the Democrat bias of his sassy (female) producer Mac - is supposed to be a card-carrying Republican. Well, he could have fooled me. Each and every news item so far (I'm about half-way through the series) has been slanted shamelessly in a Democrat direction. Opponents are not given a fair hearing (as they often were in The West Wing) - they are badgered. I may be the one being naïve now, but this is not how I imagine a news program should be like. Whatever happened to objectivity - couldn't they have a shot at it, at least?

What bugs me is not the politics in themselves - though I'm pretty sure President Obama himself would cover his eyes with embarrassment at some of McAvoy's manipulative tirades and mumble "not in my name" - but the lack of honesty. This news program is not unbiased, and its anchor is not Republican, so stop pretending otherwise.

In spite of these annoyances, though, I enjoy the series, largely because of its script. Sorkin has lost none of his snappiness since the early West Wing days. I find myself chuckling several times in front of each episode, even if it's one I don't care for much. The characters may not be quite such a charming bunch as the West Wing crew, but they're more likeable than the ones in Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip. I'm won over by Emily Mortimer's MacKenzie McHale aka Mac - her English accent may have something to do with it - and the nicely self-deprecating economist Sloan (also a woman) is a character to root for, most of the time. Maggie does irritate me a bit - she should make up her mind on the man front. But the fact that I care at all has to be a good sign.                  

Desperately seeking family sagas

I'd like to think that the sudden craving for family sagas that inspired my Amazon shopping spree the other week isn't entirely down to Downton abstinence. After all, I've always had a soft spot for family sagas. Soames Forsyte in The Forsyte Saga was one of my first villain loves (as played by Eric Porter - sorry Damian Lewis, love the hair, but there can be only one...). Family sagas - set in historical times, naturally - offer endless opportunities when it comes to romantic entanglements, and my inner Emma Woodhouse delights in them.

Imagine my pleasure, then, when I found a whole category entitled "family sagas" on the co.uk version of Amazon. Once I was faced with this wealth of opportunities, though, a minimum of caution set in. It's been a while since Galsworthy's day, and family sagas are no longer considered quite the thing. That may not be such a bad thing - I wouldn't want anything too arty when looking for pure self-indulgence reads - but the challenge is to pick a novel that is frothy, entertaining and well-written.

While browsing, I came across many a die-hard plot formula. The World War Two Love Story seems unaccountably popular. What is it with the Brits and World War Two? What makes it an ideal back-drop for a hundred-and-one romances? It's a war, for pity's sake. It's grim at the front (as it tends to be in wars) and grim at home. Is this the draw, that the hardships on the home front make the heroine Suffer And Grow As A Person? Me, I like my sagas to have glamour, and not to be all clotted up with mud and debris. A bit of suffering never hurt a heroine, but preferably in picturesque surroundings, please.

While on the subject of mud, World War One is a pretty popular setting too, which is almost less comprehensible. While the British view of WWII remains rose-tinted for some reason (winning might have something to do with it), the Brits do get that WWI was horrible and not much else. And yet, and yet. I can't be the only one who secretely rolls her eyes as yet another scene in the trenches pops up in a British drama. Honestly, they all look the same. Whether on Doctor Who, Downton, Parade's End or even Horrible Histories: a trench is a trench is a trench. And as if these mud contests weren't tedious enough to sit through while they're on the screen: imagine reading about them. I know I sound callous, and I wouldn't quibble if we were talking about soul-searching explorations of human misery and man's beastliness to man. But these books, with glossy nurses and girls in uniform on the cover, are supposed to be light entertainment. As such, could they perhaps feature wars - if any - that are a little less recent and traumatic? The Crimean, say?

My main quarrel with the War Romances, though, is that I don't know why they're billed as family sagas. Didn't they forget the "family" bit? One bint who sighs for her RAF sweetheart or American bomber does not a family saga make, even if she does get a kid. This is what a family saga should be like: It should be set in historical times. It should feature a family on a landed estate, or at a pinch in a big townhouse. There should ideally be either a strong matriarch or a strong patriarch who is able to mess up his/her children's lives while trying to do what's best for them. There should be between two to five grown-up children. Poor cousins are most welcome to swell the ranks. Maybe there's a family feud with another clan. Throw in a bit of from-rags-to-riches-to-keeping-riches plotting, titled fortune-hunters, rich but unwanted suitors, hard-to-get heiresses, pretty maids with a tendency to get pregnant at the wrong moment - oh, and villains, of course. Voilà - that's what I call a real family saga. How hard can it be?

Harder than it looks, apparently. More than once, when I've given some "guilty pleasure" bestseller a try, I've come across what should have been a lip-smacking yarn told in flat and uninteresting prose. They've been written in what I call the "now read on" style: a prose style that reminds you of the action-packed summaries preceding the latest instalment of a serialised story in a women's magazine. It is as if some writers, knowing a fool-proof formula, think that they can rely on it to such an extent that they don't have to write it up at all. Consequently, I'm a little wary of novel titles that state the contents a bit too boldly, like Cockney Orphan, The Workhouse Girl or A Wartime Nurse. It's as if the scaffolding has not been removed properly, and if you get that feeling from the title, what will the rest of the story be like?

One could argue, I suppose, that good writers shun formulas in favour of deep, meaningful and original projects. But must that be the case? Regency romances have (or rather had) Georgette Heyer, among others: why should there not be similar "froth pros" writing family sagas? I mean to have a good look for a writer of popular fiction who realises one simple fact about much-loved plot formulas: You may have got the recipe, but you still have to cook the meal.      

The Observations and getting historical fiction just right

I was really pleased when I started reading The Observations by Jane Harris - because it hooked me from the start, because it's the best book I've read this year (at least among those I hadn't read before), but also because I hoped it would prove blogworthy. I didn't count on the  fact that it's easier to fill a blog post with catty remarks about a book you didn't like than it is to praise a book you did like, and have no quarrel with. Consequently, this won't be one of my longer posts (as opposed to when I'm in the middle of one of my don't-mess-with-the-Victorians-rants).

The Observations is set in Victorian times, though it makes no great hue and cry about it. It's narrated by Bessy - not her real name, as it later turns out - an Irish girl who, by a fluke, is taken on as a maid-of-all-work in a run-down mansion in the Scottish countryside. Bessy is an engaging heroine and narrator, and she needs to be, because everyone else in the novel is pretty terrible. The lady of the house, with whom Bessy is very taken, is a cold-hearted piece of work. It's no big surprise when she disappoints her devoted maid, though the reader still gasps (I did, anyway) when the extent of her indifference and self-centeredness becomes clear. The lord of the manor is a miser and a bear - his brittle wife must carry every social event (which she dutifully does, though conjugal relations are out, apparently). They both shine, though, in comparison to Bessy's awful mother. You almost understand Bessy for giving the "missus" a second chance and once more offering her affection and loyalty after a brief but fateful period of disillusion and dislike. Anything and anyone must be better than the ghastly life waiting for her in Glasgow courtesy of her mum. Other members of the cast include a self-satisfied vicar and a fantastically unattractive young farm hand. It's fortunate that Bessy's a girl who knows how to keep her spirits up.

There's grittiness enough in The Observations, but the humour and resilience of the narrator/heroine stops it from depressing you, and you keep turning the pages. There's a mystery surrounding one of Bessy's predecessors, Nora Hughes, who died on the railway tracks. The suspense slowly builds up. What really happened? Is the "missus" to blame in any way for Nora's death, and is that why she seems so dementedly fond of the dead girl? And is it possible that Nora is haunting her mistress?

The solution of the mystery comes as something of an anticlimax, as is so often the case when the quality of the writing leads you to believe you're in for some marvellously clever twist which you'd never have thought of yourself. And a few things are left unexplained, perhaps intentionally. But otherwise, The Observations is a thoroughly satisfying read. It's the kind of historical novel Goldilocks would like. Not too hard, not too soft; not too grim, not too trashy; but readable, well-written and just right.

I have no great hopes that the gaggle of family sagas which I impulse-bought on Amazon yesterday will prove anything like as good. Not because they are formulaic - I have a great affection for many of the standard plots of historical pot-boilers - but because it's so difficult to find a formula that is actually well-executed. But more on the difficulty of finding the perfect feather-light read another time.      

Why I'm unreasonably prejudiced against The Village (without having watched any of it)

"Mr Smith was an ordinary man. He went around looking ordinary all day." This, or something like it (I've forgotten the man's real name), was how an extract from a novel by Goofy went in an old comic adventure. He was trying to get the book published and finally got lucky when he encountered an insomniac publisher, who promptly went to blissful sleep after hearing only a few lines from the manuscript. I keep thinking of this adventure when a book, film or TV program is touted as being about "ordinary people". To be honest, my heart sinks a bit.

The phrase was used lately in an article about The BBC's new period drama The Village, and again with the presumption that a story about "ordinary people" is something positive instead of a colossal bore. Well, you may ask, why shouldn't it be positive? Can't dramatic mileage be won by everyday lives? Possibly, but this is more sit-com than drama territory - after all, we are living everyday lives, and if there's no particular spin on the everyday I for my part do not see why I should have to watch it on the box as well. What's more, "ordinary people" is so often, as it seems to be here, code for "people living impossibly bleak and grim lives". In The Village, the story appears to center on a (naturally) dirt-poor farmer family where the husband drinks, the wife is long-suffering and the boys get beaten up. Sound like fun viewing to you?

I have to admit that there are other motives for my scepticism apart from my aversion to social history, also known as "history from below". It has, predictably, to do with how the series has been described to the public by various newspaper articles and reviews. Let me cite some of the phrases used: "debunking Downton", "the anti-Downton", "an antidote to Downton", "the real Downton Abbey" (as in telling it like it really was).

Poor Peter Moffat, the creator of the series. I'm pretty sure he didn't want his series to be a stick to beat Downton with at all (as transpires in an interview with The Sunday Times, he quite likes the show). What he wants to do sounds like an English version of Heimat, seeing the great events of the 20th century through the eyes of an entire small community. Supposedly, there are characters from all walks of life in this drama: even the "big house" residents are said to get a look in. Nevertheless, after all that media guff about how real and raw and unlike Downton the series is, one can't expect a devoted Downton fan like myself to feel very warmly towards it. I wonder what part the BBC plays in all of this. They already did an "anti-Downton", didn't they? There was Parade's End, an inert drama with a polished script where well-known actors were given little to do playing characters you didn't care about - it doesn't get more anti-Downton than that. And now, here's another drama that's supposed to crush its lightweight ITV rival with its worthiness. I certainly hope this isn't a conscious sales pitch on behalf of the Beeb, because it is a seriously rubbish one. True, all the viewers - and there are quite a few - who loathe Downton will be dying to give The Village a go. But the 120 million of us around the world who watched and loved the period-drama hit of the decade won't.

One of my favourite film quotes is from The Sound of Music, when Maria explains her terrible dress to the Captain: "The poor didn't want this one". I suppose it could be used as an argument in favour of stories like The Village: "the poor" are individuals, not a grey mass, and human passions are the same in hovels as they are in castles. On the other hand, this quip highlights that drabness is not generally appreciated, not even - or especially not - by those who have to put up with a great deal of it in their life. If The Village turns out to be too muddy and depressing, it may well become the period drama that the poor didn't want.                       

Hang on - the bohemian painter's a baddie?!

I continue to be pleased with Mr Selfridge. It's a perfectly respectable costume-drama effort, and yes, it's better than The Paradise. However, it remains short of interesting villains, and when one of the characters suddenly shows his nasty side he proved a somewhat too - well - innovative baddie for my taste. The creep in question is not Mr Perez (if he keeps fading into the background, Victor will snatch his job), nor Mr Grove (a ginger cutie, but weak) but - Roderick Temple! That's right, the surely-completely-fictional bohemian artist that Rose Selfridge flirted with when she was at her angriest with her variety-girl-chasing husband. I was convinced that Roderick's only plot function was to show that Rose wasn't such a doormat as all that and could have had another man if only she'd chosen to. But no, suddenly he turns up again, charms the Selfridges' daughter Rosalie, ingratiates himself with the family, and makes lightly veiled threats to Rose - "come to my studio and I won't have to come here".

The immense unfairness lies in the fact that while I find this behaviour stalker-like and not at all attractive in an unshaved artist, it would probably be a completely different story if the roles were reversed. Imagine Mr and Mrs Selfridge had been a struggling artist couple, and Temple had been a succesful businessman. Imagine he would have used his money and influence to get a hold over the Selfridge family and lay siege to Rose. Well, it doesn't take much imagining really, because plots like that are common enough, and when they occur I'm usually all over the wicked money-man. So why not grant the same courtesy to a painter?

As a champion of the middle-class, I should be offended that middle-class villains - lawyers and businessmen, bankers especially, top the list - are such a frequent occurrence they've become well-worn clichés. After all, they have little basis in fact. When we have reason to be angry with our lawyer or banker, it's usually because we feel that he or she has messed up. Uriah-Heepish cunning plans to consciously do the clients down are, I imagine, quite rare. But one reason that these professions have to carry such a heavy villain-burden is that they do it so well - they can be portrayed as brainy, ambitious and power-hungry enough to make their plotting credible. Another reason is of course that various writers have used their fiction as a platform for bashing lawyers/businessmen/whoever has considerably more money than them. But turning your bête noire into a villain in a story can seriously back-fire. Your scoundrel can become so popular with the readers that he puts your right-thinking artist/worker/something-else-poor-but-honest hero in the shade. In sum, instead of berating the users of the middle-class villain cliché, I want to shake their hand for giving us middle-classers such good PR.

But that doesn't mean, surely, that the bad guy shouldn't be able to have another occupation entirely - bohemian painter, say? Well, it's hard  to make an interesting villain out of a drifter, and we are so used to seeing bohemians as unworldly - another cliché, if you like - that it's difficult to imagine one of them having enough sheer drive to make a success of the demanding role of villain. A baddie doesn't have to be middle-class (servants and leaders of pick-pocket gangs work well, just to name two examples completely at random), but having aspirations doesn't hurt.

I'm not sure all this is an excuse for not fancying Roderick. Maybe I'm turning into a villain snob? Be that as it may, the hunt for the next big thing costume-drama-villain-wise is still on.

The sad case of Anacrites - or, how to lose readers and alienate villain-lovers

For the second time in a short while, I'm distrusting my own judgement. I'm currently reading Master and God by Lindsey Davis, and though she's such a pro when it comes to Roman historical yarns, I'm finding it hard to warm to the book, or to the characters. Maybe, though, it's not the author's fault. Maybe, deep down, even my appreciation of a non-Falco Davis novel is poisoned by my resentment regarding Anacrites.

Lindsey Davis is the author of the hugely and rightfully popular Falco series, which follows the career of private investigator Marcus Didius Falco in ancient Rome during the days of Emperor Vespasian. Falco makes an engaging hero, mainly because of his sense of humour which shines through the first-person narrative. He has his trying points, though - for instance, he's a little in love with his own outsider status. Nevertheless, I can recommend the first ten books in the series - up to and including Two for the Lions - unreservedly. Then, in One Virgin Too Many, things slow down a bit, maybe because Falco's strangely ungrateful when he at last acquires the equestrian rank he has striven ten books to get (and what happened to the great wedding with Helena we'd been looking forward to?). In the next book, Ode to a Banker, the rot really sets in, and when things didn't improve in A Body in the Bath House I simply stopped reading the Falco novels. Well, all right, pace and plot improved in A Body in the Bath House. What did not improve, however, was the characterisation of Anacrites. Davis cooly and consciously ruins a perfectly good villain by making him increasingly brutal and ham-fisted, and humiliates him too by means of the Falco family.

So who is Anacrites, and why do I care so much that Davis broke him on her wheel? Well, he is the chief spy under Vespasian and a Greek freedman, sly and cynical. His relationship to Falco is strained most of the time, because Falco once took over a failed mission of his and completed it successfully (because of his contacts, as I remember, though Falco himself believes it was because of his superior skill). Sometimes, though, there's a thaw and they get along quite well for a time, until something new crops up which makes them enemies again. To sum up, Anacrites is - or was - the Clever Villain.

Only Falco doesn't think he's that clever. Because of the one botched mission, the PI actually believes himself to be smarter than the Imperial Chief Spy, which becomes a bit wearying after a while, because of course he isn't. Not, that is, until in Ode to a Banker, where Anacrites seems to have swallowed a bowl-full of stupid pills and confirms all Falco's smug assumptions. He gives Falco's mother bad advice on banks. He has an affair with her, but she also has an affair with an old neighbour (two-time Anacrites? Get away!). He shows interest in one of Falco's sisters, but she turns him down. In A Body in the Bath House, he responds in an ungentlemanly manner by having her lodgings wrecked - at the same time as he botches another spy mission. In one plot-line after another, Anacrites loses all his clever-villain cred., and it's just painful to watch. After A Body, I couldn't go on with it.

There are larger things at stake here than the destruction of a dreamy chief spy. By making him more or less into a figure of fun, Davis has shown disrespect to the villain-loving part of her readership. I'm not the only one with a weakness for baddies, happily, and I feel a particular fondness for authors who recognise villain-lovers as an important group of readers. That's one of the reasons I love Dickens. He put his villains through all kinds of misery, but he respected them, and he made sure most of his books feature at the very least one interesting "bad" character. Davis, on the other hand, by tarring and feathering a well-known and well-loved villain type (I mean - chief spy! Aaaah...), has more or less slapped the villain-loving community in the face, telling us "I don't need you, I only need healthy, sensible readers who root for honourable, under-dog private investigators". It is something it's hard to forgive. That's why the ghost of Anacrites may be getting in the way of my enjoying Master and God.

Falco book number ten, Two for the Lions, ends with the words "Anacrites was still alive". If only.