From prestigious drama to Gossip Central: strange development of The Crown

Well, now the Trojan horse is well and truly open, and the Greeks are storming out. There's no more room for doubt: The Crown has outed itself as anti-Monarchist.

I can say this much for myself: I did call it in season three, so I wasn't as surprised as some reviewers. But that is still embarrassingly late to cotton on to what Peter Morgan was up to. Even so, I wasn't alone in thinking The Crown gave a largely positive picture of the Queen and her family in season one, was I? Even season two didn't seem like a hatchet job, with the exception of the episode where Prince Philip sent Prince Charles to that awful school. Then there was Morgan's track record: he had shown himself sympathetic with the Queen both in the film The Queen and in the play The Audience. So has The Crown really been a con, lulling viewers largely favourably disposed towards the royals into a feeling of false security, only to finally denounce the whole pack of 'em? Or has there really been a change of perspective on Morgan's part over the seasons? To be sure I'd need to rewatch the series from the beginning, which I'm not that eager to do, as I have always found it rather slow.

Because here's the shame confession: the most ethically questionable episodes, about the short pre-wedding romance and unhappy marriage of Prince Charles and Princess Diana, have been the ones I most enjoyed watching throughout the series. All in all, this season feels a little pacier than the others: there are few scenes so slow that you can hear steps echoing and the grandfather clocks ticking in the palace. Also, it can't be denied that an unhappy relationship between two mismatched people (Charles and Diana) makes for better drama than a few spats in a happy relationship between two well-matched ones (the Queen and Philip). Is it fair to the real Prince Charles and his sons to make his failed marriage with their mother into a TV entertainment which probably contains a fair amount of horrendous falsehoods? Probably not. Does it work as TV entertainment? I'm afraid so.

Morgan could argue that the Charles-Diana breakup has been televised before, and that he gives a more nuanced picture than those soapy dramas did (yep, I saw them too, so I'm not in a position to morally judge anyone). This is true, as far as it goes. There's been a lot of talk about how different the two spouses were, but in The Crown a convincing argument is made for the possibility that there were similarities too, and that these similarities created their own problems. In the TV series, both Charles and Diana admit to each other that they crave affection and approval, which is why Charles, who already feels rejected by his parents, cuts up rough when he's rejected by the public too in favour of his wife. The performances from Josh O'Connor and Emma Corrin as the miserable couple are brilliant, and for a while you can see both sides of the argument. At the end of the series, however, Diana, though not depicted as a saint - she shows both self-centredness and errors of judgment - is clearly seen as a victim of her emotionally cold in-laws and the nastiness of her emotionally all-too-hot husband. The perspective feels more than a little skewed, though I thought Camilla came out of it surprisingly well, perhaps due to a likeable performance from Emerald Fennell.

Enough with the gossip: what about the rest of the season? Well... I'm sorry to say, the gossip was the best bit. Something that's bothered me with The Crown for some time, though I've never been able to put my finger on it until this season, is that it's so manipulative. The events are very clearly presented in a certain way to make us feel something specific. Though I'm happy to be manipulated into sadness over Lord Mountbatten's death and satisfaction over Michael Shea's successful career as writer of political thrillers (I don't know if he was really made the fall guy over a palace leak he disapproved of, but I want to give his books a try now!), there were other instances where I wasn't so ready to play ball. The worst duds of the season, in my view, were the episodes Fagan - about a man who broke into Buckingham Palace twice, who is here made into a symbol of Everything That Was Wrong With Thatcherite Britain - and The Hereditary Principle, where Princess Margaret learns of a couple of severely mentally disabled cousins hidden away in a mental institution. "It is cold and cruel", rails Margaret, who isn't normally given to moral indignation. But the establishment was well-run and the cousins were obviously in need of care: I didn't quite see what made her so upset, apart from the secrecy. It's not every day you feel less empathic than The Crown's version of Princess Margaret.

What of the other Margaret then, Margaret Thatcher? I'm a little torn over Gillian Anderson's performance: it wasn't terrible, but it didn't really convince me, either. It felt more like an impersonation than acting in the "getting inside a character" sense. Also, the script is rather clunky: Thatcher's conversations with the Queen feel more like interviews with a Guardian journalist, where Thatcher makes public statements and the Queen quietly criticises. I thought Thatcher's crack in an interview about the Good Samaritan was rather neat, but I doubt she was so pleased with it that she bothered to rehash it with Her Majesty. Not until the very last scene between the two do we actually get a feeling of there being a meeting "woman to woman". However, there's a marked improvement of the treatment of this relationship compared to the Thatcher scene in Morgan's The Audience. Overall, could have been worse.

To circle back to the beginning, I think there has been a shift in perspective in The Crown, and that it coincided more or less with the changing of the cast in season three. Olivia Colman doesn't really convince us the way Claire Foy did that this version of the Queen is worth caring about. In this season, you have a feeling that both the Queen and Thatcher are played by actresses who don't quite get them. The spouses do better: Denis Thatcher (Stephen Boxer) is allowed to be an absolute sweetie, and Tobias Menzies as Prince Philip still has great chemistry with Colman's Queen. Even when he criticizes her, he is affectionate and humorous about it rather than needling as Matt Smith's Philip often was.

I used to feel guilty for preferring TV series such as Once Upon A Time to the prestigious-seeming The Crown. The latter is still good drama, and I'll continue watching it, but I no longer feel guilty about preferring pacier - and less defamatory - fare.

Morgenstern's puzzling maze of stories

Like many readers, I was engrossed by Erin Morgenstern's debut The Night Circus. I didn't fall completely under its spell right away, but I remember being really caught up in the final chapters and desperately wanting everything to turn out fine. What Morgenstern really pulled off, apart from making us care at least for some of the side characters, if not necessarily for the leads, was to make the titular Night Circus seem alluring. As a dream world of magic with a hint of danger, it was convincing and drew in the reader like it drew in its visitors.

Morgenstern's second novel, The Starless Sea, also invites the reader to enter another, magical world. This time, though, it took quite a while before I got properly into the book. When I did, it was partly because I wanted to see how the author would be able to tie all the disparate story threads together. The structure is really complex with stories within stories, and I was curious to know how it all connected. Also, with time, I did care enough for the characters to go "aww, thats too bad" when things seemed to be going to pot for them and to be relieved every time they cleared a hurdle. Overall, though, it didn't engage me as much as The Night Circus did.

One reason for this was that the magic world we were supposed to want to escape to didn't seem all that appealing at first. The main character, Zachary Rawlins, comes across a mysterious book called Sweet Sorrows in the library of the university he's attending, which includes a scene from his own life. There seems to be no room for doubt, yet the book is hundreds  of years old, written long before the events it describes in such detail. 

It's a fascinating premise, but the world that Sweet Sorrows is about felt a bit off for me. It speaks of underground harbours around the Starless Sea, where stories are stored in multitudes as in one sprawling, fantastic library. That's nice. Like so many bookish people, I'm usually a sucker for stories about the power of stories. Only, among the first things we learn about the whole Starless Sea society (for want of a better word to describe it) is that they go to extraordinary lengths to preserve their precious stories. There are three "paths" you can follow, Sweet Sorrows solemnly tells us, if you want to do your bit for the story collection: you can become an acolyte, a guardian or a keeper. Each path has its own initiation rites and examples of extreme devotion to the bookish cause. Acolytes (who seem to be glorified dogsbodies) sacrifice their tongues, the better to serve the stories of others (what?). Guardian candidates who, after being given a grand tour, declare that they are not prepared to give their life for what they would be set to guard, are swiftly killed: they are of no use to the cause and have seen too much. Keepers used to be kidnapped children who grew up training for the job, until the powers that be decided that the career choice should be voluntary. Now this, I would argue, is taking devotion to stories a little too far. What's wrong with common or garden librarians, anyway?

Because of these overtones of tyranny, the world which, by the time Zachary reaches it, is vanishing fast and well past its heyday, didn't feel like a lost paradise to me. It turns out, though, that Zachary's function isn't really to restore the particular Harbour he reaches to its former supposed glory, so it doesn't matter if you don't quite buy into the marvels of yesteryear. In a way, the declining world in which Zachary stumbles around, containing less than half a dozen people and a great deal more cats, is more appealing in its melancholic way than the Harbour in the grand old days. Zachary doesn't think so, though, and is haunted by a sense of disappointment in what he finds on the other side of his particular door-to-Narnia equivalent. Would it have been better if he'd dared to try that magic painted door he came across as child, or would he have been too late even then?

So the Tyranny of Stories angle didn't bug me for long: however, the stories-within-stories structure felt too clever-clever at times. In some ways, The Starless Sea seems less assured than Morgenstern's debut novel, as it strains for effect more. Critics usually claim that the second novel is especially problematic for many authors. I'm not sure that's true: I believe it's more a case of critics overpraising someone's debut and taking it out on the next book that comes along. The Starless Sea's problems do tend to be classic second-novel ones, though. It has a way more complicated plot than The Night Circus and throws anything but the kitchen sink at it: portals to a hidden world; a huge library; a secret society wanting to close the portals; star-crossed lovers; tales containing stars and the moon and owls and swords; abstractions that are made into characters; foreshadowing mentions of a character that turns out to be more of an abstraction etc. What with the main story being told in tandem with other narratives, one after another, you can get a little impatient with it all, especially when "interludes" are added into the mix.

For all that, I enjoyed this novel. A clue to what the author may be aiming at is that Zachary is something of an expert on storytelling computer games. This proves useful when he comes up against various difficult situations: instead of giving up when facing, say, a locked door, he searches around for clues on how to open it. His adventures resemble an ambitious computer game in many ways, which gives the book some licence for not tying up every loose plot thread. As in a game (says I who haven't played one for many a day, but I think I understand the concept), there are paths left unexplored and consequently stories left untold. There is also an underlying sweetness in the descriptions of the various love stories which is very winning. Morgenstern is clearly a romantic, and that, to me at least, is an attractive trait in a storyteller.

What does Enola Holmes have to do with Holmes?

I found I sort of missed hate-watching when I'd made it through the Netflix series Cursed, so when I saw the trailer for Enola Holmes (also on Netflix) and cringed throughout, it seemed like a good candidate for a hate-watching session. Only, I've learned that it's far more comfortable to hate-watch a series one bite-sized chunk at a time rather than a 2+-hour film. There were moments when I nearly gave up on Enola Holmes, even though I watched it at a time when I had little energy to do anything else.

It was awful. The jokes were unfunny, the supposedly moving moments didn't land and the characters were as thin as tracing paper. The film is supposed to be about the little sister of Sherlock and Mycroft Holmes and set in late-Victorian times but has clearly no idea of either Sherlock Holmes lore or Victorian England. Now the actors, I grant you, were good, but a stellar cast was completely wasted on their barely-there or caricatured characters. And the "yay, women!" messaging was really clunky.

I've been reluctant to bring up Enola Holmes as I'm afraid of being unnecessarily hard on what is meant to be unpretentious entertainment. In spite of its puzzling 12+ Netflix rating, this is clearly a kids' film, best enjoyed by those who are 12- years old. It's been adapted from a book series of Young Adult mysteries, so isn't it unreasonable to expect that it should show any historical or Holmes-related insight?

There were so many things about this supposedly light confection that got my goat, though. There's the taking advantage of the Sherlock Holmes brand, when the script-writer (and possibly the author of the original books?) don't seem to know the first thing about the detective in question and his associates. Sherlock's and Enola's older brother Mycroft not only has the ungrateful task of representing the Old Horrid Order which represses women and poor people, it is expressly stated that he doesn't have his younger siblings' aptitude for deductions and detective work. Conan Doyle's Mycroft, on the other hand, was described as even more brilliant than his younger brother, and easily scores points off him when it comes to deductions. He's not into detecting simply because he can't be bothered. As for the Enola version of Sherlock himself, he has more in common with Mr Darcy than with the famous detective (including his looks): he's a bit socially awkward and doesn't know how to express his feelings, but his heart is in the right place. There's no Dr Watson, no Mrs Hudson, no Baker Street. Lestrade shows up briefly, played by Adeel Akhtar, an actor I have a lot of time for after he nailed Thénardier so brilliantly in the BBC’s Les Misérables. But he gets nothing to work with here, and is obliged to utter lines like: "Sherlock Holmes always works alone." Lies, I say!

The film wouldn't have lost anything if it had dropped the Holmes references altogether and contented itself with being a caper about a plucky girl with an unconventional upbringing and a bent for detecting who wants to find her mother (vanished without a trace, but voluntarily) and is caught up in high intrigue along the way. For my part, I could have borne it better, though I still wouldn't have liked it.

Another thing that really annoyed me about the film was the combination of its wanting to show how female-empowering it was at the expense of Those Horrible Victorians while not having done any homework about Victorian times. Now, films for children and teenagers in historical settings don't tend to be over-researched. And that's fine, mostly, that's the genre. But what with Enola Holmes making such a big deal out of how repressed women and the deserving poor are, you'd expect them to get the nature of said repression more or less right. In the film, Enola is for a time consigned to a finishing school with shades of Lowood. But elegant ladies attending a finishing school would never be subjected to simple attire and terrible food à la Lowood. Think it through.

The political circumstances of the plot are kept deliberately vague, which is just as well. But with nothing substantial to say about social conditions in Victorian England, the hand-wringing about "powerlessness" - poor Sherlock gets treated to a whole lecture on the subject from a friend of his mother's who teaches women martial arts in secret - merely comes across as irritating posturing.

Admittedly, one scene that threw me is passably historically correct. At one point, Enola comes across one of her mother's hideouts, and discovers gunpowder and bombs. "Mycroft was right", she muses, "mother is dangerous". Enola's mother is working for women's suffrage, and as I only found out fairly recently, there was a part of the suffragette movement which endorsed using violent means, though they stopped short of actually killing people. I was shocked when I discovered this, as it seemed not only wrong but counterproductive - were I a male MP, a bunch of angry women attacking my home wouldn't make me a convert to the cause of women's suffrage. Mrs Holmes is clearly one of these hard-liners, but the bombs are never touched on again, and it's not even made clear that they're not meant to be used on people. It would have been natural to bring the subject up when Enola and her mother finally meet again, or else why include the initial scene in the first place? Are we supposed to embrace the bomb-making, or what?

In its efforts to big up the resourcefulness of the heroine, the film also treats us to the tiresome trope of the Useless Male Love Interest. The young lord Enola comes across on her adventures may not be quite such an idiot as he appears in the trailer, but he is still the weak part of the pairing, what with Enola being much more intelligent, inventive, good at defending herself etc. As a woman, I feel patronised by this kind of plot-constructing. I enjoy strong women protagonists (not that they have to have kick-ass abilities, incidentally), but that doesn't mean I want to see male characters depicted as weak and pathetic. It reminds me of old Donald Duck adventures from my childhood, where Hughie, Dewey and Louie were always the responsible ones while Donald and Scrooge behaved like children. It was meant to pander to kids, I'm sure, but we saw through it - and thought Hughie, Dewey and Louie were being smug pains in the neck. (Luckily, the adventures improved with time.) A female protagonist doesn't need a useless male by her side to make her look good. Just make her interesting as a person.

It has to be said, though, that Frances de la Tour manages to rise above the material she's given as an aristocratic Dowager. Also, I did find it interesting that Fiona Shaw's finishing-school headmistress has the hots for her old school friend's son (Mycroft), which is fairly transgressive for a woman in her position. Mind you, that's played for laughs - not very sisterly, I would have thought.