Past the point of no return

The problem with giving a book a good try before shelving it is you might come so far you don’t feel there’s any point in giving it up, even though you’re not convinced by it. I’ve reached this stage with "Labyrinth", which I will keep on reading until the end, grumbling all the way. It’s a bit unfair that the novel should put me in such a grumpy mood. It’s got some things going for it, like the pace, the plotting and… well, that’s it, really. It is action-packed, which means reading it is not great a hardship. But I find no joy in the characterisation, the descriptive passages (to be fair, few authors have the knack of making those gripping) or the language.

A common complaint when it comes to characters in novels is that they are depicted in black and white, but I’ve realised there are different ways of doing black-and-white-characterisation. An author who doesn’t bother with nuances can never hope to be the new Dostoyevsky, but all-good characters can still be engaging, and all-bad characters can still be fun. In "Labyrinth", though, the goodies are colourless – the medieval version of the heroine, Alaïs, is especially annoying – and the baddies are not so much stock characters as a set of traits generally associated with a particular stock character: they fill their function in the plot, but with little relish. The Bitch – both in the medieval and the modern part of the tale – has a little more going for her, as this is a stock character which it is hard to ruin completely. But just look at the Outwardly Civilised Brute. He has a record of sexual assault and domestic violence which has been hushed up as he’s from an influential family; his interrogation methods are unsophisticated to say the least; and in his office he has a photograph of himself shaking hands with Jean-Marie Le Pen, the erstwhile leader of the Front National. Oh, and he gives generous donations to the Jesuits. Boo. Hiss.

The Jesuit detail illustrates another problem I have with the book. I understand that the author wants us to side with the religious movement who called themselves Bon Chrétiens, and who are referred to in modern days as Cathars. But maybe she’s trying to hard – anyway, I in my contrary mood failed to warm to them. Yes, it seems harsh that they should be branded as "heretics", and yes, it’s nice that they embrace the notion that we will all be saved and go to Heaven eventually. But their beliefs as described in "Labyrinth" are so well attuned to modern sensibilities they set my teeth on edge. They are perfectly pally with Jews and Saracens, for instance, but openly scornful of Catholics. I’m not above a little papist-bashing myself sometimes, but don’t they deserve some credit for recognising the same Redeemer? Why shut them out of the cosy ecumenical fellowship? At one point, Alaïs sulks because she has to attend a service at – oh horror – a proper Cathedral, with a crucifix in it to which she takes exception. Can one blame the Pope for being a teensy bit peeved with these people?

Anyway, enough praise for our friends in Rome: I can see they blotted their copybook rather in medieval times with all their crusading. It might be consistent to persecute Cathars and Jews and Saracens, but it’s not particularly admirable. Let’s not forget, though, that the Catholics of the thirteenth century did not believe in universal salvation. It is easier to be tolerant when you are not convinced that those of a different religious persuasion are damning themselves in their own fashion.

The good old days of historical drama

It's strange, when it comes to period dramas from the Seventies and Eighties, that dramas based on historical lives age better than literary adaptations. It's not that the dialogue flows more easily. It often sounds a little stilted - especially when an attempt has been made to capture the language of the age - and exposition-heavy. There are no pace-making cuts or original camera angles: like the literary adaptations of the time, the historical dramas have a certain whiff of filmed theatre. But as filmed theatre, it somehow works better. The exchanges may not be realistic by any standards, but someone has put some thought into them, and they have been conceived as a TV play from the start. When you have a wonderful novel as a source, it is perhaps easier to think that its words will do all the work for you. It doesn't work that way: I've become more and more aware that a good deal of work needs to be done for a great novel to become good TV. Novels and drama are different genres, and filming even the best actors parroting as many of the novel's words as you can cram in is not the way to do it justice.

Examples of surprisingly good older historical dramas are the excellent "Elizabeth R", which in my view knocks spots off the more recent Elizabethan biodramas I've seen (the one with Helen Mirren and the first Cate Blanchett film); a sweetly partisan TV series about Disraeli; "Edward VII" (which made me feel sorry for the Kaiser - I'm not sure that was intentional) and "Will Shakespeare", a series from as early as 1978 which I have recently watched.

"Will Shakespeare" is very much a case in point here. You could never guess the scriptwriter was John Mortimer of Rumpole fame. The only resemblance I could find with the Rumpole stories is a certain bitter-sweetness: like the crusty barrister, Shakespeare does not have a very easy life, and yet you are somehow not too depressed by his setbacks. Language-wise, though, this is cod-Shakespearean throughout, but thought-provoking enough to get away with it. It's nice to see Tim Curry in a serious part. No flashing of the famous wolfish grin here: poor Will didn't have much to smile about. Nicholas Clay as the dashing Earl of Southampton steals the show rather, though. It was quite hard to imagine him as the golden young man of Shakespeare's sonnets. Unlike poor Marlowe's potentially murderous squeeze in the first episode - continuing the poisonous-youth trend quite nicely - there was nothing even faintly androgynous about Southampton. Nature clearly meant him to be a man from the start.

I was going on to making a point about authors' lives rarely being as thrilling as their work, and dramas about them having to make the best of what they got in different ways. That is why a biodrama of Shakespeare must needs have a golden young man and Dark Lady in it, though there may not have been any such persons outside Shakespeare's imagination at all. I think I'll leave that argument for another day, though, and wrap up instead with another strange thing. How come, when recent literary adaptations are mostly - though not always - more sure-footed that the old ones, that recent historical drama is often so underwhelming? Think of "The Tudors", or (if it qualifies as historical at all, which is doubtful) "Desperate Romantics". Sorry, but a lot of bed-hopping does not a thrilling drama make. You have to invest something in the characterisation. As with Cromwell in "The Tudors", Ruskin in "Desperate Romantics" is saved by a sterling acting performance. Tom Hollander's Ruskin may not know much about what he likes, but he knows about Art - this is definitely the man you would hire to buy an art collection for you. More's the pity that actors playing interesting historical characters don't get more to work with: instead they have to make do with quite clumsy scripts, which will as likely as not shove their guy/woman aside contemptously because he/she won't bed-hop. Some things really were better in the old days.

Deadly serious No. 1 bestsellers? I don't know...

Is this how the rot sets in? Is this how one becomes a book snob? When I started to feel critical after only a few pages of "Labyrinth", the "No. 1 bestseller", I had to face up to the fact that my demands on a self-indulgence book are far, far higher than on an Ambitious Book Project. I don't expect an ABP to grip me from page one, or at least page twenty. I'll give the characters in an ABP time to grow on me. This is because I know that, even if in the end I don't like the book, the time will not have been completely wasted. I can always boast afterwards about having read a classic, or a book by a prestigious modern author. And if it bored me, I can be even more insufferably culture-vultureish by adding: "...and it was rubbish". Because of my tolerant mood when reading them, however, and because books that are highly spoken of are often highly spoken of for a reason, I seldom do find ABPs to be rubbish, quite the contrary.

Now self-indulgence books are quite different. I know no-one will pat me on the back for reading them. And so I become a more difficult audience than the most arrogant princeling in history. I want to be entertained, or else what's the whole exercise worth? "Labyrinth" bravely flings at me age-old bodies in a cave, a mysterious ring with a mysterious pattern, an initiation ritual to a strange sect that goes off in an unexpected direction, another body, fresh this time, missing a thumb, that lies in the water... And all this before you have reached page 50. It goes on in the same action-packed way, even fitting in a steamy love scene. And still I'm hard to please.

One of my problems with the novel so far, I think, is the solemn tone. It seems we are meant to take the adventures of the heroines - or heroine, as they appear to be different re-incarnations of the same girl - very seriously. I'm not sure I see the point of the grim, stone-faced action yarn. I prefer my popular authors with a dash of wit: Christie, say, for all her intricate plotting, didn't stint on the bantering dialogue or wry observations. Come to think of it, most "serious" authors benefit by some humour, too. I chuckled more than once while reading "To Kill A Mockingbird", which is more than you can say for "Labyrinth". But it may yet lighten up and make me care for the heroine/s (I don't, yet). I do hope the dignitaries of the Catholic Church don't turn out to be the big baddies, though. For my own part I wouldn't mind much if they do nab the True Grail - they're Christians, aren't they? It's not like they wouldn't appreciate it - and I'm a Protestant.

"Hard Times" as retold by Neil Kinnock

There's a "Not the Nine O'Clock News" sketch where the host of a TV programme aimed at young people - who wants to be hip, but ends up sounding like an unusually despotic teacher - sternly asks a hapless young man just what is wrong with his life at present. The youth is stumped, but a helpful friend stage-whispers to him: "The Tories..."

I was reminded of this sketch when I saw the "Hard Times" TV adaptation by Peter Barnes. The Tory party - which is confidently identified as Gradgrind's party - seems to crop up time and again in conversation as a symbol of both Gradgrind's and Bounderby's hard-hearted opinions. Now, I would have thought that a Benthamite who calls one of his children Adam Smith would be a Liberal, but what do I know? The boundaries between the main parties in Victorian England seem to have been a lot fuzzier than between the clear-cut ideologies we were taught at school, and the Tory label does explain how the high-born Harthouse fits in. Moving on, Stephen channels Jean-Paul Marat in one scene, scowling and snarling at his Capitalist Oppressor - small wonder he gets the sack. Slackbridge is in the cast list, so he must have made an appearance, but I wonder who he was supposed to be: surely not the sturdy salt-of-the-earth man who tried to persuade Stephen in a reasonable sort of way to join the Union and called him "lad"? After Stephen (not quite in Marat mode yet) has had his chat with Bounderby about his hopeless marital affairs and wanders home disconsolately, there are huge posters proclaiming "Vote for Gradgrind" all along the way. Having trouble with your Missus? Who's to blame? THE TORIES.

Though the ideological content of the book has been tweaked to fit the adapter's views, I wasn't that fussed. In a way, Dickens deserves it, as his social criticism is such a mess it's hard to make anything of it. Especially, though, there was hardly time to mind, as the adaptation moved along at a fair lick. It is interesting that, although it offers him an excuse for a bit of bourgeois-bashing, Barnes doesn't dwell in the world of Coketown longer than he has to. You'd almost believe that he's not that much fonder of the book than I am. As an overview of "Hard Times" the adaptation works well and painlessly enough: it's not deep or complex, but then that is not altogether the fault of the adapter.

The actors do their best. Pity poor Alan Bates who starts off boisterously enough as Bounderby, but then loses heart somewhere along the way, as he realises there is really nothing more to this character than bone-headed tirades. Bob Peck as Gradgrind does better, but then he's got a - comparatively - meatier part to work with. The big "making a silk purse out of a sow's ear" prize goes to Harriet Walter for injecting a bit of life into the hopeless part of Rachel. I was disappointed at first by Alex Jennings's Bitzer, having optimistically hoped for very fair (maybe albino?), very young (Sissy's age at a guess - nineteen tops), forehead-knuckling villain totty. Jennings is not fair, not nineteen, not forehead-knuckling, and does his prissy darnedest not to be totty. But he has a persuasive take on the character and won me over in the end. The venom with which he flings out "I paid for it [Gradgrind's schooling]" and the satisfied power-vacuum-here-I-come-smirk when Bounderby croaks in front of him are nice touches.

Has anyone but me noticed, incidentally, that Tom deserves to get caught? He committed a theft in cold blood; he deliberately pinned the crime on a completely innocent, if annoying, man; he is not in the least bit sorry; he has kept the spoils and has thus profited by his crime; and it is quite likely he will steal again. He is a walking catalogue of reasons why you should lock a criminal up. This isn't necessarily a flaw, though. It says something about Sleary and the circus people that they gladly help someone who is not deserving in order to do Gradgrind a favour: it doesn't diminish their kindness, but makes it more of a personal gesture than if Tom had been blameless. It says something about the supposedly rational Gradgrind that he is blind enough to ask Bitzer "What motive [...] can you have for preventing the escape of this miserable youth" when there are dozens. And it says something about Bitzer that he has no interest in occupying the moral high ground, but ignores the more worthy motives for capturing Tom in favour of his own selfish ones. Yes, I admit it, even "Hard Times" is not without interest: no book by Dickens could be.

One little white lie? Forget it - you're in high school

Well, that didn't go so badly. Like most Swedes, I'm pretty chuffed our song made it to third place in the Eurovision Song Contest. Gone are the days when we would sulk every time we didn't win. Now we're happy to make the final in the first place, and as for becoming one of the top five - marvellous.

Mind you, I was a bit worried. The song is catchy, but the charming Finn in Swedish Television's Eurovision panel gave a word of warning. He doubted that the lyrics - about a boy who dreams of being popular so he can win the prettiest girl in school - would appeal much to the over-thirties. And he has a point, not because we don't remember what it was like in school, but because we do. Not that many people were popular in school. And while non-cool kids like me took a dim view of the popular crowd, the wannabes weren't that much better. They knew, and we knew, the surest route to popularity: picking on those lower down in the pecking order, i.e. us.

Still, who's to say: maybe dancing and breaking the odd glass wall might do the trick as well. I was prepared to think so, and so, it appears, was Europe.

In one respect, I was lucky in school experiences, at least I get that impression when I see American high school comedies. Secondary school (junior high school in America) may have been Alcatraz, but senior high school was actually all right. It was a far cry from the world of petty feuding and one-upmanship shown in the films. It varies, of course, and some Swedish high schools are rumoured to be cliquey and hard to navigate, but on balance I'd say that if you've survived Swedish secondary school, you're over the worst. Whereas, it appears, for the poor yanks, your problems are only just about to start. I remember a character in the film version of "The Jane Austen Book Club" (I don't think it was in the book) stating very emphatically, after having run into an old enemy from her school days, "High school is never over".

Boy, it's fun to watch, though, as long as you haven't lived through it yourself. High school comedies are an extremely guilty pleasure: compared to them, a Disney cartoon is an art movie. The formula, and the variations on it, are part of the fun. Of course there has to be a bitch. Of course she has to have well-groomed sidekicks. Of course the film's heroine - after really trying to keep out of trouble - will have her patience tried to such an extent by the bitch's plotting that she retaliates, quite justifiably. Cue the most enjoyable part of the film where the heroine stoops to mean tricks and we are still allowed to root for her. But then, invariably, she goes too far, becomes a bitch herself, and risks losing her Real Friends who are always profoundly uncool. Then there is a Disaster and she ends up hated by the whole school, only to make a triumphant comeback after having patched things up with her uncool pals. The bitch is defeated, and then they all go to college and live happily ever after. Sometimes it's a boy who makes this journey of discovery, as in the teen movie classic "Can't Buy Me Love", which unfortunately means less backstabbing.

What is rather tough in these films - and this is a thing they have in common with Disney cartoons - is that no deception, however minor or excusable, is tolerated in the long run. If you have any secret at all it will be all out in the open at the film's climax, and the one person you wanted to keep it from will know all about it. I'm all for the message Be Yourself and To Thine Own Self Be True, but films aimed at youngsters seem to be obsessed about it. To name but two examples, Mulan must be unmasked as a woman and the "warrior" insects in "A Bug's Life" must be revealed to be failed circus artists, because only by being themselves can they triumph - in the films, that is. Being Yourself in the real world isn't always that rewarding, especially not for a kid or a teenager. Still, there's self-respect to consider, so in the long run the moral message is the correct one, if only it weren't hammered in quite so incessantly. Once in a while, I would like to see a hero or heroine of a high school comedy - or a Disney film - get away with a lie.

One shouldn't get too sniffy about the To Thine Own Self Be True story arc, though. Dickens used it brilliantly in "Great Expectations". Maybe it's his turn to get the high school comedy treatment after Shakespeare ("10 Things I Hate About You" etc.) and Austen ("Clueless")? Estella would make a first-class high school bitch.

Rectitude's reward

If there is a common theme to my reading and recent TV viewing, it is sadly not great villains but morally upright men. I'm reading "To Kill A Mockingbird" at the moment, because I wanted to tick at least one more book on the BBC Big Read's list, because I've heard it well spoken of just about everywhere but also, I must admit, because I was expecting a tense courtroom drama. The novel really is excellent, and I'm glad I've got round to reading it, but so far there has not been a single courtroom scene, and I'm almost halfway through it. So far, this is not a thriller with a Message, but a depiction - and a very convincing one, too - of the childhood of Jean Louise "Scout" Finch, the bright, tough daughter of lawyer Atticus Finch.

You can see, of course, that Atticus is admirable, but his effortless occupation of the moral high ground in every question can be a bit hard to take in the long run. Scout and her brother Jem (for Jeremy) will most likely grow up to be very well-behaved and useful members of society as they try to live up to their father's principles, but could the man get off his high horse once in a while and just be a dad? Plus when am I going to see the inside of that courtroom?

The other pillar of rectitude I've encountered lately is John Ridd in the TV dramatisation of "Lorna Doone". But here, the righteousness of the hero comes as a bit of a relief. John and his ladylove Lorna are the least interesting characters in the whole story, as is so often the case with star-crossed lovers in a Romeo-and-Juliet drama which happens not to be "Romeo and Juliet". Making John a conflicted character who had to battle down his desire for revenge against the criminal Doone family at every turn would only have made us impatient with him. Instead, he can at least be counted on to Do The Right Thing even under the most trying circumstances - and, rather upliftingly, his restraint is rewarded and justice is done without the hero having to feel that he has at any time behaved shabbily.

It is the secondary characters who keep your interest up, though, partly because they're played by the elite of British acting, which is rather more than they deserve. "Lorna Doone" is not a subtle drama. A Dickens Christmas story has more shades of grey than this. But the actors do their best. Peter Vaughan gimlet-eyes impressively as the robber baron Sir Ensor Doone; Anton Lesser just about convinces you that he's the clever one among the Doones although he in fact never comes up with any particularly cunning plan; Martin Clunes is so likeable as a food-loving, benevolent officer you can forgive the TV people for somewhat unfairly billing him above the young lovers and Michael Kitchen uses his am-I-the-only-person-with-a-brain-in-the-room pauses to great effect as hanging judge Jeffreys. Poor Martin Jarvis is saddled with playing the weak and corrupt local judge, a part not even he can make much of, although the last shot we see of him is memorable.

Carver Doone, "One of the worst villains of all time" according to the blurb, did nothing for me, I'm afraid. It wasn't the fault of Aidan Gillen who played him - no-one could have made anything of Carver, at least not in this adaptation. He raids and sulks and raids and sulks and then finally earns the worst-villain tag in one, gasp-inducing scene before going to his end, sulkily. Why he should get so hung up about sweet cipher Lorna is anybody's guess. I ended up ogling the corrupt local judge's rotten-to-the-core, pretty-boy son instead: he was dead cute, especially when he sported a plaited Doone hairdo instead of daddy's second-best wig. No noticeable motivation and not many lines, but who cares? Ruthless, underwritten youths are the new black.

The hospital series trap

It was with great reluctance I started watching "Grey's Anatomy" a few years ago. I'm not fond of hospital series. With the exception of the extremely light-hearted German series "The Schwarzwald Clinic", which happily dispensed with the rule that, as a sop to reality, once in a while someone actually has to die, hospital series tend to be depressing. This is not surprising. Death and disease are commonplace occurrences in hospitals - they are not sunny, upbeat places. And yet, it's not as if hospital series are usually made with the intention of being TV's answer to Greek Tragedies: mostly they're supposed to be comparatively light, middle-of-the-week entertainment. It seems an impossible thing to pull off, but many series have tried.

And for a long time, "Grey's Anatomy" succeeded. The focus was squarely on the doctors, their relationship problems and their career dilemmas. Patients came and went, and sometimes things ended badly, sometimes not, but they were only the side show, not the main attraction. Mostly, they didn't stay around long enough for the viewer to brood on their fate. The doctors' professional heartlessness helped, too. When faced with a horrific injury or rare illness, their reaction was not "oh, poor soul" but "yay, surgery!". Operating was seen as a job, and an intellectually stimulating one. The questions that most engaged the viewer were "Who's going to end up sleeping with whom? Who's going to land that terrific surgery? How will things work out between Derek and Meredith?". You may have rooted for a patient or two and hoped that they would pull through, but if he/she died you didn't feel like shooting yourself.

But now, finally, "Grey's Anatomy" (I'm watching the sixth season) has succumbed to the Curse of the Hospital Series. Many of the series' problems aren't related to the genre, just long-running-series-fatigue. One tell-tale sign is when a bunch of new characters are introduced, and are then under-used. In "Grey's Anatomy", a group of new surgeons arrived in connection with a hospital merger, but we haven't seen much of them. The doe-eyed potential female love interest seems to have vanished completely, and the bastard whose behaviour got series stalwart Izzie fired looks set to follow. (Seriously, how did they imagine that any character would be able to survive such a bad start?). However, as we engage less and less with the personal story lines, the balance shifts and romantic intrigues can no longer dispel the accumulating gloom of Cases Going Badly. The last episode took the biscuit, with a doting husband who learns that his wife's operation went perfectly, only for her to suffer a coma-inducing stroke in the time it takes him to reach her bedside. "Can I wake her up?" he asks, happy and oblivious. Things do not improve from there, and if the descriptions of coming episodes are anything to go by, this is not the last we see of this grief-stricken, obviously-no-great-fan-of-the-hospital character.

There are still things that make "Grey's Anatomy" just about watchable, such as the wonderful Christina: career-obsessed, brilliant at her job and unapologetically unemotional. But I wonder if I will bother with buying season seven. Still, six seasons before the grim reality of hospital life finally get the better of the series (though there have been sticky moments before): that's no mean achievement.