What's the appeal of the ranting rebel?

I think I know which of my own taboos I will break next. Next time I fall in love - or, to be precise, develop a weird villain crush - the object of my affection will probably be an idealist who likes to explain at length his plans to save the world. Because, hitherto, I have not been able to see the point of this kind of bloke at all. Clearly this is a barrier waiting to be broken down.

It is, by now, impossible to find any one common denominator among all my villain crushes, except that they have been villains. But there is one thing most of them share: supreme selfishness. If pushed, they may perform a selfless act for someone they love (think of Soames, for instance). But sacrificing themselves to a higher cause? Nope - never, and quite right too. This down-to-earthness is one of the reasons I like villains so much. They cut through the waffle - or sneer at it and parody it to great effect - and concentrate on essential things. Like looking after number one.

Of course, there have been exceptions to the rule. Javert and Bulstrode are both idealists, and Chauvelin's exertions to capture the Scarlet Pimpernel are, at least at first, powered by his wish to be of service to the Revolution. But in each of these cases, what I've admired has been the style and personality of these men rather than their beliefs. I don't believe as fanatically in law and order as Javert (though anarchy certainly holds no appeal for me, besides not having to work), and I don't think people should be strong-armed into a grim and unmerciful kind of faith even by a scrumptious banker like Bulstrode. As for the Reign of Terror, we-ell, I suppose it got of hand just the teeniest bit. But no one could fault the way these gentlemen go about their business, with cunning (Chauvelin), powerful efficiency (Bulstrode) or just bare-faced panache (Javert).

The normal template for an idealist heartthrob in the world of fiction is nothing like Javert and Co. anyway. One good example, which made me think of the subject, is a character in the book I'm reading at the moment. It's called Park Lane and should be right up my street, as it has as its central characters a maid and her young mistress in a rich London household in the 1910s. An upstairs-downstairs perspective; balls; hard-to-find eligible matches; handsome (if annoyingly blameless) footmen - I ought really to be wild about it. Somehow, though, I'm not finding it as easy going as I'd hoped, and this is largely because I can't really warm to the novel's two heroines. They seem each in their own way very silly girls, and I find it hard to care when they get into completely self-inflicted trouble. The upstairs girl, Beatrice, is especially idiotic, more like a fourteen-year-old than a twenty-one-year-old. Both girls are full of admiration for Michael Campbell, the maid Grace's brother whom Beatrice encounters when attending a suffragette rally.

Michael is a texbook idealistic revolutionary, and describes his ideas of a new world order to anyone who cares to listen. He is full of glowering resentment towards the upper classes, and far from being put off by this, upper-class Beatrice thinks his rants are top hole. She even offers to type his glittering opinions and to find a newspaper publisher who will print them.

What is wrong with these women? Show me a self-important numbskull droning on about the people's revolution (while not so much deigning to wash up his own tea-cup, in most cases) and I'll show you a flock of women sitting entranced at his feet. Whenever a surly rebel turns up in a novel - or film or TV production for that matter - you can be sure one of the female protagonists will be making a bee-line for him. And I don't get it. I simply do not.

All right, perhaps it's partly, or even mostly, to do with the fact that the grand ideas that these rebels tend to spout hold no appeal for me. Also, I am a woman of the 20th century - we were taught to be wary of Utopias which hinged on the mysterious disappearance of a considerable part of the populace. The century's hard lessons weren't available to Beatrice, of course, but still it's hard to sympathise with her starry-eyed acceptance of both Michael's railings against her own kind and the violent actions planned by the group of hard-line suffragettes she's joined.  There is no excuse for committing foul deeds in the name of creating a better world. If it demands such things of you, how good can it be?

And so I throw down my gauntlet to future villains. Make me care for a wild-eyed social reformer who commits his villanies for the good of humanity, and you will truly have achieved something new.

TV bits and pieces

Blimey. I've forgotten how tired work makes you, and how much time it takes out of your day. I certainly don't feel up for any in-depth discussion of anything, which means this will have to be one of those bitty blog posts about all kinds of things like:

Richard II - well done, BBC: I know I've been hard on the Beeb since... ooh, forever now. Since they axed Dombey, in fact. So it's only fair to mention that I was extremely impressed by the first part of The Hollow Crown which I watched during my vacation. I was no fan of Ben Whishaw's Sebastian Flyte in the mainly disastrous film version of Brideshead Revisited (don't get me started!), nor of his journalist Freddie Lyon in The Hour. They both shared a trait of whinyness, which was a pity, considering Whishaw's nervy good looks - I really wanted to like him. He was great as Richard, though - still not exactly a stoic, but able to skewer his usurping cousin Bolingbroke (Rory Kinnear, satisfyingly conscience-stricken from the first) with wry conviction. First-rate acting and verse-speaking all round: yep, if it has to be high-brow, it should be like this rather than like the soporific Parade's End.

"New grit"? No way! As if The Village wasn't bad enough. Now another gloom-and-doom-and-indignation-politics costume drama has aired in the UK, called - wait for it - The Mill. Well, at least it appears to do what it says on the tin. Apparently, the series starts off with a child worker getting his hand mangled and a woman worker being "sexually assaulted", as reviews primly put it. The events in the series are based on records from a real mill, so this, like, really happened. Well, yes, I'm sure it did. I wouldn't be surprised if similar things have happened at my workplace during its long history, but not, I believe, at the same time and as an everyday occurrence. I strongly suspect the series creators of foul-cherry-picking, milking their source material for grim details which they can serve up to their viewers, so that everyone can have a good boo and hiss over the nasty industrialists. This is the second costume drama in a short time which I have no desire whatsoever to watch even five minutes of. And this time - to be fair to the BBC again - they are not the culprits. The Mill was perpetrated by Channel Four - a commercial channel. What's worse, 2.8 million saw the first episode, which is more than the channel's usual audience at this time. It's still only half of the audience for the new Upstairs Downstairs - which was deemed a failure viewer-wise - but still there is talk of a trend of "new grit", away from cosy dramas.

Let's face it, no-one does costume drama quite as well as the Brits, which makes it so upsetting when they're side-tracked like this. They could spare a thought for their international viewers. Do they honestly think we're going to go wild about some smug, mill-owner-bashing, mud-drenched misery fest? Will we watch it in millions? Will we visit the sites, buy the calendar, like pictures of the cast - all the cast - on Facebook, and swooningly comment on what great personalities they are and how marvellously they are acted? Not bloody likely. We don't want the "new grit", thank you very much. We want the new Downton.

Three is a magic number: A far cry from ambitious Shakespeare-watching, I spent my two last-but-one vacation days glued in front of the airiest and least demanding TV viewing possible: Lace and Lace II. Then again, it might look simple to come up with light and frothy entertainment, but I bet it isn't. As I've mentioned before, formulas must be handled in the right way, or the soufflé sinks. For instance, Shirley Conran settled for exactly the right number of girls for her schoolgirl pact in Lace. Two would have been too few. Four, and the story would have lost focus. Three friends with different characters and backgrounds (though all with families able to afford a pricy finishing school in Switzerland): that works beautifully. Other sure touches include an underplaying of the abandoned daughter's revenge plans in favour of more light-hearted aspects of the plot, such as the heroines' school-girl antics. All this, and a creepy chauffeur too - no wonder I started work in a relatively good mood.                                 

“Anti”-characters – hard to like, but can work sometimes

I’m happy to say that Fingersmith proved riveting until the end, largely thanks to its cunning plot – so twisty it’s hard to comment on – and the resourcefulness of its anti-heroines. I would call them anti-heroines, though, rather than heroines. Both Susan aka Sue and Maud can behave like perfect cows. Their reluctant and, for them both, inconvenient love for each other is engaging, but partly because it fitfully renders them capable of thinking of someone else but themselves. Sue has one more person she cares for – her foster-mother Mrs Sucksby – but Maud’s is not an affectionate nature. She is the hardest to warm to, the festering lily to Sue’s weed. But though there is a refreshing frankness to Sue’s selfishness, it is no less real than Maud’s. Both girls can sweep aside comparably innocent characters or use them for their own ends without any qualms to speak of. They don’t become noticeably mellower either as the story progresses. But they are good at getting out of scrapes, I’ll give them that.

The portrait of  the villain, a rogue nicknamed Gentleman, is typical of the tricksiness of the novel. From the moment he appears and proposes an unspeakably vile plan to Sue and the band of thieves she lives with, you think that he will represent the true force of darkness in the book,  compared with whom Sue will seem almost guiltless. In a novel where almost everyone is on the make, though, you soon have reason to wonder whether Gentleman is indeed the worst character around. Be that as it may, he’s not particularly appealing, and though his ostensible role at first is that of the fortune-hunting seducer, he behaves – when off-duty – more like a Sikesy thug than like a Wickhamish smoothie.  My villain-loving heart remained unmoved, though there was fun to be had from Gentleman’s patent lack of interest in either of the two girls, which makes for an unusual triangle relationship.

Normally, I’m not that fond of the use of anti-heroes and anti-heroines. I don’t much see the point of them. After all, a hero can have all sorts of weaknesses and humanising faults and still be a hero. An anti-hero tends to be like a bumbling hero, but without the conscience part. He tries to make his way, while not considering others, and fails. Which makes him fall between two chairs, in my view: why should the reader care for someone who has neither the good qualities of a hero nor the charisma of a villain? There is a similar problem with the anti-heroine: just look at the awful Madame Bovary.

Of course, there is a definition problem. What separates a bumbling hero from an anti-hero? What separates an anti-hero from a villain in distress, a type of villain for whom I am an absolute sucker? Is Pip in Great Expectations a hero or an anti-hero? Is Bulstrode in Middlemarch a villain in distress or an anti-hero? After all, in spite of his shady past, he doesn’t really wish the protagonists of Middlemarch any harm (except possibly Farebrother, and he is a minor character), and rule one for a villain tends to be that he should constitute a threat of some kind to the story’s nicer characters.

For my part, I’d call Pip a hero, and Bulstrode a villain in distress. The difference between a hero and an anti-hero is, for me, a question of fundamental decency. If a character has a core of decency, then no matter how matter how many mistakes he makes, I’d still see him as a hero. Much has been made of Pip’s supposedly “snobbish” behaviour, but only because he makes so much of it himself. He is most ashamed about his own state of mind at different stages: his crimes are for the most part “thought-crimes”. Had he been an anti-hero, he would not have had these qualms.

As for the difference between an anti-hero and a villain in distress, it is harder to define. I should say that it is not a question of success rate – most villains fail to reach their aim, just as anti-heroes do, because the story demands it – but a question of the potential of success. Anti-heroes are natural losers:  they can certainly wreck people’s lives, but not by design. They merely mess up (and can prove irritatingly self-pitying and unrepentant when they do). Whereas villains, even the ones who get into trouble and become picturesquely anguished, are and remain a credible threat: they’re carnivores who might very well lick their wounds and rise again, if they are not redeemed in time. A temporary set-back certainly won’t keep them down for long.

I realise that the anti-heroines of Sarah Waters don’t quite fit into this pattern. They’re not losers, but on the other hand they can’t be called villainesses, as the whole story is about them, and the biggest threat they constitute are to each other. They’re not, in my opinion, good-hearted enough to be called heroines. Maybe the main thing is that in this context, and much thanks to the central love story, they work.

Unexpected ripping yarns

Summer holiday! Meaning not much blogging, and mostly about books. Shiny new costume dramas are seldom launched in the middle of the summer (though Swedish television has started  sending The Paradise now) – in fact, few of  them get launched at all. I was in London for a few days and caught one of the episodes of The White Queen, which seems to be as good as it gets just about now. It’s a thrilling story, and the women were feisted  up convincingly, but the dialogue was very portentous, and always about politics. I kept half hoping for Elizabeth Woodville to say something like “Oh, and when you go, would you mind taking the trash out?” to her husband Edward after one of her morale-boosting, you’re-the-king-for-us-speeches. OK viewing, and the viewpoint is thankfully Yorkist, but it doesn’t beat one of the good old bonnet dramas of yore. As for the one remaining HMV store in London, the pickings were meagre. The closest I got to a costume drama there was buying an adaptation of Gormenghast. I remember testing it for about five minutes when it was aired on Swedish television and finding it silly, but potential villain-crush candidates don’t grow on trees nowadays. By this time, I’m ready to stand a great deal of fantasy nonsense for a sighting of one. (I’m not against fantasy in itself, but it is a tricky genre.) 

On the other hand, I bought a load of books in London – it doesn’t look like I’m going to do much reading in Swedish this year. I started with light reads, then when I came to the second-hand bookshops I was more ready to be ambitious and optimistically go for books like Alan Hollinghurst’s The Stranger’s Child (well, when it’s only 4 pounds…). Probably, the Ambitious Book Projects will turn out to be the most worthwhile ones, if I ever start on them. The hunt for the Perfect Light Read sometimes feels like the hunt for a white unicorn.

One of my best reads lately was, in point of fact, bought as an ABP, at least partly. The Uninvited Guests by Sadie Jones takes place in a dilapitaded country house roughly during the Edwardian era (the exact year is never stated), but it has not been touted as a country-house-during-Edwardian-era novel. Reviews have instead highlighted the Tales of The Unexpected angle of the book. As far as I know, the D word has not been mentioned by either marketing people or reviewers.

Sure enough, the Tales of the Unexpected angle was well handled, if not as unexpected as all that. But the book is also a highly satisfying miniversion of a country house drama. There are the spoilt, dark-eyed, attractive youngsters in their twenties, one boy and one girl. There is their eccentric, artistic younger sister. There is the  grande dame of the place with a few shady sectrets, the housekeeper who knows more than she’s telling, the self-made potential rich suitor for the daughter, the good-girl friend and her brother, who has grown up surprisingly handsome… All in all, a promising cast to spring the nasty surprise of a bunch of third-class (supposed) train-crash survivors on. A man from first class must be accommodated as well; at first, he seems the easiest to assimilate, but he turns out to be creepier than all the third-class folk put together. There’s a lot coming-of-age to be done all round, and lessons to be learned, but there is also a great deal of straightforward romance. Recommended.

I’ve now started on Fingersmith by Sarah Waters – one of those ambitious four-pound-buys – and it really is a ripping yarn. Admittedly, I have long been deterred from testing Sarah Waters by sheer prudishness. I thought – and believed my impression to be confirmed by the good but somewhat overly racy adaptation of Tipping the Velvet – that there would be more lesbian sex and shenanigans in Waters than there actually is. And man-free raciness really is wasted on me: I prefer a bloke or two to be in on the action (actually, the woman is more optional). In fact, raciness is thankfully absent – the only sex scene so far being more touching than graphic – and the problematic relationship between the two female protagonists has the universal quality that I believe the author was aiming for. I’m keeping my fingers crossed that Fingersmith continues to be good, in which case I’ll have found a new source for great reads, and by a prestigious author too. I’m still not sure about ever trying Tipping the Velvet, though.   

To write pastiche or not to write pastiche? On balance, not.

I've been a bit on the fence when it comes to pastiches. I confess that I hate historical novels set in medieval times to be written in a Ye Olde Style - as if medieval times weren't strange enough already. But when authors try to write in the style of Jane Austen, or the Victorian novelists, I do see what they're aiming for. If some of the best novels around are written in a certain style, I can understand if you want to emulate it. "Finding your own voice" is all very well, but if you could sing in perfect imitation of Kiri Te Kanawa, who would ask for "your own voice"? I'd love there to be even more Dickens novels, so if someone were to be able to pull off writing a novel or two exactly in the style of Dickens, I don't think I would complain.

The thing is, though - can you pull it off? I remember thinking Jane Dawkins succeeded in capturing a credible Austenesque tone in Letters from Pemberley and More Letters from Pemberley, but otherwise, Austen's style seems rather harder to copy than sequel-writers think, and the best "Austenuations" are mostly those written in the writer's own style. As for Dickens - well, he is called The Inimitable. And though he has been successfully (and funnily) parodied, I doubt that his style could be captured and held up for a whole novel, by anyone but the man himself.

What I'm trying to get at is that if pastiche is not 100 per cent credible as "the real thing", it comes between the book's content and the reader. It is, quite simply, an extremely tricky genre, and I'm not sure that attempting it instead of writing in the style that comes naturally to you is really worth the risk. What's prompted me to think about this was reading D.J. Taylor's Derby Day. It is written in a mock-Victorian style which simply didn't work for me.

I was disappointed in Derby Day, to be honest, because I got the distinct impression from reviews that it would be colourful, frothy fun and a bit of a guilty pleasure. Booker prize-covering articles sounded surprised that it had made the long list. In effect, it is an ambitious novel, especially when it comes to describing the atmosphere around Derby Day (which takes place at the end of the novel) a little in the manner of Frith's picture, by weaving all manner of little scenes involving different characters - more or less important to the book's plot - together. But as for froth - no. Though some of the characters were interesting, none (barring perhaps a long-suffering governess) was particularly pleasant. It was easier to root for the horse Tiberius than for any of them. There was a woeful lack of romance, and the villain was the kind of superficial cad I can't get much out of. Above all, I found the style a bar to my enjoyment of the book: it wasn't like Dickens, or like Collins, it only seemed unnecessarily knotty. The Victorian fondness for simile especially seemed to get in the author's way a bit: I didn't get the feeling that coming up with similes came naturally to him, as it did to Dickens, and in that case it might be better not to attempt it in the first place.

I'll give Derby Day its due, though: I finished it, because I did want to know who won the race. But it is not really a good advertisement for pastiche. If you enjoy richly textured description of scenes of Victorian life (I don't much - social-history phobia again), it's well worth giving this book a try: just don't expect high-jinks and melodrama.                         

Not falling for the villain (or similar)

Villain crushes are like the pot that won’t boil if you watch it. When you’re actively seeking a new flame, you will mostly find nothing. The worrying thing is that so many of my crushes start with a “surely not?” phase, where I am in denial about having fallen at all, and I’m sligthly anxious about what taboo I’m going to break next.  There seems to be little rhyme or reason to when villain infatuations strike –they just happen, or don’t as the case may be.

How, for instance, can I explain my lack of enthusiasm for Doctor Simeon, later morphing into the Great Intelligence, in the latest episodes of Doctor Who? He’s Victorian, he’s chilly, he’s ruthless, he’s – well – intelligent: in sum, just my type. True, he’s played by Richard E. Grant, whom I have found vaguely unsettling in previous roles. However, I’ve always thought that this was because he was playing dashing blades (Sir Percy Blakeney, James Harthouse) or good eggs (Bob Cratchit) instead of villain roles, which he was obviously better suited for. Gosford Park seemed to bear me out: I approved of him as George the cynical footman (admittedly, it would have been hard to go wrong with a part like that).

In Doctor Who, though, the Grant-unsettling effect was still very much in evidence. Consequently, I had the weird experience of viewing a villain in the same way a majority of viewers do: with fear and even a little loathing. Instead of thinking “Yummy, what an adversary” I went “Yikes, I’d hate the likes of him messing with my past”. In a way, a triumph for Richard E. Grant then, as this was of course exactly how I was supposed to react. 

And why don’t I even like Thomas Watkins in Upstairs Downstairs? He’s not precisely a villain, but you could say that he’s a villain surrogate. He often behaves in a way no dyed-in-the-wool hero would get away with, and he’s got the cunning and ambition which you normally expect from the baddie. But I just can’t warm to the man. I’ve debated the point with myself roughly as follows.

“Why I don’t like Watkins? Well, he’s so shifty, isn’t he?”

“I thought you liked that in a manservant. And why don’t you call him Thomas?”
“Well, obviously I can’t. Anyway, Watkins only ever thinks of himself. He’d walk over corpses just to get on. Just look at how he lets the admittedly idiotic Mr Kirbridge down.”
“As I was saying…”
“And then he’s so cold in his personal life. He disappoints Rose, and I’m never quite convinced that he really loves Sarah. They both deserve better than him in my opinion.”
“I see, cold in his personal life. You mean like Mr Tulkinghorn? Or Bitzer? Or Balzac’s bankers?”
“Oh, just shut up, will you?”

As you can see, I can’t explain it, but there it is. In part, I can blame a latent bullish aggressiveness in Watkins’s character – even towards Rose, at one point – which I really don’t think is that common among my own diddle-diddle-darlings. Also, he came off rather badly in the spin-off series beguilingly titled Thomas and Sarah, where we learn that he didn’t make a success of his garage and he steadfastly refuses to marry his live-in-girlfriend Sarah. The spin-off ended – on a cliff-hanger too  – after only one series: I blame Watkins, plus the couple’s continuing bad luck (surely, also his fault).     

So, when it comes to villain crushes, maybe it’s just as well to stick with what I’ve got for the present. Away with embarrassment: sometime in the near future, I will buy that T-shirt with Downton’s Thomas on it and the caption “Trust me”. But the question remains when I’m going to wear it?    

Summer grumble

It starts with the bus stop tantrum. I seem to have one every year, in full view of a nervous audience of fellow travellers. The ongoing problem is, from the beginning of June to the middle of August, the bus timetables are changed and buses run much less frequently. This means you will either be far too early or a little late to wherever you're going - or, as is so often the case, much too late because the bus that is running is delayed (and packed, of course). Sometimes scheduled buses don't arrive at all. I certainly don't begrudge bus chauffeurs their holidays, but this drives me up the wall every single year. No effort seems to be made to keep time, and the impression you get is that the bus companies think that, hey, what does it matter, everyone's on holiday anyway. But I'm not on holiday. No-one's on holiday from June to August, worse luck. I'm still working, and the worst part of it is, I don't want to be. Having to run to catch a bus which then does not turn up or turns up ten minutes late only adds insult to injury.

The yearly bus stop tantrum is only a symptom of end-of-summer-term malaise. School is out, but work is still very much in. As the city shuts down around you and the TV channels start sending reruns, as the sun beats down and last-year pupils whoop and holler, enjoying one of the happiest days in their life, you are only too aware that your freedom is still far away - well, far-ish. It's not even as if things are slowing down, either at work or privately. There are so many things you need to fix "before the summer hols" that there is not much time for lazying in the sun - or out of it, comes to that.

But they will come, the holidays - and when they do, I'd quite like one of those famous good summer reads. In fact, I could do with one now. Why is it so hard to find an honest page turner? I tried another one of my family sagas and gave up after approximately a hundred pages - luscious descriptions of idyllic summer days full of honeysuckle, butterflies and what have you before Disaster Strikes (World War One) are not the best way to catch my interest. Not even Wilkie Collins can be relied on. The man in the black skull-cap in Hide and Seek turned out to be a sad disappointment - a Rough Diamond, if you please. I never much cared for men of the wild: I like my diamonds to be polished, thank you very much. Hide and Seek's plot reminded me of The Dead Secret in a way: in both novels, the characters who try to find out a secret and the ones trying to hide it are good-natured people, and so there is not much suspense. You know they will all get along swimmingly by the end. There was one plot twist I didn't see coming, but Hide and Seek still remains the weakest of the Wilkie Collins novel bunch. And even a pro-Victorian like myself must marvel at how little you need to do to be branded a vile seducer. No matter if you meant to marry the girl; no matter if you left the country not knowing she was pregnant; no matter if all your letters were intercepted through no fault of your own; no matter if you tried to make contact the moment you came back, only to learn that the girl was dead and the child you didn't know about had vanished without a trace; you are still a terrible person. Because you shouldn't have slept with her, should you? Not before you'd put a ring on her finger. I must say, supposedly moralistic Dickens cut Captain Hawdon in Bleak House much more slack than this.          

Anyway, I've now started reading a slim Swedish volume which seems to be evolving into an elegant chiller, set in a manor-house in an unspecified country during an unspecified war. I'm not greatly in favour of mysterious dystopias generally, but this story seems promising, and the author conjures up atmosphere without being boring. Perhaps I've struck gold at last - or at least first-rate electricity-conducting copper.