Giving up on and sticking to books

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

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

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

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

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

Sink or swim?

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

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

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

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

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

Beards galore

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

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

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

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

More toil

Now, don't get me wrong: I don't hate my job. It is as good a way to earn a living as anything else. But this is what it is - a way to earn a living. It does not fill my life with meaning, or make me jump out of bed with a song on my lips wondering what lovely things will happen to me today. The answer to the question "Would you quit your job if you won 20 million?" (not likely to happen in my case as I don't play the Lottery) is, for my part, "YES OF COURSE. Are you crazy?"

Surely I'm not the only one to feel this way? So how can one explain the current annoying fashion of glorifying work? As week follows dreary working week, I feel insult is added to injury when opinion makers buy into the "work ennobles" fad. Measures that may make perfect pragmatic sense but are bound to raise a few grumbles are pitched with a mixture of enthusiastic "work for work's sake" rhetoric and lofty incomprehension of the fact that anyone could actually mind working more, sometimes for less. A more modest "I know this sounds crazy, but this is why it's a good idea" approach would have more chance of persuading me. I have a pet theory that a lot of conflict is caused by the gulf between those who love their job and those who don't and their mutual failure to see each other's point of view. There may be something in it - or I may just be tired and wishing all-too-chirpy-seeming PMs/mayors/newspaper columnists would shut their face. To quote Ariel: "Is there more toil?" (and I certainly don't blame him for his low level of job satisfaction).

Sorry for straying from the vaguely-cultural blog theme a bit. I'm not going to have another Slackbridgeian attack - I just need a holiday.

Not much is happening book- and TV-wise. I promised myself to read more books in the Swedish language this year, as my daily speech has become ever more crowded with anglicized words. The project started well, with a vivacious novel about an old Swedish scandal and the dire consequences of a king taking a lover so unsuitable he makes Piers Gaveston look like Jackie Kennedy. The book even starred an enjoyable villain in the shape of a ruthless (and of course vice-free) court official. Heartened, I over-ambitiously decided to follow up with a novel by Strindberg: his autobiographical tale The Son of a Servant. Let's just say I haven't progressed very far. It is a very good depiction of a troubled childhood, but I'm just not that fond of childhood depictions. Please give me the adult world of gossip and love affairs instead - and of course brainy villains.

Far from the maddening accidents

I must confess to only ever having read one novel by Thomas Hardy. It wasn't even one of the famous ones: it was The Hand of Ethelberta, an unusually light-hearted Hardy novel where nothing very terrible happens. That, I'm afraid, is exactly why I read it. But even without grave misfortunes hailing down on the characters, I found the prose pretty hard going. Yes, the plotting was good, there were memorable set-pieces and the characterisation was strong - it is quite an achievement when you can make readers care for a pronounced goody like Ethelberta's sweet sister. But when even The Hand of Ethelberta isn't an altogether easy read, I wonder what Jude the Obscure must be like.

As someone who claims to have a great interest in Victorian novels, I have often felt that I should read something more by Hardy. I have toyed with the idea of reading Far from the Madding Crowd, as it ends - kind of - happily and I know about the tragic bits in it. But after having re-watched the ITV adaptation with Paloma Baeza, I feel less inclined to give it a go than ever.

I watched the film with Julie Christie when very young, and chiefly remember one thing about it: the dishy Peter Finch as farmer Boldwood gazing devotedly at Julie Christie's Bathsheba with those wonderful eyes. I spent the whole film thinking Bathsheba a goose for not wanting to marry Boldwood - and a good-for-nothing, flirtatious goose at that, sending him that Valentine card and making his heartache worse. The ITV adaptation's handling of the Boldwood affair was enlightening. I'm not saying Nigel Terry doesn't cut a fine and upstanding figure as Boldwood, but he's not Peter Finch, and I suspect that farmer Boldwood really shouldn't be a Peter Finch. A catch in the eyes of the neighbourhood, yes, but not too dreamboaty. Furthermore, in this version, Boldwood has no interest in Bathsheba before he receives the Valentine card - which makes her joke less insensitive - and his passion for her and inability to take no for an answer is slightly unhinged from the start. This makes Bathsheba's behaviour more understandable, though she is still darn silly. In the ITV version, Gabriel Oak, Bathsheba's "best" suitor, is played by Nathaniel Parker, and it's clearly shown that he is shrewd as well as loyal and honest. Falling for the flashy Sergeant Troy instead is about the worst thing Bathsheba could do - but fall for him she duly does.

Silly heroines are nothing new, and I think I could be able to stand Bathsheba Everdene even in the novel format. But the sheer bad luck that keeps upsetting the lives of Hardy's characters, now that's something else. The most well-known - and most parodied - feature of Hardy's novels is the cruel tricks of fate he visits on his poor characters. It is always satisfying to be able to claim that the generally held opinion of an author is a mistaken one or at the very least a simplification, but I'm afraid I've seen nothing to contradict it so far. In Far from the Madding Crowd, Gabriel's farm goes bust because his untutored dog chases all his sheep over a cliff; Sergeant Troy is prevented from marrying his true love Fanny Robin due to a mix-up over the churches; Boldwood goes nuts over that Valentine card which, but for chance, would have been sent to a boy at Bathsheba's farm instead who would have had the sense to take it as the joke it is; and Boldwood's attempts to draw a promise of marriage from Bathsheba are always frustrated at the last minute (admittedly, this is more Troy's fault than fate's). And this all happens in a book which is considered to be lighter fare than the usual run of Hardy novels!

The prolonged agony of Tess Durbeyfield in Polanski's film Tess doesn't exactly have me reaching for Tess of the d'Urbervilles either. If she has to hang, she has to hang, but was all that suffering beforehand really necessary? I'd better stick with what I know, i.e. Dickens and Collins and such - even the villains fare better with them than Hardy's protagonists do.

Wrapping up Great Expectations

The last episode of the new Great Expectations adaptation was a bit of a let-down, because once again - it was the same with the Rampling version - they failed to get the relationship between Pip and Magwitch right. It is really important that an adapter follows Dickens closely here. In the novel, Magwitch never guesses that Pip is disappointed in his benefactor - and I and I suspect a great many other readers want to keep it that way. But no, the modern the-truth-must-out-generation feels compelled to change the story so that Magwitch does suss that he's not wanted, but by the end he and Pip have formed a bond based on true feelings. For pity's sake, people! There are more important things than honesty at all costs, and Magwitch's affection for Pip being undimmed by trouble from first to last is one of them. Go and do a high school movie and get all that "truth prevails" nonsense out of your systems.

Miss Havisham's personality change ended up bugging me more in the last episode than in the two previous ones, as she's not even allowed a proper epiphany. The TV adaptation's Miss Havisham, apart from her little-girl-lost ways, is also meaner to Pip than she was in the book. There, Miss Havisham's cruelty was more an indication of indifference than anything else: Pip was someone for Estella to practice on, and someone Miss Havisham could annoy her relatives with. He was collateral damage. In the adaptation, as a contrast, she starts him dreaming of becoming a gentleman only to consciously dash his hopes by paying for his apprenticeship. I don't think it entered Miss Havisham's head in the novel that her payment of Pip's apprenticeship might not be welcomed by him. Even so, there is an argument for a more malicious Havisham-treatment of Pip: he is a man, after all.

What is necessary, in my view, is that Miss Havisham realises the grief she has caused him and others by witnessing his impassioned plea to Estella. She recognises the pain of thwarted love and is sorry. This is central to the novel: in the adaptation, however, Miss Havisham is unmoved by Pip's plight and doesn't scruple to make things worse by insulting him. It's only after she's lost Estella completely that she asks his forgiveness, rather half-heartedly. Her death becomes more or less another act of self-indulgence.

These and a few changes to Magwitch's back story which left Jaggers looking worse than he is were my main gripes, but other things were handled well. Pip's debts were reduced to an amount which it would be plausible for Joe to pay off. Pip paying Magwitch's jailers and undertakers with bits and pieces of his gentleman uniform such as his rings and his cane was a nice touch, and so was Estella thanking the horse that did for the spot-on loathsome Drummle. The ending, thankfully, had the right note of hope. All in all, still a better Great Expectation adaptation than the last one.

What is the BBC planning to do next in the Victorian novel genre, though? A new Moonstone, if you please! I've started to rewatch the spendidly cast version from 1996 trying to figure out how they could possibly improve on it. No luck so far. The story moves along smoothly, the characters are shorn of their most irritating characteristics and played by the cream of English actordom. As I've said before, I find The Moonstone overrated as a book, and this is already a better adaptation than it deserves. Why waste time on a new one? Please, BBC, be a little original once in a while. Why not do Armadale instead?

A neurotic Miss Havisham vs... another neurotic Miss Havisham

I have finally watched two of the episodes of the most recent Great Expectations TV adaptation (Yes, I know, GE again... but it is the Dickens Bicentenary after all), and I must reluctantly confess that I do not hate it. I had no time at all for Sarah Phelps's Oliver Twist adaptation, as I've mentioned in this blog before, but this is quite different. Maybe it helps that, according to a newspaper article Phelps wrote, Great Expectations is her favourite Dickens novel. She seems to understand Pip in a way she didn't understand Oliver, and so she has not changed the character overmuch. The other characters are relatively unscathed too. Joe is good and honest - if a bit more rugged and less simple than one is used to - Jaggers is splendidly stony (you'll never see David Suchet behaving less like Poirot), Orlick is properly scary and no working-class hero as in the Beeb's previous adaptation, though his case is made. Herbert Pocket behaves brattishly as a child, which is a bit of a shame, but when he appears again as a grown-up he is just as charming as he should be. Estella is treated much too kindly, but then she almost always is.

The only character radically different from the book is Miss Havisham - and here, Phelps is helped by the fact that the previous adaptation with Charlotte Rampling wasn't true to the Miss Havisham character either. Also, I have to admit that traditional Miss Havishams have a hard time making the character as chilling and as poignant as she should be. Miss Havisham is tricky. She is so very histrionic - but at the same time, she has been through every woman's nightmare, so you can't dismiss her behaviour as being completely incomprehensible. I can understand the temptation to try to make something different out of her than the usual bird's-nest-wigged hag. Where Rampling was nervy and slightly diva-ish, Gillian Anderson goes one better. Her Miss Havisham has the manner and voice of a child-bride whose development has been arrested: if Dora Spenlow had been jilted on her wedding day (and had been more ill-natured) she might have ended up like this. It's a pity all the same, this trend for neurotic Miss Havishams. Dickens's jilted bride had a wryness which is lost if you play her as self-indulgent and round the twist: in some ways, in spite of never getting over Compeyson's betrayal, she is still a tough old bird.

The best TV adaptation of Great Expectations, in my view, is still the one from 1989 with Jean Simmons as Miss Havisham, John Rhys-Davies as a sweet Joe and (somewhat improbably) Anthony Hopkins as Magwitch. But then, that adaptation had oceans of time at its disposal and could include such things as Wemmick's private "castle" and his Aged P. Phelps has much less time and has been forced to prune the story ruthlessly: Biddy has been sacrificed, as has (to Phelps's own regret) the Aged P. I don't care much for Biddy - I'm sure she doesn't guilt-trip Pip consciously, but her mopeyness is one of the reasons he feels so ill at ease with his old family once he has become a gentleman, and thus avoids them when he can. Still, Biddy is essential to Joe's happy ending, and I wonder how the third episode will work out without her. Orlick, surely, is less central to the plot and could have more easily been disposed of. For all that, so far, this adaptation is an improvement on the last one. Now a great deal hinges on how the relationship between Pip and Magwitch is depicted in episode three.