Pleased to report that March has been a successful month. It wasn't shaping up to be so.
I had set myself a goal of reaching 15,000 words in Traces by the end of the month - modest, but pretty realistic. I didn't reach it, having just passed 14,000 tonight. But I'm letting myself off with just a mild flogging because I've also written just over 4,000 words of Scratches (I'm really starting to hate that name) and that - for the mathematically challenged - takes my aggregate to well over thetarget. So with only mild fudging and re-defining of goals, I'm home very comfortably indeed.
Both stories are quite similar, plot wise. This is intentional, as I'm interested in seeing how they develop with different characters and settings. One is set here in New Zealand, the other in Glasgow in Scotland. One features a female investigator and te other a male. They have very different personalities and attitudes. So far, I'm finding it a lot easier to write fromt he point of view of the Scottish, male investigator. Which is very odd, given that I'm Scottish and male.
What is important is that the voices of both characters are utterly distinct. Otherwise, I think I would find it much more difficult to balance them. but as they are so different, they complement rather than compete. As I mentioned the other day, I am finding it easier to write Traces because of the impetus I've gained from the new project. 1,500 words a night, every night for four nights now. I will have to slow down, because I can start to feel the first strains, and I'm bluntly exhausted and living on coffee. But I'm pretty pleased with myself.
Don't worry, I'm not being naive. I know it won't last.
Tuesday 31 March 2009
Monday 30 March 2009
Still on the rampage
Three nights in a row, 1,000 words on Scratches (n.b this title is very provisional) and a more sedate 500 words on Traces. Which is awesome, almost Nano intensity. Bt the weird thing is, because the Scratches material is coming so easily, and because it is feeding the Traces work, it doesn;'t feel anything like as difficult as Nano type writing is.
Here's a tiny extract from tonight's work on Traces:
Here's a tiny extract from tonight's work on Traces:
“To be honest, I wasn’t sure if you were for real, or if it was all a fraud. You know most of them are, putting it on, usually just telling people what they want to here, stock answers which can mean just about anything.”
“I don’t do horoscopes, if that’s what you mean,” I answer, curtly.
“Sorry. But because I needed to talk to you about something really, I didn’t want to just pour it all out to anyone. And your house, well, it was just so ordinary.”
“Yeah, the crystal ball was being polished and because I’d forgotten you were coming I hadn’t put out any bats and spiders.” Enough, Donna. Like you said, she isn’t the first, and she won’t be the last. And what she said was fair enough. She wasn’t wanting to make contact with a dead cat.
The horror! The horror! A review of The Secret Life Lazlo, Count Dracula by Roderick Anscombe
I’ve always had a guilty fondness of horror stories – the tendency of these stories to be full of heaving bodices and ravishments and sexual license appealed to me in my teenage years, and any honest man will admit (and any woman confirm) no man stops being a teenager, ever.
I can’t even begin to list all the horror stories that I have read, from the respectable (Dracula, Frankenstein, Poe, Lovecraft et cetera), through the somewhat respectable (Stephen King) to the utterly unmentionable – where titles and writers blur into an endless montage of bared and rended flesh, cliché and nonsense. Ah! The joy of it all.
“Re-invention” is a dirty word to my mind. It usually entails some smart arse grabbing someone else’s laurels and trying to make off with them. Which brings us to The Secret Life Of Lazlo, Count Dracula, by Roderick Anscombe.
This is a re-invention of the Dracula story. It is, in a trivial way, emblematic of the problem with modern literature – which, as I see it, is that writers are too damn knowledgable to be able to write. Shakespeare wasn’t familiar with Freud or Neitchze, but that didn’t stop him writing a psychologically perfect illustration of the Oedipus complex (Hamlet) and brilliant examinations of power, its mis-uses and its consequences there-of (MacBeth, Richard III, Julius Ceasar). He just wrote it, damn it. In these postmodern times, however, people are too well versed in too much to do anything as simple as write it, damn it. They have to cram all sorts of stuff into the story, without thinking about what is already there. Dracula is perfect as it is. You could talk for days about the imagery and subtext, the fear of contamination, the allure of the other, Dracula as a supreme Oedipal figure who can only be killed by driving a phallus, sorry, stake through his heart. What we don’t need is a psychiatrist turned writer to do it for us.
In a nutshell: Drac isn’t a vampire, he’s an ordinary aristocrat with a fondness for rough sex, so rough that his dates don’t often survive. He dabbles in the infant science of psychiatry which allows him to ponder on his condition in a tedious manner. It isn’t the psychological brooding that annoys me, but the poor quality of the writing makes it very heavy going. Anscombe might be a qualified psychiatrist, but if this is anything to go by, his case studies make poor reading, and leave the reader feeling skeptical.
I’m not one to rush to judge too quickly. It wasn’t until page 178 that I became infuriated, when the good Count asks a friend ‘and that’s where we come in?’ – an odd phrase for a 19th century Hungarian aristocrat to utter. Of course, once I decided I was not ‘bored’ but ‘infuriated’ by the book, I showed it no mercy. I started folding pages over (after a conversation with my wife as to the practicality of using her lipstick as a highlighter) to mark things that annoyed me particularly – and I count a further 19 folded up corners. 20 blunders might not sound a lot, but remember this is from halfway through the book, and they are only the outstandingly bad examples. Add on top of that a poor quality of writing, staging (the characters seem to spend most of their time at breakfast) and plotting (not content with the violation and murder of four women, Anscombe throws in a plague, a treasonous conspiracy and a murder investigation).
The book is full of sloppy writing. We are told that one woman wants to ‘Show that she wears the pants.’ Again, an unusal ambition in 19th Cnetury Europe and an even more anachronistic styling. A few pages later, this woman and Mrs Drac have ‘Hit it off.’ Talking to the dogged Inspector Krause, probably the only convincing character in the book, Drac declares ‘if you look here and here you will see the small flaws which are the mark of manufacture – which however, superior, can never match the careful application of the craftsman to his art.’ Try saying it – people just don’t talk like that, particularly people who use phrases like ‘And that’s where we come in?’
I’m not going to list all of the top 19 Bad Things. I will, however, ask if you, knowing that your husband had killed two young women, would invite a third to stay at your home and watch indulgently while she flirts with the monster? Mrs Drac does just that. And, because I can’t resist it, the topper. As I have said, this is a book that has been written badly. Worse, it seems never to have been re-read either by the writer or by anyone else – perhaps I am the first person to have read it. If it had been read by an editor, and that editor had not been rendered unconscious by the overwhelming monotony of the prose, surely the phrase ‘Grief does not come naturally to her nature’ would have been struck out? 'Naturally to her nature'? There is so much of this sort of thing.
Vampires are so on-the-money, with spooky castles, dark capes, wolves, bats, oodles of sex, how is it possible for it to go so horribly wrong?
I can’t even begin to list all the horror stories that I have read, from the respectable (Dracula, Frankenstein, Poe, Lovecraft et cetera), through the somewhat respectable (Stephen King) to the utterly unmentionable – where titles and writers blur into an endless montage of bared and rended flesh, cliché and nonsense. Ah! The joy of it all.
“Re-invention” is a dirty word to my mind. It usually entails some smart arse grabbing someone else’s laurels and trying to make off with them. Which brings us to The Secret Life Of Lazlo, Count Dracula, by Roderick Anscombe.
This is a re-invention of the Dracula story. It is, in a trivial way, emblematic of the problem with modern literature – which, as I see it, is that writers are too damn knowledgable to be able to write. Shakespeare wasn’t familiar with Freud or Neitchze, but that didn’t stop him writing a psychologically perfect illustration of the Oedipus complex (Hamlet) and brilliant examinations of power, its mis-uses and its consequences there-of (MacBeth, Richard III, Julius Ceasar). He just wrote it, damn it. In these postmodern times, however, people are too well versed in too much to do anything as simple as write it, damn it. They have to cram all sorts of stuff into the story, without thinking about what is already there. Dracula is perfect as it is. You could talk for days about the imagery and subtext, the fear of contamination, the allure of the other, Dracula as a supreme Oedipal figure who can only be killed by driving a phallus, sorry, stake through his heart. What we don’t need is a psychiatrist turned writer to do it for us.
In a nutshell: Drac isn’t a vampire, he’s an ordinary aristocrat with a fondness for rough sex, so rough that his dates don’t often survive. He dabbles in the infant science of psychiatry which allows him to ponder on his condition in a tedious manner. It isn’t the psychological brooding that annoys me, but the poor quality of the writing makes it very heavy going. Anscombe might be a qualified psychiatrist, but if this is anything to go by, his case studies make poor reading, and leave the reader feeling skeptical.
I’m not one to rush to judge too quickly. It wasn’t until page 178 that I became infuriated, when the good Count asks a friend ‘and that’s where we come in?’ – an odd phrase for a 19th century Hungarian aristocrat to utter. Of course, once I decided I was not ‘bored’ but ‘infuriated’ by the book, I showed it no mercy. I started folding pages over (after a conversation with my wife as to the practicality of using her lipstick as a highlighter) to mark things that annoyed me particularly – and I count a further 19 folded up corners. 20 blunders might not sound a lot, but remember this is from halfway through the book, and they are only the outstandingly bad examples. Add on top of that a poor quality of writing, staging (the characters seem to spend most of their time at breakfast) and plotting (not content with the violation and murder of four women, Anscombe throws in a plague, a treasonous conspiracy and a murder investigation).
The book is full of sloppy writing. We are told that one woman wants to ‘Show that she wears the pants.’ Again, an unusal ambition in 19th Cnetury Europe and an even more anachronistic styling. A few pages later, this woman and Mrs Drac have ‘Hit it off.’ Talking to the dogged Inspector Krause, probably the only convincing character in the book, Drac declares ‘if you look here and here you will see the small flaws which are the mark of manufacture – which however, superior, can never match the careful application of the craftsman to his art.’ Try saying it – people just don’t talk like that, particularly people who use phrases like ‘And that’s where we come in?’
I’m not going to list all of the top 19 Bad Things. I will, however, ask if you, knowing that your husband had killed two young women, would invite a third to stay at your home and watch indulgently while she flirts with the monster? Mrs Drac does just that. And, because I can’t resist it, the topper. As I have said, this is a book that has been written badly. Worse, it seems never to have been re-read either by the writer or by anyone else – perhaps I am the first person to have read it. If it had been read by an editor, and that editor had not been rendered unconscious by the overwhelming monotony of the prose, surely the phrase ‘Grief does not come naturally to her nature’ would have been struck out? 'Naturally to her nature'? There is so much of this sort of thing.
Vampires are so on-the-money, with spooky castles, dark capes, wolves, bats, oodles of sex, how is it possible for it to go so horribly wrong?
NO STAR
Sunday 29 March 2009
Fallen Idols - Anthony Burgess and Graham Greene
Burgess, eh? Used to love him. Now I'm not so sure. Can't say why. Something lacking, underneath the artifice and the word play. A sense of him taking not it seriously, perhaps?
Also, he wrote too damn much, too quickly. Most of his novels are just throwaways - a half, or quarter, decent idea flung down in 160 pages or or so, the essential weakness covered up by a lot of clever verbal antics, and rudeness.
Neither of which would be a bad thing if there was a sense that Burgess wrote the novel for any reason other than maintaining his quota of books for the year.
It is hard not to be drawn towards Burgess the man. There is so much about him that is endearing and bizzare. Most famously there is story of how he came to be a full-time, professional writer - diagnoised with an in operable brain tumour, he cast about for different ways that he might provide for his wife and (as then unborn, and tragically never born) child. As he'd had a couple of books published by this time, he decided to try to write a book a month in the months remaining to him. He failed, but he did manage to crank out three or four, and - more importantly - he also failed to die. Infact, he kept on failing to die until 1993. This, and other legends, make it easy to like the man and forgive the problems with the books.
Only it has been suggested that most of the legends are just that - legends, invented by a man with an urge to create stories and myths about himself. His brain tumour and medical death sentence appear to be one of these little fibs Burgess told over the year (1). Which just leaves us with the boooks, which are a mixed bunch, always very clever and written with great brio, but usually seeming a bit hastily put together, lacking in a developed plot and the sense that the author was really interested in them as anything more than an excuse to show off his vocabulary.
There are exceptions. The Malayan Trilogy (Time for a Tiger, The Enemy in the Blanket, Beds in the East) are vey good and there is a real sense that Burgess connects with his characters situations - probably because he is writing at least semi-autobiography. While I haven't read Man of Nazereth describing the life of Jesus, the sequel, Kingdom of the Wicked, is also very good. Here Burgess is addressing big stories and huge characters, and he seems to respond to the task.
While I have little time for Enderby the flatulent poet whom everyone else seems to regard as a masterful creation, the third (or was it fourth?) in the trilogy (or was it quartet?), Enderby's Dark Lady is worth reading. The good news is it isn't strictly necessary to read the earlier books in the sequence as various irreversible things happen to Enderby in books one and two, and then are mysteriously reversed in book three (or was it four?). His book about Shakespeare, Nothing Like the Sun is excellent, perhaps his best. Again, he is engaged, the intellect and the word play being used to describe one of the few people he seemed to admire almost as much as Anthony Burgess. A Dead Man in Debtford, describing the life of Marlowe, is also very, very good, for the same reason.
His great big not-quite-Booker-winning book, Earthly Powers, I am not sure about. The first time I read it I was sixteen and did so to annoy my mother - because the book's main character is homosexual and this had convinced her that Burgess must be "of that ilk" (I can still remember her saying that) and this might corrupt and taint me. At the time I thought it was brilliant. Re-reading it a few years ago, I'm no longer sure. Thee is a lot about it that is excellent, but a lot of it is just the typical Burgessian froth and frot, spread over several hundred pages instead of a hundred. It deals with big important themes like love and faith and art and blah blah blah blah but doesn't really have very much to say about them. The climactic revelation about the fate of the Toomey children shocked an sickened me the first time around. The second time, the scene seemed very mishandled and written like a bad comedy.
So yeah, Anthony Burgess, I don't know if he's good or bad or not.
As for Graham Greene, all in all its a bit like the Burgess thing. I used to like him, Hell, I used to love him. Now I don't. Why not? Don't know. But when lovers fall out, it isn't usually pretty or reasonable or rational. And I used to love Greene. I even blamed (?) him for my loss of faith at one stage, though I was sixteen at the time and prone to saying silly things. Where did it go wrong?
Introduced to Brighton Rock in secondary school, I quickly read most of his other major works - my parents had a compendium of five or six of his novels, and several gorgeous orange backed penguins. I lived and breathed The Heart of the Matter, The Power and The Glory, The Quiet American, A Burnt Out Case, The Honorary Consul and the other 'major' novels. I can even remember feeling very upset when he died in 1991.
At university I even wrote my dissertation on his religious novels - "Bakhtinian Readings of Graham Greene' or some such piffle. By this time I'd read most of the famous ones and was polishing off the minor works - Travels With My Aunt, The Captain and the Enemy, Monsignor Quixote and so on. I didn't think much of them but I didn't let that worry me. I recognised them as what they were - minor fluff, not to be taken seriously and not compared to the great work that Greene had done before. Though it is interesting to note that it wasn't until my university years that I read The End of the Affair - and I disliked it intensely, for all that it is rated as one of his best. I loved the alienated brooding of Bendrix, but I choked on the absurd religious elemnt of it. Which is interesting, in light of what was to come.
Then we driffted apart for a while. Perhaps we should have left it at that, but I tried to rekindle the romance a frew years ago, picking up a copy of A Burnt Out Case from the local library. it had always been a favourite. But now it sucked. Abysmally. What had once seemed charged with pathos and beauty and terror was just ... dull. And very schematic. And really, obviously, trying too hard to make itself seem important.
Since then, Ive been too scared to re-read any more Greene. I'm afraid that the other greats will seem just as bad. Particularly the other favourites - The Heart of the Matter, The Power and the Glory, The Human Factor. What if they two are as dry and worthless, second (though it might be third or fourth) time round?
Recalling another of his novels that I admired, The Quiet American, published in 1955 and seeming to predict every American foreign policy misadventure between then and now, made me think - what if Greene had resisted the temptation to write all these banally sanctimonious Catholic novels, and written more in the line of the The Quiet American?
Greene was always characterised as being a writer torn between Catholicisim and socialism, though I think that is simplistic - the socialism never really seemed like anything more than ideology he paid lip service to to shock and annoy his fellow Catholics (and vice versa, I suspect). But what if he had thrown the mumbo-jumbo out and written more politically, more journalistically? It is an interesting thought, and I for one, as a disillusioned Greene-ite, wish that he had.
And yes, the title of this post is a bit of a Greene in-joke.
Also, he wrote too damn much, too quickly. Most of his novels are just throwaways - a half, or quarter, decent idea flung down in 160 pages or or so, the essential weakness covered up by a lot of clever verbal antics, and rudeness.
Neither of which would be a bad thing if there was a sense that Burgess wrote the novel for any reason other than maintaining his quota of books for the year.
It is hard not to be drawn towards Burgess the man. There is so much about him that is endearing and bizzare. Most famously there is story of how he came to be a full-time, professional writer - diagnoised with an in operable brain tumour, he cast about for different ways that he might provide for his wife and (as then unborn, and tragically never born) child. As he'd had a couple of books published by this time, he decided to try to write a book a month in the months remaining to him. He failed, but he did manage to crank out three or four, and - more importantly - he also failed to die. Infact, he kept on failing to die until 1993. This, and other legends, make it easy to like the man and forgive the problems with the books.
Only it has been suggested that most of the legends are just that - legends, invented by a man with an urge to create stories and myths about himself. His brain tumour and medical death sentence appear to be one of these little fibs Burgess told over the year (1). Which just leaves us with the boooks, which are a mixed bunch, always very clever and written with great brio, but usually seeming a bit hastily put together, lacking in a developed plot and the sense that the author was really interested in them as anything more than an excuse to show off his vocabulary.
There are exceptions. The Malayan Trilogy (Time for a Tiger, The Enemy in the Blanket, Beds in the East) are vey good and there is a real sense that Burgess connects with his characters situations - probably because he is writing at least semi-autobiography. While I haven't read Man of Nazereth describing the life of Jesus, the sequel, Kingdom of the Wicked, is also very good. Here Burgess is addressing big stories and huge characters, and he seems to respond to the task.
While I have little time for Enderby the flatulent poet whom everyone else seems to regard as a masterful creation, the third (or was it fourth?) in the trilogy (or was it quartet?), Enderby's Dark Lady is worth reading. The good news is it isn't strictly necessary to read the earlier books in the sequence as various irreversible things happen to Enderby in books one and two, and then are mysteriously reversed in book three (or was it four?). His book about Shakespeare, Nothing Like the Sun is excellent, perhaps his best. Again, he is engaged, the intellect and the word play being used to describe one of the few people he seemed to admire almost as much as Anthony Burgess. A Dead Man in Debtford, describing the life of Marlowe, is also very, very good, for the same reason.
His great big not-quite-Booker-winning book, Earthly Powers, I am not sure about. The first time I read it I was sixteen and did so to annoy my mother - because the book's main character is homosexual and this had convinced her that Burgess must be "of that ilk" (I can still remember her saying that) and this might corrupt and taint me. At the time I thought it was brilliant. Re-reading it a few years ago, I'm no longer sure. Thee is a lot about it that is excellent, but a lot of it is just the typical Burgessian froth and frot, spread over several hundred pages instead of a hundred. It deals with big important themes like love and faith and art and blah blah blah blah but doesn't really have very much to say about them. The climactic revelation about the fate of the Toomey children shocked an sickened me the first time around. The second time, the scene seemed very mishandled and written like a bad comedy.
So yeah, Anthony Burgess, I don't know if he's good or bad or not.
As for Graham Greene, all in all its a bit like the Burgess thing. I used to like him, Hell, I used to love him. Now I don't. Why not? Don't know. But when lovers fall out, it isn't usually pretty or reasonable or rational. And I used to love Greene. I even blamed (?) him for my loss of faith at one stage, though I was sixteen at the time and prone to saying silly things. Where did it go wrong?
Introduced to Brighton Rock in secondary school, I quickly read most of his other major works - my parents had a compendium of five or six of his novels, and several gorgeous orange backed penguins. I lived and breathed The Heart of the Matter, The Power and The Glory, The Quiet American, A Burnt Out Case, The Honorary Consul and the other 'major' novels. I can even remember feeling very upset when he died in 1991.
At university I even wrote my dissertation on his religious novels - "Bakhtinian Readings of Graham Greene' or some such piffle. By this time I'd read most of the famous ones and was polishing off the minor works - Travels With My Aunt, The Captain and the Enemy, Monsignor Quixote and so on. I didn't think much of them but I didn't let that worry me. I recognised them as what they were - minor fluff, not to be taken seriously and not compared to the great work that Greene had done before. Though it is interesting to note that it wasn't until my university years that I read The End of the Affair - and I disliked it intensely, for all that it is rated as one of his best. I loved the alienated brooding of Bendrix, but I choked on the absurd religious elemnt of it. Which is interesting, in light of what was to come.
Then we driffted apart for a while. Perhaps we should have left it at that, but I tried to rekindle the romance a frew years ago, picking up a copy of A Burnt Out Case from the local library. it had always been a favourite. But now it sucked. Abysmally. What had once seemed charged with pathos and beauty and terror was just ... dull. And very schematic. And really, obviously, trying too hard to make itself seem important.
Since then, Ive been too scared to re-read any more Greene. I'm afraid that the other greats will seem just as bad. Particularly the other favourites - The Heart of the Matter, The Power and the Glory, The Human Factor. What if they two are as dry and worthless, second (though it might be third or fourth) time round?
Recalling another of his novels that I admired, The Quiet American, published in 1955 and seeming to predict every American foreign policy misadventure between then and now, made me think - what if Greene had resisted the temptation to write all these banally sanctimonious Catholic novels, and written more in the line of the The Quiet American?
Greene was always characterised as being a writer torn between Catholicisim and socialism, though I think that is simplistic - the socialism never really seemed like anything more than ideology he paid lip service to to shock and annoy his fellow Catholics (and vice versa, I suspect). But what if he had thrown the mumbo-jumbo out and written more politically, more journalistically? It is an interesting thought, and I for one, as a disillusioned Greene-ite, wish that he had.
And yes, the title of this post is a bit of a Greene in-joke.
1 - From the wikipedia biography of Burgess, viewed on the 10th of December, 2008. It should be noted the claims are not verified, however. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthony_Burgess#Borneo)
It started off as a pebble rolling down a hillside ...
I was reluctant to start back at Traces tonight. It has been going slowly for a few nights, as I mentioned the other day. I was worried I'd managed to dig myself into a hole. Yes, even at 500 words a night, it can be too late when you realise you're in trouble. I took the night off last night to give me a chance to think about - or rather, not think about - this.
Night off worked nicely. An elegant solution emerged, but I was still reluctant to get back to work - this is the danger of allowing yourself any sort of life away from the keyboard.
Then, musing idly, I thought of a couple of funny (to my ear, anyway) lines for another story. The idea of the story itself - the character and setting - was not knew, I'd dreamed them up last year at some stage and just put them in the shantytown for lost characters in the back of my mind. But now, suddenly, I had a couple of lines.
I opened a blank Word document, typed them out. They looked good. I added a few more, and suddenly - whoosh - I was away. I reached a thousand words without knowing it and I enjoyed every moment of it. The new character is fantastic and he's allowing me to bring out the humour that's been lacking in Traces for some time.
And this is the cool bit - after rattling off 1,000 words of brand new narrative (tentatively titled Scratches), I wrote my 500 word quota of Traces as well. And the positivity of Scratches carried over to Traces - suddenly, there was a bit more humour and vitality in the story, and it seemed to be moving again.
Traces over 12,000 words and Scratches over 1,000. So a good night.
Night off worked nicely. An elegant solution emerged, but I was still reluctant to get back to work - this is the danger of allowing yourself any sort of life away from the keyboard.
Then, musing idly, I thought of a couple of funny (to my ear, anyway) lines for another story. The idea of the story itself - the character and setting - was not knew, I'd dreamed them up last year at some stage and just put them in the shantytown for lost characters in the back of my mind. But now, suddenly, I had a couple of lines.
I opened a blank Word document, typed them out. They looked good. I added a few more, and suddenly - whoosh - I was away. I reached a thousand words without knowing it and I enjoyed every moment of it. The new character is fantastic and he's allowing me to bring out the humour that's been lacking in Traces for some time.
And this is the cool bit - after rattling off 1,000 words of brand new narrative (tentatively titled Scratches), I wrote my 500 word quota of Traces as well. And the positivity of Scratches carried over to Traces - suddenly, there was a bit more humour and vitality in the story, and it seemed to be moving again.
Traces over 12,000 words and Scratches over 1,000. So a good night.
Saturday 28 March 2009
Of Human Bondage by W. Somerset Maughan
I enjoyed the film of The Painted Veil, though mostly for the amusment of watching Edward Norton and Naomi Watts pretend to be terribly proper English people. The plot clunked along from one fairly predictable point to another. It was pretty to look at (Particularly Ms Watts), unchallenging but at the same time just slightly better than the usual period costuumer-in-an-exotic-location fluff. Perhaps the book would have felt been less by-the-numbers, and as they say, never judge a book by its film adaptation. Look what the bastards did with Joseph Conrad's Amy Foster. And that was only a short story.
So, in the spirit of Finding Out More, I read Of Human Bondage. As the luckless curate said, part sof it were excellent.
The first two chapters are perhaps the most pathetic (in the true meaning of the word) I've ever read. Perhaps they are a touch sentimental by modern standards, but the writing is controlled but at the same time empathetic.
Alas, the rest of the book slides quickly down into a morass of awfulness and never manages to drag itself out.
Those first two chapters deal with the orphaning of the main character, Philip. After the death of his mother, he is sent to live with his deeply priggish uncle, a minister, then attends boarding school where he is bullied and mocked because of his club foot. He tries various professions and decides to become an artist in Paris for a while. After he fails tin that endeavour, he returns to England, completes his medical training, but falling in love with a trollopy tease of a waitress and is drawn into an arid, loveless, potracted relatinoship with her.
The whole thing is very banally pretentious. Various theories or philosophies for life are put forward, giving the affair a rather studied (and shallow) European air. But Sentimental Education this is not - though I suspect Flaubert's novel was very much on Maughan's mind when he wrote Of Human Bondage. There's nothing here that is interesting or remarkable. The philosophy is bland and superficial. The psychology of the characters dull and the action sluggish.
What dirt and nastiness Maughan permits is decorous and prim - ironically, this studied unpleasantness precisely the sort of thing Philip rails agains. Maughan is obviously trying to show his readers something of the grisly little world they try to ignore, but chickens out - surcumbs to his own conventional respectability - rather than present them with the real, unalloyed unpleasantness of life. Obviously, one can rebel against bourgeois conventions and morality, but only so far. I can't recall anything very interesting about how it was written - after a hundred pages or so I switched off, though I kept turning them in the hope of finding something to reward my perseverance. It is fustrating, though, to think that while Maughan was moving his stuffy litle marionettes in their quiant little comedy, Joyce had already written Potrait of the Artist and was at work on Ulyssess.
Now, it is not fair to compare a book to Ulyssess and say, "It isn't Ulyssess, so it is no good." If all books were as experimental, dense and byzantine as Ulyssess, book sales would be even lower than they are and illiteracy would be a necessity for keeping a blanced mind. But one can, fairly, compare a book to its contemporaries. When we do that, it's pretty obvious that Of Human Bondage was written twenty years too late - it is too old fashioned, uninteresting and blandly written compared to other books published in 1915 which are nowhere near as radical or unreadable as Ulyssess (1). I would take The Valley of Fear - or even Tarzan - over Of Human Bondage. And that's just the popular fiction. Never mind that D.H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, Kafka and Ford Maddox Ford all had considerable books published that year.
So, in the spirit of Finding Out More, I read Of Human Bondage. As the luckless curate said, part sof it were excellent.
The first two chapters are perhaps the most pathetic (in the true meaning of the word) I've ever read. Perhaps they are a touch sentimental by modern standards, but the writing is controlled but at the same time empathetic.
Alas, the rest of the book slides quickly down into a morass of awfulness and never manages to drag itself out.
Those first two chapters deal with the orphaning of the main character, Philip. After the death of his mother, he is sent to live with his deeply priggish uncle, a minister, then attends boarding school where he is bullied and mocked because of his club foot. He tries various professions and decides to become an artist in Paris for a while. After he fails tin that endeavour, he returns to England, completes his medical training, but falling in love with a trollopy tease of a waitress and is drawn into an arid, loveless, potracted relatinoship with her.
The whole thing is very banally pretentious. Various theories or philosophies for life are put forward, giving the affair a rather studied (and shallow) European air. But Sentimental Education this is not - though I suspect Flaubert's novel was very much on Maughan's mind when he wrote Of Human Bondage. There's nothing here that is interesting or remarkable. The philosophy is bland and superficial. The psychology of the characters dull and the action sluggish.
What dirt and nastiness Maughan permits is decorous and prim - ironically, this studied unpleasantness precisely the sort of thing Philip rails agains. Maughan is obviously trying to show his readers something of the grisly little world they try to ignore, but chickens out - surcumbs to his own conventional respectability - rather than present them with the real, unalloyed unpleasantness of life. Obviously, one can rebel against bourgeois conventions and morality, but only so far. I can't recall anything very interesting about how it was written - after a hundred pages or so I switched off, though I kept turning them in the hope of finding something to reward my perseverance. It is fustrating, though, to think that while Maughan was moving his stuffy litle marionettes in their quiant little comedy, Joyce had already written Potrait of the Artist and was at work on Ulyssess.
Now, it is not fair to compare a book to Ulyssess and say, "It isn't Ulyssess, so it is no good." If all books were as experimental, dense and byzantine as Ulyssess, book sales would be even lower than they are and illiteracy would be a necessity for keeping a blanced mind. But one can, fairly, compare a book to its contemporaries. When we do that, it's pretty obvious that Of Human Bondage was written twenty years too late - it is too old fashioned, uninteresting and blandly written compared to other books published in 1915 which are nowhere near as radical or unreadable as Ulyssess (1). I would take The Valley of Fear - or even Tarzan - over Of Human Bondage. And that's just the popular fiction. Never mind that D.H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, Kafka and Ford Maddox Ford all had considerable books published that year.
NO STAR
1 - '1915 in Literature,' wikipedia article, viewed 10th of December, 2008. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1915_in_literature)
Friday 27 March 2009
The films I watched in 2009
In reverse order:
- Ice Age. D: Carlos Saldhana. Good fun animated creature caper. Production above average in all areas. **
- Sea of Love. D: Harold Becker. Pacino is great in an otherwise conventional murder mystery. Nice atmosphere. [DVD] *
- Cheri. D: Stephen Frears. Banal costume drama that eschews the groteque humour that might have saved it. [Cinema] No stars
- Tyson. D: James Toback. Superficial account of the boxer's rise and fall, about as incisive as a sofa. [Cinema] No stars
- Infernal Affairs. D: Wai Keung Lau, Alan Mak. Moderately impressive drama about moles in the police and triad. [Cinema] **
- Wild Side. D: Don Cammel. Camp caper about crime and lesbianism. Director's cut - Cammel killed himself after studio re-cut. [DVD] *
- The Big Easy. D: Jim McBride. New Orleans set police sex and slaying romp. What seemed sexy and cool when I was younger now just seems like camp fun. But still fun. [DVD] *
- We, The Living. D: Roy Anderssen. Bleak tablaeu of isolation and despair in Sweden. A feature from the genius behind Songs From The Second Story can not be uninteresting, but this effort contains about an equal number of hits and misses. [Cinema] *
- La Chinoise. D: Jean luc Godard. Godard renounces radical leftism in charactertistically off beat tale of student terrorists. Characteristically baffling and defiantly unhelpful, but contains many moments of Godardian genius. [DVD] ***
- Navigators. D: Ken Loach. Kitchen sinker about the effects of rail privaisation improves as it becomes less topical and the agitprop less grating. Still not exactly subtle and trapped in its reductive workers-bosses dialectic. [Cinema] *
- Inglourious Basterds. D: Quentin Tarantino. Grisly, messy botch of a war fantasy. Frequently spectacular, but incoherent and the two halves of the film never gel. Concscientiously nasty. [Cinema] *
- Paris. D: Agnes Varda. A selection Varda's short films from different decades. Ranges from irritating to embarrassing. [Cinema] No stars
- Russian Ark. D:Alexander Sokurov. Technically audacious single take film. In part, its main achievement is to remind us why we have editing. Visually spectacular, and the final sequence is very impressive, though the point of the whole exercise is elusive. [DVD] **
- Suburban Mayhem. D: Paul Goldman. Teen mega bitch terrorises her neighbourhood. A cigarette paper seperates this from reality. Very well done, brilliant performance from Emily Barclay as the monstrous Katrina. Like an Elizabethan comedy, it is essentially tragedy played for laughs. [DVD] **
- The In Crowd. D: Mary Lambert. Exploitative tosh about beautiful, heartless, underclad rich kids. A decent cast, competent direction and reasonable production can't redeem a witless, predictable script, where the twists are so obvious they look like red herrings. They aren't. [DVD] No stars
- Eternity. D: Wilhelm Leibenberg, Frederico Sanchez. Erotic horror about Elizabeth Bathory. Neither sexy or scary. Two credited directors fail to do the job of one mediocre one. [DVD] No stars
- To Kill A Mockingbird. D: Rober Mulligan. Mild adaptation. Good, but dated No excuse for not reading the book. Peck's Oscar winning performance seems mannered today, but Mary Badham as Scout and Philip Alford as Jem are good. [DVD] **
- Thirst. D:Park Chan-wook. The insane Korean auteur geleefully combines Therese Raquin, Zola's sleazy tale of adultrery and nemesis, with Kathryn Bigelow's modern vampire film, Near Dark. Inevitably weird, but more conventional than the majestically mad Oldboy. [Cinema] **
- Red Cliff. D: John Woo. Massive Chinese battle epic, but for seasoned Woo watchers, basically a remake of Hardboiled with swords. [Cinema] **
- Architekten. D: Peter Kahane. East German architects run up against institutional inertia. More interesting than it sounds. [Cinema] ***
- Wall-E. D: Andrew Stanton. Excellent film, brilliantly executed, lovely characters and a thankful lack of rubbish jokes aimed at adults. [DVD] ***
- Noi the Albino. D: Dagur Kari. Dull, wilfully offbeat tale of misfit youth. Iceland is presented as a sort of Scaninavian Lake Woebegon, without the humour. [Cinema] No stars
- Pierrepoint. D: Adrian Shergold. The life of Britain's premier hangman. A great idea, a great lead, but let down by the Coronation Street production values and a lack of visual, philisophical or narrative insight. [DVD] *
- Nackt Unter Wolfen. D: Frank Beyer. Concentration camp cat and mouse as prisoners conceal a Jewsih child. A distant ancestor of the slushier Life is Beautiful, this film is stark, brilliant drama. [Cinema] ****
- 2046. D: Wong Kar-Wai. Beautifully filmed meditation on love confounded, lacking only purpose and urgency. Which is, unfortunately, two things it really needs. A s with much of this director's work, it is like watching beautiful paint dry. [DVD] *
- Charade. D: Stanley Donnen. Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn in a comedy thriller with too much of the former and not enough of the latter. Directed with a bit of style, but nowhere near as charming as it thinks it is. [DVD] *
- Made in USA. D: Jean Luc Godard. A big, pretenious mess of a film by the master, stumbling badly between the brilliance been (Les Mepris) and to come (Weekend). Still, nothing by Godard is entirely worthless. Striking use of colour, visual audacity, and a the sheer gall of the project provokes something mid way between admiration and condemnation. [DVD] *
- Ich War Neunzehn. D: Konrad Wolf. The final days of WW2, from the point of view of Red Armyy soldiers always just behind or to one side of the main action. The Spandau sequence and the final scenes pack considerable wallop. [Cinema] **
- The Fast and the Furious (1955). D: John Ireland, Edward Sampson. Corman quickie with nothing to recommend it. The remake looks like Potemkin in comparison. [DVD] No stars
- Oldboy. D: Park Chan-wook. Sick, brutal, nasty film about long delayed revenge. Redeemed only by the fact that it is brilliant in almost every way. [DVD] ****
- Last Tango in Paris. D: Bernardo Berolucci. What is the worst aspect of this film? The script? Brando's performance? The turgid sex? The embarassing 'lets make a movie' sub-plot? The insufferable self importance of Bertolucci's direction? [DVD] No stars
- Elephant. D: Gus van Sant. A shooting at a school very like Columbine. The too clever, sleek cinematic technique ends up being exploitative, which, I assume, was not van Sant's intention. [DVD] *
- Days of being Wild. D: Wong Kar-Wai. An arrogant playboy takes his women for granted. His life falls apart as he seeks his birth mother. Beautifully done, but uneven. [DVD] **
- Moolade. D: Ousmane Sembene. In a traditional African vilalge, a woman gives four girls, facing female circumsion, sanctuary. This provokes a confrontation between her and the vilalge, progress and tradition, locals and outsiders, men and women. Simple, predictable but well done. [DVD] *
- Gaslight. D: George Cukor. Charles Boyer tries to drive Ingrid Bergman insane in this creaky, overwrought but still fun melodrama. Very quaint, it is strange to think that in the USA, Citizen Kane and The Maltese Falcon were already history. Joe Cotten made the not-dissimilar Shadow of a Doubt with Hithcock the year before, and must have found the change jarring. [Cinema] *
- They Drive by Night. D: Raoul Welsh. First half is great, blue collar drama, blessed with terrific dialogue as Bogey and Raft truck on. Second half is absurd melodrama, though Ida Lupino is obviously haveing fun. [DVD] *
- Mala Noche. D: Gus van Sant. Highly likeable tale of gay hustlers at the social fringes. Beautifully acted, wonderful freewheeling syle and densely composed sound track. Very good, though small scale means it feels slightly inessential. ***
- Infamous. D: Douglas McGrath. Covers same ground as the better known Capote. A more conventional, but perhaps better film with its own strengths and weaknesses. Toby Jones is superb. [DVD] ***
- Der Dritte. D: Egon Gunther. A woman seeks love amid the socialist realism. Stylish, very nouvelle vague winner from the GDR. [Cinema] ***
- Berlin-Schonhauser Corner. D: Gerhard Klein. It doesn't sound promising: 1950s East German teenage rebellion. The actual film is every bit as unconvincing as that summary sounds. [Cinema] *
- Lone Wolf & Cub 4: Baby Cart in Peril. D: Kenji Misumi. Frantic, preposterously bloody samurai fun. With a topless ninjette. [DVD] *
- Sleeping Dogs. D: Roger Donaldson. Feisty little film, chronicling the rise of fascism in 1970s New Zealand. No, really. Features a gaunt, youthful Sam Neill. [DVD] **
- Knafayim shvurot. D: Nir Bergman. Generic, but likeable, Israeli family drama. Offbeat setting and believeable cast are assets. [Cinema] *
- Capote. D: Bennett Miller. Well made account of the writing of In Cold Blood, though too self-consiously crafted and enigmatic. [DVD] **
- Manufactured Landscapes. D: Jennifer Baichwal. Profile of the work of photographer Edward Burtynsky. His photographs are astonishing, clinically objective illustrations of the impact of industrialisation on landscape, but the additional material is less interesting. [Cinema] **
- San Pietro. D: John Huston. Another supressed WW2 doco from Huston, detailing the cost of a single battle in the Italian campaign. [DVD] *
- Let There Be Light. D: John Huston. Long supressed WW2 doco, showing rehabilitation of shellshocked GIs. Somewhat dated. [DVD] No Stars
- Darwin's Nightmare. D: Hubert Sauper. Jarring documentary about poverty, exploitation and pending ecological collapse around Lake Tanzania, where locals fish for invasive Nile Perch which are freighted to European restaurants while the fishermen subsist on rotting fish remains. [Cinema] ****
- Zulu Dawn. D: Douglas Hickox. Prequel to the events described in the better known Zulu, this film is less jingoistic and more sympathetic to the Zulus. Merciless in exposing the blunders that lead up to the disaster at Isandlwana. [DVD] ***
- No Country for Old Men. D: Joel & Ethan Coen. Film noir in cowboy hats. Accomplished, polished and well turned out, but spoiled by a cartoon villan. Still, gave Tommy Lee Jones a chance to act, rather than chew the scenery. [DVD] ***
- Perfect Strangers. D: Gaylene Preston. He kidnaps her, she kills him, keeps him in the freezer, falls in love with him. So mad it almost works. Good performances and lovely locations. [Cinema] *
- March of the Penguins. D: Luc Jaquet. Let down by anthropomorphism, sentimental music and a lack of facts and data. Nice pictures. [DVD] No stars
- The Producers. D: Mel Smith. First half is superb, with Mostel and Wilder playing off each other. Opening number of 'Springtime' is brilliant, but the other musical scenes are flat, lacking the comedy or bad taste that made the first half great. [DVD] **
- Flandres. D: Bruno Dumont. Wilfully bleak, purposeless film about farms, mud, sex, war, only much less interesting than that sounds. Dumont tells us that life sucks, in every film he makes. He doesn't seem to be capable of saying why it sucks, or what we could do about it. [Cinema] *
- The Longest Day. D: Ken Annakin, Andrew Marton, Bernhard Wicki, Elmo Williams. Still stirring war film. The pre-invasion scenes are often twee, but the staging of D-Day itself is impressive and gritty. Three 'official' directors, plus Elmo Williams is credited for co-ordinating 'battle scenes' and deserves directorial recognition. [DVD] ***
- Mauvais Sang. D: Leos Carax. Four things that ruin French films are here in condensed form: no plot, no urgency, stylistic excess, Juliette Binoche. [Cinema] No stars
- All the Kings Men. D: Robert Rossen. Triple Oscar winner from 1950 still works brilliantly, partly because politicians are still corrupt scum bags who lie, but mainly because the cscript, direction and cast - particularly Mercedes MacCambridge - are superb. Ends predictably, just missing out on that coveted fourth star. [DVD] ***
- King Lear. D: Brian Blessed. Blessed, as Lear, looks like a tetchy hobbit. Some good performances among minor players. A poor adaptation which looks like it was filmed on a mobile phone. [DVD] No stars
- Gospel According to Harry. D: Lech Majewski. A summary would make this banality seem more interesting than it is. A big disappointment from the director of the fascinating Angelus. [Cinema] No stars
- Diva. D: Jean-Jaques Beineix. Homage to Hollywood, Hitchcock (note the shameless MacGuffin driven plot, the lighthouse, and matters "disposed of from a great height"), Blow Up, Godard, Paris. Tres chic, but empty. [Cinema] **
- Toy Story 2. D: John Lasseter. An advantage of parenthood is that you get to watch films like this. Enjoyable, and possessed of an old fashioned, pre-Shrek innocence. [VHS - no, really, it does still exist] **
- La Science des Reves. D: Michael Gondry. Watery romantic comedy which tries too hard to be batty but is annoying and superficial. There are some very cute animations. [Cinema] No stars
- Leonard Cohen: I'm Your Man. D: Lian Lunson. By-the-numbers tribute concert, but does that matter with numbers like these? Some interesting commentary from Cohen. A pity Bono exists. [DVD] *
- Basquait. D: Julian Schnabel. An indulgent biography of the graffitti artist. There are some good performances, but the whole thing feels suspiciously like a highbrow Finding Forrester. [Cinema] *
- Mr Arkadin. D: Orson Welles. Mad, late period attempt to combine Kane, The Trial and The Third Man into one. Less than those mighty works, but like anything Welles did in his late phase, this film has baroque touches of near accidental genius. [DVD] **
- Hamlet. D: Mike Mundell. After a creaky opening segement, this is well done, though its low budget shows in almost every scene. A spirited presentation with a good cast that capturesd the 'feel' of the play more effectively than some mega-star and big budget vehicles. [DVD] **
- Wild Things: Diamonds in the Rough. D: Jay Lowi. Sleazy, exploitative, and delightfully trashy, though pretty much worthless for anything other than lewd amusement. No stars
- Melissa P. D: Luca Guadagnino. Glossy, softcore Europorn. Hallmark erotica which pretends to be investigating the fraght topic of teenage sexual misadventure but is really just exploiting it. Avoid, no matter how base your motives. No stars
- Angelus. D: Lech Majewski. Weird fable about individuality and spirituality in communist Poland. Beautiful and successful on its own captivatingly strange terms. **
- MacBeth. D: Jeremy Freeston. A very poor attempt at the play, with Connery and Baxendale weak in the lead roles. The text has been hacked to pieces and the whole thing is poorly staged. Good Banquo and decent witches. [DVD] No stars
- The Boy in the Striped Pajamas. D: Mark Herman. Unsurprisingly bleak film which serves as a good introduction to the Holocaust. Yes, it is contrived and not very realistic, how much does that matter? [Cinema] *
- To Have and Have Not. D: Howard Hawks. Shameless clone of Casablanca. Bogey & Bacall exchange sardonic one liners. Hoagy Carmichael sings. William Faulkner writes. Nil resembleance to the Hemingway novel of the same name, apart from the involvement of boats. Daffy fun. [DVD] **
- The Sweet Smell of Success. D: Alexander MacKendrick. Uber-louse Tony Curtis oils and weasels his way about the screen in a stupendous film about how vile people can be to each other. [DVD] ****
Thursday 26 March 2009
DVD review: Leonard Cohen - I'm Your Man
Most reviews of this documentary start off in the same general way, with the reviewer stating that he or she is a big fan of Cohen's work. This makes sense, after all, it would be pretty miserable to sit through ninety minutes of songs and interviews by / about /with someone whose work you despise. If they ever make a documentary about Celine Dion, I can assure you, I will not be rushing to watch it.
(I always thought Screaming Celine had one good song - the Jim Steinman penned 'It's all coming back to me now.' This delusion continued until I heard the Meatloaf / Marion Raven version on Bat Out of Hell III. There after, Celine was restored to her former position as nerve-jangling, screeching banshee with no redeeming qualities.)
So, let me say now, I am a big fan of Leonard Cohen.
As such, it is natural to regard any attempt to pay tribute to an artist's work with some dubiety. There are generally two forms that this takes - "We're not worthy" grovelling or shameless gold-digging. Often it is hard to tell the seperate the two. Leonard Cohen - I'm Your Man features a lot of the former, but this tendency towards veneration is balanced by the fact that many of the renditions of Cohen's songs are really good, if predictable.
The film consists of three strands - footage of performances of Cohen's songs by all-sorted performances at a tribute concert staged in Sydney in 2005. Strand two is these same performers discussion Cohen's work and influence. Strand three is Cohen himself talking about his life and work.
This tripartite approach is the films weakness. By pursuing these different routes, the film makers reach no clear end. There is SOME concert footage, but not enough. There is SOME discussion of Cohen's work by his admirers, but probably too much. There is some interesting information about Cohen, from the man himself, but it is too restricted and disjointed to be more than a handful of anecdotes and snapshots of his life and thought. It is fustrating that an interesting observation by Cohen isn't explored further, or that a rivetting performance of one of his songs is followed by Bono, at his most moist-eyed and fawning, offering his arid thoughtlets.
The performances are from a mixed bag of artistes. Stand outs to me included Martha Wainwright's bleak performance of 'The Traitor,' brother Rufus's take on 'Chelsea Hotel,' Anthony's stirring rendition of 'If it be your Will,' and the duet of Julie Christensen and Perla Battala on 'Anthem.' Nick Cave provides a couple of workmanlike performances, though there is a feeling that he should have been able to find something more than he delivers. Jarvis Cocker - perhaps the most interesting inclusion - gives an odd rendition of 'I Can't Forget' - which irritated me at first, but which I've subsequently come to admire.
Which takes us to an important question about the purpose of the concert. As we watch the concert footage, are we seeking a Cohen adulation-fest with his songs rendered straight, as the man himself recorded and performed them, or looking for something strange and unusual which encourages us to see the material in new ways?
Given the conservative choices of performers, and the tribute concert setting, and the songs selected, it's pretty obvious that the producers had the former in mind as they planned the concert, which is a shame. There are precisely three types of people in the world - those who are not familiar with Cohen's work, those who know it and want to be reminded about how nice it is, and those who know it and want to be reminded how great it is. The second category will enjoy this unreservedly. They'll hear great songs well presented, but the exercise is suspiciously middle of the road - here is a good song, sung pretty much the way you know it, so everyone can join in with the chorus. Okay, it isn't likely that many people were brandishing cigarette lighters during 'Hallelujah,' but you can't be too sure ...
Basically, a lot of the concert seemed to be pandering to people's preconceived idea of what Leonard Cohen's music was. If he was truly as influential as is claimed, let's hear the reggae and afro-beat versions of his songs, lets hear them translated into Afghan and sung by choirs of amputees (that might be in rather poor taste, but you get the idea). If Cohen's music is as vital as it is meant to be (and I believe it is), it doesn't need to be preserved in aspic. If Leonard Cohen's fans are as discerning as they think they are (I think, unfortunately, they are not) then they would find the experience at least interesting, perhaps exhilerating.
Most likely, of course, a tribute concert along those lines would be a commercial disaster. It would work, perhaps, as a straight album, or performances recorded in a studio setting, rather than in an opera house infront of thousands of fans wanting to hear the songs the way they like them.
As for the Cohen interviews, they are interesting, but presented in a disjointed manner that allows little more than a general picture of the man to emerge. He was from Canada, he went to New York, wrote a dirty song about Janis Joplin, but wasn't as much of a ladies' man as people think and became a Bhuddist monk. There should be more of this, or less.
Then there are the interviews with the performers and various Cohen devotees. These are, pretty much what you would expect. It is, after all, unlikely someone asked to give an opinion for a project like this would be uncouth enough to say something nasty, and it is even less likely that such a comment would have made it to the final cut. You learn little beyond the fact that those involved really like Leonard Cohen, which is nice, but it is repeated a few times too many. Bono appears, as he seems to do in every thing these days, and provides some unintentional comedy with his too-earnest paeans of praise to the genius of Cohen. He is given too much screen time and he doesn't have much to say, but I suppose the film makers provide some sort of service by capturing him mispronouncing 'chasm' on film. Hah-ha. Plonker.
So, there you go. It is worth watching, though there are a thousand different versions of the concert and film that Might Have Been, all of them holding out more promise than this one realised.
(I always thought Screaming Celine had one good song - the Jim Steinman penned 'It's all coming back to me now.' This delusion continued until I heard the Meatloaf / Marion Raven version on Bat Out of Hell III. There after, Celine was restored to her former position as nerve-jangling, screeching banshee with no redeeming qualities.)
So, let me say now, I am a big fan of Leonard Cohen.
As such, it is natural to regard any attempt to pay tribute to an artist's work with some dubiety. There are generally two forms that this takes - "We're not worthy" grovelling or shameless gold-digging. Often it is hard to tell the seperate the two. Leonard Cohen - I'm Your Man features a lot of the former, but this tendency towards veneration is balanced by the fact that many of the renditions of Cohen's songs are really good, if predictable.
The film consists of three strands - footage of performances of Cohen's songs by all-sorted performances at a tribute concert staged in Sydney in 2005. Strand two is these same performers discussion Cohen's work and influence. Strand three is Cohen himself talking about his life and work.
This tripartite approach is the films weakness. By pursuing these different routes, the film makers reach no clear end. There is SOME concert footage, but not enough. There is SOME discussion of Cohen's work by his admirers, but probably too much. There is some interesting information about Cohen, from the man himself, but it is too restricted and disjointed to be more than a handful of anecdotes and snapshots of his life and thought. It is fustrating that an interesting observation by Cohen isn't explored further, or that a rivetting performance of one of his songs is followed by Bono, at his most moist-eyed and fawning, offering his arid thoughtlets.
The performances are from a mixed bag of artistes. Stand outs to me included Martha Wainwright's bleak performance of 'The Traitor,' brother Rufus's take on 'Chelsea Hotel,' Anthony's stirring rendition of 'If it be your Will,' and the duet of Julie Christensen and Perla Battala on 'Anthem.' Nick Cave provides a couple of workmanlike performances, though there is a feeling that he should have been able to find something more than he delivers. Jarvis Cocker - perhaps the most interesting inclusion - gives an odd rendition of 'I Can't Forget' - which irritated me at first, but which I've subsequently come to admire.
Which takes us to an important question about the purpose of the concert. As we watch the concert footage, are we seeking a Cohen adulation-fest with his songs rendered straight, as the man himself recorded and performed them, or looking for something strange and unusual which encourages us to see the material in new ways?
Given the conservative choices of performers, and the tribute concert setting, and the songs selected, it's pretty obvious that the producers had the former in mind as they planned the concert, which is a shame. There are precisely three types of people in the world - those who are not familiar with Cohen's work, those who know it and want to be reminded about how nice it is, and those who know it and want to be reminded how great it is. The second category will enjoy this unreservedly. They'll hear great songs well presented, but the exercise is suspiciously middle of the road - here is a good song, sung pretty much the way you know it, so everyone can join in with the chorus. Okay, it isn't likely that many people were brandishing cigarette lighters during 'Hallelujah,' but you can't be too sure ...
Basically, a lot of the concert seemed to be pandering to people's preconceived idea of what Leonard Cohen's music was. If he was truly as influential as is claimed, let's hear the reggae and afro-beat versions of his songs, lets hear them translated into Afghan and sung by choirs of amputees (that might be in rather poor taste, but you get the idea). If Cohen's music is as vital as it is meant to be (and I believe it is), it doesn't need to be preserved in aspic. If Leonard Cohen's fans are as discerning as they think they are (I think, unfortunately, they are not) then they would find the experience at least interesting, perhaps exhilerating.
Most likely, of course, a tribute concert along those lines would be a commercial disaster. It would work, perhaps, as a straight album, or performances recorded in a studio setting, rather than in an opera house infront of thousands of fans wanting to hear the songs the way they like them.
As for the Cohen interviews, they are interesting, but presented in a disjointed manner that allows little more than a general picture of the man to emerge. He was from Canada, he went to New York, wrote a dirty song about Janis Joplin, but wasn't as much of a ladies' man as people think and became a Bhuddist monk. There should be more of this, or less.
Then there are the interviews with the performers and various Cohen devotees. These are, pretty much what you would expect. It is, after all, unlikely someone asked to give an opinion for a project like this would be uncouth enough to say something nasty, and it is even less likely that such a comment would have made it to the final cut. You learn little beyond the fact that those involved really like Leonard Cohen, which is nice, but it is repeated a few times too many. Bono appears, as he seems to do in every thing these days, and provides some unintentional comedy with his too-earnest paeans of praise to the genius of Cohen. He is given too much screen time and he doesn't have much to say, but I suppose the film makers provide some sort of service by capturing him mispronouncing 'chasm' on film. Hah-ha. Plonker.
So, there you go. It is worth watching, though there are a thousand different versions of the concert and film that Might Have Been, all of them holding out more promise than this one realised.
*
From Potter's Field by Patricia Cornwell
Occasionally, I dip my toe in the pool of popular literature, and the strange thing is I persist in doing this, even if almost every time I do, it either gets scalded or bitten off by a pike.
My most recent exercise in toe dipping involved From Potter's Field by Patricia Cornwell. I worship Tom Waits, and he wrote a song called 'Potter's Field' and I though the novel might be related to it in some murky post-modernity way. And anything to do with Tom Waits must be brilliant, or so I thought.
I should have borne in mind the Rod Stewart covers of his songs, that are just naff reprises of the original. I should have been more circumspect and thought - there is glory, and then there is reflected glory, and then there is stuff that is nothing to do with anything at all glorious. You have to approach these things with caution. The part of me that continues to have faith in human nature maintained that so many people revered Cornwell that she couldn't be bad. The more cynical side thought that popularity must equal bilge. Numerous evidences could be cited in support of the second proposition, and alas, precious few in support of the former.
From Potter's Field joins the multitude, I am afraid. Cornwell is not a bad writer as such - but Potter's shows she is a poor plotter and her characters don't act or speak in a believable manner.
Her plotting is based on withoholding of a key piece of information or action. The classic example of this is The Hound Of the Baskervilles, where Conan Doyle keeps Sherlock Holmes off stage for most of the novel, and once he turns up he reveals everything in 5 minutes. All crime stories rely on withholding, to some extent. It wouldn't be much fun if the criminal admitted to the crime on page 5 - though then we might have space for a proper investigation into motive for and consequence of the crime, both of which rarely feature in crime literature, and particularly in From Potter's Field. But there is withholding that works, and then there is withholding that doesn't. In this case, it is the latter, I am afraid.
In Cornwell's case, it is the crucial plot element could have been realised at almost every point - characters talk about it early in the story, then seem to forget about it for a couple of hundred pages, until the bland and unlikable Kay Scarpetta remembers it and decides to put it into effect, at which point the plot resolves itself in a most helpful manner. This wouldn't be too awful if the narrative that filled the intervening pages was exciting enough. Dashiell Hammett deliberately withholds the identity of the killer in The Maltese Falcon until the end, to generate suspense. It doesn't matter, because the reader is caught up in the tale that he doesn't realise he is, essentially, been told a shaggy dog story. But in From Potter's Field, there is little suspense and little of interest, and because the essential action has been foregrounded and then neglected, the characters just seem slightly dumb.
My most recent exercise in toe dipping involved From Potter's Field by Patricia Cornwell. I worship Tom Waits, and he wrote a song called 'Potter's Field' and I though the novel might be related to it in some murky post-modernity way. And anything to do with Tom Waits must be brilliant, or so I thought.
I should have borne in mind the Rod Stewart covers of his songs, that are just naff reprises of the original. I should have been more circumspect and thought - there is glory, and then there is reflected glory, and then there is stuff that is nothing to do with anything at all glorious. You have to approach these things with caution. The part of me that continues to have faith in human nature maintained that so many people revered Cornwell that she couldn't be bad. The more cynical side thought that popularity must equal bilge. Numerous evidences could be cited in support of the second proposition, and alas, precious few in support of the former.
From Potter's Field joins the multitude, I am afraid. Cornwell is not a bad writer as such - but Potter's shows she is a poor plotter and her characters don't act or speak in a believable manner.
Her plotting is based on withoholding of a key piece of information or action. The classic example of this is The Hound Of the Baskervilles, where Conan Doyle keeps Sherlock Holmes off stage for most of the novel, and once he turns up he reveals everything in 5 minutes. All crime stories rely on withholding, to some extent. It wouldn't be much fun if the criminal admitted to the crime on page 5 - though then we might have space for a proper investigation into motive for and consequence of the crime, both of which rarely feature in crime literature, and particularly in From Potter's Field. But there is withholding that works, and then there is withholding that doesn't. In this case, it is the latter, I am afraid.
In Cornwell's case, it is the crucial plot element could have been realised at almost every point - characters talk about it early in the story, then seem to forget about it for a couple of hundred pages, until the bland and unlikable Kay Scarpetta remembers it and decides to put it into effect, at which point the plot resolves itself in a most helpful manner. This wouldn't be too awful if the narrative that filled the intervening pages was exciting enough. Dashiell Hammett deliberately withholds the identity of the killer in The Maltese Falcon until the end, to generate suspense. It doesn't matter, because the reader is caught up in the tale that he doesn't realise he is, essentially, been told a shaggy dog story. But in From Potter's Field, there is little suspense and little of interest, and because the essential action has been foregrounded and then neglected, the characters just seem slightly dumb.
NO STAR
James Kelman
Since Alastair Gray has put himself out of the running (1), James Kelman can now lay claim to the crown of 'Most Important Living Scottish Writer' - should he care for such a title, which I rather doubt.
I have read three of his novels, plus short stories (2). Since that trio includes THE WHOLE of the near unreadable Translated Accounts, it surely qualifies me as Kelman's most devoted reader, and world authority on his works. Come on! Who else has actually read the whole damn thing?
Other that Translated Accounts, I've read How Late It Was, How Late and A Dissaffection. Both are good, though it was a long time ago and I'm struggling to recall enough to make a spirited defence of them.
How Late It Was, How Late won the Booker Prize a few years ago, back when I was naive to imagine that this particular trophy actually meant something.
At the time, it was TERRIBLY controversial, because Kelman's fondness of the word 'fuck' and all variations thereof proved too strong for some folk. One newspaper calculated that the word occurred more than four times a page. How did they work that out? What poor bugger had to sit there and count how frequently James Kelman swears? It has been a long time since I read it, but I remember it being being very intense and bleak. The other two are clearer in my mind, so I'll focus on them.
I recall A Disaffection as reminiscent of Dostoevsky's Notes From Underground, only coarser, longer and set in Glasgow.
The main character, Patrick Doyle, is a pissed off 29 year old teacher and he is fustrated sexually and careerwise. Sometimes you want to scream at Patrickbut this is a testament to Kelman's ability to make his character seem real, because real people are like that. The final scenes of the book - basically an all day piss up with his brother and his brother's mates, when he should be teaching, interrupted by the arrival of his brother's wife, culminating in a long walk home in the rain - are brilliantly poignant. Kelman must be the only writer who could imagine a trudge home in the Glasgow rain, with a strong liklihood of a kicking from a couple of belligerent cops, seems at all redemptive.
Translated Accounts is a very strange book, composed of fragments of first person narratives, translated by a person or persons who have only a limited familiarity with English. Here are the final lines, which I think are stunningly good:
He has also been accused of misogyny, a charge often levied at male who write about males subjects, though curiously often aimed at females who write about females. It is a libel that can easily be put to rest. Though most of his narrators are male, he is concious of an excluded 'female voice' (ducks anouther swing from Kelman) and highlights this in the closing pages of A Disaffection. The first speaker is Patrick, well pissed. The second is his sister-in-law, Nicola. Kelman doesn't like quotation marks and the paraphenalia of bourgeois grammar. Live with it:
First of all, by writing a novel that tetters on the verge of incomprehensibility, he is trying to make the reader actively create the narrative from the fragments he has provided. The reader has to create the characters and action in his head. If so, he has failed dramatically, because the novel is too resistant to this sort of exercise. The reader will simply give up in fustration. That said, there was one sequence which I read as describing a building crowded with refugees, which gave me the heebie-jeebies. But, with reflection, I don't think that was what he was trying to do.
Second, he might be attempting - by making the setting, characters and conflict anonymous - to describe some universal experience of displaced or opressed persons. The anonymous characters who flit through the ... (words fail. Novel? Story? Collection?) ... the accounts might be Palestinians and Israelis, or Sandinistas and Contras, Jews and Nazis, blacks slaves and their owners, or Glaswegians fighting against English tyranny. If this was his purpose, however, he failed again as the book is so incoherent that it is impossible to draw any sort of narrative or structure out of it. It isn't anyone's experience.
Which brings us to option number three, which is, I think the correct one. I think Kelman has been trying to respond to the critics who bemoan his obscenity and his refusal to write in anything approaching Standard English (pah!). Translated Accounts a story taken out of its natural reister and translated into a hideous non-language by computer mediation - a bit like running Zola through Babelfish. It is, to all intents, unreadable and incomprehensible - which is the point. I think Kelman is trying to show us that a story or a character must be described in its natural voice. To do otherwise is to bastardize it and to make it - from an intellectually and artistically honest point of view - as deadly and meaningless as the mangled accounts that he has produced. So the Accounts themselves are almost a shaggy dog story - it isn't the accounts that are important, but the fact that they have been translated. They've been taken out of their natural register, an immediately cease to be relevant, interesting or important.
If that was what he intended to do, he's suceeded magnificently. But it is a Phyrric vistory, because the book isn't any more readable just because it is meant to be unreadable.Though I would be interested in reading an alternate version, Untranslated Accounts, to see what was actually going on.
I have read three of his novels, plus short stories (2). Since that trio includes THE WHOLE of the near unreadable Translated Accounts, it surely qualifies me as Kelman's most devoted reader, and world authority on his works. Come on! Who else has actually read the whole damn thing?
Other that Translated Accounts, I've read How Late It Was, How Late and A Dissaffection. Both are good, though it was a long time ago and I'm struggling to recall enough to make a spirited defence of them.
How Late It Was, How Late won the Booker Prize a few years ago, back when I was naive to imagine that this particular trophy actually meant something.
At the time, it was TERRIBLY controversial, because Kelman's fondness of the word 'fuck' and all variations thereof proved too strong for some folk. One newspaper calculated that the word occurred more than four times a page. How did they work that out? What poor bugger had to sit there and count how frequently James Kelman swears? It has been a long time since I read it, but I remember it being being very intense and bleak. The other two are clearer in my mind, so I'll focus on them.
I recall A Disaffection as reminiscent of Dostoevsky's Notes From Underground, only coarser, longer and set in Glasgow.
The main character, Patrick Doyle, is a pissed off 29 year old teacher and he is fustrated sexually and careerwise. Sometimes you want to scream at Patrickbut this is a testament to Kelman's ability to make his character seem real, because real people are like that. The final scenes of the book - basically an all day piss up with his brother and his brother's mates, when he should be teaching, interrupted by the arrival of his brother's wife, culminating in a long walk home in the rain - are brilliantly poignant. Kelman must be the only writer who could imagine a trudge home in the Glasgow rain, with a strong liklihood of a kicking from a couple of belligerent cops, seems at all redemptive.
Translated Accounts is a very strange book, composed of fragments of first person narratives, translated by a person or persons who have only a limited familiarity with English. Here are the final lines, which I think are stunningly good:
I cannot say about a beginning, or beginnings, if there is to be the cause of all, I do not see this. There are events, I speak of them, if I am to speak it is these, if I may speak. (1)And now, a digression ... I remember reading some spurious comparison between Alastair Gray and Kelman, to the detriment of the latter on the grounds that Kelman is limited by his decision to write in dialect (ducks Kelman's haymaker - he dislikes the word intensely) and his concentration on dull realism. This is bullshit. Kelman's concern is for with the unrepresented, and those who are made to be silent.
He has also been accused of misogyny, a charge often levied at male who write about males subjects, though curiously often aimed at females who write about females. It is a libel that can easily be put to rest. Though most of his narrators are male, he is concious of an excluded 'female voice' (ducks anouther swing from Kelman) and highlights this in the closing pages of A Disaffection. The first speaker is Patrick, well pissed. The second is his sister-in-law, Nicola. Kelman doesn't like quotation marks and the paraphenalia of bourgeois grammar. Live with it:
Pat waited a few seconds before speaking. What I mean there about Elizabeth is she's got a sense of peace. John has it as well right enough but I think she has it more. It's a real sense of peace.Back to Translated Accounts. It is, I think, the ultimate realsiation of what Kelman has been trying to do with his linguistic guerilla warfare. Reading it a few years ago, I tried to work out what his goal was. I came up with three options:
Pat. Women have to listen more than men, that's why they've got a sense of peace as you call it; they're used to listening - that's what they have to do all the time, listen to men talking. Yet to hear them you'd think it was us did it. And not only listen to them, women have to watch them all the time as well, they've got to study their moods, they've got to see its alright to speak if this is the bloody time you can ask the question or no, is it the wrong time and you'll have to wait because half the time men just areni willing to listen to something if they don't want to hear it, it gets you down. (2)
First of all, by writing a novel that tetters on the verge of incomprehensibility, he is trying to make the reader actively create the narrative from the fragments he has provided. The reader has to create the characters and action in his head. If so, he has failed dramatically, because the novel is too resistant to this sort of exercise. The reader will simply give up in fustration. That said, there was one sequence which I read as describing a building crowded with refugees, which gave me the heebie-jeebies. But, with reflection, I don't think that was what he was trying to do.
Second, he might be attempting - by making the setting, characters and conflict anonymous - to describe some universal experience of displaced or opressed persons. The anonymous characters who flit through the ... (words fail. Novel? Story? Collection?) ... the accounts might be Palestinians and Israelis, or Sandinistas and Contras, Jews and Nazis, blacks slaves and their owners, or Glaswegians fighting against English tyranny. If this was his purpose, however, he failed again as the book is so incoherent that it is impossible to draw any sort of narrative or structure out of it. It isn't anyone's experience.
Which brings us to option number three, which is, I think the correct one. I think Kelman has been trying to respond to the critics who bemoan his obscenity and his refusal to write in anything approaching Standard English (pah!). Translated Accounts a story taken out of its natural reister and translated into a hideous non-language by computer mediation - a bit like running Zola through Babelfish. It is, to all intents, unreadable and incomprehensible - which is the point. I think Kelman is trying to show us that a story or a character must be described in its natural voice. To do otherwise is to bastardize it and to make it - from an intellectually and artistically honest point of view - as deadly and meaningless as the mangled accounts that he has produced. So the Accounts themselves are almost a shaggy dog story - it isn't the accounts that are important, but the fact that they have been translated. They've been taken out of their natural register, an immediately cease to be relevant, interesting or important.
If that was what he intended to do, he's suceeded magnificently. But it is a Phyrric vistory, because the book isn't any more readable just because it is meant to be unreadable.Though I would be interested in reading an alternate version, Untranslated Accounts, to see what was actually going on.
1 - This review was written a couple of years ago. Gray has produced another book since, so perhaps he is not as out of the race as he appeared to be a few years ago.
2 - And since writing this, I have read Kelman's You Have to be Careful in the Land of the Free, which was a major disappointment.
Wednesday 25 March 2009
The books I read in 2009
In reverse order:
- History of the English Church and People by Bede. Interesting history gives way to repetitivie lists of alleged miracles. *
- Roseanna by Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö. Swedish policer. Wry characters and painstakingly slow pace. Clumsy ending. *
- Germinal by Emile Zola. Raw, brutal tale of miners strike. Overwrought and bathetic, but retains some power and plenty rage. *
- Above Suspicion by Lynda la Plante. Girl cop can't decide to shag her boss or the chief suspect. Dismal. No stars
- Purple America by Rick Moody. Excess style failing to compensate for trivial plot and unconvincing characters. A lit fic sugar treat. *
- For The Islands I Sing by George MacKay Brown. The life of an Orcadian poet. Nicely written, but not exactly eventful. *
- The Third Murderer by Carrol John Daly. Clunky and clumsy pulp novella from the 30s, where it should have stayed. No stars
- Heresies by John Gray. Moderately interesting collection of essays by a contrarian philosopher that starts well but soon becomes repetitive. Good points, hammered home rather too hard. *
- Wolf in the Shadow by Marcia Muller. PI Sharon McCone tries to find her missing lover. Indifferent mystery. No stars
- Vodka Doesn't Freeze by Leah Giarratano. Aussie policer spoiled by nastiness, plot cheats and clumsy character exposition. No stars
- Red Blood by Heather Graham. Insipid, femme orientated scares'n'sex vampire novel. Doesn't really deliver either, but not offensively bad either. Keeps you reading, just about. No stars
- Bound by Fire by Anna Windsor. Adominable combination of eroticism and horror. Neither arousing or scary, and so badly written it left me feeling embarrassed for the author. No stars
- December Heat by Luiz Alfredo Garcia-Rosa. Poorly plotted and dully writen (albeit in translation) police thriller. Unconvincing, uninteresting and makes Rio sound like a very dull place. The writer is compared to Chandler - trust me, he isn't. No stars
- The Wild Palms by William Faulkner. Two novellas - one about a convict forced into freedom against his will, the other about a couple cornered by reality - exploring freedom and compulsion. Initially unconvincing, particularly around the central relationsip, but ultimately riveting. **
- Baghdad Burning by Riverbend. Life in Iraq after the invasion, as told with wit and rage by a blogger who has been silent for almost 2 years. **
- The Hemingway Book Club of Kosovo by Paula Huntley. An American teaching English in Kosova (sic) is impressed by her student's response to The Old Man and the Sea, and their courage in a dismal situation. Lacks the rigour needed to make it be than modestly interesting. No stars
- Vlad the Impaler by M.J. Trow. An attempt to examine the history of Dracula - the historical Impaler and the myth that has built up around him. Waffley and unfocused, even its grisly subject matter barely makes it interesting. No stars
- Big Muddy by B.C. Hall & C.T. Wood. A modern journey down the Mississippi. Tries hard to be worthy, but lacks the detail to match the scope of the project, and the crisis, faced by the river and the people living on it. *
- One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Revisiting Macondo reveals a reversal of prior experience. The first half drags, and the second half soars. Still one of the greats. ***
- The Steps to the Empty Throne by Nigel Tranter. The ascent of Robert the Bruce to the throne of Scotland, passably told. The prose is marred by touches of imperial purple. No Stars
- An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser. Apallingly long, ill written account of a tormented young man's motivation to commit murder. Dostoevsky this ain't. Perhaps the worst book I have ever read. Avoid. No Stars
- Quisante by Anthony Hope. No Ruritanian derring-do in this well written but underpowered novel of an ambitious, talented man who lacks any moral sense or qulaity of self reflection. *
- The Cold Six Thousand by James Ellroy. Coruscating, technically challenging, but perhaps too ambitious for its own good. Not for the faint hearted. ***
- All Too Human by George Stephanopolous. Pacey insider on Clinton's first term. Stephanopolous comes across as either dishonest, or incredibly naive. He is good company, however.
- Red Shift by Alan Garner. Brilliant little novel that defies simple description. Events and characters in Roman Britain, the English Civil War and the 20th century overlap and echo around the same locations. ****
- Becoming Madame Mao by Anchee Min. Tepid account of the life of Jiang Ching, wife of Mao and instigator of the Cultural Revolution. Not as interesting or as well written as it needed to be to do justice to its atrocious subject. No Stars
- From Bondage by Henry Roth. Third installment of Roth's semi-postumous, somewhat fictionalised autobiography about literature and depravity in 1920s New York. **
- Under Western Eyes by Joseph Conrad. Off kilter tale of crime and punishment among Russian anarchists in Geneva. Uneven, but still interesting to Conradians. **
- America in the Twenties by Geoffrey Perrett. The last time the wheels came off the global economy in an excess of consumer credit and financial recklessness. Interesting, but long. **
- Hitler: a Study in Tyranny by Alan Bullock. This was the first full length biography of Hitler pubslished after the war. Enthralling, though hardly uplifting. ***
- The Ropemaker by Peter Dickinson. A rather disappointing novel from one of the greats of British fantasy. Young readers might over-look its schematic format but others are advised to seek out the Changes Trilogy to see Dickinson at his best. *
- Towards Another Summer by Janet Frame. Memories of Frame's childhood are conveyed with nightmarish intensity and dazzling skill, but the other half, an uneasy comedy of manners and errors, is much less satisfying. **
- The Winter's Tale by William Shakespeare. Strange late play, of mismatched parts, but possessed of its own strange magic. Includes the best stage direction ever - "Exit, pursued by a bear." *
The Fanatic by James Robertson
The Fanatic is an interesting novel, with two different plots running through it. One of them is set in Edinburgh in 1997, and tells the story of Andrew Carlin, who works as a spook on an Edinburgh ghost walk. The second narrative is based on actual hoistory, and concerns James Mitchell, a 17th century religious fanatic who attempts to murder the Archbishop of St Andrews. Captured after failing to carry out his scheme, he is imprisoned, tortured and finally hung.
What attracted me to this book is that it deals with a period of Scottish history that I know very little about, much to my shame. The only time I can remember meeting the Covenanters in literature before is in Sir Walter Scott's Old Mortality, which I read in my sixth year at school. Robertson slyly drops his name into The Fanatic a couple of times, which is a nice touch. Though a sceptic, when it comes to entertainment I don't mind unexplained forces and supernatural powers. I have a peculiar fondness for books with a supernatural element like this, where curious, never fully explained forces influence people centuries later - Peter Ackroyd has made an entire career out of books like this. Robertson isn't half the writer that Ackroyd is, but, unlike Ackroyd, he does bother to include a plot, which helps.
The main weakness of the book is that the 17th century narrative is so much more interesting that the modern day sections. Carlin is an interesting character, and his profound oddness is well portrayed, but it can't match the bloodthirsty narrative that it is paired with. The 17th century has slaughter, torture, bestiality, incest, witchcraft... The 20th century parts have a lonely loon talking to his mirror. I felt Robertson would have been happier writing a straight historical novel, but included the 20th century parts for his own inscrutable reasons - to avoid being consigned to the "Historical Fiction" ghetto, perhaps? Or is it the old Marxtist maxim that history is bound to repeat itself, the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce? Or demonstrating that that we're all just quivering neurotic wrecks, regardless of what century we live in?
There is also an annoying parochialism about it, something I've noticed in Scottish literature. I remember it annoying me when Iain Rankin went on about Irn Bru in his Rebus novels, or waffled on about the character of malt whiskies. We dinnae need to explain everything, and if we try it disrupts the story. For example:
Sometimes, alas, Robertson slips up - would a country lad in 17th century Scotland really have referred to himslef or his ilk as a "Proletarian"? Dinnae think so. In the 17th century sections he struggles to convey the atmosphere of the time - really make you feel it, the way Ackroyd does. He decides to stage the big trial scene at the end as if it was Boston Legal - I don't imagine 17th Scots law had quite the same feel to it.
These are the the things I don't like about the book. What did I like? It is still a good story, despite the reservations. It might have been a better story if he hadn't tried to find a 20th century corrolation. Despite the old slip up, he's a decent writer. He could do with using a few more unusual adjectives and similies, but he's far from alone in this. It does generate a fair degree of excitement - it only take a couple of days to read.
And am I being too cynical when I wonder why it is that Robertson climaxes the 17th century strand with the trial of Mitchell, where the Scottish legal system is shown to be a tool of the ruling class, and the 20th century strand with the triumph of New Labour in 1997? I dinnae ken, but the thought made me smile.
What attracted me to this book is that it deals with a period of Scottish history that I know very little about, much to my shame. The only time I can remember meeting the Covenanters in literature before is in Sir Walter Scott's Old Mortality, which I read in my sixth year at school. Robertson slyly drops his name into The Fanatic a couple of times, which is a nice touch. Though a sceptic, when it comes to entertainment I don't mind unexplained forces and supernatural powers. I have a peculiar fondness for books with a supernatural element like this, where curious, never fully explained forces influence people centuries later - Peter Ackroyd has made an entire career out of books like this. Robertson isn't half the writer that Ackroyd is, but, unlike Ackroyd, he does bother to include a plot, which helps.
The main weakness of the book is that the 17th century narrative is so much more interesting that the modern day sections. Carlin is an interesting character, and his profound oddness is well portrayed, but it can't match the bloodthirsty narrative that it is paired with. The 17th century has slaughter, torture, bestiality, incest, witchcraft... The 20th century parts have a lonely loon talking to his mirror. I felt Robertson would have been happier writing a straight historical novel, but included the 20th century parts for his own inscrutable reasons - to avoid being consigned to the "Historical Fiction" ghetto, perhaps? Or is it the old Marxtist maxim that history is bound to repeat itself, the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce? Or demonstrating that that we're all just quivering neurotic wrecks, regardless of what century we live in?
There is also an annoying parochialism about it, something I've noticed in Scottish literature. I remember it annoying me when Iain Rankin went on about Irn Bru in his Rebus novels, or waffled on about the character of malt whiskies. We dinnae need to explain everything, and if we try it disrupts the story. For example:
"He raised his glass, souked an inch or more out of it. 'Slainte.' It was only recently that he'd learnt that this was gaelic for 'Health'. For years he'd said 'Slange' thinking it was an obscure Scots term signifying 'Slam your drink down your throat and let's get another in'. It was watching Machair, the gaelic soap opera, that had enlightened him."The idea of modern urbanite Scots gaining their cultural knowledge from soap opera is amusing, but do we really need to know exactly which soap? It is the sort of precision that dates very quickly. (For all those who don't know, Machair was a real soap, set on a wee island. It was a bit like Eldorado, only colder. It went the same way as Eldorado did).
Sometimes, alas, Robertson slips up - would a country lad in 17th century Scotland really have referred to himslef or his ilk as a "Proletarian"? Dinnae think so. In the 17th century sections he struggles to convey the atmosphere of the time - really make you feel it, the way Ackroyd does. He decides to stage the big trial scene at the end as if it was Boston Legal - I don't imagine 17th Scots law had quite the same feel to it.
These are the the things I don't like about the book. What did I like? It is still a good story, despite the reservations. It might have been a better story if he hadn't tried to find a 20th century corrolation. Despite the old slip up, he's a decent writer. He could do with using a few more unusual adjectives and similies, but he's far from alone in this. It does generate a fair degree of excitement - it only take a couple of days to read.
And am I being too cynical when I wonder why it is that Robertson climaxes the 17th century strand with the trial of Mitchell, where the Scottish legal system is shown to be a tool of the ruling class, and the 20th century strand with the triumph of New Labour in 1997? I dinnae ken, but the thought made me smile.
**
On Beulah Height by Reginald Hill
I'd previously read Singing The Sadness by Reginald Hill and though I wasn't uncritical, I generally quite liked it. I figured - charitably - that the intrusive jokiness I detected was a purposeful affectation, perhaps even a character trait. Perhaps Joey Sixsmith really did think everyone he meets looks like a star from the Golden Age of Hollywood. I was inclined to be charitable and was happy enough to pick up On Beulah Height, featuring 'tec team Daziell and Pascoe, which is held to be one of his better efforts.
On further investigation, I am sad to report this is not the case. The stylistic bum notes are no affectation. 'Tis ingrained, as Shakespeare had it.
On Beulah Height is a book about child murder, which is a very serious thing to write about. Hill uses the killing of children to make crap jokes. It's not that he is an atrocious writer - when he writes straight exposition he is streets ahead of Ian Rankin, for example. But he butts into his narrative with asides that are meant to be funny, with irritating regularity. It is intrusive as it disrupts the flow, and offensive, because this is a book about dreadful things.
For Agatha Christie, a bodywas simply a pretext for a smug bourgeoise type to demonstrate how clever he or she was in solving the mystery (and hence how clever Christie was for pulling the wool over everyone's eyes). She did it very well, and her murders had a innocence about them - murder was an after dinner game for adults, it was never sexual and never involved children. Christie's books were so removed from the real world that it is churlish to criticise them as exploitative and cruel. At the other end, writers like Hammett and Chandler also made murder into entertainment - but it was always something grim and nasty, carried out by depressingly real people for horribly mundane purposes.
Hill writes about the nastiness, but in a supercilious and annoying way that makes me angry. As I said earlier, he can write competently enough, though I note an irritating fondness of the exclamation mark and the elipsis, villans of punctuation best left behind with short trousers and acne. Hill over-writes to an extent that would make Iain Banks blush. Sometimes it is almost impossible to work out what he is trying to convey, he is so busy showing us how clever he thinks he is. Key scenes are ruined by throw-away jokes and snide comments.
Hill's characters seem thin and uninteresting. Characterisation is done with a sledgehammer - a character from Newcastle is not only called Geordie (fair enough, people might call him that), but his speech is littered with clunky 'Geordie-isms.' Hill also seems peturbingly concerned with his female character's sex lives - we are told a great deal about Mrs Pascoe's stupendous breasts and we meet Shirley Novello in the confessional, owning up to having shagged some bloke five times. Pascoe himself is a dull prig. Even the bloated and buccolic Dalziell is only intermittently interesting or convincing, but even his would-be gargantuan presence he is obscured by what seems to be a cast of thousands. The plot is spread thinly between a half dozen protagonists, and that is only the 'goodies.' Gone are the days of the mercurial loner stalking the mean streets in endless rain. I know that modern police work is not about one brilliant individual engaged in a philisophical quest disguised as a murder story - but if we have to spend so much time with all these folk, at least make them better company.
The books flaws don't end there, however. There is a structural weakness. The problem is that the central event of the book - the murder of a little girl - is witnessed, no by one person, but by two. One of these people immediately and conveniently lapses into a coma before they can give the game away, and the other simply bites their tongue, for no convincing reason. Hill then brings the first witness out the coma, just in time to resolve everything and paper over the holes in the plot. Worse, he used exactly the same device in Singing The Sadness - putting a crucial witness incommunicado until it becomes absolutely necessary for them to speak - because Hill can't think of any other way to sort out his stew of red herrings.
But wait - there's more. Thinking about the second plot strand of On Beulah Height, I realised that for the fifteen year old mystery to remain unsolved required YET ANOTHER character to have remained unconvincingly silent all these years. Sorry, but no, this just doesn't wash. This isn't a mystery, it is a mess. Yet it is acclaimed as a fine novel, an exemplar of the modern mystery genre. It is not.
On further investigation, I am sad to report this is not the case. The stylistic bum notes are no affectation. 'Tis ingrained, as Shakespeare had it.
On Beulah Height is a book about child murder, which is a very serious thing to write about. Hill uses the killing of children to make crap jokes. It's not that he is an atrocious writer - when he writes straight exposition he is streets ahead of Ian Rankin, for example. But he butts into his narrative with asides that are meant to be funny, with irritating regularity. It is intrusive as it disrupts the flow, and offensive, because this is a book about dreadful things.
For Agatha Christie, a bodywas simply a pretext for a smug bourgeoise type to demonstrate how clever he or she was in solving the mystery (and hence how clever Christie was for pulling the wool over everyone's eyes). She did it very well, and her murders had a innocence about them - murder was an after dinner game for adults, it was never sexual and never involved children. Christie's books were so removed from the real world that it is churlish to criticise them as exploitative and cruel. At the other end, writers like Hammett and Chandler also made murder into entertainment - but it was always something grim and nasty, carried out by depressingly real people for horribly mundane purposes.
Hill writes about the nastiness, but in a supercilious and annoying way that makes me angry. As I said earlier, he can write competently enough, though I note an irritating fondness of the exclamation mark and the elipsis, villans of punctuation best left behind with short trousers and acne. Hill over-writes to an extent that would make Iain Banks blush. Sometimes it is almost impossible to work out what he is trying to convey, he is so busy showing us how clever he thinks he is. Key scenes are ruined by throw-away jokes and snide comments.
Hill's characters seem thin and uninteresting. Characterisation is done with a sledgehammer - a character from Newcastle is not only called Geordie (fair enough, people might call him that), but his speech is littered with clunky 'Geordie-isms.' Hill also seems peturbingly concerned with his female character's sex lives - we are told a great deal about Mrs Pascoe's stupendous breasts and we meet Shirley Novello in the confessional, owning up to having shagged some bloke five times. Pascoe himself is a dull prig. Even the bloated and buccolic Dalziell is only intermittently interesting or convincing, but even his would-be gargantuan presence he is obscured by what seems to be a cast of thousands. The plot is spread thinly between a half dozen protagonists, and that is only the 'goodies.' Gone are the days of the mercurial loner stalking the mean streets in endless rain. I know that modern police work is not about one brilliant individual engaged in a philisophical quest disguised as a murder story - but if we have to spend so much time with all these folk, at least make them better company.
The books flaws don't end there, however. There is a structural weakness. The problem is that the central event of the book - the murder of a little girl - is witnessed, no by one person, but by two. One of these people immediately and conveniently lapses into a coma before they can give the game away, and the other simply bites their tongue, for no convincing reason. Hill then brings the first witness out the coma, just in time to resolve everything and paper over the holes in the plot. Worse, he used exactly the same device in Singing The Sadness - putting a crucial witness incommunicado until it becomes absolutely necessary for them to speak - because Hill can't think of any other way to sort out his stew of red herrings.
But wait - there's more. Thinking about the second plot strand of On Beulah Height, I realised that for the fifteen year old mystery to remain unsolved required YET ANOTHER character to have remained unconvincingly silent all these years. Sorry, but no, this just doesn't wash. This isn't a mystery, it is a mess. Yet it is acclaimed as a fine novel, an exemplar of the modern mystery genre. It is not.
NO STAR
Tuesday 24 March 2009
As far as writing goes ...
I am currently working on 'something.' It has been a struggle to get started, but I've made some progress recently. I broke 10,000 words the other night, which made me very pleased. There are some dicey plot situations ahead, but I'm taking it slowly - ah, the joys of not writing 1667 or 2000 words a night! - and hopefully won't get myself into too much of a mess.
Th genesis of this story is interesting. It is drawing on at least three different quasi-abandoned projects. One was a longish piece about someone looking for his missing brother. I started pretty well with that, with some interesting ideas floating about, but after ther strip club scene (I always have to have a strip club scene) I got lost and ended up with my characters wandering about the Manawatu countryside in search of a plot. Then I started re-writing it, but this time with a woman looking for her missing sister. This didn't strike me as weird or pointless at the time, and I managed a coupleof nights work before I realsied it was doomed - DOOMED I TELL YOU - because I still hadn't thought to plan anything. Hell, all these people getting killed off, and no-one having any idea who or why or how it was done. Least of all me. So that was abandoned, and I went into a bit of a funk.
Nanowrimo pulled me out of the trough, but only to dumpt me back into a deeper one. I really wanted to suceed at Nano in 2008, after burning out in Socnoc earleir in the year. I managed 50,000 words in Novmeber, but the consequences were pretty devastating - I hated what I was writing, hated writing mysteries and hated myself for making such a bloody mess of it. So at the end of Novmber I downed tools and sulked even more fervently for a couple of months.
Immedaitely prior to Nano, I'd tried writing a disconnected scene featuring the investigator who had featured in the two incomplete efforts mentioned above. This time I just put her in a strange, slightly scarey (at least, that was the intention) situation and wrote it, to get back intot he habit of writing regularly again for Nano. It wasn't bad, but it didn't fit into anything much. And then it was put aside for Nano, which, as I said, didn't go too well and ended up with me not writing anything until February.
In February, I decided it was time to pull myself together. When that didn;t work, I decided it was time to start writing again, regardless. I had thought of a (fairly) killer opening line and opening scene and decided to see where that took me. After writing it, I relaised that it would make perfect sense to attach one of my previously abandoned efforts from 2008 onto it, as a first chapter. Suddenly, I had characters, and if not a plot, at least some action that required explanation. Hurrah! So I cobbled them together, and carried on, hoping the joins weren't too obvious. Then I thought the pre-Nano exercise, an not inconsiderable 5000 words, could be worked in further along the line. So, suddenly, this had POTENTIAL. ANd I even managed to work in an extract from my botched 2008 Socnoc effort. Only a few hundred words, but it got me out of an awkward situation quite nicely. And it felt good to have salvaged something from that.
(Though if I ever re-visit that story - and it has possibilities, damnit! - I'll have to remember that I've already used that bit.)
So things are moving, things are moving. The last couple of nights have been tricky because I'm tryig to bridge a gap in my plot, betwen Lots Of Stuff Happening and the investigator Making An Important Decision (i.e. deciding, "I've got to find out who did this terrible thing!"). It can't be rushed, but it is fustrating to be -effectively - killing time.
And with that dreadful pun, I will away.
Th genesis of this story is interesting. It is drawing on at least three different quasi-abandoned projects. One was a longish piece about someone looking for his missing brother. I started pretty well with that, with some interesting ideas floating about, but after ther strip club scene (I always have to have a strip club scene) I got lost and ended up with my characters wandering about the Manawatu countryside in search of a plot. Then I started re-writing it, but this time with a woman looking for her missing sister. This didn't strike me as weird or pointless at the time, and I managed a coupleof nights work before I realsied it was doomed - DOOMED I TELL YOU - because I still hadn't thought to plan anything. Hell, all these people getting killed off, and no-one having any idea who or why or how it was done. Least of all me. So that was abandoned, and I went into a bit of a funk.
Nanowrimo pulled me out of the trough, but only to dumpt me back into a deeper one. I really wanted to suceed at Nano in 2008, after burning out in Socnoc earleir in the year. I managed 50,000 words in Novmeber, but the consequences were pretty devastating - I hated what I was writing, hated writing mysteries and hated myself for making such a bloody mess of it. So at the end of Novmber I downed tools and sulked even more fervently for a couple of months.
Immedaitely prior to Nano, I'd tried writing a disconnected scene featuring the investigator who had featured in the two incomplete efforts mentioned above. This time I just put her in a strange, slightly scarey (at least, that was the intention) situation and wrote it, to get back intot he habit of writing regularly again for Nano. It wasn't bad, but it didn't fit into anything much. And then it was put aside for Nano, which, as I said, didn't go too well and ended up with me not writing anything until February.
In February, I decided it was time to pull myself together. When that didn;t work, I decided it was time to start writing again, regardless. I had thought of a (fairly) killer opening line and opening scene and decided to see where that took me. After writing it, I relaised that it would make perfect sense to attach one of my previously abandoned efforts from 2008 onto it, as a first chapter. Suddenly, I had characters, and if not a plot, at least some action that required explanation. Hurrah! So I cobbled them together, and carried on, hoping the joins weren't too obvious. Then I thought the pre-Nano exercise, an not inconsiderable 5000 words, could be worked in further along the line. So, suddenly, this had POTENTIAL. ANd I even managed to work in an extract from my botched 2008 Socnoc effort. Only a few hundred words, but it got me out of an awkward situation quite nicely. And it felt good to have salvaged something from that.
(Though if I ever re-visit that story - and it has possibilities, damnit! - I'll have to remember that I've already used that bit.)
So things are moving, things are moving. The last couple of nights have been tricky because I'm tryig to bridge a gap in my plot, betwen Lots Of Stuff Happening and the investigator Making An Important Decision (i.e. deciding, "I've got to find out who did this terrible thing!"). It can't be rushed, but it is fustrating to be -effectively - killing time.
And with that dreadful pun, I will away.
DVD review - Hamlet (2003)
Hamlet (2003). D: Mike Mundell. Starring Will Houston, Gareth Thomas.
Disc Two of my set of three. Fortunately, something of an improvement on the dismal MacBeth. This version of Hamlet bears all the marks of a very low budget production but has enough going for it to make it worth while.
It looks like a theatre production opened up and filmed. The cast range from competent to very good - a hint they are presenting a well rehearsed stage production - but some are incongruous. A very contemporary looking Osric, for example, or the youthful Polonius. On stage oddities such as there are less noticeable than on film. The production looks cheap, with the final duel between Hamlet and Laertes taking place in a small, drab room that doesn't reflect well on the majesty of the Danish royal house. A badly presented ghost doesn't help either.
The text has been edited heavily. The film bravely dumps the brilliant opening Shakespeare envisaged on the dark battlements of Elsinore. "To be or not to be" is shunted forwards to just before the entrance of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. This gives Hamlet's melancholy a more genuine feel - no question of him hamming it up for Claudius and Laertes - but it also means the audience has empathy with him, and less sympathy for his plight. We've only just met the guy, and he's telling us about how he wants to off himself. Don't you hate people like that? Fortinbras is gone entirely - the final catastrophe that befalls the Danish royal family leaves a power vacuum with no cynical warlordling ready to stride into it.
The film stutters at the start. The opening scenes are stages in Elizabethan buildings and look awkward and staged. Subsquent scenes are more effective, and the Elizabethan settings are discarded in favour of pleasingly medieval look. It's possible the director was trying for something similar to Olivier's Henry V in mind, which started with a facsimile of an Elizabethan staging of the play. It doesn't really work, and the opening scenes are ragged but it does pick up after that.
The main strength of the film is the cast. It looks like they have been playing the parts on stage and they are generally very good. Will Houston as Hamlet is very good, after a shaky start. Gareth Thomas is a sympathetic Claudius, and Lucy Cockram - after another dicey first scene - is good as Ophelia. David Powell Davies is too young for Polonius, but provides the character with a more dignity than he is usually allowed. He doesn't come across as pompous or foolish. This combination of a fairly likable Claudius and a wily Polonius makes our identification with Hamlet more provisional than is often the case, and this is good, for me at any rate.
The staging of the Mousetrap and the confrontation between Hamlet and Gertrude are very well done - the latter is superb. Houston imbues his lines with manic energy to make them more menacing than they are often read. This Hamlet's witty retorts seem to be teetering on the edge of madness. He carries this over onto the following scene, where he is quizzed about the fate of Polonius. Our sympathy here is actually with the hapless Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, as they try to keep pace with the Prince, and it works very well. Hamlet's verbal sparring alienates us, as it should - he has, after all, just killed someone. That Houston manages to pull us back to him in the final scenes is a credit to a young actor who should shine in years to come.
All in, a brave attempt to film one of the difficult texts in the cannon. It is flawed, but the flaws relate more to the realities of film making. Its virtues, on the other hand, are most noticeable where they are most needed - the acting, the poetry, and the staging. There has been a glut of Hamlets recently. None have been perfect, including this one, but this is the one I like best.
Disc Two of my set of three. Fortunately, something of an improvement on the dismal MacBeth. This version of Hamlet bears all the marks of a very low budget production but has enough going for it to make it worth while.
It looks like a theatre production opened up and filmed. The cast range from competent to very good - a hint they are presenting a well rehearsed stage production - but some are incongruous. A very contemporary looking Osric, for example, or the youthful Polonius. On stage oddities such as there are less noticeable than on film. The production looks cheap, with the final duel between Hamlet and Laertes taking place in a small, drab room that doesn't reflect well on the majesty of the Danish royal house. A badly presented ghost doesn't help either.
The text has been edited heavily. The film bravely dumps the brilliant opening Shakespeare envisaged on the dark battlements of Elsinore. "To be or not to be" is shunted forwards to just before the entrance of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. This gives Hamlet's melancholy a more genuine feel - no question of him hamming it up for Claudius and Laertes - but it also means the audience has empathy with him, and less sympathy for his plight. We've only just met the guy, and he's telling us about how he wants to off himself. Don't you hate people like that? Fortinbras is gone entirely - the final catastrophe that befalls the Danish royal family leaves a power vacuum with no cynical warlordling ready to stride into it.
The film stutters at the start. The opening scenes are stages in Elizabethan buildings and look awkward and staged. Subsquent scenes are more effective, and the Elizabethan settings are discarded in favour of pleasingly medieval look. It's possible the director was trying for something similar to Olivier's Henry V in mind, which started with a facsimile of an Elizabethan staging of the play. It doesn't really work, and the opening scenes are ragged but it does pick up after that.
The main strength of the film is the cast. It looks like they have been playing the parts on stage and they are generally very good. Will Houston as Hamlet is very good, after a shaky start. Gareth Thomas is a sympathetic Claudius, and Lucy Cockram - after another dicey first scene - is good as Ophelia. David Powell Davies is too young for Polonius, but provides the character with a more dignity than he is usually allowed. He doesn't come across as pompous or foolish. This combination of a fairly likable Claudius and a wily Polonius makes our identification with Hamlet more provisional than is often the case, and this is good, for me at any rate.
The staging of the Mousetrap and the confrontation between Hamlet and Gertrude are very well done - the latter is superb. Houston imbues his lines with manic energy to make them more menacing than they are often read. This Hamlet's witty retorts seem to be teetering on the edge of madness. He carries this over onto the following scene, where he is quizzed about the fate of Polonius. Our sympathy here is actually with the hapless Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, as they try to keep pace with the Prince, and it works very well. Hamlet's verbal sparring alienates us, as it should - he has, after all, just killed someone. That Houston manages to pull us back to him in the final scenes is a credit to a young actor who should shine in years to come.
All in, a brave attempt to film one of the difficult texts in the cannon. It is flawed, but the flaws relate more to the realities of film making. Its virtues, on the other hand, are most noticeable where they are most needed - the acting, the poetry, and the staging. There has been a glut of Hamlets recently. None have been perfect, including this one, but this is the one I like best.
**
DVD review - MacBeth (1997)
MacBeth (1997). Directed by Jeremy Freeston and Brian Blessed. Starring Jason COnnery and Helen Baxendale.
This was part of a box set I bought recently, a triple bill of Shakespearean tragedies -MacBeth, Hamlet and King Lear (reviews of the other two to follow). I watched MacBeth first because it is one of my favourite plays by Shakespeare, and I've been curious about this version for some time.
MacBeth, I've always thought, is the most accessible of Shakespeare's 'Great Period' plays. Compact, focused, with heaps of violence, it should have been the play most open to screen adaptations. I'm not aware of a really good rendering of the story, however - the best effort being Orson Welles's vigorous shoestring version. To the list of MacBotches we must add the Connery/Baxendale effort.
(It seems it was not a 'film adaptation' at all, but a TV version that was given a theatrical release, post Luhrman's Romeo + Juliet and Branagh's Hamlet. That might explain some of its flaws, but doesn't excuse them.)
It starts well, with a feisty battle sequence with pleasingly grisly witches looking on. Poor old Gray Malkin and Paddock are cut from the opening scene, but they aren't alone for long. In quick order they are joined by the bloodied Sargent and his account of the battle, the treachery of the Thane of Cawdor, the luckless master o' the Tiger, even MacBeth's meeting with Duncan when he is invested as thane of Cawdor. All of these had virtues that plead like angels trumpet tongued against the dark damnation of their sending off, but sent off they are. These aren't the only cuts, either. This is MacBeth in a hurry.
From the opening battle we are pitched directly into MacBeth's encounter with the witches, which is well done. Brian Blessed, curiously, directed the witchy sequences, and he has great fun with the special effects as MacBeth and Banquo are told of their fates. Jason Connery as MacBeth is awkward, obviously unsure what to make of the verse. Graham MacTavish as Banquo, on the other hand, is capable, making his lines natural and easy. Within a few minutes of Connery's mumbling, the viewer is struck the urge to see the roles reversed and MacTavish in the title role. No wonder MacBeth felt he needed to kill him.
These first few minutes marks the high point of the film. From there we move to Helen Baxendale receiving word of her husband. She's as lost as Connery, and denied the beard that he gets to hide behind. Her "Unsex me here" invocation of evil is embarrassing, not unsettling. There are some reasonably clever touches - MacBeth's "We will speak further" is not a sign of his hesitancy in the face of his wife's wicked ambition, but his attempt to silence her prattling as he throws her onto the bed.
The acting of the leads is the biggest let down. Connery's method consists of staring glazedly about the screen while he mumbles his monologues via voice-over. Baxendale looks pinched and neurotic. An attempt to do something interesting with "Is this a dagger?" - the fantastical dagger is a shadow cast by a cross on an altar - falls flat due to Connery's poor delivery and sloppy direction, which mars the production throughout. We accompany Lady MacBeth back into the murder chamber, where she gets to stab the reviving Duncan, but the effect is comic, not dramatic.
Big scenes are botched - the appearance of Banquo at the feast is made incomprehensible through attempts to mix subjective rendering of MacBeth's delusion with what those around him see, or don't see. The second meeting with the witches is even less coherent, and the prophetic visions are confusing. Timing seems to be an issue here - Banquo's banquet is the centrepoint of the play, but the film moves rapidly towards conclusion after it, giving it an unbalanced feel and no scope for the intricacies of the riddles MacBeth is caught in to be appreciated, or for his descent into madness to be convincing. Another crucial cut is the scene where Malcolm tests MacDuff, and MacDuff learns of the murder of his family. This robs his revenge of most of its emotional force - and the character of a lot of the screen time. He's a virtual stranger when he turns up to kill MacBeth.
A point for trying. MacTavish's Banquo earns another. The first few minutes garners another. But that's all. From then on it's sound and fury blah blah blah.
This was part of a box set I bought recently, a triple bill of Shakespearean tragedies -MacBeth, Hamlet and King Lear (reviews of the other two to follow). I watched MacBeth first because it is one of my favourite plays by Shakespeare, and I've been curious about this version for some time.
MacBeth, I've always thought, is the most accessible of Shakespeare's 'Great Period' plays. Compact, focused, with heaps of violence, it should have been the play most open to screen adaptations. I'm not aware of a really good rendering of the story, however - the best effort being Orson Welles's vigorous shoestring version. To the list of MacBotches we must add the Connery/Baxendale effort.
(It seems it was not a 'film adaptation' at all, but a TV version that was given a theatrical release, post Luhrman's Romeo + Juliet and Branagh's Hamlet. That might explain some of its flaws, but doesn't excuse them.)
It starts well, with a feisty battle sequence with pleasingly grisly witches looking on. Poor old Gray Malkin and Paddock are cut from the opening scene, but they aren't alone for long. In quick order they are joined by the bloodied Sargent and his account of the battle, the treachery of the Thane of Cawdor, the luckless master o' the Tiger, even MacBeth's meeting with Duncan when he is invested as thane of Cawdor. All of these had virtues that plead like angels trumpet tongued against the dark damnation of their sending off, but sent off they are. These aren't the only cuts, either. This is MacBeth in a hurry.
From the opening battle we are pitched directly into MacBeth's encounter with the witches, which is well done. Brian Blessed, curiously, directed the witchy sequences, and he has great fun with the special effects as MacBeth and Banquo are told of their fates. Jason Connery as MacBeth is awkward, obviously unsure what to make of the verse. Graham MacTavish as Banquo, on the other hand, is capable, making his lines natural and easy. Within a few minutes of Connery's mumbling, the viewer is struck the urge to see the roles reversed and MacTavish in the title role. No wonder MacBeth felt he needed to kill him.
These first few minutes marks the high point of the film. From there we move to Helen Baxendale receiving word of her husband. She's as lost as Connery, and denied the beard that he gets to hide behind. Her "Unsex me here" invocation of evil is embarrassing, not unsettling. There are some reasonably clever touches - MacBeth's "We will speak further" is not a sign of his hesitancy in the face of his wife's wicked ambition, but his attempt to silence her prattling as he throws her onto the bed.
The acting of the leads is the biggest let down. Connery's method consists of staring glazedly about the screen while he mumbles his monologues via voice-over. Baxendale looks pinched and neurotic. An attempt to do something interesting with "Is this a dagger?" - the fantastical dagger is a shadow cast by a cross on an altar - falls flat due to Connery's poor delivery and sloppy direction, which mars the production throughout. We accompany Lady MacBeth back into the murder chamber, where she gets to stab the reviving Duncan, but the effect is comic, not dramatic.
Big scenes are botched - the appearance of Banquo at the feast is made incomprehensible through attempts to mix subjective rendering of MacBeth's delusion with what those around him see, or don't see. The second meeting with the witches is even less coherent, and the prophetic visions are confusing. Timing seems to be an issue here - Banquo's banquet is the centrepoint of the play, but the film moves rapidly towards conclusion after it, giving it an unbalanced feel and no scope for the intricacies of the riddles MacBeth is caught in to be appreciated, or for his descent into madness to be convincing. Another crucial cut is the scene where Malcolm tests MacDuff, and MacDuff learns of the murder of his family. This robs his revenge of most of its emotional force - and the character of a lot of the screen time. He's a virtual stranger when he turns up to kill MacBeth.
A point for trying. MacTavish's Banquo earns another. The first few minutes garners another. But that's all. From then on it's sound and fury blah blah blah.
NO STAR
The thing about Ian MacEwan
... is that he is a great writer, but he is too much like Whoopi Goldberg.
That requires some explanation, I feel. So let me explain.
Whoopi Goldberg is a great actress. Speilberg's adaptation of The Color Purple may be flawed (arguably, less so than Alice Walker's book) but Goldberg's performance is brilliant. Her career since then, however, has been marred by her inability to choose good scripts. Burglar, Jumping Jack Flash, Clara's Heart ... Whoopi is game, but was too willing to waste her talents in unworthy vehicles.
Ian McEwan suffers from a similar affliction. Though he's a great writer, he seems to be squandering his talents. He never seems to produce convincing books, or even books that are good but flawed. Rather, his books seem to be poor with occasional flashes of brilliance. Because good McEwan is like nothing else , these occasional fits of inspiration are often the part that gets reviewed -the fairly weak book attached to them is overlooked.
McEwan's work seems too focused on small things. A middle class couple menaced by a lunatic (Enduring Love), a middle class family menaced by war (Atonement), a middle class family menaced by a lunatic (Saturday) ... you see what I am getting at? Without reading his latest, On Chesil Beach, it doesn't sound promising. It was described by the Guardian as describing the "trauma of a honeymoon in Dorset on the brink of the sexual revolution". This doesn't bode well.
McEwan seems to be stuck in a rut. His books books are always
McEwan's books have always been short. Enduring love was a middling 247 pages. Amsterdam was a trifling 208 pages. On Chesil Beach weighs in at just 166 pages. Black Dogs was 178 pages long. Atonement was more substantial, at 371 pages, but the relative epic quality this imparted to the book just serves to highlight how slender the others are.
Quantity does not necessarily mean quality, of course. There is nothing wrong with short fiction. A short intense novella, like John Banville's The Sea, or his even better The Book of Evidence, can provide as much satisfaction, trouble, puzzlement or whatever you crave from fiction, as a far bigger book. Bryce Courtney has mastered the expanded style of fiction - he uses as many pages in one book as McEwan might in three or four. Whether his novels are better than McEwan's are, of course, entirely a matter of personal taste.
I am worried, however, about McEwan's tendency to write short, focused novels. It seems to me that by doing so, and doing so repeatedly, he is limiting himself. By necessity, he focuses on striking incidents and short time frames - Saturday covers the events of one twenty four hour period, unsurprisingly. Atonement ranged far across time and space, but did so in clinically discrete sections. Enduring Love focused on the relationship between two middle class people and a psychopath. It is arguable that McEwan is allowing himself to focus on (pretentious phrase alert!) the intimate signifigance of moments, with a forensic level of detail, and that is all very well. But that seems to be all his does now.
As for the charge of McEwan's books being too middle class, the truth of this should be apparent from a survey of his characters and his readership. Perowne is a surgeon - a neuro-surgeon at that. The menaced couple in Enduring love are both successful careerists. The family in Atonement have a big country house and SERVANTS, for Heaven's sake. Characters sport names like Briony, Clarissa, Cecilia and Pierrot. Perowne's children are, respectively, a jazz musician and a poet. This wouldn't be a problem if it was just one instance - ther is nothing wrong with a book set in a middle-class milieu, modern or old, but since he keeps returning to these environs, it is again a limit on his creativity, his licence to explore life in all its forms and all the places where it lurks.
At least part of the reason for might be that McEwan is a writer-of-choice among the middle classes themselves. These are the people who buy his books - self-absorbed professionals and wannabe intelligensia, who would quite like the idea of their children (often named things like Clarissa and Pierrot) growing up to be jazz musicians or poets. They like reading about themselves, or the sort of people they would like to be, and gain a vicarious thrill from the intrusions of ugly, violent reality into the lives of characters the identify with so strongly. The real challenge, which McEwan seems reluctant to take up, would be to carry his readers out of their comfort zones and into a world that is unfamiliar to them.
This brings us to the sense of smallness that I identified earlier. This is partly a function of the limited scope of McEwan's preferred form, the novella, and his focus on characters drawn from the middle class, or upper middle class. But there is something else apart from that - a lack of ambition on his part, a failure of desire to venture into uncomfortable, unfamiliar ground as a writer. This is a significant failing of all for a novelist - choosing the comfortable and familiar over the risky and new. He does not seem interested in pushing the envlope further. It could be argued that he is trying to perfect one thing, but that seems a deathly pursuit - revisiting the same tropes, shaking them up or rearranging them in the hope that this time, they will fall perfectly into place. Perhaps this is why McEwan's prose has a detached quality, even as he describes the most thrilling sequence - he's bored, at some level, by what he is doing.
What McEwan needs to do is blow his boundaries sky high. Shakespeare wrote great plays that reeled from taverns to court to battlefields, combining ribaldry with calculating ruthlessness, heroism, stupity, venality and everything else - in one play.
McEwan should take note, and instead of writing another novella about the troubled middle classes, he should try something different. A huge book, covering the whole of society in all its ugliness, the model used by Dickens, Flaubert, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. Or put his ability to write unforgettable scenes to full use by writing a war novel - the Dunkirk sequence of Atonement hinted at how brilliantly he could do this. Or even follow John Banville's lead and try his hand at genre fiction. Something new, rather than another clinical exercise of his undoubted gifts in the same style as before.
That requires some explanation, I feel. So let me explain.
Whoopi Goldberg is a great actress. Speilberg's adaptation of The Color Purple may be flawed (arguably, less so than Alice Walker's book) but Goldberg's performance is brilliant. Her career since then, however, has been marred by her inability to choose good scripts. Burglar, Jumping Jack Flash, Clara's Heart ... Whoopi is game, but was too willing to waste her talents in unworthy vehicles.
Ian McEwan suffers from a similar affliction. Though he's a great writer, he seems to be squandering his talents. He never seems to produce convincing books, or even books that are good but flawed. Rather, his books seem to be poor with occasional flashes of brilliance. Because good McEwan is like nothing else , these occasional fits of inspiration are often the part that gets reviewed -the fairly weak book attached to them is overlooked.
McEwan's work seems too focused on small things. A middle class couple menaced by a lunatic (Enduring Love), a middle class family menaced by war (Atonement), a middle class family menaced by a lunatic (Saturday) ... you see what I am getting at? Without reading his latest, On Chesil Beach, it doesn't sound promising. It was described by the Guardian as describing the "trauma of a honeymoon in Dorset on the brink of the sexual revolution". This doesn't bode well.
McEwan seems to be stuck in a rut. His books books are always
a) too short,These failings are all interwoven and (mixed metaphor alert) feed off each other.
b) too middle class, and
c) beset by a sense of smallness.
McEwan's books have always been short. Enduring love was a middling 247 pages. Amsterdam was a trifling 208 pages. On Chesil Beach weighs in at just 166 pages. Black Dogs was 178 pages long. Atonement was more substantial, at 371 pages, but the relative epic quality this imparted to the book just serves to highlight how slender the others are.
Quantity does not necessarily mean quality, of course. There is nothing wrong with short fiction. A short intense novella, like John Banville's The Sea, or his even better The Book of Evidence, can provide as much satisfaction, trouble, puzzlement or whatever you crave from fiction, as a far bigger book. Bryce Courtney has mastered the expanded style of fiction - he uses as many pages in one book as McEwan might in three or four. Whether his novels are better than McEwan's are, of course, entirely a matter of personal taste.
I am worried, however, about McEwan's tendency to write short, focused novels. It seems to me that by doing so, and doing so repeatedly, he is limiting himself. By necessity, he focuses on striking incidents and short time frames - Saturday covers the events of one twenty four hour period, unsurprisingly. Atonement ranged far across time and space, but did so in clinically discrete sections. Enduring Love focused on the relationship between two middle class people and a psychopath. It is arguable that McEwan is allowing himself to focus on (pretentious phrase alert!) the intimate signifigance of moments, with a forensic level of detail, and that is all very well. But that seems to be all his does now.
As for the charge of McEwan's books being too middle class, the truth of this should be apparent from a survey of his characters and his readership. Perowne is a surgeon - a neuro-surgeon at that. The menaced couple in Enduring love are both successful careerists. The family in Atonement have a big country house and SERVANTS, for Heaven's sake. Characters sport names like Briony, Clarissa, Cecilia and Pierrot. Perowne's children are, respectively, a jazz musician and a poet. This wouldn't be a problem if it was just one instance - ther is nothing wrong with a book set in a middle-class milieu, modern or old, but since he keeps returning to these environs, it is again a limit on his creativity, his licence to explore life in all its forms and all the places where it lurks.
At least part of the reason for might be that McEwan is a writer-of-choice among the middle classes themselves. These are the people who buy his books - self-absorbed professionals and wannabe intelligensia, who would quite like the idea of their children (often named things like Clarissa and Pierrot) growing up to be jazz musicians or poets. They like reading about themselves, or the sort of people they would like to be, and gain a vicarious thrill from the intrusions of ugly, violent reality into the lives of characters the identify with so strongly. The real challenge, which McEwan seems reluctant to take up, would be to carry his readers out of their comfort zones and into a world that is unfamiliar to them.
This brings us to the sense of smallness that I identified earlier. This is partly a function of the limited scope of McEwan's preferred form, the novella, and his focus on characters drawn from the middle class, or upper middle class. But there is something else apart from that - a lack of ambition on his part, a failure of desire to venture into uncomfortable, unfamiliar ground as a writer. This is a significant failing of all for a novelist - choosing the comfortable and familiar over the risky and new. He does not seem interested in pushing the envlope further. It could be argued that he is trying to perfect one thing, but that seems a deathly pursuit - revisiting the same tropes, shaking them up or rearranging them in the hope that this time, they will fall perfectly into place. Perhaps this is why McEwan's prose has a detached quality, even as he describes the most thrilling sequence - he's bored, at some level, by what he is doing.
What McEwan needs to do is blow his boundaries sky high. Shakespeare wrote great plays that reeled from taverns to court to battlefields, combining ribaldry with calculating ruthlessness, heroism, stupity, venality and everything else - in one play.
McEwan should take note, and instead of writing another novella about the troubled middle classes, he should try something different. A huge book, covering the whole of society in all its ugliness, the model used by Dickens, Flaubert, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. Or put his ability to write unforgettable scenes to full use by writing a war novel - the Dunkirk sequence of Atonement hinted at how brilliantly he could do this. Or even follow John Banville's lead and try his hand at genre fiction. Something new, rather than another clinical exercise of his undoubted gifts in the same style as before.
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