The last couple of months have seen me take a couple of technological strides (well, shuffles) forward. Earlier this month, on a research trip to the British Library, I finally got myself an Oyster card. Like anybody else new to this system, I spent the next few days in a fug of self-satisfaction at saving money, perfecting my Oyster Slap (the nonchalant yet forceful placing of the wallet against the yellow pad when passing through the gate) and guffawing inwardly at those still fumbling with their card tickets, waiting all that time for the barrier to take the card and spit it out again. I was, of course, aware that real life Lunnoners were similarly guffawing at me last year, and will indeed miss the cardboard Underground ticket (its dimensions making it somehow perfectly suited for bookmark duty), but as with any other popular technology, there's a pervasive sense of "How could I have been so arse rippingly stupid as to carry on with the old stuff?" Paper tickets, VHS, portable CD players... bringing me to the second (or, chronologically, first) technological leap - the MP3 player, which I adopted in December. For the moderately frequent flyer, this constitutes a whole revolution in carry-on luggage. No more stuffing the seat pocket in front of me with a CD player and a couple of fabric clams containing the best prog-, art- and classic rock the 1970s has to offer (you try Bach on a plane), leaving no room for one's knees, and even then forcing one to have already taken out the superfluous magazines and duty-free brochures already in the pouch, and putting them in your neighbour's pouch before he or she arrives (then feigning ignorance when they pull out the in-flight film guide and seven copies of Sky Mall tumble out as well). No more juggling all that stuff - just a tiny silver thing that fits in the pocket. And so it was that one of the best moments of last year (after getting married, 'f course) came right at the end, flying to Oklahoma City on New Year's Eve. Having scored the holy grail of economy seating (exit row, window seat) thanks to the quite superb Continental check-in staff at Gatwick (muffins all round), the final approach into US airspace was undertaken to the equally dramatic soundtrack of Led Zeppelin's "Kashmir" in its compressed digital glory. It was difficult to be precise, but I'm fairly sure that we entered the US just as the track ended and as I had semi-intended (look, it can get boring up there). That was good. What was better, however, and which came as a rather more unintended surprise (as surprises tend to be), was that the next track, immediately after entering the States, was Laurie Anderson, "From the Air."
Which brings me to the subject of this week's (um, month's?) doughnut, Laurie Anderson. Anderson is somewhat prominent in my head at the moment, not only because of her taking a significant chunk of my MP3 player at the moment (incidentally, it's not an Apple, more of a clementine), but also because I've just bought tickets for her new show, Homeland, at the Barbican this May, and am hugely excited, because despite the centrality of performance art to Anderson's career, I've never seen one of her performances. The theme of Homeland is America’s current preoccupation with national security, which at first I though was something of a retread of old concerns, until I actually thought about it and realised it’s not something that crops up in her earlier work (there’s a possible exception in “Night in Baghdad” from Bright Red, perhaps). Rather, the World Trade Center attacks and everything after have been retroactively superimposed over the songs, most obviously the 1982 ha-ha vocoder fest “O Superman,” Anderson’s most famous piece (“Here come the planes. They’re American planes. Made in America”). The 2007 re-issue of Big Science (1982) rams the point home with uncharacteristic bluntness, the back cover showing the twin towers themselves. “From the Air,” the piece that accompanied my aerial entrance in the US, is narrated by the captain of an aircraft which is about "to attempt a... crash landing." There's a silent 'uh' implied before "crash." It's that precise. And humorous too, when the Captain's instructions to the passengers rapidly devolve into a game of Simon Says. But the reason why this song was so perfect as a soundtrack for entering America was not only the plane setting (it is, after all, about a crash, so perfect in the slightly masochistic sense that it re-establishes that the big turbine thing just outside your exit row window seat is also what your entire world relies on), but the album's evocation of America as a whole, a technologically sated society from the cities to the slightly indeterminate out-of-town zones wonderfully evoked in the title track of Big Science. There's more aural precision here: "Big Science" gradually becomes "Big Signs," which puts me in mid of the towering neon to be found on most highway sides in the midwest. So while Anderson hasn’t yet directly tackled the idea of Homeland Security, it’s always been there in the background, since her work has obsessively explored the idea of what it is to be American, or at least be in America. This may be why her last album to date, 2001's Life on a String, got some rather mixed reviews, since it opens out the sound to include influences from the slightly oddly named 'world' music, and some of the tracks move away from Anderson's characteristic concern with postmodern experience to present meditations on the theme of Moby Dick. I actually quite like Life on a String, particularly the emphasis on the violin, although the lyrical flirtation with cliche will have alienated some; 'Dark Angel', with its rather banal observation that maybe material possessions don't really count for much, is better left out altogether in favour of 'My Compensation,' 'Statue of Liberty,' and the beautiful 'Pieces and Parts.' In fact, I was listening to these an awful lot when flying to the US in December 2006. From the air, indeed.
Tuesday, 26 February 2008
Friday, 4 January 2008
The Doughnuts: End of Year Literary Awards
No Guildhall setting, BBC4 coverage, or public intellectual punditry; but similarly, no forced smiles in defeat, or Richard and Judy. Let's crack on.
Best New Author: Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go
A new author to me, anyway (by the way, few if any of these awards are actually going to reflect the white heat of publishing in 2007 - does this look like the website of one who can afford hardbacks that aren't from a remaindered shop?) and still alive, which is the other rule for this category. Last year was a closely run race; first it was going to be Liz Jensen, then D. M. Thomas, then Christopher Priest stole it right at the end of 2006 with The Prestige. Then, in a weird symmetry, Ishiguro shows up three days later with the first novel of 2007 and sets the benchmark for everyone else to not quite meet. Another win, then, for the 'Is it science fiction or not?' subgenre, as Kaz escapes the fame shadow of The Remains of the Day with a near-future tale of growing up in an organ-harvesting facility boarding school (perhaps a bit like Billy Bunter in Logan's Run). It combines a rather moving mournful tone with hot-damn readability, and although the plot resolution is not quite the killer punch it could have been, that's not really the point.
The also-rans:
Matthew Kneale, English Passengers (runner up)
A. S. Byatt, Angels and Insects
David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas
Best Neo-Victorian Novel: Michel Faber, The Crimson Petal and the White
A slightly, almost dementedly, specific category, but this kind of thing is my bag. Faber doesn't count for the category above (he won in 2003, after all), but this would have been a strong contender, and now sits at the centre of my module on NeoVictorian fiction. An academic colleague of mine described it as "more intelligent than anything Sarah Waters wrote," which is a little harsh, but then again Faber's recreation of the Victorian novel seems more instinctual and direct than Waters' sometimes self-conscious updating of nineteenth century tropes (the sensation novel in Fingersmith, and Affinity is soooo Foucault, or at least so I would say if in a Berkeley coffee shop). I'm also loath to recommend a book as a mathematical relation of pages involved to reading time, but nine hundred pages have rarely passed so quickly. It wins int he face of some tough competition from the aforementioned Byatt and Kneale, moderate challenge from Caleb Carr's The Alienist, and laughable muppetry from the 1850 sections of Mitchell's Cloud Atlas.
Best Victorian Novel: George Gissing, New Grub Street
Re-reads are disallowed, to prevent Bleak House winning five times a decade, so I'll have to confess to not having read some big Victorian titles (it's OK to do that, they published a hell of a lot). A fantastic portrait of late Victorian publishing which, because this is Gissing, is laced with naturalist misery and privation. Similarly, a startlingly prescient account of post-PhD career paths in the humanities and probably too depressing to read before the interviews start appearing.
Best Novel: Ian McEwan, Saturday
For a while, McEwan has been the David Bowie of literature; famous, influential, interdisciplinary, and with a prodigious output of works characterised by being fantastic except for some annoying flaw, a chapter or plot development that seems out of step, that doesn't quite work (now come on, do you really listen to Heathen from beginning to end? Aren't you slightly annoyed that "Slip Away" is the third track, leaving the rest of the album somewhat anticlimactic?). Saturday, finally, is the McEwan novel without the "yes, but...". I know some people have complained about the penultimate chapter's implication that all it takes to reform criminals is poetry (good liberal humanist thinking there, and accordingly the poet in question is Matthew Arnold), but that scene just somehow works. But what is really nice is the way the reader inhabits the mind - not the brain - of the neurosurgeon Henry Perowne, a committed materialist, so that our very access to his thoughts becomes a kind of challenge to his particular brand of scientific positivism. There's also some marvellous writing (yes, the BT tower is "seedy and municipal" by day) which is stylish but not grandstanding (I think Martin Amis would make this tiresome). Some may find the debate over the Iraq war clunky, but Perowne's ambivalence towards these events makes for an interesting perspective and corrective to auto-outrage. Finally, to those reviewers on amazon.co.uk who found the novel irritatingly smug and middle-class - I'd probably stay away from novels about neurosurgeons who live in Fitzrovia if I were you.
Worst Disappointment: Neil Gaiman, Neverwhere
Quite a packed field, this year. The term 'disappointment' is also crucial; had this been 'worst novel,' then Paul Auster would have run off cackling with award-winning glee thanks to Travels in the Scriptorium. Here, an amnesiac (charmingly called Mr. Blank) wakes up in a bare room to be visited by - you'll like this - characters from Auster's other novels. Is Mr. Blank the figure of the artist? Is it Auster being visited by his own characters, complaining about how they've been treated in much better novels? Is it us, the reader? All these questions and more are- no, it's just dull talking about it. Walks in the Wankery may count as a disappointment in the context of Auster's other novels (and it does have the distinct feel of a writers' block exercise that mistakenly got sent to Faber and Faber), but since another colleague of mine had already warned me about it, it doesn't quite measure up. Similarly, Stephen L. Carter's The Emperor of Ocean Park missed out because I didn't finish it, and I'm not that unfair. A 'thriller' based in the largely ignored by fiction milieu of affluent black Americans, this was a tedious affair undone by a narrative voice that put me in mind of Morgan Freeman doing a really bored narration. There are also some astonishingly crass moments, such as when the central character literally sees red when he thinks of white injustices to the - sigh - 'darker nation,' and chess references that have the subtlety of Jim Davidson swinging a wrecking ball bearing the face of Bernard Manning at a big sign saying 'POLITICAL CORRECTNESS' (talk of white men interfering with the progress of black men, black men blocking other black men...).
But this distracts me from the year's biggest let-down, Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere, a novel which has inexplicably received an almost universal adulation, although I suspect most of this comes from goth girls or those who think that Fighting Fantasy books count as literature. I was reading the 'Author's Preferred Text,' which did nothing to excuse some really clumsy sentences, or the fact that even though this story has been through two or three different versions, it seems as if Gaiman is making it up as he goes along (oh yes, there's an angel down here... she's a bad angel... and hell is in there too). Similarly, Richard Mayhew is simply too absent as a central character, and so uselessly bemused it's amazing he isn't killed in the first hundred pages (the fact that he's named - or so I assume - after the Victorian urban explorer Henry Mayhew is the best part of the book, and that's a gag only Victorianists are going to get). But there are two more serious problems with the novel. The first is that Gaiman's idea of London Above (that is, normal, full fat, four star, actual London) is painted in such broad strokes that we don't get a sense of how weird London Below actually is by comparison, or how it might relate to the world we know. It's as if Gaiman wrote a novel about a city with no other experience of it than one of those glossy guidebooks sold at tiny newsagents in the West End (obviously, a friend bought the brochure and sent it to him in, I don't know, Burkino Faso). The second is the political aspect of the narrative. The original television series was based on the idea that the homeless are, effectively, invisible, as we walk past them every day without offering any recognition. This is a potent way of putting it, until you then decide that the homeless are invisible because they live in a world that is actually far more exciting and interesting than the one we live in, where they have super adventures and implicitly despise the humdrum lives of the affluent. Hurrah! Bang! and the social problem is gone! Admittedly, one character towards the end of the novel says to Mayhew that the homeless don't live in a fantasy world - they freeze to death in winter. But that's it - one sentence, potential for a rather darker narrative brushed aside in favour of whizz-bang swordfighting. The review on the back of my copy says that Neverwhere is what Franz Kafka and Terry Pratchett would produce if locked in a cell together. I imagine Kafka went straight to sleep and Pratchett decided to see what he could come up with in fifteen minutes. Before, of course, fashioning a paper-mache head and hollowing out the grille at the back of the cell with a broken-off spoon.
Best New Author: Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go
A new author to me, anyway (by the way, few if any of these awards are actually going to reflect the white heat of publishing in 2007 - does this look like the website of one who can afford hardbacks that aren't from a remaindered shop?) and still alive, which is the other rule for this category. Last year was a closely run race; first it was going to be Liz Jensen, then D. M. Thomas, then Christopher Priest stole it right at the end of 2006 with The Prestige. Then, in a weird symmetry, Ishiguro shows up three days later with the first novel of 2007 and sets the benchmark for everyone else to not quite meet. Another win, then, for the 'Is it science fiction or not?' subgenre, as Kaz escapes the fame shadow of The Remains of the Day with a near-future tale of growing up in an organ-harvesting facility boarding school (perhaps a bit like Billy Bunter in Logan's Run). It combines a rather moving mournful tone with hot-damn readability, and although the plot resolution is not quite the killer punch it could have been, that's not really the point.
The also-rans:
Matthew Kneale, English Passengers (runner up)
A. S. Byatt, Angels and Insects
David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas
Best Neo-Victorian Novel: Michel Faber, The Crimson Petal and the White
A slightly, almost dementedly, specific category, but this kind of thing is my bag. Faber doesn't count for the category above (he won in 2003, after all), but this would have been a strong contender, and now sits at the centre of my module on NeoVictorian fiction. An academic colleague of mine described it as "more intelligent than anything Sarah Waters wrote," which is a little harsh, but then again Faber's recreation of the Victorian novel seems more instinctual and direct than Waters' sometimes self-conscious updating of nineteenth century tropes (the sensation novel in Fingersmith, and Affinity is soooo Foucault, or at least so I would say if in a Berkeley coffee shop). I'm also loath to recommend a book as a mathematical relation of pages involved to reading time, but nine hundred pages have rarely passed so quickly. It wins int he face of some tough competition from the aforementioned Byatt and Kneale, moderate challenge from Caleb Carr's The Alienist, and laughable muppetry from the 1850 sections of Mitchell's Cloud Atlas.
Best Victorian Novel: George Gissing, New Grub Street
Re-reads are disallowed, to prevent Bleak House winning five times a decade, so I'll have to confess to not having read some big Victorian titles (it's OK to do that, they published a hell of a lot). A fantastic portrait of late Victorian publishing which, because this is Gissing, is laced with naturalist misery and privation. Similarly, a startlingly prescient account of post-PhD career paths in the humanities and probably too depressing to read before the interviews start appearing.
Best Novel: Ian McEwan, Saturday
For a while, McEwan has been the David Bowie of literature; famous, influential, interdisciplinary, and with a prodigious output of works characterised by being fantastic except for some annoying flaw, a chapter or plot development that seems out of step, that doesn't quite work (now come on, do you really listen to Heathen from beginning to end? Aren't you slightly annoyed that "Slip Away" is the third track, leaving the rest of the album somewhat anticlimactic?). Saturday, finally, is the McEwan novel without the "yes, but...". I know some people have complained about the penultimate chapter's implication that all it takes to reform criminals is poetry (good liberal humanist thinking there, and accordingly the poet in question is Matthew Arnold), but that scene just somehow works. But what is really nice is the way the reader inhabits the mind - not the brain - of the neurosurgeon Henry Perowne, a committed materialist, so that our very access to his thoughts becomes a kind of challenge to his particular brand of scientific positivism. There's also some marvellous writing (yes, the BT tower is "seedy and municipal" by day) which is stylish but not grandstanding (I think Martin Amis would make this tiresome). Some may find the debate over the Iraq war clunky, but Perowne's ambivalence towards these events makes for an interesting perspective and corrective to auto-outrage. Finally, to those reviewers on amazon.co.uk who found the novel irritatingly smug and middle-class - I'd probably stay away from novels about neurosurgeons who live in Fitzrovia if I were you.
Worst Disappointment: Neil Gaiman, Neverwhere
Quite a packed field, this year. The term 'disappointment' is also crucial; had this been 'worst novel,' then Paul Auster would have run off cackling with award-winning glee thanks to Travels in the Scriptorium. Here, an amnesiac (charmingly called Mr. Blank) wakes up in a bare room to be visited by - you'll like this - characters from Auster's other novels. Is Mr. Blank the figure of the artist? Is it Auster being visited by his own characters, complaining about how they've been treated in much better novels? Is it us, the reader? All these questions and more are- no, it's just dull talking about it. Walks in the Wankery may count as a disappointment in the context of Auster's other novels (and it does have the distinct feel of a writers' block exercise that mistakenly got sent to Faber and Faber), but since another colleague of mine had already warned me about it, it doesn't quite measure up. Similarly, Stephen L. Carter's The Emperor of Ocean Park missed out because I didn't finish it, and I'm not that unfair. A 'thriller' based in the largely ignored by fiction milieu of affluent black Americans, this was a tedious affair undone by a narrative voice that put me in mind of Morgan Freeman doing a really bored narration. There are also some astonishingly crass moments, such as when the central character literally sees red when he thinks of white injustices to the - sigh - 'darker nation,' and chess references that have the subtlety of Jim Davidson swinging a wrecking ball bearing the face of Bernard Manning at a big sign saying 'POLITICAL CORRECTNESS' (talk of white men interfering with the progress of black men, black men blocking other black men...).
But this distracts me from the year's biggest let-down, Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere, a novel which has inexplicably received an almost universal adulation, although I suspect most of this comes from goth girls or those who think that Fighting Fantasy books count as literature. I was reading the 'Author's Preferred Text,' which did nothing to excuse some really clumsy sentences, or the fact that even though this story has been through two or three different versions, it seems as if Gaiman is making it up as he goes along (oh yes, there's an angel down here... she's a bad angel... and hell is in there too). Similarly, Richard Mayhew is simply too absent as a central character, and so uselessly bemused it's amazing he isn't killed in the first hundred pages (the fact that he's named - or so I assume - after the Victorian urban explorer Henry Mayhew is the best part of the book, and that's a gag only Victorianists are going to get). But there are two more serious problems with the novel. The first is that Gaiman's idea of London Above (that is, normal, full fat, four star, actual London) is painted in such broad strokes that we don't get a sense of how weird London Below actually is by comparison, or how it might relate to the world we know. It's as if Gaiman wrote a novel about a city with no other experience of it than one of those glossy guidebooks sold at tiny newsagents in the West End (obviously, a friend bought the brochure and sent it to him in, I don't know, Burkino Faso). The second is the political aspect of the narrative. The original television series was based on the idea that the homeless are, effectively, invisible, as we walk past them every day without offering any recognition. This is a potent way of putting it, until you then decide that the homeless are invisible because they live in a world that is actually far more exciting and interesting than the one we live in, where they have super adventures and implicitly despise the humdrum lives of the affluent. Hurrah! Bang! and the social problem is gone! Admittedly, one character towards the end of the novel says to Mayhew that the homeless don't live in a fantasy world - they freeze to death in winter. But that's it - one sentence, potential for a rather darker narrative brushed aside in favour of whizz-bang swordfighting. The review on the back of my copy says that Neverwhere is what Franz Kafka and Terry Pratchett would produce if locked in a cell together. I imagine Kafka went straight to sleep and Pratchett decided to see what he could come up with in fifteen minutes. Before, of course, fashioning a paper-mache head and hollowing out the grille at the back of the cell with a broken-off spoon.
Sunday, 9 December 2007
Nietzsche's Coming to Get You: *Cloud Atlas* continued
Last week (or in the strangely ahistorical world of the internet, about twenty five centimetres below), I criticised David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas for its failure to create a convincingly realised diary from 1850. The fact that I hadn't read the rest of the novel at the time was a bit of a risk, admittedly, and indeed later that day I read the section in which one of the characters suggests that the 1850 section may be a fraud. Perhaps, then, this was leading up to some amazing intertextual twist in the closing pages? Well... no.
Cloud Atlas struggles under the weight of its own tricksy structure, six broken-backed stories arranged symmetrically and which 'follow' each other as characters 'read' the following/preceding sections. The trouble is, the novellas themselves aren't quite interesting enough to exist outside the gimmicky structure; yet that same gimmicky structure isn't quite ingenious enough to justify the content. The idea that characters in one section have read other sections of, gosh darn, the novel that you're reading right now, is now so dated (going back to at least 1860 and Wilkie Collins' The Woman in White, and probably even further back to Laurence Sterne) that it doesn't really count as structural ingenuity any more. Similarly, I was expecting a bit more narrative intertwining than the idea that one man's writing makes for another's reading. As for the novel's theme of historical recurrence and the eternal return (yep, Nietzsche is in there, peeping out from 'Letters from Zedelghem'), it's the kind of thing Peter Ackroyd made a career out of in the eighties, but with more depth and resonance. Admittedly, Ackroyd's novels are also characterised by a certain kind of social conservatism (if the past just keeps coming back, what's the point of change?), something Mitchell is at pains to avoid, but with only moderate success.
So much for the structure. Once past this, the content of the six novellas is somewhat variable. "The Pacific Diary of Adam Ewing" is hamstrung by its clumsy prose, which is at least rather less cringeworthy in the second half (incidentally, that suggestion of fakery never becomes more than a suggestion, and comes across as an insurance policy for Mitchell in case the chapter isn't wholly convincing). "Letters from Zedelghem" is a so-so account of sentimental education; "Half-Lives: The First Luisa Rey Mystery" starts well, but its second part is something of a let-down (the resolution seems ludicrously hurried, and the Russian doll construction of the novel means that by the time I'd got to the second part, I'd largely forgotten who was who in this section). "The Ghastly Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish" also starts well as comedy, but becomes weirdly inconsequential when the focus moves to Cavendish's escape from the retirement home in which he has become trapped. "An Orison of Sonmi-491" is the most interesting section, but loses focus towards the end (there's a theme developing here). Finally, "Sloosha's Crossin' and Ev'rythin After" is another ostentatious attempt to capture a particular voice; as the only narrative in the novel not to be split in two (being at the centre), it seems to go on for a little too long.
It's not as if the novel is awful - "Luisa Rey," "Timothy Cavendish" and "Sonmi-491" are quite compulsive in style - but this kind of historical scope and structual ambition requires a better pay-off than Ewing's final meditation that the will to power will eventually undo humanity (you think so?). I'm also not sure if the novel's recurrent structure means that we're meant to find Ewing's final optimism for a better future misguided, or if the inherent reactionary politics of the idea of the 'eternal return' simply undoes the novel's critique of the desire for colonial and corporate ascendancy. Although on reflection, that ambiguity may probably be the best thing about the novel.
Cloud Atlas struggles under the weight of its own tricksy structure, six broken-backed stories arranged symmetrically and which 'follow' each other as characters 'read' the following/preceding sections. The trouble is, the novellas themselves aren't quite interesting enough to exist outside the gimmicky structure; yet that same gimmicky structure isn't quite ingenious enough to justify the content. The idea that characters in one section have read other sections of, gosh darn, the novel that you're reading right now, is now so dated (going back to at least 1860 and Wilkie Collins' The Woman in White, and probably even further back to Laurence Sterne) that it doesn't really count as structural ingenuity any more. Similarly, I was expecting a bit more narrative intertwining than the idea that one man's writing makes for another's reading. As for the novel's theme of historical recurrence and the eternal return (yep, Nietzsche is in there, peeping out from 'Letters from Zedelghem'), it's the kind of thing Peter Ackroyd made a career out of in the eighties, but with more depth and resonance. Admittedly, Ackroyd's novels are also characterised by a certain kind of social conservatism (if the past just keeps coming back, what's the point of change?), something Mitchell is at pains to avoid, but with only moderate success.
So much for the structure. Once past this, the content of the six novellas is somewhat variable. "The Pacific Diary of Adam Ewing" is hamstrung by its clumsy prose, which is at least rather less cringeworthy in the second half (incidentally, that suggestion of fakery never becomes more than a suggestion, and comes across as an insurance policy for Mitchell in case the chapter isn't wholly convincing). "Letters from Zedelghem" is a so-so account of sentimental education; "Half-Lives: The First Luisa Rey Mystery" starts well, but its second part is something of a let-down (the resolution seems ludicrously hurried, and the Russian doll construction of the novel means that by the time I'd got to the second part, I'd largely forgotten who was who in this section). "The Ghastly Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish" also starts well as comedy, but becomes weirdly inconsequential when the focus moves to Cavendish's escape from the retirement home in which he has become trapped. "An Orison of Sonmi-491" is the most interesting section, but loses focus towards the end (there's a theme developing here). Finally, "Sloosha's Crossin' and Ev'rythin After" is another ostentatious attempt to capture a particular voice; as the only narrative in the novel not to be split in two (being at the centre), it seems to go on for a little too long.
It's not as if the novel is awful - "Luisa Rey," "Timothy Cavendish" and "Sonmi-491" are quite compulsive in style - but this kind of historical scope and structual ambition requires a better pay-off than Ewing's final meditation that the will to power will eventually undo humanity (you think so?). I'm also not sure if the novel's recurrent structure means that we're meant to find Ewing's final optimism for a better future misguided, or if the inherent reactionary politics of the idea of the 'eternal return' simply undoes the novel's critique of the desire for colonial and corporate ascendancy. Although on reflection, that ambiguity may probably be the best thing about the novel.
Sunday, 2 December 2007
NeoVictorian Bandwagon in Wheel-loss Incident: or, the first chapter of David Mitchell's *Cloud Atlas*
Just a brief note this time, primarily because of an urgent need to complain about something everybody else thinks is great (cf. Kylie Minogue, J. K. Rowling, Russell T Davies). This week I finally got around to picking up my copy of David Mitchell's much touted novel Cloud Atlas, of which I have only heard good things (although these include the damned-with-praise Richard and Judy thumbs up - never forget that these two (or more accurately, their researchers) gave an actual, proper, award to Dan Brown for his cliche compendium The Da Vinci Code)). For those of you who have missed all this, Cloud Atlas is composed of texts from various historical periods (including the future) and genres, which combine to form some kind of quasi-postmodernist time-bending extravaganza. I can't explain this more clearly at the moment, because I'm only halfway through the second chapter. I write now because I found the first infuriating.
The novel opens with "The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing," a diary purporting to be from 1850. As you might have guessed by now, it's dreadful; the worst kind of pseudo-Victorian prose where 'tis and 'twas are bandied around like it's 1746 and long words are dragged out because that's, like, how they spoke in olden days, innit? Some choice cuts: "No more tatterdemalion a renegado I ever beheld" (9), "circumambulating" (19), "terraqueous globe" (11). "I fancy he is a Bedlamite" (4) already sounds far too dated for the mid-nineteenth century (it might not be, but it sounds like it). The word 'and' is taboo, since the ampersand apparently lends much more historic kudos (it goes on & on & on...). Nobody actually says 'egad' or 'gadzooks,' but they're thinking about it. If this were a play, you can be sure that everyone would be rigid backed and bowing at each other continually, or punctuating conversation with waves of a handkerchief like some kind of heritage semaphore. It's 1850, but not as we know it.
There are also mistakes littered throughout. Adam is clearly from California, but his spelling is English (any decent edition of Dickens' novels clearly demonstrates the reach of American linguistic conventions) - glances at later pages of the novel reveal that other American texts have their spelling intact. Adam mentions himself as being a Yankee, which really refers specifically to one from New England or the north-east more generally (where one definitely cannot find San Francisco). But the real clincher (for me, anyway), comes on page 35: "I recalled my father-in-law's aphorism, 'To fool a judge, feign fascination, but to bamboozle the whole court, feign boredom.'" I hope later chapters reveal Adam's father-in-law to be Charles Dickens, who invented the word 'boredom' two years later in Bleak House (1852).
Of course, anyone demented enough to thoroughly cross-reference any historical novel with the OED is going to come up with inaccuracies (to be fair, pre-1852 instances of 'boredom' are my own alarm bell, and I hope to catch out Derek Acorah some day soon). But the problem is that Mitchell fails to write something that generally sounds convincingly and specifically Victorian; his idea of the period seems to belong to the later eighteenth century, and it's difficult to read this chapter as existing in the same precise period as, say, David Copperfield. Of course, I'm also taking a risk in making these complaints without finishing the novel; later chapters may well reveal the text to be a fake (in which case, I told you so). But I had to say something, egad.
The novel opens with "The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing," a diary purporting to be from 1850. As you might have guessed by now, it's dreadful; the worst kind of pseudo-Victorian prose where 'tis and 'twas are bandied around like it's 1746 and long words are dragged out because that's, like, how they spoke in olden days, innit? Some choice cuts: "No more tatterdemalion a renegado I ever beheld" (9), "circumambulating" (19), "terraqueous globe" (11). "I fancy he is a Bedlamite" (4) already sounds far too dated for the mid-nineteenth century (it might not be, but it sounds like it). The word 'and' is taboo, since the ampersand apparently lends much more historic kudos (it goes on & on & on...). Nobody actually says 'egad' or 'gadzooks,' but they're thinking about it. If this were a play, you can be sure that everyone would be rigid backed and bowing at each other continually, or punctuating conversation with waves of a handkerchief like some kind of heritage semaphore. It's 1850, but not as we know it.
There are also mistakes littered throughout. Adam is clearly from California, but his spelling is English (any decent edition of Dickens' novels clearly demonstrates the reach of American linguistic conventions) - glances at later pages of the novel reveal that other American texts have their spelling intact. Adam mentions himself as being a Yankee, which really refers specifically to one from New England or the north-east more generally (where one definitely cannot find San Francisco). But the real clincher (for me, anyway), comes on page 35: "I recalled my father-in-law's aphorism, 'To fool a judge, feign fascination, but to bamboozle the whole court, feign boredom.'" I hope later chapters reveal Adam's father-in-law to be Charles Dickens, who invented the word 'boredom' two years later in Bleak House (1852).
Of course, anyone demented enough to thoroughly cross-reference any historical novel with the OED is going to come up with inaccuracies (to be fair, pre-1852 instances of 'boredom' are my own alarm bell, and I hope to catch out Derek Acorah some day soon). But the problem is that Mitchell fails to write something that generally sounds convincingly and specifically Victorian; his idea of the period seems to belong to the later eighteenth century, and it's difficult to read this chapter as existing in the same precise period as, say, David Copperfield. Of course, I'm also taking a risk in making these complaints without finishing the novel; later chapters may well reveal the text to be a fake (in which case, I told you so). But I had to say something, egad.
Wednesday, 22 August 2007
The In-Flight On-Screen Round-Up
I've recently been on an absurd number of international flights, having temporarily relocated to the US in June, and subsequently been invited back to the UK for a frenzy of interviews for academic posts (my top tip for those negotiating the famously inpenetrable academic job market: be on the other side of the world. Or, light the touch paper of application, then retire to a safe distance of about 6,000 miles). To add to the confusion, at the end of July I moved from Woodland, California (as mentioned above) to Norman, Oklahoma, where I now remain until the end of August.
Anyway, since other commitments are taking up my resources for acute intellectual debate at the moment, this issue makes good my promise to degenerate into televisual review (or rather, film). And also to assuage the considerable anxieties of those who thought the Doughnuts were over with. So, here's my critical round-up of the various delights in-flight entertainment has to offer those travelling in the very near future:
Wild Hogs: John Travolta, William H. Macy, and two other vaguely recognisable men relieve their mid-life crisis by pretending to be bikers. It's the kind of film best summed up by the word 'amiable', but mostly in a good way (cf. Hot Fuzz, discussed below). The kind of film one watches on a Sunday, late morning, then realising that you watched the whole thing and you need to get into town before the shops close early (thanks Sunday Trading laws - why should Christians get all the inconvenient fun?). Or the kind of film watched at 36,000 thousand feet when there's no other choice and the alternative is reading more of Neil Gaiman's hideously overrated Neverwhere.
Bridge to Terabithia: The fact that I managed to follow this without sound and out of the corner of my eye suggests that it isn't Citizen Kane. Although I suspect that it would also be difficult to make sense of Police Academy 4: Citizens on Patrol under the same conditions, so maybe I'm being harsh.
Blades of Glory: I may regret writing this, but this was my guilty pleasure of the recent transatlantic shenanigans. Like the Hogs, this was a desperation choice, but one that turned out rather well thanks to the visible influences of This is Spinal Tap (including figure skating commentary such as "Famed for his personal hygiene, McElroy is beginning to reek. Of gold.") and the first half of Zoolander (before the plot takes over and it loses its way). The director also seems to have it in for figure skating championship mascots as well, which surely counts for something. The best bit, however, is the last thirty seconds. All films should end that way.
Premonition: I only watched the first twenty minutes, before being reminded why I'd only ever seen one other Sandra Bullock film, ten years ago.
Stranger than Fiction: Another non-starter, lasting only fifteen minutes because of the labouring of the central idea (like a bad comedy sketch), and Emma Thompson's irritating voice-over. Or just voice.
Borat: It's no wonder Kazakhstan complained. The film starts with a tour of Borat's home town, which is vaguely uncomfortable in an "Aren't foreigners funny?" way (similar to those fake guide books to Molvania and the like, which are amusing until about half past two on Boxing Day). Things get more uncomfortable once we get to the US, but for the better as often very funny faux-interview high jinks ensue. Singing the national anthem at the rodeo is one of the high points; the naked fight in the hotel is another, with a caveat of "I shouldn't be finding this that funny, surely". Other encounters are startling, such as Borat stopping street punks for fashion advice, or meeting some depressingly misogynist frat boys. There's a plot about going to meet Pamela Anderson, but it really doesn't matter. The most impressive thing, however, is how Sacha Baron Cohen makes such a potentially unlikeable character quite sympathetic and endearing.
Hot Fuzz: I don't want to inaugurate some kind of Simon Pegg/Nick Frost/Edgar Wright backlash, because I like them all, but it has to be said: Hot Fuzz is something of a disappointment. It's let down by two main problems: it's too long, and it's conceptually muddled. The idea is that a spectacularly successful London cop is transferred to a rural town, where law enforcement culture clash hijinks ensue (hijinks always ensue). It's the basically the same idea as Shaun of the Dead: relocate a filmic genre to an inappropriate setting. And indeed, the final half hour or so, which moves an LA gunfight to rural England, is amusing. But this should be the starting point, not the end. Wouldn't it have been funnier to have the central character as a violent maverick from the beginning? I suspect the outlandish nature of the murders throughout is also supposed to be funny, but it doesn't work because the events and the setting aren't incongruous enough, thanks to Midsomer Murders and the like. The comedy is also 'amiable', but this time in a bad way, because one expects much more from the people involved. It feels as if the writer, producer, and director all had slightly different ideas about what they were parodying; as if half of them thought they were making English policing look like CSI for comic effect, while the other half thought the idea was to bring Lethal Weapon to the countryside. So while the final part is funny, it takes too long to get there, like a comedy sketch was bloated into a two hour film (and it really shouldn't be more than ninety minutes). There are good parts - Timothy Dalton has fun as the amusingly obvious bad guy, there are some hints at a Wicker Man style denouement (Edward Woodward stars, after all) and I liked the subtlety of the two Bill Bailey characters reading novels by Iain Banks and Iain M. Banks - but it should be better than it is.
Anyway, since other commitments are taking up my resources for acute intellectual debate at the moment, this issue makes good my promise to degenerate into televisual review (or rather, film). And also to assuage the considerable anxieties of those who thought the Doughnuts were over with. So, here's my critical round-up of the various delights in-flight entertainment has to offer those travelling in the very near future:
Wild Hogs: John Travolta, William H. Macy, and two other vaguely recognisable men relieve their mid-life crisis by pretending to be bikers. It's the kind of film best summed up by the word 'amiable', but mostly in a good way (cf. Hot Fuzz, discussed below). The kind of film one watches on a Sunday, late morning, then realising that you watched the whole thing and you need to get into town before the shops close early (thanks Sunday Trading laws - why should Christians get all the inconvenient fun?). Or the kind of film watched at 36,000 thousand feet when there's no other choice and the alternative is reading more of Neil Gaiman's hideously overrated Neverwhere.
Bridge to Terabithia: The fact that I managed to follow this without sound and out of the corner of my eye suggests that it isn't Citizen Kane. Although I suspect that it would also be difficult to make sense of Police Academy 4: Citizens on Patrol under the same conditions, so maybe I'm being harsh.
Blades of Glory: I may regret writing this, but this was my guilty pleasure of the recent transatlantic shenanigans. Like the Hogs, this was a desperation choice, but one that turned out rather well thanks to the visible influences of This is Spinal Tap (including figure skating commentary such as "Famed for his personal hygiene, McElroy is beginning to reek. Of gold.") and the first half of Zoolander (before the plot takes over and it loses its way). The director also seems to have it in for figure skating championship mascots as well, which surely counts for something. The best bit, however, is the last thirty seconds. All films should end that way.
Premonition: I only watched the first twenty minutes, before being reminded why I'd only ever seen one other Sandra Bullock film, ten years ago.
Stranger than Fiction: Another non-starter, lasting only fifteen minutes because of the labouring of the central idea (like a bad comedy sketch), and Emma Thompson's irritating voice-over. Or just voice.
Borat: It's no wonder Kazakhstan complained. The film starts with a tour of Borat's home town, which is vaguely uncomfortable in an "Aren't foreigners funny?" way (similar to those fake guide books to Molvania and the like, which are amusing until about half past two on Boxing Day). Things get more uncomfortable once we get to the US, but for the better as often very funny faux-interview high jinks ensue. Singing the national anthem at the rodeo is one of the high points; the naked fight in the hotel is another, with a caveat of "I shouldn't be finding this that funny, surely". Other encounters are startling, such as Borat stopping street punks for fashion advice, or meeting some depressingly misogynist frat boys. There's a plot about going to meet Pamela Anderson, but it really doesn't matter. The most impressive thing, however, is how Sacha Baron Cohen makes such a potentially unlikeable character quite sympathetic and endearing.
Hot Fuzz: I don't want to inaugurate some kind of Simon Pegg/Nick Frost/Edgar Wright backlash, because I like them all, but it has to be said: Hot Fuzz is something of a disappointment. It's let down by two main problems: it's too long, and it's conceptually muddled. The idea is that a spectacularly successful London cop is transferred to a rural town, where law enforcement culture clash hijinks ensue (hijinks always ensue). It's the basically the same idea as Shaun of the Dead: relocate a filmic genre to an inappropriate setting. And indeed, the final half hour or so, which moves an LA gunfight to rural England, is amusing. But this should be the starting point, not the end. Wouldn't it have been funnier to have the central character as a violent maverick from the beginning? I suspect the outlandish nature of the murders throughout is also supposed to be funny, but it doesn't work because the events and the setting aren't incongruous enough, thanks to Midsomer Murders and the like. The comedy is also 'amiable', but this time in a bad way, because one expects much more from the people involved. It feels as if the writer, producer, and director all had slightly different ideas about what they were parodying; as if half of them thought they were making English policing look like CSI for comic effect, while the other half thought the idea was to bring Lethal Weapon to the countryside. So while the final part is funny, it takes too long to get there, like a comedy sketch was bloated into a two hour film (and it really shouldn't be more than ninety minutes). There are good parts - Timothy Dalton has fun as the amusingly obvious bad guy, there are some hints at a Wicker Man style denouement (Edward Woodward stars, after all) and I liked the subtlety of the two Bill Bailey characters reading novels by Iain Banks and Iain M. Banks - but it should be better than it is.
Spiderman 3: This is going to make me sound terribly grumpy, but this had my 'law of diminishing returns' sense tingling. It's still above average for the superhero genre, but since it relies so much on the previous films as a continuation of that narrative (rather nicely summed up in the credits), it also invites comparison with them, and the judgement is that it's more of the same. That is, more dizzying and hectically edited fight sequences around the skyscrapers of New York, more near death misses for Spidey... and a creeping lack of investment from the viewer. By the grand finale, Spiderman has been through so much and recovered that he seems pretty much invicible, which somewhat undermines the inevitable final confrontation (yes, at a large building). There's also too much crammed into the storyline; Peter's relationship with Mary Jane, the ongoing conflict with Harry over his father's death, a rivalry with another photographer, an escaped prisoner who turns into Sandman, some black goo from space which turns Peter bad in a Superman 3 way and turns the rival photographer into a monster... making some sense of all this requires the writers to take some questionable shortcuts. Since the "you killed my dad you bastard" plotline isn't going anywhere, Harry conveniently gets amnesia, only to recover later, only to have the butler reveal some previously concealed evidence that resolves the whole storyline (so what was the butler doing throughout the second film? Shooting hoops?). The Sandman thread is equally careless; the convict escapes from prison and is next seen literally wandering into the middle of some particle accelerator thing, where he gets turned into sand. Of course, he needs some motivation to be evil beyond the basic determinism of being a criminal anyway, so he's upset about his daughter being ill. That's about as far as motivation goes, so in a remarkable act of narrative retrofitting, it turns out that he was the guy who shot Peter's uncle after all, and not the guy in the first film. Beyond that, it's not particularly clear why Sandman should have any kind of grudge against Spiderman, except that he is Bad and Spiderman is Good. Of course. The black goo is also unexplained; this might have been satisfying in a more tightly focused plot, but given the holes on display here, it also looks careless. It's not all bad - the performances are good, and the resolution is nice. Well, at least the Venom plot ends well, resolved by what might be the best example of "I knew that information would prove useful at the end of the film" because the set-up wasn't obvious and the execution isn't tediously over-explained. The Sandman plot ends as poorly as it started, with the bad guy realising out of nowhere that he's been naughty and must change his ways. Peter's forgiveness of him would be powerful if the character had been thought through in any depth... but I'm getting back to grumpy here. It's a very watchable and enjoyable film, but don't think about the plot too much, or you'll end up like me.
Sunday, 15 April 2007
Doctor Who and the Critical Backlash
I'm now back in the UK, and all too aware that I didn't write much live from the States. My excuses are that a) I'll deal with such things later, this being more of an occasional column than realtime e-gawpfest, and b) time moves much more quickly in Northern California than it does in Britain, so much so that I feel I've returned even before I departed. So in lieu of American adventures and thoughts (which will be forthcoming, have no doubt), I invite you to browse an equally informative website about what is increasingly becoming my US home, Woodland CA:
http://insidewoodland.com/
In the meantime, let's discuss British stuff, and in particular Doctor Who. I hadn't seen any of the new series until "Gridlock," the third episode. Unfortunately, it didn't make me feel particularly bereaved to have missed the first two instalments, nor did it make me excited about the 'pleasures' to come. This is not something I say (or rather, write) easily, being a Who enthusiast well before it was cool. I never went so far as to attend a convention, but I do have a fantastic range of Target novelisations in a box downstairs, most of which I bought in Mevagissey, a Cornish fishing village which in the late eighties boasted not one but two remaindered bookshops, an unnaturally high fishing-village-to-remaindered-bookshop ratio. This was back in the days when remaindered bookshops sold things one might want to buy, rather than cheap stationery and synthesizer albums. I presume this historical shift indicates an increased restraint in the publishing industry, now that editors have learnt the bitter lessons of printing half a million copies of The Twin Dilemma (incidentally, if any Who minded rare book dealers are reading, I also bought a copy of The Sontaran Experiment, the contents of which turned out to be The Armageddon Factor. Does this make me rich?). Even at the age of eleven, I was already enough of a Victorianist to realise that Ghost Light was conceptually flawed in its treatment of Darwinian theory, and also that it just wasn't a very good story. So, when I heard that Who was making a sustained return to the screen (and I don't mean the 1996 telemovie, in which the Doctor did a lot of wandering around San Francisco with an attractive woman - how could I have known that, eleven years later, I too would be a doctor doing a lot of wandering around San Francisco with an attractive woman?) I had that strange combination of excitement and "don't mess it up."
Two years on from the revival, and the gloss of excitement has worn off to reveal... not very much. Firstly, there's David Tennant. Hearing Tennant was going to take over from Christopher Eccleston was good, since I'd liked him in Blackpool in 2004, and even more so in a touring production of Comedians (where, in a before-he-was-famous style, he was lost in the billing behind Ron Moody and Martin Freeman). Ah, I thought, Tennant will do just fine, and in any case, anybody can play the Doctor. To be proved wrong on both counts, however, is not just disappointing but embarrassing. Eccleston may have seemed eccentric casting to some (and even he seemed surprised by it well into the first series), but he was convincing and could carry the weaker moments. Tennant can't - in fact, quite often he is the weaker moments. Shouting isn't an alternative to authority.
Secondly, there's Russell T. Davies, whose reputation as one of our best television writers is baffling. I can't think of any Davies script or project that hasn't included some major flaw. 1991's Dark Season was passable, but being two stories shoehorned into one series gave it the appearance of being broken-backed. Two years later, Century Falls made hardly any sense at all. I'll admit I didn't see any of Queer as Folk or Bob and Rose, although I know some people were vaguely offended by the latter's intimation that "hey, maybe gay men can like women as well! Wouldn't that be whacky??" The Second Coming in 2003 was interesting, but like so much of Davies' work, unravelled itself in yet another conclusion that made no sense and was based in the most embarrassing kind of atheism, one that refutes religion not on ontological but ethical grounds, where lack of belief in god stems not from the fact that he doesn't exist, but that he's fairly useless to humanity and so not worth bothering with. It's the kind of dogmatism that gives writers like Terry Eagleton the opportunity to make such nonsensical remarks (in his After Theory) that atheism is really just inverted religion. (While we're on the subject of religion, it's intriguing to see the extent to which the Daleks have been reshaped. In the seventies, they were Nazis; now they're religious fundamentalists, with gods, cults, and marytrs). My main problem with Davies, however, is that he can't tell a self-contained story, since much of his creative idiom is in soap opera, a genre concerned less with narrative than with providing imaginary friends for the undemanding (in a year which gave us Life on Mars and a new series of Peep Show, in a Radio Times interview Davies chose Hollyoaks as the televisual highlight). Doctor Who is the opposite of Coronation Street - in fact, that's the precise reason it was cancelled in the 1980s. It also means that this revival is oddly parochial, revisiting the same people and places in a similar attempt to create some kind of fictional community. Star Trek is science fiction about community; Who is essentially "Anchorite in Space", a weird bloke in a box.
Thirdly, and I'll leave it here for now, nu-Who is just a bit too glossy. I've always wondered why, in terms of scenery, it's acceptable to guffaw "It's just a quarry in Surrey!" but not "It's just the inside of a computer!" At least the quarry exists, and since I know they haven't actually gone to the moon, I don't see why realising that should be so unpalatable. But one of the distinguishing marks of classic Who was the challenge of creating universes and narratives on comparatively limited resources. It was the televisual equivalent of the literary group Oulipo, trying to create under severe restrictions (as in George Perec's novel La Disparition, without using the letter 'e') which would in turn create something intriguing. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn't, sometimes it had startling consequences (such as Warrior's Gate, for instance). Nu-Who has no such restrictions, being able to CGI almost anything into existence and so eliminating any of the material challenges that only good writing and a theatrically imaginative approach can meet. Instead of grimy corridors, we have glossy sheen (remember the station in The Impossible Planet? For a desolate outpost in the very pit of hell, it seemed awfully shiny and well-lit). The rejigging of the theme music is a perfect example. The Who theme gained its considerable fame through sounding like nothing else, yet at the same time having been produced by two or three people and a lot of ingenuity (again, creative restriction). It sounded weird and perfectly matched the content of the show. Today, we have the National Anthem of the State of Doctor Who, something that sounds exactly like something else - an orchestra on Earth. I'm fairly sure more demented fans than me actually stand up for it now, which is not the point - it should leave us shaken, not stirred.
http://insidewoodland.com/
In the meantime, let's discuss British stuff, and in particular Doctor Who. I hadn't seen any of the new series until "Gridlock," the third episode. Unfortunately, it didn't make me feel particularly bereaved to have missed the first two instalments, nor did it make me excited about the 'pleasures' to come. This is not something I say (or rather, write) easily, being a Who enthusiast well before it was cool. I never went so far as to attend a convention, but I do have a fantastic range of Target novelisations in a box downstairs, most of which I bought in Mevagissey, a Cornish fishing village which in the late eighties boasted not one but two remaindered bookshops, an unnaturally high fishing-village-to-remaindered-bookshop ratio. This was back in the days when remaindered bookshops sold things one might want to buy, rather than cheap stationery and synthesizer albums. I presume this historical shift indicates an increased restraint in the publishing industry, now that editors have learnt the bitter lessons of printing half a million copies of The Twin Dilemma (incidentally, if any Who minded rare book dealers are reading, I also bought a copy of The Sontaran Experiment, the contents of which turned out to be The Armageddon Factor. Does this make me rich?). Even at the age of eleven, I was already enough of a Victorianist to realise that Ghost Light was conceptually flawed in its treatment of Darwinian theory, and also that it just wasn't a very good story. So, when I heard that Who was making a sustained return to the screen (and I don't mean the 1996 telemovie, in which the Doctor did a lot of wandering around San Francisco with an attractive woman - how could I have known that, eleven years later, I too would be a doctor doing a lot of wandering around San Francisco with an attractive woman?) I had that strange combination of excitement and "don't mess it up."
Two years on from the revival, and the gloss of excitement has worn off to reveal... not very much. Firstly, there's David Tennant. Hearing Tennant was going to take over from Christopher Eccleston was good, since I'd liked him in Blackpool in 2004, and even more so in a touring production of Comedians (where, in a before-he-was-famous style, he was lost in the billing behind Ron Moody and Martin Freeman). Ah, I thought, Tennant will do just fine, and in any case, anybody can play the Doctor. To be proved wrong on both counts, however, is not just disappointing but embarrassing. Eccleston may have seemed eccentric casting to some (and even he seemed surprised by it well into the first series), but he was convincing and could carry the weaker moments. Tennant can't - in fact, quite often he is the weaker moments. Shouting isn't an alternative to authority.
Secondly, there's Russell T. Davies, whose reputation as one of our best television writers is baffling. I can't think of any Davies script or project that hasn't included some major flaw. 1991's Dark Season was passable, but being two stories shoehorned into one series gave it the appearance of being broken-backed. Two years later, Century Falls made hardly any sense at all. I'll admit I didn't see any of Queer as Folk or Bob and Rose, although I know some people were vaguely offended by the latter's intimation that "hey, maybe gay men can like women as well! Wouldn't that be whacky??" The Second Coming in 2003 was interesting, but like so much of Davies' work, unravelled itself in yet another conclusion that made no sense and was based in the most embarrassing kind of atheism, one that refutes religion not on ontological but ethical grounds, where lack of belief in god stems not from the fact that he doesn't exist, but that he's fairly useless to humanity and so not worth bothering with. It's the kind of dogmatism that gives writers like Terry Eagleton the opportunity to make such nonsensical remarks (in his After Theory) that atheism is really just inverted religion. (While we're on the subject of religion, it's intriguing to see the extent to which the Daleks have been reshaped. In the seventies, they were Nazis; now they're religious fundamentalists, with gods, cults, and marytrs). My main problem with Davies, however, is that he can't tell a self-contained story, since much of his creative idiom is in soap opera, a genre concerned less with narrative than with providing imaginary friends for the undemanding (in a year which gave us Life on Mars and a new series of Peep Show, in a Radio Times interview Davies chose Hollyoaks as the televisual highlight). Doctor Who is the opposite of Coronation Street - in fact, that's the precise reason it was cancelled in the 1980s. It also means that this revival is oddly parochial, revisiting the same people and places in a similar attempt to create some kind of fictional community. Star Trek is science fiction about community; Who is essentially "Anchorite in Space", a weird bloke in a box.
Thirdly, and I'll leave it here for now, nu-Who is just a bit too glossy. I've always wondered why, in terms of scenery, it's acceptable to guffaw "It's just a quarry in Surrey!" but not "It's just the inside of a computer!" At least the quarry exists, and since I know they haven't actually gone to the moon, I don't see why realising that should be so unpalatable. But one of the distinguishing marks of classic Who was the challenge of creating universes and narratives on comparatively limited resources. It was the televisual equivalent of the literary group Oulipo, trying to create under severe restrictions (as in George Perec's novel La Disparition, without using the letter 'e') which would in turn create something intriguing. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn't, sometimes it had startling consequences (such as Warrior's Gate, for instance). Nu-Who has no such restrictions, being able to CGI almost anything into existence and so eliminating any of the material challenges that only good writing and a theatrically imaginative approach can meet. Instead of grimy corridors, we have glossy sheen (remember the station in The Impossible Planet? For a desolate outpost in the very pit of hell, it seemed awfully shiny and well-lit). The rejigging of the theme music is a perfect example. The Who theme gained its considerable fame through sounding like nothing else, yet at the same time having been produced by two or three people and a lot of ingenuity (again, creative restriction). It sounded weird and perfectly matched the content of the show. Today, we have the National Anthem of the State of Doctor Who, something that sounds exactly like something else - an orchestra on Earth. I'm fairly sure more demented fans than me actually stand up for it now, which is not the point - it should leave us shaken, not stirred.
Tuesday, 3 April 2007
Neo-Victorians at 36,000 feet
A week into my latest
So, The Prestige (in either format) is highly recommended. And certainly more so than Deja Vu, one of the other film choices. This is one of those conceptual thrillers Hollywood is so fond of nowadays, but unfortunately let down by the fact that its concept is a crock. An absolute crock.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)