Books read in June

Lord Edgware Dies, Agatha Christie
Dammit, James Blunt's been at it again! First I find him in Richard III, and now here he is on the guest list to Sir Montagu Corner's dinner party. Damn your fictional antics, Blunt!
Another high second-ranker. It's extremely easy to guess the identity and method of the killer - even more so than in Three Act Tragedy - and working out the motive is only a matter of time, but this book scores with its engaging prose and lively story. Amusingly, this must be the only Christie novel that ITV made less licentious when they adapted it - Lord Edgware's legendary cruelty clearly extends into rooms other than his study, as his proudly displayed collection of de Sade books suggests, not to mention the fact that he picked up his effete butler in a dodgy nightclub. Not a hint of it in the Suchet adaptation. They couldn't even allow themselves to cast the butler that way.

Dumb Witness, Agatha Christie
This book is (in)famous for its cutesy dog "dialogue", and I can now reveal that it's almost as trying as people say. Almost, but not quite. There's much to recommend it, not least the little side jokes and the light relief of Market Basing's "hearty old woman" character. And Poirot's harsh yet compassionate handling of the denouement makes a refreshing change from the all too familiar everyone-in-the-parlour ending. High third tier, perhaps.

Death in the Clouds, Agatha Christie
So, here's another story that relies heavily on a favourite social truism of Christie's... does nobody ever simply look up and make eye contact at the wrong moment? Still, it's a lively story, and it's nice to see the old Train Murder concept transferred to the modern airliner (is this the only example in crime fiction? not aware of any others). Another high second-tier story.
Also contains my favourite instance of casual racism in all the Christies I've read so far, when the two romantic leads bond over their mutual dislike for "negroes". Well, it was the 1930s, you've got to make allowances, etc etc.

Peril at End House, Agatha Christie
Perhaps a slightly lower rating for this one. It chunters along fairly happily, and then all the revelations just kind of tumble out at the end, probable and improbable alike, as though someone had opened an overstuffed overhead locker. It's also pretty hard by this stage in the Poirothon not to spot when the murderer fulfils one or more of the Suspicious Criteria, and the murderer here doesn't do it by halves. At the time of publication it may have been a different story, but now... Still, it's a good middler.

Poirot's Early Cases, Agatha Christie
I don't think Christie's quite as good in ten or fifteen pages as she is over the length of a novel. It's not so much that a crime story as short as these has to be nearly all puzzle and little else; it's rather that Christie's puzzles benefit from the leisurely build-up and resolution that a novel affords. That said, there's enough variety to make it possible to read this collection over a couple of days - a few murders, a few thefts, two fireside stories told by Poirot to Hastings, and even some of Poirot's Late Early Cases from the 1930s.

Third Girl, Agatha Christie
Stodgy, very stodgy. It's something like five sixths of the way into the book before we're even sure that there's anything to investigate; in the meantime, Poirot has spent pretty much all of his time having no clues and bemoaning, at great length, the fact that he has no clues. When we do get there, though, things more or less come together. Perhaps the greatest asset the plot has in terms of misdirection is the reader's absolute certainty that Christie, notorious Daily Mail reader that she is, won't be able to resist turning the denouement into a tirade against drug culture - pleasingly, she does something more interesting.
There is, however, plenty of hippie action, and of 1960s atmosphere in general. Whoever it was who said that Christie's work is timeless can't have been paying much attention. There's also what looks suspiciously like a theme, that of coincidence - on the face of it, it's just lazy for Ariadne Oliver to magically land the various bits of information she passes on to Poirot, but when Poirot takes two pages out to lecture on the subject of coincidence, it all starts to look a bit more significant. Perhaps Christie was aiming for something a bit artier than mere thrillers at this stage of her career. Which is a bit of a shame when most of us lot are just after thrillers.

The Life and Crimes of Agatha Christie, Charles Osborne
This month's reference book is quite a bit more substantial than last month's - Osborne combines story synopses, brief opinions, occasional insights and plenty of background detail into a book-by-book biography of Christie. It's interesting, although not quite as perfect as it thinks it is - Osborne spends a couple of footnotes, apparently without irony, taking down his fellow critical writers for mistakes in their works, then goes and claims that Poirot appears in A Pocket Full of Rye (Marple), or crows about a supposed flaw in The Murder on the Links that's entirely due to his own misreading. Let's just say it's unfortunate. Maybe the paperback edition included corrections, but sadly I'm not able to check. Still 'n' all, a good read, and he has a very compelling theory about the writing of Five Little Pigs that I might relate when I get round to reading the book.

The Hollow Man, John Dickson Carr
Just to keep things interesting, a non-Christie. This is apparently the greatest locked room mystery of them all. It's highly readable, and goes all-out to present an apparently supernatural murder. I'm tempted to describe the solution as absurd, but it does all add up. I'm not quite sure whether it's supposed to be set in the 1930s, when it was written - it comes across as entirely Victorian. What the lecture-chapter on locked room mysteries has to do with any of it I don't know, although I suspect it's there purely to cushion the reader against the more absurd elements of the denouement - can't be a good sign when a character makes a direct appeal to the reader to suspend their disbelief. Still, it might be worth reading more of Carr's work.

Books read in May

Notes & Counter Notes: Writings on the Theatre, Eugene Ionesco (translator Donald Watson)
A collection not only of Ionesco's own writings, but which also includes a famous (in its day) exchange of letters and articles between Ionesco and his critics. This is a highlight of the book and a valuable piece of commentary on Ionesco's theatre. It's nice to read it in the original English - in the book's original French, this section had to be translated... Touch of irony there.
This is another book that replaces the French version on my shelves. The funny thing is, there was one specific Ionesco quote that I remembered from this book, concerning his fascination with language: "Ils se parlent. Ils se comprennent. C'est ca qui m'etonnait." ("People talk to each other - they understand each other. It's that which astonished me.") But damned if I can find it anywhere in here. I can't even find it on Google now. Has the memory cheated?


There then followed a bout of Poirot-mania. The Lovely Jo and I have progressed from watching ITV3's patchy Poirot repeats to renting and buying the DVDs (and renting other "1930s detective" DVDs, of which more may follow), to re-reading the books.

There's a catch here in that at the start of the month we didn't own any of the books - readers may recall that I once went through a Christie phase, but all the books went down to the second-hand shop years ago for reasons of space. The books that both of us have read this month and are likely to read over the next few months as well are therefore a mix of library copies, friends' copies, and a few select titles that I decided I would actually like to own after all.

(I've discovered a very attractive edition of Christie's novels that was apparently sold as a partwork about five years ago, several hundred copies of which have since ended up in second-hand bookshops. However, as seems to be the way with partworks, the later issues had smaller runs and it doesn't look as though anybody who stuck it out as far as Curtain is prepared to sell their copy second-hand. I'm keeping my eye on Abebooks, but in the meantime a cheap paperback edition is holding its place on the shelf.)

They're pretty good reading - light, entertaining, only a couple of hundred pages long. They're like book candy. You can pop a couple in in a week without difficulty.


Curtain: Poirot's Last Case, Agatha Christie
This one's a keeper. I could go on about it all day - the murderer's unusual method, the startling ending (so who's really won - Poirot? the murderer? both?), the whole dramatic scope of it (it's really Poirot vs the very idea of murder itself, as much as it's Poirot vs X).
The only problem with it is that it's very definitely set in the 1940s (when it was written and then locked away, just in case Christie didn't survive WW2 - it seems to be set just after WW2, although at the time this must just have been wishful thinking on Christie's part), which doesn't fit too well with Poirot's continued career during the '50s, '60s and '70s. Apparently this is a well-known problem within Christie fandom, which most fans prefer to address by fudging the dates in this one book and simply pretending that he wasn't over 100 years old when he died. Personally I prefer ITV's solution of setting the entire rest of the series in an endlessly repeating 1936.

The Life and Times of Hercule Poirot, Anne Hart
Looked like it might be an interesting overview of the Poirot stories, but it doesn't go far enough for my liking. It's descriptive, but not interpretative (it doesn't even try to tackle the Poirot age problem). It does, however, give a good analysis of Poirot's character, and it's very light reading. Also manages to avoid spoiling the endings of the books, for the most part.

Murder in the Mews, Agatha Christie
Four novellas - or at least, three novellas and a moderately long short story. The short story is fairly negligible, but the other three are pretty good.

Mrs McGinty's Dead, Agatha Christie
Better than I'd remembered. It's got quite a lively sense of humour, which contrasts with ITV's idea that their more recent adaptations should be darker to reflect the allegedly more serious tone of the later books. Also gives a very good picture of small town life in the 1950s, and the everyday characters are a profound contrast with the upper class set of Poirot's '30s adventures.

The Clocks, Agatha Christie
First time of reading this one. A little bit turgid, and Poirot doesn't even show up until halfway through. When he does show up, he's on a dare to solve the case without leaving his flat, so in effect this is Christie trying to please the readers by including Poirot while pleasing herself by sidelining him. Poirot also plucks the final revelations out of the air rather more than he usually does, which makes for unsatisfying reading.
What is interesting is the way that this book comes across as a spy thriller (but thankfully not in the line of Christie's other, slightly dodgy spy thrillers) for most of its length. It almost feels like an attempt to spoof James Bond, who at the time of publication (1963) would have been stealing the crime-lovin' public's attention away from Christie's old-fashioned detectives. The Colonel Beck material is brilliant, though. I'd love to see him turn up in a Jasper Fforde novel. He's so obviously a Jurisfiction agent working undercover.

Three Act Tragedy, Agatha Christie
A middling novel. For no particular reason it features Mr Satterthwaite, crime fiction's greatest undiagnosed split-personality sufferer, although he takes a back seat to Poirot and doesn't actually solve anything here. Bizarrely Christie tells you right up front exactly whodunnit, and then trusts you to forget she said anything. Hey ho. Even if she hadn't, it'd be pretty easy to guess it outright.

The Murder on the Links, Agatha Christie
The second ever Poirot novel, and the one in which she marries off Captain Hastings. The prose is still at an early stage of development - characters and the narrator repeat entire phrases within paragraphs of each other in a way that's somewhat awkward for the reader. There's also a certain amount of melodramatic shennanigans between Hastings, the future Mrs Hastings and Poirot that doesn't sit too well with me. I'm inclined to think that the ITV scriptwriter made the right changes with this one. Can't really see the love interest's daring denouement acrobatics working in any way.

Murder in Mesopotamia, Agatha Christie
Halfway through this one. First time of reading, but I know how it ends thanks to the TV adaptation. So far the prose is good and the backstory is only a little bit improbable (it'll get more so by the end...). Subject to a final opinion after finishing, I'd place this in the second tier of Christies.
Edit: Yes, not quite the top ten but a high second-ranker.

A mirrorball-faced gimp and two breakdancing mimes

Yes, it's Eurovision time again. "I don't know where some of those shots were taken, but that's not the Moscow I'm staying in," said Graham Norton over the opening sequence - damn right, I've seen Moscow, it's a concrete hell. Personally I'm amazed they found a bit of Moscow with trees in it for their half-time vox pops. Overall we think Norton measured up well as a replacement for Terry Wogan. That Norton was off the booze owing to his recent injury may have helped - Norton dry has just about the familiar tone of grumpiness we used to get with Wogan drunk, but with an extra dash of bitchiness thrown in.

An even more subdued contest this year - where were all the comedy entries? (Filtered out in the semi-finals, one assumes.) And why so much monochrome? We were starting to wonder if the TV was working properly (and then the Portuguese entry appeared...). Also disappointing that the second half should be so dominated by songs sung in English - it's a lot more noticeable when they all come along at once like that.

On the plus side, the voting was a lot more balanced this year - you mean they actually got panels of industry experts to judge the entries on their musical merit? The very idea! On the other plus side, not a lot of echoing of last year's winner. It's usual to see more than one knock-off of the previous year's most successful act, so I was bracing myself for several Peter Andre lookalikes in white jackets, but in the end we only got one, which was a mercy.

And now, read on...

Lithuania. Sung half in English. Not much to say about this one - decidedly hum ho. Is he really playing that piano? (The rules may say the lead vocal has to be performed live, but do they say anything about instruments?) "Aaaaaaaahhhhhh - my hand's on fire!" seem to have been the final lyrics.

Israel. Sung half in English. Barring a couple of minor scrapes on the high notes, pretty damn good. Scores for some nice harmonies, also scores bonus points for worthiness. I quite like the olive oil tin drums too. The only obvious downside is that presentation is close to zero. I mean, it's all well and good not having explosions, giant props and so on, but one can go too far the other way. The audience aren't very likely to remember this one when the voting starts.

France. What, no comedy entry? No pissing about at all? From the French?! Truly, Eurovision died tonight! A very ordinary ballad, and the surprise "Tales of the Unexpected" ending can't rescue it from its mire of dullness.

Sweden. Sung half in English, half in... French? Say, aren't these extruded, reconstituted Beatles lyrics? By and large I quite like what Graham Norton calls "popera", although it does go a bit "Fifth Element" towards the end (well, if you've seen the film, you'll know what I mean). But what the hell is going on with those masks?

Croatia. Surpriiiiise! Now where was he hiding her? Ew, put her back! Put her back!! At least he can sing. This song could've been a contender if it weren't for the female vocalist.

Portugal. Wouch, my eyes! I think we see who's stolen all the colour from the previous five entries. The overall effect is something like a live action Magic Roundabout. Good selection of instruments on show, that's always a plus. There's a very familiar song hiding underneath this one - but what? If I were to listen repeatedly to this for a week, I expect it'd come to me, but there are some questions that just aren't worth answering.

Iceland. Sung in English. Look out - giant dolphin! It's amazing to think that we've got through six whole entries without a single bad key change. Alas, no sooner did I think that... Look out - nuclear attack! A very bland song, and the background material seems to have been lifted straight out of a five-year-old girl's head (well, apart from the apparent nuclear blast at the end). I'm sure it's exactly what Europe's looking for, god help it.

Greece. Sung in English. And here he is, the only act trying to imitate last year's winning Russian entry. So what we have here are Chicane offcuts being performed by Petros Andropoulos while he suffers some sort of convulsions on a conveyor belt. Red Alert! Red Alert! Key change incoming! Nice of them to signal that one in advance for us. Apparently the bookies rated this one highly. Ha ha ha ha ha, ha ha ha ha ha.

Armenia. Sung half in English. Hey, ladies, why not just pick a note and stick to it? Oh, now you're just shouting. "Sister - here we go!" Ugh. Foul indeed. Throw in a key change and you've got the complete misshapen package.

Russia. Hey, it's Servalan! Now what I want to know is, how on Earth does she manage to sing out of tune with herself? All things considered, this is an extremely wretched item. It's pretty clear Moscow doesn't want the cost of having to host Eurovision again next year.

Azerbaijan. Sung in English. Now, what we seem to have here is Napoleon in the Wild West cat house. It's by no means a bad number. The balalaika middle eight is a very nice touch. Bonus points for having no nasty key change. Should do well.

Bosnia & Herzegovina. And here's another act in bloody Napoleonic jackets. Is there some sort of vogue in Europe at the moment for Napoleonic jackets? And if so, dammit, why wasn't I told? (Memo to self...) Definite militaristic undertones to this one - must check the news tomorrow to see if there's been a coup... This pretty much forms a matching pair with the previous entry. Think I might give this one the edge for singing in their own language.

Moldova. An interesting choice of brass sounds to open with - it sounds like a folk version of "Casino Royale"! Ick, morris dancing. And what's the guy at the back doing with that mop? The rap middle eight was, putting it charitably, a bad choice.

Malta. Sung in English. The synth pan pipes are a bit 1990s. Hmm, took a bit of panning for the camera to get her in shot. This is a very static performance - ha, she had to move the microphone stand to make it look like something was happening on stage! A very ordinary song, and with a key change too. Not a contender.

Estonia. Nice use of strings. You get bonus points for cellos. Hey, look, she plays the violin too! And extra points for no key change. Definitely a goer.

Denmark. Sung in English. What can I add to Graham Norton's own comments about this one? Who's that playing the keyboard? It looks like Tom Jones dressed as a tramp. And astonishingly, sixteen acts in we get the first gratuitous pyrotechnics of the evening! (Well, apart from the Lithuanian guy's flaming hand.) Now that deserves extra special demerits.

Germany. Sung in English. After last year's horrific wrong turn, they've gone back to the swing band sound. More pyrotechnics - once they've popped, they won't stop. Whose idea were the Bacofoil trousers? Hmm, more than a little evidence of robbing from "Minnie the Moocher" here.

Turkey. Sung (or rather, shouted) in English. Couldn't they have found a singer who could, well, sing? Or a fill-in dancer in the same costume as the others (or at least of the same gender)? Bondage acrobat - attack!

Albania. Sung in English. Now here's a thing. We have a seventeen-year-old vocalist in a tiny pink baby-doll outfit, and she's by far the least interesting thing on the stage. Look at the freaky backing dancers! A green mirrorball-faced gimp and two breakdancing mimes! Get rid of the singer, let's just have three minutes of these guys! Deserves strong bonus points for sheer visual freakiness, but sadly we'll have to dock those back off again for that very nasty key change.

Norway. Sung in English. A disturbing mixture of Riverdance and "Save All Your Kisses For Me", this is just nasty. Someone, get the Square Jaw Kid and his stick-on eyebrows out of there. Bring the gimp and the mimes back on, why not. Apparently this one's the bookies' favourite (and, as with last year's contest, they were proved right - there's no justice).

Ukraine. Sung in English. You know you're watching Eurovision when you've just seen three semi-naked Roman centurions pelvic-thrusting their way across the stage. Eye bleach, please. The singing's very bad, but she gets points for playing her own drums and for sticking to the original key.

Romania. Sung in English. Apart from the women morris dancing, utterly unremarkable. Doomed to sink without trace.

United Kingdom. Nng, R&B singing. I hate R&B singing. Ooh, an interesting time signature. Damn, dramatic key change. And the violinists were doing such a good job of holding it together. Well, we've put 'em on the line with this one - a reality TV show, a Continent-wide promotional campaign, and the gnome-like one himself playing the piano on stage. But let's be honest - we don't really want to win the contest. We don't really want that cost in the present economic climate, not when we've already foolishly taken on the 2012 Olympics. We just want to do moderately well. I'm confident that we can manage that - this is clearly better than a lot of recent UK Eurovision entries, and it's not up against an awful lot of competition tonight.

Finland. Sung in English. Whatever happened to Vanilla Ice? Well, I think if we just look down this alleyway... Seriously, whose idea was it to dress the set with oil drum braziers? Pyros to the max! As if the fire jugglers and the oil drums weren't enough.

Spain. Sung half in English. Send in the Barry Manilow Tumblers! Ooh, a little stage magic as well. This act's got it all. Sadly including gratuitous pyros and a very shrill final note.

So, here's my personal top five this year. Let's see if I can get any of them right: Estonia, Israel, Bosnia & Herzegovina, Portugal, and why not, the UK. Actual top five: Norway (bah!), Iceland (bah!), Azerbaijan (fair enough), Turkey (bah!), and... the UK! Good news for the UK there. Still, the best act of the evening may well have been the crew of the International Space Station declaring the voting lines open.

Books read in April

An Utterly Impartial History of Britain, or 2000 Years of Upper Class Idiots in Charge, John O'Farrell
A humorous write-up of British history, it seemed a natural choice of read after The Decline and Fall of Practically Everybody. I wouldn't put it quite in that league, though. Much of the text is either valuably informative or (more rarely) dryly witty, but there's also a large helping of the sort of humour you find in certain Radio 4 comedies. The kind that you don't tune in for after the first week. Most of it's presented as imagined dialogue, so you can bet O'Farrell's already got his eye on a radio adaptation, or at least the talking book market. Worse yet were the frequent moments when, clearly feeling compelled to show his learning and/or avoid outraged letters, O'Farrell would cap a section of dialogue-humour with a footnote beginning "Actually...".
It was hard going to trawl through the flat material in search of the occasional gems of wit, notwithstanding the sheer size of the book. I had to pause just after the Tudors (barely halfway through) to read the following two books and revive my flagging spirits.

The Theatre of the Absurd, Martin Esslin
Yer seminal critical work on the theatre of Eugene Ionesco, Samuel Beckett and others like them. I'd previously only read the chapter on Ionesco back in school, and was tempted by the shiny revised paperback edition (now with added Harold Pinter!). Mmm, delicious absurdist theatre.

Why I Have Not Written Any Of My Books, Marcel Benabou (translator David Kornacker)
Hard work for little reward. Considering how short this book is (less than 100 pages, once you discount all the blank pages between chapters), that's no mean feat.
It sounds like it ought to be fun - I mean, would you ignore a book with that title? Benabou, or possibly an anonymous narrator (it depends on whether you take it as fiction or not) explains at great length why he keeps failing to write a novel. It could have been a wry satire on the world of writers and writing, perhaps even laugh-out-loud. The people quoted on the back cover seem to have thought that it was. Somehow it just never came to life for me - there wasn't any sparkle, just page after page of florid prose and those peculiarly French extra-long multi-claused sentences.
This is a shame, as Benabou's a member of the OuLiPo, and so in my mind his work came with the, if you will, implicit recommendation of Perec and Queneau. Perhaps I should hold onto it and try again at some point - it's only one or two days' reading anyway. First impression, however, is not good. After this I was ready to limp back to the rest of the O'Farrell.

The Dragon's Nine Sons, Chris Roberson
A bit of light reading, adventure by the book. A misfit group of soldiers under arrest are given the chance to escape execution by going on a top secret suicide mission, and oh, you know the rest. The key difference here is that the story takes place in a parallel future where the space race was between the Empires of China and the Aztecs. (The title sounds like it might be a suitably colourful Chinese description of the solar system, but turns out in fact to refer to the story's Dirty Three-Quarters-Of-A-Dozen.)
It's an interesting set-up, but owing to the nature of the story it isn't developed in very great detail - the Mexica (as the Aztec Empire is called here) is only seen from outside, but we do see a lot more of it than of the Chinese Empire. Most of the book is preoccupied with revealing the soldiers' various stories of shame and having them bump heads with each other before developing a grudging respect, etc, on board the cramped spacecraft in which they plan to infiltrate a Mexica asteroid base. An excess of background world-building here would only detract from the much smaller-scale character story at the heart of the book.
By no means mould-breaking, but enjoyable. Familiar, in a pleasant sort of way.

Swirly Thing Alert

TV SF specials a-plenty this Easter. And yet "special" wasn't really the word, in the end.

Doctor Who - "Planet of the Dead"
At last, an episode of New Who where you can actually see a double-decker bus being driven through the hole in the story. I'm assuming that was deliberate on the scriptwriters' part. Best to give the benefit of the doubt.

The actual base plot - space locusts create wormholes from planet to planet, next wormhole happens to lead to Earth - was extremely simple and would have made a solid comic strip storyline. It should have taken some stretching to make an hour-long special out of it, yet strangely the story just seemed to fly by. All that time for explanations, character development... padding... and yet it just drifted straight past the eyeballs. Inconsequential is the word. It was candy-floss Who. The seasonal special you can watch without ruining your appetite. No fattening tension, no filling drama. In itself, it isn't a problem for the Who seasonal special to be insubstantial fluff, provided that the visuals are pretty, the characters are interesting and the dialogue is zingy.

It's at this point that you should imagine your humble blogger briefly grimacing and sucking in his breath.

Dubai - why? Let's all go to an exotic location, shipping a bus out with us (and crushing the top deck along the way), so that we can take full advantage of... the sand. Lots and lots of the boring yellowy stuff you can find easily and cheaply in substantial quantities right here in England, or else mock up with CGI and a studio set. The guest aliens - two blokes in boiler suits with big fly heads on. Just when you thought RTD might finally have got over having obvious men with (terrestrial) animal heads for aliens. As characters, they were thrown away after only a couple of scenes anyway, so perhaps it wasn't deemed worth the effort of doing anything more inventive. The flying monsters were at least quite pretty.

Only one definite character in the guest cast in Dubai, and that was Lady Christina de Souza. Yes, nice to have an assertive female assistant who's a match for the Doctor, but I'm quite glad not to have her as a regular. The posh accent was a bit ropey and as a character she was already starting to get on my nerves by the end. The rest of the bus passengers didn't really have anything to do except stay on the bus and variously scream, loaf and make cod ominous pronouncements. Damned if I can name any one of them now, mere days after the event. Damned if I could have fifteen minutes after transmission, or even tell you how many of them there were. Back on the London tunnel set, we had an off-the-peg comedy boffin; we had a UNIT captain whose job was to threaten the comedy boffin with a gun until there wasn't any need, after which everybody apparently agreed to pretend that the whole gun thing had never really happened at all, and to amusingly salute the Doctor because we all know he hates that kind of thing; and that was about it.

No stand-out zingers in the script either. The one bit that sticks in my mind was the comedy boffin telling the Doctor he'd watched all his DVDs (or some such thing) and the Doctor saying he bet The One With The Giant Robot was his favourite - and that's only because I'd mentally inserted the follow-up "Ah, no, actually that one was a bit crap, Doctor". And then, at the end, the "Fear Her" moment - the abrupt insertion of a bit of heavy-handed laid-on-with-a-trowel doomy foreshadowing. "He will knock four times" - gee willerkins, wouldn't be two postmen, would it? (Edit: that joke only works if, like me, you completely forget for a couple of days that The Postman Always Rings Twice. Numpty.) No, I think we can all guess who's in David Tennant's big finale.

So not an actively bad episode, but not really actively anything. This is Doctor Who, in the Year of Specials, when it ought to be giving us nothing but Event TV, decidedly marking time. Let's say 5 out of 10. The Scottish Falsetto Sock Puppet Theatre have already produced their take on it:

Excellent point about the TARDIS.

Red Dwarf - "Back to Earth"
Now this is a shocker - apparently the ratings for this were not only Dave's best ever, but favourably comparable to Torchwood's ratings. And if a niche satellite channel can mount a successful comeback for Red Dwarf a full decade after the last TV series on a budget of naff all, there surely isn't any good reason why the Beeb couldn't pump some serious money into a full series.

The only question is, should they?

After seeing "Back to Earth", I'm more firmly convinced than ever that Red Dwarf is a show that has had its day. I think the essence of the show in its heyday, what originally gave it much of its charm - apart of course from the excellent interaction between the cast - was that it was filmed on a physical stage set in front of an audience. It always worked best as a kind of theatre, and I think the move away from that as much as the departure of one half of the writing team spoiled the show for me after Series 6. Red Dwarf was always SF second, a sitcom first, and nothing gave the comedy a bigger boost than having a studio audience reacting to what the cast were doing, so that they could themselves react by discovering which bits of the script or their performance were funniest and ramping those up to best effect. People have said that what these new episodes were missing (like Series 7) was the sound of audience laughter, but I believe that's only the surface symptom of the true problem - without that feedback at the time of filming, the performances fall flat.

It doesn't help that there was bugger all comedy in the script in the first place. Rob Grant is still sorely missed.

Part 1 looked quite promising. Better than Series 8, although that wasn't hard. The nice shiny CGI didn't jar like the blocky, primary colour CGI in Series 7 and 8 did - the "outside" shot of the Garden of Remembrance can hold its head up high next to lovely model shots like the Series 2 observation dome. Even a few smiles and a chuckle or two in the bunkroom scenes.

And then it all went horribly wrong in Part 2. The script was exactly what you'd expect to get if you showed the plot outline to a teenager and asked him to write a fanfic around it. The plugging of the merchandise was merciless. The child actors were possibly the worst in the country. And for extra cheeky self-reference, throw in spurious references to a ninth and tenth series, although apparently the only interesting thing to happen in these two missing series (and ten missing years) is that Kochanski leaves Lister while he's in the bath. I don't think we missed much there.

It was in Part 3 that the Blade Runner references came to the fore (after a brief ropey interlude on the set of Corrie). This chimed nicely with the theme of the characters learning of their imminent deaths and asking their creator for more life, although it didn't sit well with the present-day real-world setting. Still, it gave the set designers a chance to show what they could do on a low budget, and it all looked good. (Implausibly, we're now asked to retroactively believe that the entire series was originally inspired by Blade Runner, even though the resemblance is non-existent and the obvious source film is Dark Star. Tsk.) Sadly, the ending was pat and, by retreading an old RD storyline, it only made it look as though Doug Naylor had run out of fresh ideas. The mash-up of reality and Blade Runner may have been awkward but it was livelier than the wrap-up.

Overall, a disappointment with occasional nice bits. Some good acting from the cast. Carbug was nice, as a prop. The pacing within scenes was bad, slowing the dialogue down which didn't help the less-than-zingy script - was this the fault of the director (Doug Naylor doubling up - not his first time, either) or the editor (if there was one - I can't find a credit anywhere for a production editor on this, which might explain things). Could've used some more close-ups of the actors' faces too - now that would be down to the director. Some moments where it seemed as though different versions of the script were poking through - what exactly was the point of the Russian hologram character, when she was disposed of so arbitrarily, and was there any reason at all for the strange Police Squad pause before Part 2's advert break (I'd expected some post-modern reference to the advert break, but alas, no)? A more satisfying coda to the show than the end of Series 8, perhaps, but still no great shakes.

Still, imagine if Doctor Who's comeback after sixteen years had looked like this. Small mercies, eh?

Books read in March, part two

Stories and Remarks, Raymond Queneau (translator Marc Lowenthal)
Birthday present to self. I hadn't even realised this book had been translated into English - a pleasant surprise. This replaces the French copy - increasingly I feel I'm kidding myself by keeping hold of any books in French when it's so much effort now to read them. So now I plan to keep hold of the originals only when I feel there's a real need, i.e. when I don't rate the English translator's chances of keeping the wordplay intact. Which pretty much narrows it down to Ionesco's plays, OuLiPo anthologies, Queneau's Exercises de style and La disparition (see below).
This volume includes a nice illuminative introduction and a moderate set of translator's notes, which I appreciated. Highlight of the collection would be Queneau's earnest scientific analysis of the language of dogs in Sylvie and Bruno. Saucy fellow.

A Void, Gilbert Adair (translation of La disparition by Georges Perec)
See, here's a case where the translation, while as close as it can be, can't hope to capture the exact sense of the original, but deserves kudos in its own right. It's almost a reimagining rather than a translation.
What Perec did was to write a 300-page novel without using the letter "e", while - for extra cheeky points - making the absence of the letter "e" the centre of the story. You should be able to see at once the difficulties in translating this into English while still keeping "e" out of it. A Void isn't perfect, but it's as good as - there might be as many as half a dozen cases where Adair's used a past tense apostrophe (e.g. "vanish'd") or an abbreviation that, spelled out in full, would contain an "e". Purists might call this cheating, but it's a 300-page translated novel for goodness' sake, and it's a staggering achievement to get away with only half a dozen fudges. And it's still both readable and intellectually stimulating.
What's surprising is that there were two other competing translations that might have been published if this one hadn't got there first. One of them was by Ian Monk, who like Perec is* a member of OuLiPo. Dammit, why can't we have two translations of the same book?!
*Yes, even though Perec is dead he's still a member. The OuLiPo are very clear on this point: membership cannot be resigned, revoked or considered defunct just because the member is dead.

Death and the Penguin, Andrey Kurkov (translator George Bird)
Birthday book #2. A modern Russian novel that isn't a gratuitous pulp gangster story. Nice to know that Viktor Pelevin isn't the only author whose work falls into this category. Still a bit of a disappointing read, though. The premise is that a struggling Ukrainian writer, whose flatmate is a penguin that he rescued when Kiev's zoo ran out of money, gets work writing obituaries to order for a newspaper. The twist being that the subjects of his obituaries start dying after he's written them.
This sounds like it ought to make for an excellent novel - a pleasing mixture of suspense, black comedy and surrealism. In fact it's quite flat. Victor, the protagonist, just seems to drift from chapter to chapter while things happen around him. The penguin is played straight rather than for laughs, which isn't a problem in itself - in fact he may be the best thing about the book. But a perfectly ordinary realistic penguin, even in the unusual setting of a Ukrainian flat, isn't enough to carry a book on its own. None of the characters were lively enough to engage my interest. The translation's slightly jarring in places as well. Russian doesn't have a definite or indefinite article, so an English translator has to decide for himself whether the sentence calls for "a", "the" or nothing at all - the translator here plumps for nothing at all in a large number of cases where I really would have thought something would have worked better, judging from the context. But maybe I'm just looking for faults now. Not the year's top read.

The Decline and Fall of Practically Everybody, Will Cuppy
Much better. A series of factually accurate but very sardonic historical profiles. A bit like 1066 And All That rewritten by PG Wodehouse (ugh, an "X written by Y" reviewbite!). Nice light-hearted reading to round off the month. Well, nearly.

The Quiet Woman, Christopher Priest
Now there's a title that invites cheap Les Dawson-esque gags. (What kind of book is it? Fiction! What kind of fiction? Fantasy!) An author's manuscript is seized by an over-zealous Home Office in a slightly parallel world where a French nuclear reactor leak has irradiated the Home Counties. She tries to investigate the reasons for her manscript's censorship and the reasons for her neighbour's murder, and it turns out they're connected. Priest himself is apparently dissatisfied with this novel, and a lot of people apparently agree with him. I certainly wouldn't rank it among his best, but it's not bad. Problematic is the word. It's Christopher Priest's problem novel. Having had the chance now to go through it with NESFA's collection of critical essays on Priest in my other hand has shed some more light on the story, but hasn't really made me like it any better. Still, it might warrant another reading at some point.

Books read in March, part one

As She Climbed Across the Table, Jonathan Lethem
A professor of anthropology loses his physicist girlfriend to a tiny experimental bubble universe. By which I don't mean that she's involved in a lab accident, but that she falls in love with it and leaves him for it. It's not every day you read the story of a love triangle between a man, a woman and a quantum phenomenon. This is only a short book, but rich - Lethem's good for a quirky turn of phrase and a nice metaphor or two. Always a pleasure to read.

Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions, Edwin Abbott
Another brief book, but very satisfying for the brain. Abbott's thought in quite surprising detail about some aspects of how sentient geometric shapes might live their lives (even if he's left a number of other aspects completely untouched on). 2-D society is alarmingly totalitarian, I must say. I don't know if it might have seemed less so to readers at the time. Perhaps we might start a rumour that it directly inspired that other mathematical dystopia, Evgeny Zamyatin's We? Anything for a laugh, eh?

Captain Britain and MI13 vol. 1, Paul Cornell
Birthday book #1. Paul Cornell's avowed intent is to make British comic book superheroes great again, not in a kick-ass American way but in an upbeat, proud-to-be-British way. I must admit that I'm not especially patriotic (not really at all, when it comes down to it), but there certainly is something special, something stirring about a comic book in which a young Muslim woman in a khimar can cry an "Allahu akbar!" of thanksgiving at the sight of a beefy man wearing a Union Flag and carrying a sword. I'm all for that. Plenty of material here with potential for future development.

Wuthering Heights, Emily Bronte
Tonight on Fox: When Ingenus Go Bad. A provocative study of People Who Really Need A Good Slap. I think it might be pushing it a bit for the introduction to this edition (1966) to claim that Wuthering Heights is "a thriller in the modern sense", but it certainly is gripping. What I don't quite get is why people - people who have, presumably, actually read the thing - believe that it's a love story, or that naming their children Heathcliff and Catherine is a sane thing to do. Or that Kate Bush's #1 hit could possibly be interpreted as a love song, and not the succubus song of a damned soul.
Wuthering Heights is surely a Gothic horror story. It looks a lot like Frankenstein - man defies nature and a supernatural revenge is visited on him and his family. And here, as in Frankenstein, the defiance of nature and the revenge are both embodied in the same individual - Old Man Earnshaw's Monster, the demonic foundling Heathcliff. His defiance of nature is, of course, to raise Heathcliff as his own favourite child at the expense of neglecting his own children, and it all goes horribly wrong from there. Heathcliff comes across as a Victorian social climber with the surface of polite manners ripped away (or in fact, never applied in the first place). His behaviour, and his corrupting influence on all the characters around him must have inspired nothing but horror in mid-nineteenth century readers. I'd be interested to know if people then reacted to the book in the same way that people now react to video nasties and violent computer games.
My only other question about the Heights is just what accent Joseph, the unpleasant old servant, is supposed to have. I would have guessed Yorkshire, but it reads like a strange mix of Geordie and Scots, with occasional moments of Cockney thrown in. What really gets me is that, even though it must be a second language to them, all the other characters can speak and write Joseph fluently to each other. Perhaps there's a dictionary of it somewhere with agreed spellings, just like there must be one for New England Hillbilly that all of HP Lovecraft's heroes have read.

Edit: Well, now I've seen a few online critiques and commentaries of Wuthering Heights - the Freudian interpretation, the Jungian interpretation, the "storm/calm" interpretation. To these I'd like to add my own response: the "weaponised character" theory. (Surprisingly, not pinched from Jasper Fforde, honest guv.) Perhaps Heathcliff isn't merely a demon in human form, or Catherine's own id/animus personified, but the ultimate in narrative warfare. Perhaps Emily Bronte's novel was an inoffensive, ordinary rustic romance called Thrushcross Grange, until some agency as yet unknown sent in Heathcliff to undermine it. Perhaps, somewhere out there, there's a book that's been infiltrated and converted into the bridgehead for a series of attacks on other books, a factory novel stockpiling Heathcliffs of Mass Destruction? Or perhaps it got into a fight with another book, who knows? Perhaps we should look for the other combatant - a novel that shows the marks of counter-attacks, with its characters and story dented and buckled but unbeaten.
If we can find a novel populated entirely by arseholes who talk in an unidentifiable regional English dialect, so much the better, because that would back up my further theory that Joseph is Heathcliff's "handler".

Double edit: I'm thinking maybe Cold Comfort Farm. It's got videophones in it, which looks suspicious for a start. And Flora Poste would appear to be the counter-attack, sent into a grim rustic novel to subvert it into parody. Success on both sides, then - a Pyrrhic victory.

So here we are, it's 11/03 and I'm 11 x 03 years old. 21 + 12. A nice palindromic age. Send in the dancing curry.

First We Take Manhattan

Hey kids, do you like violence? Want to see me stick nine inch nails through each of my eyelids? Zack Snyder does. Zack Snyder sure does love his gore. This is largely the reason why Watchmen is the best film I never want to see again.

Let's see if I can pull a coherent review out of the assembled thoughts that follow. Ware ye big, floppy, luminous blue spoilers.

Positives first. This is unquestionably a very close adaptation of the graphic novel - we'll talk about the small changes in translation in a minute. Visually it's phenomenal, with the title sequence a particular triumph. Dan/Nite Owl's anxiety dream is another notable piece of work. The use of '80s songs to reinforce the story's setting is lovely, and even the incidental soundtrack sounds like something from an '80s film. Very nice indeed. The acting is generally good - I can't think of any glaringly bad performances. The costumes are, perhaps, in the case of the superheroes, a little more 2000s than 1980s, but one can make allowances. All in all, it's recognisably Watchmen.

Only one surface negative - there are a couple of very ropey make-up jobs. Silk Spectre Snr's "old" face and Richard Nixon's big rubber nose and jowls are the two that really stand out. (Now watch some idiot awards ceremony give it Best Make-Up.)

There have been complaints from Watchmen fans that the ending was changed. Personally I feel it was changed for the better. The "squid" ending never felt entirely right to me, whereas I found the film ending a lot more coherent and a lot more satisfying. It all ties in more neatly. So an allegedly alien squid monster levels part of New York - what's that to the Russians? How's that going to affect the course of the Cold War? But a number of cities levelled worldwide, and apparently by America's big superweapon gone rogue - that not only involves other countries besides America, it also puts the burden on America (the only real military superpower even during the Cold War, as we discovered after the man behind the Iron Curtain showed us the rust that had glued his missiles into their silos) to apologise to the world, to be the first to step down and offer peace. As with Lord of the Rings, I think here we see how liberties taken by filmmakers can actually improve a story.

However, there were other liberties, even beyond the cuts and compressions needed to fit the story into a film of less than three hours. I'm talking here about gratuity.

At first it didn't seem as though anything was amiss. The opening scene, with the Comedian fighting for his life, didn't seem out of place. The Comedian's attempted rape of Silk Spectre Snr, if lingered over perhaps a little too long, was pretty much as in the book. The Viet Nam flashbacks were almost frame-for-frame matches for the graphic novel. If the fight scenes overall were more physical, more limb-breaky and nose-bloody than in the book, well, that's just cinema for you. It's easier to stomach violence in comic books, one carefully framed shot at a time, one more step removed from fluid reality. I was half prepared to dismiss my unease as mere preciousness on my part.

And then we saw someone cutting someone else's forearms off with a circular saw. Dammit, I thought, that definitely wasn't in the book. Careful reference to the book confirms that a number of events were gored up beyond reasonable need. Rorschach's confrontation with the child abductor is another one that springs to mind. (What other films has Zack Snyder directed? 300. I don't remember that being particularly over-gory, although I may have made allowances given the subject matter. What else? Dawn of the Dead. Ah yes, that could well explain it.) But Zack doesn't just like gratuitous gore - he likes gratuitous sex as well. The scene where Dan/Nite Owl and Laurie/Silk Spectre Jnr, fired up by a late-night act of costumed heroism, make love aboard the NiteOwlMobile is a thing of subtlety and beauty in the book. In the film, it's frankly clinical. Or, as Stephen "Bob the Angry Flower" Notley very rightly says, "Where the book has taste and class and frailty, the movie has a porny fuck scene." In fact, go and read Stephen's review, for he has many just and accurate things to say about the film.

There's one change that I think stands for the film adaptation as a whole. It's not an especially gratuitous bit. It's the scene where, as Dan and Laurie try to break him out of prison, Rorschach holds them up so that he can go and do nasty (unseen) things to Big Figure in the gents' toilets. It's implicitly clear in the book that he forces Big Figure bodily down the lav and flushes on him - this is backed up by an innocent remark from Laurie about not wanting to dive head first into things, and a knowing reply from Rorschach. It's a moment of sick humour. In the film, the joke is lost and it's blood, not water, that flows out under the toilet door as they walk away. Red, viscous blood in Shining-esque quantities. As I say, this pretty much sums up for me what Zack Snyder has done here - sacrificed subtlety for the sake of being more in-your-face.

(This paragraph left intentionally blank for you to add your own pertinent thoughts about Dr Manhattan's enormous luminous blue wanger. See, even that had to be bigger and more graphic, didn't it? Tsk.)

So yes, it's an excellent film, both in itself and as a version of Watchmen. It's remained complex and thought-provoking, if less nuanced than the book. But it's just rather horrible in places. The story itself is horrible, philosophically speaking - an "end justifies the means" fable with no happy ending and no easy answers, although that in itself may serve as a comment on Alan Moore's true feelings about the "end justifies the means" worldview. But the book is a lot easier to stomach.

Who watches the watchmen?

Who fires the firemen?

Who bins the binmen?

Who milks the milkmen?

Who walks the walkmen?

Who stays the stamen?

Who frenches the Frenchmen?

Who marks the marksmen?

Who airs the airmen?

Who heads the headsmen?

Who anchors the anchormen?

Who hies the hymen?

Who bonds the bondsmen?

Who moons the Moon-men?

Who cycles the cyclamen?

Who lays the laymen?

Who owes the omen?

Who sees the semen?

Well, Bill Clinton's dry cleaner, obviously. I'll get me coat...