The most interesting question raised by Edgar Wright’s Scott Pilgrim vs. the World is why it left me feeling delighted rather than quivering with feminist rage. I bounced hard off the first volume in the film’s source material, a six-volume comic book series by Bryan Lee O’Malley which follows the titular twentyish slacker as he battles the seven evil exes of his beloved, Ramona Flowers, in order to be with her. I couldn't get over the way Scott treated his teenage girlfriend Knives Chau, lying to her, neglecting her, and letting her fall deeper in love with him even though he’d already fallen for Ramona, all because he could’t face the onerous task of breaking off their relationship. Even the assurances of my friends, who are fanatic lovers of the comics and have been anticipating the film and the final volume in the series with bated breath, that O’Malley does eventually acknowledge the creepiness of Scott’s behavior, wasn’t enough to bring me back. Wright’s film, meanwhile, shies away from such an acknowledgment.
To the horror of my friends when I told them about it, Scott Pilgrim vs. the World deviates significantly from the comics, especially towards the end of the story where most of Scott’s soul-searching happens. Even outside of Scott’s self-absorbed point of view, the film's treatment of its female characters leaves much to be desired. Ramona is a near-blank whose attraction to Scott never really makes sense. Knives’s growing attachment to Scott, and her anger when she realizes he’s fallen in love with Ramona, are portrayed alternately as funny or pathetic, at least until the end of the film when she forgives Scott, helps him to defeat his last opponent, and urges him to make it work with Ramona. The fights between Scott and Ramona’s exes are explicitly described as duels in which Ramona is the prize, as opposed to the fight between Ramona and Knives, which is about Knives’s hurt feelings, without any expectation that the winner will get Scott. The only other person that Ramona fights is her female ex--otherwise, she stands back and lets Scott take a pummeling. Finally, Ramona’s behavior in the film’s last act is inexplicably out of character, and turns out to be the result of mind-control, a condition whose significance the film all but ignores and which is resolved with no fanfare whatsoever. Walking out of the theater with a big smile on my face, I couldn’t help but feel that, like Todd, the evil ex whose superpowers are revoked by the Vegan Police after Scott tricks him into drinking half-and-half (Brandon Routh, in a performance so deliciously hammy that it’s impossible to believe he made such a lackluster villain in this season of Chuck), I should be deprived of my feminist credentials.
So, assuming that I'm not simply a Bad Feminist, what is it about Scott Pilgrim vs. the World that made it so easy for me to ignore the shitty way it treats its female characters? The most obvious possibility is that the film is Just That Good, and there have been other cases where I've allowed the quality of a work to obscure its more problematic aspects (The Lord of the Rings, Anathem, various Pixar films). But that's really not the case where Scott Pilgrim is concerned. The film isn't so much good as it is very, very fun. The comic's central gimmick is that the story is constructed like a video game, with Scott battling Ramona's exes and gaining points and experience as he defeats each one, until the final boss battle with her most evil ex Gideon (Jason Schwartzman). The film takes to the video game idiom so naturally that it's hard to believe that the story wasn't created for this medium, effortlessly combining a naturalistic setting with cartoonish violence, and adding to both the visual tropes of a comic book--split screens, titles that introduce characters or announce location changes, spelled-out action noises.
This could have all resulted in an unholy mess, of course, but Wright, who as the director of Hot Fuzz is no stranger to cartoonish, over-the-top comedic action, handles his material beautifully. He establishes the ground rules of his world with a scene in which Scott and Knives play, in perfect synchronization, an arcade game that is a cross between Mortal Kombat and Dance Dance Revolution, then starts delivering the action scenes, which are sweeping and exhilarating, and the jokes, which are frequently uproarious. This cartoonishness is offset and grounded by a strong cast who help us care about all this candy-colored action--Michael Cera is recycling the same performance that he's worn nearly to the nub in a mere half-decade in film, but it suits the character of Scott Pilgrim so well that one might almost imagine that the comics were written with him in mind for the role; Mary Elizabeth Winstead gives Ramona heft, ably conveying the character's understanding that both the people around her and the story she's in think of her as a Manic Pixie Dream Girl, and her exasperation at this; Kieran Culkin is a delight as Scott's roommate Wallace, who vacillates between trying to steer Scott towards better, more mature choices and taking a childish pleasure in the trainwrecks that occur when Scott fails to do so, and nearly steals the film in both capacities; everyone else is underused, but the only sour note is Schwartzman, who isn't nearly as charismatic or as evil as the build-up to Gideon's introduction leads us to expect.
Fun, however, is not quite the same thing as good, and as much as I enjoyed Scott Pilgrim, it does outlast the exhilaration created by its innovative format and Wright's sharp direction. The problem here, clearly, is the necessity of cramming a six-part story with a cast of dozens into a two-hour, three-act film. It's obvious even to someone who hasn't read the comics that the majority of the cast are being seriously under-served, their plotlines reduced or entirely redacted, but their presence means that the film feels overpopulated, and by the its midpoint I was getting a little tired of the frenetic pace at which Wright was throwing characters and plot twists at me. And if, when it came to secondary characters, Wright had some wriggle room, the story's central premise was untouchable, even though Scott Pilgrim would probably have been a much tighter film with only four evil exes for Scott to battle. Chris Evans, Brandon Routh, and Mae Whitman are all good as exes 2-4, but between them they slow the film's pace, and it would have been better to keep only one of the three. Meanwhile, exes five and six are so unimportant that they don't even get lines or a close-up, but they still warrant a long, explosive fight scene, which is fantastic in itself but which, coming so late in the film, only stalls the story, delaying Gideon's introduction, Scott's one moment of character growth, and the climactic battle. I was thus ready for Scott Pilgrim to end a good ten or fifteen minutes before it actually did.
Besides these structural problems, however, there is the more crucial flaw that Scott Pilgrim doesn't really know what to do with its main character. Scott defeats Gideon by, as the film puts it, gaining the power of self-esteem (which is represented by a sword), but it's not as if a tendency to be self-abnegating or retiring was ever this kid's problem--if anything he's overconfident, taking it for granted that his selfishness and failures as a boyfriend will be shrugged off and forgiven--and the character's final triumph thus rings a little hollow, more like the standard Hollywood template of what character growth at the end of a summer blockbuster should look like than anything relating to who Scott actually is. In the original comics, I'm told, there is a character called nega-Scott who forces Scott to face up to his self-serving recollections of his past relationships, and to the hurt he's caused the women in his life, which is more like the kind of growth this character needs, but in the film nega-Scott is done away with with an (admittedly quite funny) gag. None of these are fatal flaws, and the film's energy and inventive look are more than enough to carry it through its rough patches, but taken together they do keep Scott Pilgrim from the greatness that might have justified, or at least made it easier to ignore, its misogyny.
So, if Scott Pilgrim vs. the World is not a searing masterpiece for the ages whose quality overwhelms any and all problems with its politics, why was it so easy for me to ignore those problems? Another possible answer is that the film is too silly, too steeped in and conscious of its unreality, to take seriously enough to criticize. This is probably closer to the mark, though not for the obvious reason that Scott Pilgrim is a semi-cartoon about people who fight video game battles in real life. Rather, it's because of the way the film depicts romance and sexual attraction. The male gaze is almost entirely absent from Scott Pilgrim. Its female characters are not sexualized or fetishized--most of them spend the film covered from head to toe and muffled in heavy coats, the better to protect themselves from the snowy Toronto weather that is almost its own character. Scott, meanwhile, is almost asexual. He gets a huge kick out of modest intimacies such as holding hands or cuddling--or rather, he doesn't. His excitement at these acts is emotional, not sexual, and the sexual component of his desire for Ramona and Knives gets almost no play in the film. This approach has the effect of making the film and its characters seem innocent and childlike. Scott isn't a manchild; he's just a child. It's easy, therefore, to disassociate his behavior towards the women in his life from the familiar figure of the entitled nerd/gamer/musician/hipster who believes that having been the target of bullying absolves them from ever examining their behavior towards others--the same figure that, as I understand it, the original Scott Pilgrim was created to examine and, to a certain extent, decry.
To this mitigating factor I'd add another, which is that the film offers other pleasures besides the romance between Scott and Ramona. In fact, I would go further and say that, unlike (500) Days of Summer, a film that it resembles in several respects, Scott Pilgrim vs. the World doesn't really try to hook its viewers by getting them to root for the romance or feel a vicarious infatuation with the object of the main character's affection. Instead, like the best computer games, the pleasure of the film is rooted in the quest itself--defeating the seven evil exes--rather than in Scott's pursuit of Ramona, who is literally his reward. This is, of course, risible, but it also means that there are aspects of the film one can enjoy without buying into a poorly conceived, unconvincing romance. In fact, at the very end of the film Scott and Knives team up again to fight Gideon, mirroring their game session at its start, and do such a good job that even Ramona comments that they make a good team right before walking off because she thinks that there is too much drama in her relationship with Scott. For a minute it seemed entirely possible that the film would end by pairing up Scott and Knives, or leaving Scott on his own but more confident, and so uninvested was I in the relationship between Scott and Ramona that this seemed like an entirely reasonable and satisfying ending (it helps that Ellen Wong's effervescent performance as Knives is so much more accessible than Winstead's, whose work is mostly done below the surface). So on the one hand, Scott Pilgrim is a romance that pays very little attention to the female half of its central couple, but on the other hand, it doesn't force its viewers to buy into that couple, or even pay it a great deal of attention, if they want to enjoy the film.
Let's be clear--the mitigating factors I note here are not intended as a
defense of the film against the accusation that it is misogynistic.
There is no such defense. This is a misogynistic film. It's also a fun
one. When it comes to Hollywood blockbusters, that's often the best one can hope for, and Scott Pilgrim might almost be described as a better sort of misogynistic film because if offers distractions from its misogyny rather than foregrounding it as so many others do. But especially given that, according to my friends who are its fans,
Scott Pilgrim the comic is a story that tries to combat much of the
misogyny that underlies Scott Pilgrim the film and other works of its
ilk, it's a shame that this is the best Edgar Wright could come up
with--a film that uses flashing lights and bright colors to distract its
viewers from the unpleasantness at its core. In an aside to a blog entry from a few months ago, Sady Doyle discusses consuming pop culture while feminist, and touches on a lot of the issues I tried to raise in this post last year, doing a much better job at articulating the frustrations I tried to express in it. How firmly, Doyle asks, should we cling to our feminism goggles? Is it right to always filter art through a political stance? Is it right to let that stance take a back seat to artistic appreciation? Scott Pilgrim vs. the World raises these questions from a direction I wasn't expecting--is it OK to enjoy a silly, frivolous piece of art even though you can clearly see that it is toxic? I'm not sure what the answer is, or whether it even matters--it won't change the fact that I enjoyed Scott Pilgrim, and I'm not so masochistic as to wish I'd suffered through it for the sake of ideological purity. What I do wish, however, is that I lived in a world in which the choice between the two was not forced upon me quite so often.
Sunday, August 15, 2010
Thursday, August 12, 2010
Sherlock
Sherlock Holmes first appeared in print in 1887, and entered the public domain some time in the 20th century. Long before he did so, however, he entered the public consciousness. There are many more people who know who Holmes is, and can identify his defining qualities and tropes--his keen intelligence, his ability to deduce the most intimate details about a person from a brief observation of their appearance and behavior, his friendship with Doctor Watson--than have ever read a single one of Arthur Conan Doyle's Holmes stories or novels, or even seen them adapted. One of the most interesting recent indications of the depth to which Holmes has permeated Western culture is the fact that Stephen Moffat and Mark Gatiss's Sherlock, which concluded its three-episode 'season' this week, doesn't simply borrow Holmesian tropes from Conan Doyle's originals, but from intervening adaptations. The jangling score seems to have been lifted from Guy Ritchie's 2009 film. Holmes's reconfiguration as a sociopath with substance abuse problems, who pursues cases solely for the joy of stimulating his intellect and without a thought for the lives that are often at stake, is ground that has been well trodden by House. And though Moffat, at least, writes Holmes in a manner so similar to his take on the Doctor that there were moments in his episode, "A Study in Pink," that I could have sworn the character was being played by Matt Smith instead of Dominic Cumberbatch, Cumberbatch himself sometimes seems to be channeling Jeremy Brett, particularly in the way he uses his voice.
Of course, with the possible exception of the music, it is probably premature to identify any influence on the show's tone or direction, because at present there isn't really a show. The season, comprising three 90 minute stories, is probably best thought of as a proof of concept for the idea of Holmes transposed to the 21st century. Or rather, as an attempt at such a proof that isn't entirely persuasive, but rather demonstrates that the though the idea has potential, its pitfalls are numerous and not easily avoided. Of the three episodes, "A Study in Pink" is superb, a witty, effortlessly involving story with an irresistible hook--how can a killer force his victims to commit suicide--that also doubles as compelling introduction to the reinvented Holmes and Watson, and to the beginning of their partnership. Steve Thompson's followup, however, "The Blind Banker," is terrible, and Mark Gatiss's "The Great Game" is good, but achieves that goodness only by stuffing its running time to the brim with puzzles, close shaves, explosions and near-explosions, and the introduction of a new Moriarty who doesn't quite light up the screen as the new Holmes and Watson do. It achieves through brute force what "A Study in Pink" managed with a much lighter, more elegant approach.
More importantly, the three stories don't create a sense of belonging to a single series. They vary in tone and in their treatment of their characters. Holmes is a Doctor-ish blur of super-excited intelligence in "A Study in Pink," but more subdued in the other two. Watson is stiff but stalwart in "Study," a bumbling pushover in "Banker," and an audience surrogate, whose normalcy sheds a light on Holmes's cold detachment, in "Game." The two meet for the first time in "Study" and spend the episode forming a tentative bond, but the two following episodes take their partnership for granted rather than building it up. "Study" introduces Holmes's drug addiction and strongly hints that his personal growth will be the series's overarching theme, but this is abandoned in "Banker" and "Game." There is, in short, no sense that a single vision is driving this reinvention of the character. The three stories feel disconnected from one another, as though Thompson and Gatiss were writing fanfic in Moffat's world, and failing to get the feel of it quite right. (Of course, given how brief the season has been, it might be equally possible to say that Thompson or Gatiss have the true measure of the show and that Moffat is the fanfic writer, but as I like his story best, I'm inclined to think that it's his vision that should prevail.)
The problem, I think, is the running time. 90 minutes is an unforgiving timeslot for a writer who can't plot or keep their plot moving--which is, quite frankly, most television writers. Moffat manages the task with ease and Gatiss barrels through it, while Thompson produces a stultifying hour and a half. But because each of them is aware of how easily a less than engaging mystery might lose the audience, they put most of their eggs in the plot basket--the longer running time demands it. So that the variations in the way Holmes and Watson are presented in the three episodes are compounded by the latter two's willingness to put the two characters, and the relationship between them, on the back-burner in favor of moving the plot along. A one-hour episode, meanwhile, can afford to be a little slack on the story front, and to develop its characters instead. Another way of putting it, of course, is that Sherlock is keeping faith with Conan Doyle himself, who famously did little to develop either Holmes, Watson, or their friendship. Like Moffat and Gatiss's versions, they have a brief introduction, agree to live together, and set off on their adventures. From that moment onwards, the status quo--Holmes's feats of deduction, his uncontainable personality, and Watson's total devotion to him--is established and only rarely deviated from. I liked the idea of a more traditional type of television series centered on Holmes, which Moffat's episode seemed to promise, and my mixed feelings about Sherlock are mainly rooted in the fact that it doesn't seem interested in becoming that series. But there is also the simple fact that the status quo established by Moffat and Gatiss isn't as compelling or as well-crafted as Conan Doyle's. None of the three writers can consistently deliver Holmes-ian deduction, and their take on Holmes itself is not only, as Dan Hartland (who has written more effusive praise about all three episodes) says, a less rounded character than Conan Doyle's Holmes, who was principled and compassionate on top of being brilliant and cold (to which I would add that it also smacks disappointingly of the all-too typical tendency to vilify intellect and those who possess it), but also a lesser version of a character that's been done definitively. House is by no means great television, but it has surely plumbed the depths of what it means to always be the smartest guy in the room, to always know that people are lying and keeping secrets, and to more easily find pleasure in intellectual pursuits than in the company of others. It's pretty clear that neither Sherlock nor Cumberbatch--who may have a performance of Hugh Laurie's caliber in him but is not being given the chance to demonstrate this--are interested in delving that deep, so I'm not sure what the point of this watered down version of the character arc is.
All of this is not to say that there aren't things I like about Sherlock. I think Martin Freeman's Watson is very good; I think the combination of humor and horror is very effective; I really like the way the writers use on-screen titles (will it ever make sense to show the screen of a cell phone again?). But again, these are all things that worked very well in "A Study in Pink" and were either abandoned or handled less effectively in the following episodes. The one thing that Sherlock does well and consistently is its recreation of Victorian London in the 21st century, which is nothing short of masterful. The music plays a part in this, of course, and so do directors Paul McGuinan and Euros Lyn, who ensure that interiors are always close and overstuffed and exteriors always dark and foggy (I suspect that we will never see an episode of Sherlock set in summer or spring), and who carefully point their cameras away from billboards, neon lights, logos and trademarks, showing only the bricks and cobblestones that are still there underneath it all. But it's the writing that truly transposes Victorian Holmes onto the 21st century, so perfectly that you'd swear the character had been written for our era. It's darkly funny that Watson can just as easily have sustained a war injury in Afghanistan in 2010 as in 1887. Blogs and text messages map perfectly onto popular magazines and telegrams, and anonymous commenting is as good a way to keep in touch with a mysterious contact as cryptic messages in the personals page. Cabs are, of course, as necessary a means of transportation in today's London as they were 123 years ago. The writers' eagerness to play around with Conan Doyle's original material contributes to the series's sense of Holmes-ishness, whether it's Moffat's clever inversion of the dying message in "A Study in Scarlet," or Gatiss's more straightforward incorporation of "The Bruce Partington Plans" as a sub-plot of "The Great Game." In a way, Sherlock is as much, if not more, a work of steampunk as Ritchie's Sherlock Holmes--it overlays a Victorian sensibility over modern technology, and creates an unreal world that is all its own. If I'm enchanted with the series despite its many flaws, it is mainly because of the overpowering sense of that world that it creates, which often overwhelms those flaws.
There is, of course, a dark underside to Sherlock's fascination with Victoriana, and it is very much on display in "The Blind Banker," which on top of being a slack, overwrought mystery is suffused with so many Asian stereotypes straight out of a pulp novel (or out of Conan Doyle's more objectionable Holmes stories) that it has to be seen to be believed: sinister Chinese triads masquerading as circus performers, chasing down a vulnerable and doomed young woman just trying to escape her past, and torturing our heroes with deadly chinoiserie (as if this were not enough, the episode kicks off with a non-sequitor of a scene in which Holmes is attacked by a robed swordsman straight out of a 19th century penny dreadful). It's tempting to read the episode as a ham-fisted attempt to comment on Victorian Orientalism that ends up participating in it instead, but Sherlock has been so very bad with other issues of representation that one can't help but assume that the fault is in the intent rather than the execution. SelenaK has a nice summary of "The Great Game"'s rather troubling treatment of homosexuality, and then there are the women: Mrs. Hudson, whose job is to be unquestioningly accommodating and, on occasion, to provide comic relief through cheerful dimness; Sally Donovan, a bitter shrew who earns the audience's ire for being mean to Holmes and has yet to demonstrate a shred of competence in her job as a police detective; Molly the pathologist, a pathetic doormat who makes obvious, doomed passes at Holmes, and whom he casually humiliates on a regular basis; and Sarah, Watson's love interest who clearly has no existence beyond that role, because her response to a first date that ends with her being kidnapped, tied up, and nearly killed is to agree to a second one. Just about the only positive thing that can be said about Sherlock's depiction of women is that it doesn't happen very often, unless they are the victims of a crime.
I've written a lot here about the things that frustrate or anger me about Sherlock, so it may sound strange if I say that I actually like the show a lot and look forward to the next batch of episodes. The thing is, the problems with the show are the things about it that stick out--the inconsistency between chapters, the laziness of borrowing Holmes's characterization from another television series, the often shoddy plotting, the ghastly writing for women--whereas what works, what I found enjoyable and even lovable, is more in the realm of ambiance--the worldbuilding I've already written about, but also the chemistry between Freeman and Cumberbatch, and more than either of these the sense that this really is Holmes, not quite Conan Doyle's Holmes but Holmes nonetheless, brought to the 21st century. That's certainly enough to bring me back, even though I suspect that the series will never deliver the character development that "A Study in Pink" seemed to promise, and that its female characters will never improve. What I'd like, however, if the Sherlock that I wanted can never be, is a little more care in the construction of the episodic, Conan Doyle-esque Sherlock that Moffat and Gatiss seem interested in. Let's have a lot more "Study in Pink"s, and a lot fewer "Blind Banker"s.
Of course, with the possible exception of the music, it is probably premature to identify any influence on the show's tone or direction, because at present there isn't really a show. The season, comprising three 90 minute stories, is probably best thought of as a proof of concept for the idea of Holmes transposed to the 21st century. Or rather, as an attempt at such a proof that isn't entirely persuasive, but rather demonstrates that the though the idea has potential, its pitfalls are numerous and not easily avoided. Of the three episodes, "A Study in Pink" is superb, a witty, effortlessly involving story with an irresistible hook--how can a killer force his victims to commit suicide--that also doubles as compelling introduction to the reinvented Holmes and Watson, and to the beginning of their partnership. Steve Thompson's followup, however, "The Blind Banker," is terrible, and Mark Gatiss's "The Great Game" is good, but achieves that goodness only by stuffing its running time to the brim with puzzles, close shaves, explosions and near-explosions, and the introduction of a new Moriarty who doesn't quite light up the screen as the new Holmes and Watson do. It achieves through brute force what "A Study in Pink" managed with a much lighter, more elegant approach.
More importantly, the three stories don't create a sense of belonging to a single series. They vary in tone and in their treatment of their characters. Holmes is a Doctor-ish blur of super-excited intelligence in "A Study in Pink," but more subdued in the other two. Watson is stiff but stalwart in "Study," a bumbling pushover in "Banker," and an audience surrogate, whose normalcy sheds a light on Holmes's cold detachment, in "Game." The two meet for the first time in "Study" and spend the episode forming a tentative bond, but the two following episodes take their partnership for granted rather than building it up. "Study" introduces Holmes's drug addiction and strongly hints that his personal growth will be the series's overarching theme, but this is abandoned in "Banker" and "Game." There is, in short, no sense that a single vision is driving this reinvention of the character. The three stories feel disconnected from one another, as though Thompson and Gatiss were writing fanfic in Moffat's world, and failing to get the feel of it quite right. (Of course, given how brief the season has been, it might be equally possible to say that Thompson or Gatiss have the true measure of the show and that Moffat is the fanfic writer, but as I like his story best, I'm inclined to think that it's his vision that should prevail.)
The problem, I think, is the running time. 90 minutes is an unforgiving timeslot for a writer who can't plot or keep their plot moving--which is, quite frankly, most television writers. Moffat manages the task with ease and Gatiss barrels through it, while Thompson produces a stultifying hour and a half. But because each of them is aware of how easily a less than engaging mystery might lose the audience, they put most of their eggs in the plot basket--the longer running time demands it. So that the variations in the way Holmes and Watson are presented in the three episodes are compounded by the latter two's willingness to put the two characters, and the relationship between them, on the back-burner in favor of moving the plot along. A one-hour episode, meanwhile, can afford to be a little slack on the story front, and to develop its characters instead. Another way of putting it, of course, is that Sherlock is keeping faith with Conan Doyle himself, who famously did little to develop either Holmes, Watson, or their friendship. Like Moffat and Gatiss's versions, they have a brief introduction, agree to live together, and set off on their adventures. From that moment onwards, the status quo--Holmes's feats of deduction, his uncontainable personality, and Watson's total devotion to him--is established and only rarely deviated from. I liked the idea of a more traditional type of television series centered on Holmes, which Moffat's episode seemed to promise, and my mixed feelings about Sherlock are mainly rooted in the fact that it doesn't seem interested in becoming that series. But there is also the simple fact that the status quo established by Moffat and Gatiss isn't as compelling or as well-crafted as Conan Doyle's. None of the three writers can consistently deliver Holmes-ian deduction, and their take on Holmes itself is not only, as Dan Hartland (who has written more effusive praise about all three episodes) says, a less rounded character than Conan Doyle's Holmes, who was principled and compassionate on top of being brilliant and cold (to which I would add that it also smacks disappointingly of the all-too typical tendency to vilify intellect and those who possess it), but also a lesser version of a character that's been done definitively. House is by no means great television, but it has surely plumbed the depths of what it means to always be the smartest guy in the room, to always know that people are lying and keeping secrets, and to more easily find pleasure in intellectual pursuits than in the company of others. It's pretty clear that neither Sherlock nor Cumberbatch--who may have a performance of Hugh Laurie's caliber in him but is not being given the chance to demonstrate this--are interested in delving that deep, so I'm not sure what the point of this watered down version of the character arc is.
All of this is not to say that there aren't things I like about Sherlock. I think Martin Freeman's Watson is very good; I think the combination of humor and horror is very effective; I really like the way the writers use on-screen titles (will it ever make sense to show the screen of a cell phone again?). But again, these are all things that worked very well in "A Study in Pink" and were either abandoned or handled less effectively in the following episodes. The one thing that Sherlock does well and consistently is its recreation of Victorian London in the 21st century, which is nothing short of masterful. The music plays a part in this, of course, and so do directors Paul McGuinan and Euros Lyn, who ensure that interiors are always close and overstuffed and exteriors always dark and foggy (I suspect that we will never see an episode of Sherlock set in summer or spring), and who carefully point their cameras away from billboards, neon lights, logos and trademarks, showing only the bricks and cobblestones that are still there underneath it all. But it's the writing that truly transposes Victorian Holmes onto the 21st century, so perfectly that you'd swear the character had been written for our era. It's darkly funny that Watson can just as easily have sustained a war injury in Afghanistan in 2010 as in 1887. Blogs and text messages map perfectly onto popular magazines and telegrams, and anonymous commenting is as good a way to keep in touch with a mysterious contact as cryptic messages in the personals page. Cabs are, of course, as necessary a means of transportation in today's London as they were 123 years ago. The writers' eagerness to play around with Conan Doyle's original material contributes to the series's sense of Holmes-ishness, whether it's Moffat's clever inversion of the dying message in "A Study in Scarlet," or Gatiss's more straightforward incorporation of "The Bruce Partington Plans" as a sub-plot of "The Great Game." In a way, Sherlock is as much, if not more, a work of steampunk as Ritchie's Sherlock Holmes--it overlays a Victorian sensibility over modern technology, and creates an unreal world that is all its own. If I'm enchanted with the series despite its many flaws, it is mainly because of the overpowering sense of that world that it creates, which often overwhelms those flaws.
There is, of course, a dark underside to Sherlock's fascination with Victoriana, and it is very much on display in "The Blind Banker," which on top of being a slack, overwrought mystery is suffused with so many Asian stereotypes straight out of a pulp novel (or out of Conan Doyle's more objectionable Holmes stories) that it has to be seen to be believed: sinister Chinese triads masquerading as circus performers, chasing down a vulnerable and doomed young woman just trying to escape her past, and torturing our heroes with deadly chinoiserie (as if this were not enough, the episode kicks off with a non-sequitor of a scene in which Holmes is attacked by a robed swordsman straight out of a 19th century penny dreadful). It's tempting to read the episode as a ham-fisted attempt to comment on Victorian Orientalism that ends up participating in it instead, but Sherlock has been so very bad with other issues of representation that one can't help but assume that the fault is in the intent rather than the execution. SelenaK has a nice summary of "The Great Game"'s rather troubling treatment of homosexuality, and then there are the women: Mrs. Hudson, whose job is to be unquestioningly accommodating and, on occasion, to provide comic relief through cheerful dimness; Sally Donovan, a bitter shrew who earns the audience's ire for being mean to Holmes and has yet to demonstrate a shred of competence in her job as a police detective; Molly the pathologist, a pathetic doormat who makes obvious, doomed passes at Holmes, and whom he casually humiliates on a regular basis; and Sarah, Watson's love interest who clearly has no existence beyond that role, because her response to a first date that ends with her being kidnapped, tied up, and nearly killed is to agree to a second one. Just about the only positive thing that can be said about Sherlock's depiction of women is that it doesn't happen very often, unless they are the victims of a crime.
I've written a lot here about the things that frustrate or anger me about Sherlock, so it may sound strange if I say that I actually like the show a lot and look forward to the next batch of episodes. The thing is, the problems with the show are the things about it that stick out--the inconsistency between chapters, the laziness of borrowing Holmes's characterization from another television series, the often shoddy plotting, the ghastly writing for women--whereas what works, what I found enjoyable and even lovable, is more in the realm of ambiance--the worldbuilding I've already written about, but also the chemistry between Freeman and Cumberbatch, and more than either of these the sense that this really is Holmes, not quite Conan Doyle's Holmes but Holmes nonetheless, brought to the 21st century. That's certainly enough to bring me back, even though I suspect that the series will never deliver the character development that "A Study in Pink" seemed to promise, and that its female characters will never improve. What I'd like, however, if the Sherlock that I wanted can never be, is a little more care in the construction of the episodic, Conan Doyle-esque Sherlock that Moffat and Gatiss seem interested in. Let's have a lot more "Study in Pink"s, and a lot fewer "Blind Banker"s.
Friday, August 06, 2010
The Fortunes of War by Olivia Manning
Six and a half decades after its end, the second World War continues to be one of the most popular and fruitful foundations for works of fiction in Western culture. This is in part due to its influence--there are probably very few people on the planet, even today, whose lives were not shaped to some extent by the war and its aftermath. But it's also because there are so many stories to tell. In my to be read stack right now you would find Hans Fallada's Every Man Dies Alone, about German dissidents under the Nazi regime, and Israeli author Nir Baram's Good People, whose characters are forced to collaborate with the Nazi and Communist regimes in order to survive. One of the most well-received books of this year, Julie Orringer's The Invisible Bridge, is a story of Jewish lovers on the run from the Nazis. HBO's The Pacific spent ten hours telling the story of the Marine takeover of the Japanese-held Pacific islands, and came under fire for not telling the story of the Navy's role in the same battles. Still, if war stories and stories of survival, Jewish or otherwise, under Nazi rule are relatively commonplace, Olivia Manning's six-volume work The Fortunes of War presents an unusual and thus fascinating perspective of the war, telling the story of British civilians fleeing before the German forces in Eastern Europe and the Middle East.
The Fortunes of War is grouped into two trilogies. The Balkan Trilogy consists of The Great Fortune (1960), The Spoilt City (1962) and Friends and Heroes (1965), and tells the story of the series's central couple, Guy and Harriet Pringle, as they make their way out of increasingly Nazi-friendly Romania and into Greece. The Levant Trilogy--The Danger Tree (1977), The Battle Lost and Won (1978) and The Sum of Things (1980)--follows the Pringles to Egypt, and later follows Harriet on a journey to Damascus, Beirut, and Jerusalem, and also adds the character of Simon Boulderstone, a young lieutenant with the British forces who takes part in the battle to repel Rommel's forces from North Africa. NYRB Classics has recently republished The Balkan Trilogy and will hopefully do the same for The Levant Trilogy soon, but I was lucky enough to find both (as well as several other works by the prolific Manning which I will be checking out in the near future) in a used bookstore, and quickly made my way through the entire series. It's a long work--1500 pages all told (though spread out over six books, which means that in modern terms, Manning was practically writing novellas)--but also a compelling and eventually compulsive read. Not because it depicts exciting events or close brushes with danger--on the contrary, Manning deliberately defuses much of the danger that Guy, Harriet, and eventually Simon face, and shies away from nearly every trope of the war story--but because of Manning's character work, her close and intimate descriptions of the effect that the peculiar combination of normalcy and danger her characters are subjected to has on their personalities and lives.
The Great Fortune finds the Pringles, who met and married during Guy's summer vacation from his job as a lecturer for the British Council in Bucharest, traveling back there by train in the fall of 1939. The war has only just been announced and all is confusion. On the train are refugees who are not quite certain what they are running from, or to, and the staff is nervous and unfriendly. The Pringles observe this nervousness with sympathy, but also detachment, and the business of The Balkan Trilogy is the slow loss of that detachment. Looking back on it six and a half decades later, it's easy to think of World War II as a single, clearly delineated block of time in which the rules of the world changed, from peacetime to wartime, from normalcy to a battle for the future of humanity. Even if we realize that people living through the war would not have thought of it as World War II, 1939-1945, that they would have feared, as the characters in The Fortunes of War frequently put it, spending their entire lives in the shadow of this all-consuming monster, it had never really occurred to me that they would have had trouble telling when the war had started. When Harriet and Guy arrive in Bucharest life is still, for the most part, moving along its familiar grooves. They quickly immerse themselves in the city's society of British ex-pats, meeting at bars and restaurants, dimly observing subtle changes in the country around them--food disappearing from stores and restaurants as Romania tries to buy Hitler off by feeding the German army, the ouster of anti-German government ministers, louder and louder voices calling for the abdication of the British-backed king, growing sympathy for Germany as threats from the Soviet border become more pronounced. This slow erosion of normalcy is the focus of the first two books in the trilogy, and it is masterfully handled and, to someone who lives in a country where the boundaries between war and peace seem to have all but vanished, terribly familiar.
As well as being a war story, however, The Fortunes of War is also the story of the Pringles' marriage. Guy is a brilliant, vivacious, gregarious man, an idealist who believes in the coming Communist utopia and who greets every person as a friend. Harriet is more reserved and, as we soon discover, more observant. If Guy (who, in a slightly trite device, is near-sighted and can barely make out people's faces) assumes the goodness and benevolence of everyone he meets, Harriet judges people more shrewdly, correctly gauging their weaknesses and selfishness, and the ways in which they might take advantage of Guy. In Bucharest, Guy is beloved for his friendliness, his boundless energy, and his progressiveness. Towards the climax of the novel he arranges a production of Troilus and Cressida, as a way of showing the British colors even as British forces retreat from the continent at Dunkirk and the German army advances on Paris. He manages to recruit the entire ex-pat community and their hangers-on and transforms them, for a single night, into a company that gives a dazzling performance. It's only Harriet who sees how this willingness to give himself to everyone is also an unwillingness to commit to anyone, including herself, and what thoughtlessness underpins Guy's generosity. When he and Harriet rent a flat, he begins offering their spare room to whoever happens to elicit his sympathy, and only Harriet's firmness prevents it from becoming a hostel. He does, however, manage to bring in two tenants--Prince Yakimov, an aging dandy descended from White Russians who has lived his entire life from one never-to-be-repaid loan to another and finds himself, in an increasingly impoverished and unfriendly Bucharest, on the verge of starvation, and Sasha Druker, the son of a Jewish industrialist whom the Romanian authorities arrest in order to get their hands on his oil holdings. It's only Harriet who realizes that the thoughtless and selfish Yakimov would inform on Sasha, who has defected from the Romanian army, in a minute, she who has to deal with the practical necessities of concealing Sasha and feeding both him and Yakimov, and when the time comes to ask Yakimov to leave, Guy leaves the uncomfortable task in her hands.
The Fortunes of War is autobiographical work--like Harriet, Manning married shortly before the war and followed her husband to Bucharest, Athens, Egypt, and eventually Jerusalem. It's easy to guess this from the lived-in details of Guy and Harriet's ordeal--for example, while working for the American Embassy in Cairo in The Danger Tree, Harriet arrives at the office to find her coworkers gone, having fled before a presumed German invasion and left her, an unimportant foreigner, behind, and the offense Harriet feels at this slight feels very much like Manning's. But it's also noticeable because Manning is as shrewd an observer of humanity as Harriet is, capable of humanizing and making sympathetic even the most unpleasant personality. Yakimov is the prime example. He shares point of view duties with Harriet in The Balkan Trilogy, and his head is an uncomfortable, frustrating space to inhabit. A middle-aged child who has never been forced to grow up, Yakimov has spent his life going through his money, his lover's money, and the money lent to him by increasingly exasperated friends against an allowance that he burns through the minute it comes into his hands. He takes this as his due, and never thinks to make his own way in the world or pay his debts, feeling only self-pity for his inability to live as he had once been accustomed. When the Pringles take him in, he feels only resentment--at Harriet for not purchasing the rich and now prohibitively expensive food he craves, and at Guy for making much of him when he was the star of Troilus and Cressida but shifting his focus to other interests once the play is staged. Yakimov's thoughtlessness and self-absorption shift into the horrific when, in The Spoilt City, he travels to Cluj, which is about to be handed over to Hungary as part of Romania's efforts to appease Germany. The city's inhabitants are fleeing before what they fear is a massacre, but Yakimov only cares about visiting a friend--the German legate--whom he hopes will offer him richer hospitality than the Pringles can. The panicked flight of Cluj's Romanian (and Jewish) inhabitants, seen through Yakimov's naive, uncomprehending eyes, is one of the most affecting sequences in The Fortunes of War, but it is outdone when Yakimov, a natural raconteur who earns his suppers by telling humorous tales, thoughtlessly tells his German friend about a blueprint he found in Guy's papers--part of an attempt by British intelligence to recruit him to sabotage strategic Romanian resources in case of a German invasion. Without even realizing the significance of his actions, Yakimov gives Guy's name to the Gestapo as a possible spy. You want to hate Yakimov at this point, but Manning's portrait of him is so subtle, so sympathetic, that you can't help but understand him--his learned helplessness, his incurable childishness, his fundamental, though potentially destructive, innocence. When Harriet, having barely gotten out of Bucharest and desperate to discover whether Guy has done the same, encounters him in Athens at the end of The Spoilt City, you can't help but feel, as she does, that his familiar face, flawed as it is, is welcome.
Friends and Heroes sees the Pringles quickly reunited in Athens (in one of Manning's signature moves, she ends The Spoilt City with Harriet frantically waiting for news of Guy's escape, but begins the next novel with the anticlimactic announcement--delivered to Harriet by Yakimov--that he's made it out and will soon be with her). The threat of German capture and incarceration (and probably worse for Guy) no longer looms over them, but it quickly becomes clear that imminent danger is what was keeping their marriage going in Bucharest, despite Guy's inattention and neglect, his habitual preference for the company of new friends over that of his wife. In Athens, in relative safety, the cracks soon begin to show. A crisis occurs when Harriet, just beginning to decompress from those last tense months in Bucharest, is overjoyed at the news that in British-friendly Athens, British films are still showing. A new film makes its way to the city and a party is planned, and Harriet makes Guy promise to take her. But when the night arrives it turns out that Guy forgot his promise and is engaged to meet a group of local students of left-wing politics. He refuses to take Harriet to the film because "the meeting's much more important." Which is what's wrong with Guy Pringle in a nutshell--it never occurs to him that there might be difference between what's important and what's important to him, because he truly doesn't perceive the barriers between himself and the world. It's why he's so friendly (and why he refuses to see flaws in people even when they betray him and hurt him), and simultaneously, why he's so inconsiderate of Harriet's wishes and needs--because he thinks of her, as he frequently tells her, as a part of himself, to which he owes no courtesy or consideration.
Harriet, faced with this kind of infuriating neglect, does what any sane woman would do and has an affair, or rather flirts with the idea of one--the morality of the novels and the characters is very much of their time (there is only one mention of sex between Guy and Harriet, and the narrative literally fades to black the minute anything gets started), and though Harriet walks right up to the precipice in her not-quite-romance with the British officer Charles Warden, it's only very late in the relationship that she even allows herself to acknowledge that she's considering an affair. What's best about Manning's depiction of Guy and Harriet's relationship in Friends and Heroes, however, is that even as she makes us feel how frustrating and infuriating Guy's tiny slights against Harriet are, she subtly undermines the romantic cliché of Harriet finding another, more appreciative man--a cliché that not even Harriet fully believes in. The fact is, as selfish and neglectful as Guy is, he is a much better person than Harriet, whose mundane concerns while living in Bucharest often obscure her understanding of the horrible events she's living through--she would not, for example, have offered Sasha Druker a place to live on her own, even though his life depended on it. More importantly, being married to Guy is actually the most interesting thing about Harriet. In a scene in Friends and Lovers, she sneers at the British ex-pats in Athens who, before the war, lived idly on their family money, but it never occurs to her that she is living no less idly, flitting from cafe to restaurant, on her husband's salary. Even when she gets a job in Athens, Harriet remains painfully conventional, and so is her affair with Charles, which is depicted in the most unromantic terms possible as an uneasy negotiation between a woman uncertain of what she wants and a man barely out of childhood.
It's easy to see what a boring, middle-class life Harriet would have with Charles, which may be the reason that she hesitates for so long before committing to the affair (which she anyway only does once the war situation heats up and it becomes clear that Charles will soon be sent to the front lines). So that even as he continues to fail as a husband, it's hard not to want Harriet to stay with Guy, who at least makes her life worth reading about. The one flaw in all of this, of course, is that Manning never really makes it clear why Harriet and Guy married in the first place. It's easy to imagine Harriet falling, as everyone else does, under Guy's spell, but why does Guy, whom Harriet describes as possessing a core of selfishness that protects him from the worst excesses of his impulse towards indiscriminate friendliness, marry her? The obvious answer is love, but there's nothing loving in Guy's behavior towards Harriet--it's only in The Sum of Things that he demonstrates any outward affection for her, anything resembling a desire or need for her presence, which leaves us with the unsatisfying cliché of the man who loves his wife deeply but doesn't change his behavior in any way that reflects this, and anyway doesn't explain why Guy married Harriet when he clearly has no interest whatsoever in being married.
Friends and Heroes, however, is not simply a novel about Guy and Harriet's marital troubles, though these quickly come to dominate it. The move to Greece gives Manning a chance to stretch her descriptive muscles, in particular when it comes to Greek society. The Great Fortune and The Spoilt City are deeply critical of Romanian society, though acknowledging the forces--a deeply corrupt ruling class backed by the British Empire--that have shaped it. They depict Romanians as predatory towards their own peasants and towards the no-longer powerful foreigners among them--British ex-pats, Polish refugees, Jews--and as sympathetic towards Hitler's fascist ideals. Manning is a great deal more sympathetic towards the Greeks. She describes them as welcoming towards their British allies, and staunch in their opposition of the Germans and Italians. It's heartbreaking, therefore, to follow Greece's fading fortunes over the course of the novel, as it first experiences terrible loss of life but manages to defend its borders, and finally succumbs to the German war machine. This is the closest that The Fortunes of War comes to being a typical war novel, but because the story is told through Harriet's slightly disinterested (and, as her affair with Charles heats up, increasingly distracted) eyes, even this narrative undercuts the familiar romance of the story about the doomed defense of these European nations. As a British citizen, Harriet sympathizes with the Greek people, but like the British military she eventually leaves them to their fate, more concerned with her and Guy's survival.
The Levant Trilogy is less successful than The Balkan Trilogy. This is in part due to the decreased tension of the Pringles' predicament. Arriving in Cairo in 1942, they spend a tense year anticipating Rommel's takeover of Egypt, but the war never threatens them as closely as it did in Europe, and by the second volume in the trilogy the German army is already being repelled and the Pringles and their fellow ex-pats are safe, albeit stranded in the Middle East (the Mediterranean is crawling with German U-Boats, and a major sub-plot in the trilogy's last two books involves an evacuation ship carrying British women and children back to England, which is torpedoed, leading to the loss of all but one passenger). It's a very different Middle East to the one we're used to, and part of the appeal of The Balkan Trilogy as far as I was concerned was the glimpse it gave me of this region under Imperial British rule, when people could hop a train from Cairo to Baghdad, or drive from Beirut to Jerusalem. The first two volumes of the trilogy, however, remain in Cairo, where Guy and Harriet settle, more or less comfortably, to wait out the war and observe the final collapse of their marriage. Guy's neglect of Harriet becomes total, to the extent that even when she's hospitalized with dysentery he can't bear to spend more than a few minutes in her room and away from his work. Ashamed of his exemption from fighting due to his poor eyesight, he's consumed with the need to think himself useful, and takes on more and more projects--tutoring local students in English, putting on revues for the troops--that keep him away from home, even as Harriet finds her own crowd in which he takes no interest.
The difference in Manning's depiction of the Pringles' marriage in the two trilogies is that Harriet is growing while Guy is diminishing. She's discovering her own interests and making her own friends while Guy consumes himself with frivolous, ephemeral projects whose actual purpose is to give his life meaning. It's no longer possible to say that Guy is the most interesting thing about Harriet, who explores the new, foreign world she finds herself in more thoroughly than Guy does, and gains a greater understanding of Egypt and the Middle East than Guy does in his cafe conversations with political sympathizers. The justification for the existence of the Pringles' marriage thus fades away, and my reading of the later chapters of The Battle Lost and Won was accompanied by a constant and, by the end of the book, almost deafening mental refrain of leave-him-leave-him-leave-him, especially in the scene that breaks Harriet's resolve to stay with Guy in Egypt, in which he notices a gaudy but expensive piece of jewelry given to Harriet by a friend and, over Harriet's objections, takes it, explaining that Harriet can't possibly like it (she does) and that he might as well give it to the star of his latest revue (who has been shamelessly flirting with him).
The Levant Trilogy, however, is also about the war, and as the civilians are so removed from it Manning gives us Simon Boulderstone, whose point of view alternates with Harriet in the first two books, and with Harriet and Guy in the third. In keeping with her resistance to the romantic tropes of the war novel, Manning makes Simon's experiences of the war deliberately unglamorous. In The Danger Tree he is assigned to a unit at the far end of the British line. He spends most of the novel waiting and struggling to instill respect in his increasingly bored men towards their obviously unqualified commander. His single engagement with the enemy is a confusing melee in which he abandons his men in a doomed effort to save his batman. In The Battle Lost and Won, Simon is reassigned, on the whim of a superior officer with whom he makes a passing acquaintance, to HQ, and given the job of ferrying messages between it and the fighting units as the second battle of El Alamein rages on. It's closer to the center of the action but at the same time far away from it. Simon is literally passing through, watching soldiers advancing, sappers removing mines, tanks burning, but never participating in the action--he just delivers his messages and moves on. Through his eyes, Manning crafts a view of the desert war (which, as far as I know, is underrepresented in WWII fiction) that is both panoramic and remote. The war is just as bewildering when seen from HQ as it was from a unit in the middle of nowhere. Unfortunately, though Simon makes for an interesting vantage point, he's a bit underwhelming as a character (especially as a substitute for Yakimov, who dies at the end of The Balkan Trilogy). This is no doubt deliberate, as it is part of Simon's journey that he grows from the half-formed child he was at the beginning of the trilogy into a man, but that man isn't particularly interesting, and Manning keeps having to tell us how much he's changed and grown because Simon himself can't convey that growth through his thoughts or actions.
At the end of The Battle Lost and Won, an infuriated and fed-up Harriet agrees to go on the evacuation ship to England, but changes her mind at the last minute and accepts a ride to Damascus from a Wren she'd made friends with. There she settles down to recover from the emotional trial of trying to sustain a marriage single-handedly and of Guy's increasing disinterest in her, reasoning that because the ship will take two months to reach England, she can wait at least that long before letting Guy know where she is (though this is clearly an excuse, and a way for Harriet to avoid having the admit that she's left her husband). But the ship, as I've already mentioned, is torpedoed, and at the beginning of The Sum of Things Guy hears the news and believes that Harriet has died. For the first time since a brief interlude in The Great Fortune, Manning gives Guy his own point of view, the better for him to grieve for Harriet and be confronted, finally, with the common perception of their marriage as unloving, and of his behavior as a husband as cruelly neglectful. This is, of course, a very trite device, and the first half of The Sum of Things, in which Guy is repeatedly confronted with characters who have finally bothered to point out to him that he never spent any time with his wife, is a little aggravating. What saves the book is first that so much of it is spent with Harriet in her adventures in the Middle East, and that the region as viewed through her eyes--before the collapse of the British Empire, before the British and French mandates, before Israel, before OPEC, before Islamic fundamentalism and 9/11--is utterly fascinating, a wholly different world already on the verge of collapse due to the war, but expertly and vividly described (and, of course, it's fun to read about fictional characters banging about in familiar places--I know the King David Hotel and the YMCA, where Harriet and her group stay during their sojourn in Jerusalem, very well--and my next foray into Manning's bibliography will be School for Love, which takes place in wartime Jerusalem).
The other reason that Manning's depiction of Guy learning a valuable lesson about appreciating his wife doesn't rankle as much as it should is that Guy doesn't actually learn that lesson. When Harriet discovers that the ship she was supposed to sail on sank and that Guy thinks she's dead, she immediately makes her way back to Cairo. Guy is overwhelmed at the sight of her and breaks down in tears--to the shock of everyone who knows him--but within a few hours he's back to his old tricks, making plans to work late and leaving Harriet to entertain herself. The one who's changed is Harriet, who has apparently decided that for all his flaws, she's going to stick with Guy because he's a better, and more interesting, man than all the other options that have presented themselves, and who has gained a bit of self-confidence--when Guy, showing the barest smidgen of self-awareness, asks her to promise that she won't run away again, she simply says that she probably won't, and laughingly accepts his flaws. This is an unsatisfying end to the trilogy, for Guy's sake as much as for Harriet. Throughout The Levant Trilogy, but especially in The Sum of Things when he's left on his own, Manning makes it clear that though he possesses prodigious amounts of both, Guy doesn't know how to direct either his energies or his affections. He wastes himself on worthless people and pointless projects, and when seen from his point of view rather than Harriet's this comes to seem sad rather than infuriating. You can't help but wish that he'd learn to understand himself and the people around him a bit more, to be more stinging with his time in some quarters, and more generous with it in others. As Manning portrays him in The Sum of Things, he is a man who is squandering the chance at a remarkable life and marriage.
A more prosaic reason that the ending of The Sum of Things is unsatisfying is, I think, that it wasn't intended as the end of the story. The book was published in 1980, the year of Manning's death. Especially given how closely The Fortunes of War shadows Manning's wartime experiences, it's impossible not to believe that she was planning another, concluding trilogy, one that followed Harriet to Jerusalem, where Manning went when her husband was made the head of the Palestine Broadcasting Station, and finally back to England after the end of the war, and which might finally bring some balance and happiness to her and Guy's marriage. Alas, it wasn't to be, and we're left with the six books that Manning was able to write, and the incomplete portrait they paint of both the war and the Pringles' struggling marriage. This is by no means, however, an unsatisfying work, though I might argue that The Balkan Trilogy stands better on its own than as part of an unfinished work with the inferior Levant Trilogy. Manning's unique take on the war, and her intimate, bemused, and infinitely compassionate portraits of Guy, Harriet, and the people they meet, should not be missed. They do what so many war novels fail to do--make the experience of living through terrible upheavals, helpless to affect the events directing your life, an immediate and familiar one, and one that resonates even six and a half decades after the war's end.
The Fortunes of War is grouped into two trilogies. The Balkan Trilogy consists of The Great Fortune (1960), The Spoilt City (1962) and Friends and Heroes (1965), and tells the story of the series's central couple, Guy and Harriet Pringle, as they make their way out of increasingly Nazi-friendly Romania and into Greece. The Levant Trilogy--The Danger Tree (1977), The Battle Lost and Won (1978) and The Sum of Things (1980)--follows the Pringles to Egypt, and later follows Harriet on a journey to Damascus, Beirut, and Jerusalem, and also adds the character of Simon Boulderstone, a young lieutenant with the British forces who takes part in the battle to repel Rommel's forces from North Africa. NYRB Classics has recently republished The Balkan Trilogy and will hopefully do the same for The Levant Trilogy soon, but I was lucky enough to find both (as well as several other works by the prolific Manning which I will be checking out in the near future) in a used bookstore, and quickly made my way through the entire series. It's a long work--1500 pages all told (though spread out over six books, which means that in modern terms, Manning was practically writing novellas)--but also a compelling and eventually compulsive read. Not because it depicts exciting events or close brushes with danger--on the contrary, Manning deliberately defuses much of the danger that Guy, Harriet, and eventually Simon face, and shies away from nearly every trope of the war story--but because of Manning's character work, her close and intimate descriptions of the effect that the peculiar combination of normalcy and danger her characters are subjected to has on their personalities and lives.
The Great Fortune finds the Pringles, who met and married during Guy's summer vacation from his job as a lecturer for the British Council in Bucharest, traveling back there by train in the fall of 1939. The war has only just been announced and all is confusion. On the train are refugees who are not quite certain what they are running from, or to, and the staff is nervous and unfriendly. The Pringles observe this nervousness with sympathy, but also detachment, and the business of The Balkan Trilogy is the slow loss of that detachment. Looking back on it six and a half decades later, it's easy to think of World War II as a single, clearly delineated block of time in which the rules of the world changed, from peacetime to wartime, from normalcy to a battle for the future of humanity. Even if we realize that people living through the war would not have thought of it as World War II, 1939-1945, that they would have feared, as the characters in The Fortunes of War frequently put it, spending their entire lives in the shadow of this all-consuming monster, it had never really occurred to me that they would have had trouble telling when the war had started. When Harriet and Guy arrive in Bucharest life is still, for the most part, moving along its familiar grooves. They quickly immerse themselves in the city's society of British ex-pats, meeting at bars and restaurants, dimly observing subtle changes in the country around them--food disappearing from stores and restaurants as Romania tries to buy Hitler off by feeding the German army, the ouster of anti-German government ministers, louder and louder voices calling for the abdication of the British-backed king, growing sympathy for Germany as threats from the Soviet border become more pronounced. This slow erosion of normalcy is the focus of the first two books in the trilogy, and it is masterfully handled and, to someone who lives in a country where the boundaries between war and peace seem to have all but vanished, terribly familiar.
As well as being a war story, however, The Fortunes of War is also the story of the Pringles' marriage. Guy is a brilliant, vivacious, gregarious man, an idealist who believes in the coming Communist utopia and who greets every person as a friend. Harriet is more reserved and, as we soon discover, more observant. If Guy (who, in a slightly trite device, is near-sighted and can barely make out people's faces) assumes the goodness and benevolence of everyone he meets, Harriet judges people more shrewdly, correctly gauging their weaknesses and selfishness, and the ways in which they might take advantage of Guy. In Bucharest, Guy is beloved for his friendliness, his boundless energy, and his progressiveness. Towards the climax of the novel he arranges a production of Troilus and Cressida, as a way of showing the British colors even as British forces retreat from the continent at Dunkirk and the German army advances on Paris. He manages to recruit the entire ex-pat community and their hangers-on and transforms them, for a single night, into a company that gives a dazzling performance. It's only Harriet who sees how this willingness to give himself to everyone is also an unwillingness to commit to anyone, including herself, and what thoughtlessness underpins Guy's generosity. When he and Harriet rent a flat, he begins offering their spare room to whoever happens to elicit his sympathy, and only Harriet's firmness prevents it from becoming a hostel. He does, however, manage to bring in two tenants--Prince Yakimov, an aging dandy descended from White Russians who has lived his entire life from one never-to-be-repaid loan to another and finds himself, in an increasingly impoverished and unfriendly Bucharest, on the verge of starvation, and Sasha Druker, the son of a Jewish industrialist whom the Romanian authorities arrest in order to get their hands on his oil holdings. It's only Harriet who realizes that the thoughtless and selfish Yakimov would inform on Sasha, who has defected from the Romanian army, in a minute, she who has to deal with the practical necessities of concealing Sasha and feeding both him and Yakimov, and when the time comes to ask Yakimov to leave, Guy leaves the uncomfortable task in her hands.
The Fortunes of War is autobiographical work--like Harriet, Manning married shortly before the war and followed her husband to Bucharest, Athens, Egypt, and eventually Jerusalem. It's easy to guess this from the lived-in details of Guy and Harriet's ordeal--for example, while working for the American Embassy in Cairo in The Danger Tree, Harriet arrives at the office to find her coworkers gone, having fled before a presumed German invasion and left her, an unimportant foreigner, behind, and the offense Harriet feels at this slight feels very much like Manning's. But it's also noticeable because Manning is as shrewd an observer of humanity as Harriet is, capable of humanizing and making sympathetic even the most unpleasant personality. Yakimov is the prime example. He shares point of view duties with Harriet in The Balkan Trilogy, and his head is an uncomfortable, frustrating space to inhabit. A middle-aged child who has never been forced to grow up, Yakimov has spent his life going through his money, his lover's money, and the money lent to him by increasingly exasperated friends against an allowance that he burns through the minute it comes into his hands. He takes this as his due, and never thinks to make his own way in the world or pay his debts, feeling only self-pity for his inability to live as he had once been accustomed. When the Pringles take him in, he feels only resentment--at Harriet for not purchasing the rich and now prohibitively expensive food he craves, and at Guy for making much of him when he was the star of Troilus and Cressida but shifting his focus to other interests once the play is staged. Yakimov's thoughtlessness and self-absorption shift into the horrific when, in The Spoilt City, he travels to Cluj, which is about to be handed over to Hungary as part of Romania's efforts to appease Germany. The city's inhabitants are fleeing before what they fear is a massacre, but Yakimov only cares about visiting a friend--the German legate--whom he hopes will offer him richer hospitality than the Pringles can. The panicked flight of Cluj's Romanian (and Jewish) inhabitants, seen through Yakimov's naive, uncomprehending eyes, is one of the most affecting sequences in The Fortunes of War, but it is outdone when Yakimov, a natural raconteur who earns his suppers by telling humorous tales, thoughtlessly tells his German friend about a blueprint he found in Guy's papers--part of an attempt by British intelligence to recruit him to sabotage strategic Romanian resources in case of a German invasion. Without even realizing the significance of his actions, Yakimov gives Guy's name to the Gestapo as a possible spy. You want to hate Yakimov at this point, but Manning's portrait of him is so subtle, so sympathetic, that you can't help but understand him--his learned helplessness, his incurable childishness, his fundamental, though potentially destructive, innocence. When Harriet, having barely gotten out of Bucharest and desperate to discover whether Guy has done the same, encounters him in Athens at the end of The Spoilt City, you can't help but feel, as she does, that his familiar face, flawed as it is, is welcome.
Friends and Heroes sees the Pringles quickly reunited in Athens (in one of Manning's signature moves, she ends The Spoilt City with Harriet frantically waiting for news of Guy's escape, but begins the next novel with the anticlimactic announcement--delivered to Harriet by Yakimov--that he's made it out and will soon be with her). The threat of German capture and incarceration (and probably worse for Guy) no longer looms over them, but it quickly becomes clear that imminent danger is what was keeping their marriage going in Bucharest, despite Guy's inattention and neglect, his habitual preference for the company of new friends over that of his wife. In Athens, in relative safety, the cracks soon begin to show. A crisis occurs when Harriet, just beginning to decompress from those last tense months in Bucharest, is overjoyed at the news that in British-friendly Athens, British films are still showing. A new film makes its way to the city and a party is planned, and Harriet makes Guy promise to take her. But when the night arrives it turns out that Guy forgot his promise and is engaged to meet a group of local students of left-wing politics. He refuses to take Harriet to the film because "the meeting's much more important." Which is what's wrong with Guy Pringle in a nutshell--it never occurs to him that there might be difference between what's important and what's important to him, because he truly doesn't perceive the barriers between himself and the world. It's why he's so friendly (and why he refuses to see flaws in people even when they betray him and hurt him), and simultaneously, why he's so inconsiderate of Harriet's wishes and needs--because he thinks of her, as he frequently tells her, as a part of himself, to which he owes no courtesy or consideration.
Harriet, faced with this kind of infuriating neglect, does what any sane woman would do and has an affair, or rather flirts with the idea of one--the morality of the novels and the characters is very much of their time (there is only one mention of sex between Guy and Harriet, and the narrative literally fades to black the minute anything gets started), and though Harriet walks right up to the precipice in her not-quite-romance with the British officer Charles Warden, it's only very late in the relationship that she even allows herself to acknowledge that she's considering an affair. What's best about Manning's depiction of Guy and Harriet's relationship in Friends and Heroes, however, is that even as she makes us feel how frustrating and infuriating Guy's tiny slights against Harriet are, she subtly undermines the romantic cliché of Harriet finding another, more appreciative man--a cliché that not even Harriet fully believes in. The fact is, as selfish and neglectful as Guy is, he is a much better person than Harriet, whose mundane concerns while living in Bucharest often obscure her understanding of the horrible events she's living through--she would not, for example, have offered Sasha Druker a place to live on her own, even though his life depended on it. More importantly, being married to Guy is actually the most interesting thing about Harriet. In a scene in Friends and Lovers, she sneers at the British ex-pats in Athens who, before the war, lived idly on their family money, but it never occurs to her that she is living no less idly, flitting from cafe to restaurant, on her husband's salary. Even when she gets a job in Athens, Harriet remains painfully conventional, and so is her affair with Charles, which is depicted in the most unromantic terms possible as an uneasy negotiation between a woman uncertain of what she wants and a man barely out of childhood.
It's easy to see what a boring, middle-class life Harriet would have with Charles, which may be the reason that she hesitates for so long before committing to the affair (which she anyway only does once the war situation heats up and it becomes clear that Charles will soon be sent to the front lines). So that even as he continues to fail as a husband, it's hard not to want Harriet to stay with Guy, who at least makes her life worth reading about. The one flaw in all of this, of course, is that Manning never really makes it clear why Harriet and Guy married in the first place. It's easy to imagine Harriet falling, as everyone else does, under Guy's spell, but why does Guy, whom Harriet describes as possessing a core of selfishness that protects him from the worst excesses of his impulse towards indiscriminate friendliness, marry her? The obvious answer is love, but there's nothing loving in Guy's behavior towards Harriet--it's only in The Sum of Things that he demonstrates any outward affection for her, anything resembling a desire or need for her presence, which leaves us with the unsatisfying cliché of the man who loves his wife deeply but doesn't change his behavior in any way that reflects this, and anyway doesn't explain why Guy married Harriet when he clearly has no interest whatsoever in being married.
Friends and Heroes, however, is not simply a novel about Guy and Harriet's marital troubles, though these quickly come to dominate it. The move to Greece gives Manning a chance to stretch her descriptive muscles, in particular when it comes to Greek society. The Great Fortune and The Spoilt City are deeply critical of Romanian society, though acknowledging the forces--a deeply corrupt ruling class backed by the British Empire--that have shaped it. They depict Romanians as predatory towards their own peasants and towards the no-longer powerful foreigners among them--British ex-pats, Polish refugees, Jews--and as sympathetic towards Hitler's fascist ideals. Manning is a great deal more sympathetic towards the Greeks. She describes them as welcoming towards their British allies, and staunch in their opposition of the Germans and Italians. It's heartbreaking, therefore, to follow Greece's fading fortunes over the course of the novel, as it first experiences terrible loss of life but manages to defend its borders, and finally succumbs to the German war machine. This is the closest that The Fortunes of War comes to being a typical war novel, but because the story is told through Harriet's slightly disinterested (and, as her affair with Charles heats up, increasingly distracted) eyes, even this narrative undercuts the familiar romance of the story about the doomed defense of these European nations. As a British citizen, Harriet sympathizes with the Greek people, but like the British military she eventually leaves them to their fate, more concerned with her and Guy's survival.
The Levant Trilogy is less successful than The Balkan Trilogy. This is in part due to the decreased tension of the Pringles' predicament. Arriving in Cairo in 1942, they spend a tense year anticipating Rommel's takeover of Egypt, but the war never threatens them as closely as it did in Europe, and by the second volume in the trilogy the German army is already being repelled and the Pringles and their fellow ex-pats are safe, albeit stranded in the Middle East (the Mediterranean is crawling with German U-Boats, and a major sub-plot in the trilogy's last two books involves an evacuation ship carrying British women and children back to England, which is torpedoed, leading to the loss of all but one passenger). It's a very different Middle East to the one we're used to, and part of the appeal of The Balkan Trilogy as far as I was concerned was the glimpse it gave me of this region under Imperial British rule, when people could hop a train from Cairo to Baghdad, or drive from Beirut to Jerusalem. The first two volumes of the trilogy, however, remain in Cairo, where Guy and Harriet settle, more or less comfortably, to wait out the war and observe the final collapse of their marriage. Guy's neglect of Harriet becomes total, to the extent that even when she's hospitalized with dysentery he can't bear to spend more than a few minutes in her room and away from his work. Ashamed of his exemption from fighting due to his poor eyesight, he's consumed with the need to think himself useful, and takes on more and more projects--tutoring local students in English, putting on revues for the troops--that keep him away from home, even as Harriet finds her own crowd in which he takes no interest.
The difference in Manning's depiction of the Pringles' marriage in the two trilogies is that Harriet is growing while Guy is diminishing. She's discovering her own interests and making her own friends while Guy consumes himself with frivolous, ephemeral projects whose actual purpose is to give his life meaning. It's no longer possible to say that Guy is the most interesting thing about Harriet, who explores the new, foreign world she finds herself in more thoroughly than Guy does, and gains a greater understanding of Egypt and the Middle East than Guy does in his cafe conversations with political sympathizers. The justification for the existence of the Pringles' marriage thus fades away, and my reading of the later chapters of The Battle Lost and Won was accompanied by a constant and, by the end of the book, almost deafening mental refrain of leave-him-leave-him-leave-him, especially in the scene that breaks Harriet's resolve to stay with Guy in Egypt, in which he notices a gaudy but expensive piece of jewelry given to Harriet by a friend and, over Harriet's objections, takes it, explaining that Harriet can't possibly like it (she does) and that he might as well give it to the star of his latest revue (who has been shamelessly flirting with him).
The Levant Trilogy, however, is also about the war, and as the civilians are so removed from it Manning gives us Simon Boulderstone, whose point of view alternates with Harriet in the first two books, and with Harriet and Guy in the third. In keeping with her resistance to the romantic tropes of the war novel, Manning makes Simon's experiences of the war deliberately unglamorous. In The Danger Tree he is assigned to a unit at the far end of the British line. He spends most of the novel waiting and struggling to instill respect in his increasingly bored men towards their obviously unqualified commander. His single engagement with the enemy is a confusing melee in which he abandons his men in a doomed effort to save his batman. In The Battle Lost and Won, Simon is reassigned, on the whim of a superior officer with whom he makes a passing acquaintance, to HQ, and given the job of ferrying messages between it and the fighting units as the second battle of El Alamein rages on. It's closer to the center of the action but at the same time far away from it. Simon is literally passing through, watching soldiers advancing, sappers removing mines, tanks burning, but never participating in the action--he just delivers his messages and moves on. Through his eyes, Manning crafts a view of the desert war (which, as far as I know, is underrepresented in WWII fiction) that is both panoramic and remote. The war is just as bewildering when seen from HQ as it was from a unit in the middle of nowhere. Unfortunately, though Simon makes for an interesting vantage point, he's a bit underwhelming as a character (especially as a substitute for Yakimov, who dies at the end of The Balkan Trilogy). This is no doubt deliberate, as it is part of Simon's journey that he grows from the half-formed child he was at the beginning of the trilogy into a man, but that man isn't particularly interesting, and Manning keeps having to tell us how much he's changed and grown because Simon himself can't convey that growth through his thoughts or actions.
At the end of The Battle Lost and Won, an infuriated and fed-up Harriet agrees to go on the evacuation ship to England, but changes her mind at the last minute and accepts a ride to Damascus from a Wren she'd made friends with. There she settles down to recover from the emotional trial of trying to sustain a marriage single-handedly and of Guy's increasing disinterest in her, reasoning that because the ship will take two months to reach England, she can wait at least that long before letting Guy know where she is (though this is clearly an excuse, and a way for Harriet to avoid having the admit that she's left her husband). But the ship, as I've already mentioned, is torpedoed, and at the beginning of The Sum of Things Guy hears the news and believes that Harriet has died. For the first time since a brief interlude in The Great Fortune, Manning gives Guy his own point of view, the better for him to grieve for Harriet and be confronted, finally, with the common perception of their marriage as unloving, and of his behavior as a husband as cruelly neglectful. This is, of course, a very trite device, and the first half of The Sum of Things, in which Guy is repeatedly confronted with characters who have finally bothered to point out to him that he never spent any time with his wife, is a little aggravating. What saves the book is first that so much of it is spent with Harriet in her adventures in the Middle East, and that the region as viewed through her eyes--before the collapse of the British Empire, before the British and French mandates, before Israel, before OPEC, before Islamic fundamentalism and 9/11--is utterly fascinating, a wholly different world already on the verge of collapse due to the war, but expertly and vividly described (and, of course, it's fun to read about fictional characters banging about in familiar places--I know the King David Hotel and the YMCA, where Harriet and her group stay during their sojourn in Jerusalem, very well--and my next foray into Manning's bibliography will be School for Love, which takes place in wartime Jerusalem).
The other reason that Manning's depiction of Guy learning a valuable lesson about appreciating his wife doesn't rankle as much as it should is that Guy doesn't actually learn that lesson. When Harriet discovers that the ship she was supposed to sail on sank and that Guy thinks she's dead, she immediately makes her way back to Cairo. Guy is overwhelmed at the sight of her and breaks down in tears--to the shock of everyone who knows him--but within a few hours he's back to his old tricks, making plans to work late and leaving Harriet to entertain herself. The one who's changed is Harriet, who has apparently decided that for all his flaws, she's going to stick with Guy because he's a better, and more interesting, man than all the other options that have presented themselves, and who has gained a bit of self-confidence--when Guy, showing the barest smidgen of self-awareness, asks her to promise that she won't run away again, she simply says that she probably won't, and laughingly accepts his flaws. This is an unsatisfying end to the trilogy, for Guy's sake as much as for Harriet. Throughout The Levant Trilogy, but especially in The Sum of Things when he's left on his own, Manning makes it clear that though he possesses prodigious amounts of both, Guy doesn't know how to direct either his energies or his affections. He wastes himself on worthless people and pointless projects, and when seen from his point of view rather than Harriet's this comes to seem sad rather than infuriating. You can't help but wish that he'd learn to understand himself and the people around him a bit more, to be more stinging with his time in some quarters, and more generous with it in others. As Manning portrays him in The Sum of Things, he is a man who is squandering the chance at a remarkable life and marriage.
A more prosaic reason that the ending of The Sum of Things is unsatisfying is, I think, that it wasn't intended as the end of the story. The book was published in 1980, the year of Manning's death. Especially given how closely The Fortunes of War shadows Manning's wartime experiences, it's impossible not to believe that she was planning another, concluding trilogy, one that followed Harriet to Jerusalem, where Manning went when her husband was made the head of the Palestine Broadcasting Station, and finally back to England after the end of the war, and which might finally bring some balance and happiness to her and Guy's marriage. Alas, it wasn't to be, and we're left with the six books that Manning was able to write, and the incomplete portrait they paint of both the war and the Pringles' struggling marriage. This is by no means, however, an unsatisfying work, though I might argue that The Balkan Trilogy stands better on its own than as part of an unfinished work with the inferior Levant Trilogy. Manning's unique take on the war, and her intimate, bemused, and infinitely compassionate portraits of Guy, Harriet, and the people they meet, should not be missed. They do what so many war novels fail to do--make the experience of living through terrible upheavals, helpless to affect the events directing your life, an immediate and familiar one, and one that resonates even six and a half decades after the war's end.
Monday, August 02, 2010
Review: Under the Dome by Stephen King
My review of Stephen King's latest opus, Under the Dome, appears today in Strange Horizons. It's a strange book--definitely not up to the standard of King's heyday, but suggesting so many new directions he might have gone in, and then failing to follow through, that I ended up finding it simultaneously invigorating and depressing.
Thursday, July 29, 2010
Inception: Further Thoughts
Between them, Niall Harrison, Adam Roberts, and, in the comments to my post about it (starting here), Brian Francis Slattery, have talked me over to their reading of Inception--the film and the concept at its core--as a metaphor for storytelling and the artifice of filmmaking (which probably means that my original take on the film, as an SFnal story about learning the world, is, if not off-base, then probably no more productive than obsessing over whether Cobb is still dreaming in the last scene). As I say to Brian, however, I think that as an analogy to storytelling, dreaming is a very poor fit. Niall is right to point out that most of us don't dream as vividly and imaginatively as the more common filmic represenation of dreams--vividly colored surrealist landscapes--would have us believe. My dreams, the ones I remember at least, usually feature familiar settings and actions (though I did once dream that I was investigating the murder of Kermit the frog--I'm still pissed about being woken up before getting to the bottom of that mystery) that have been scrambled into illogic by my sleeping brain. If it's unfair to condemn Inception for not being The Cell, however, it still seems valid to me to compare it to Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind or the Buffy episode "Restless," both of which feature dreams that are entirely mundane in their settings and events (or, in the latter case, as mundane as settings and events in Buffy get), and whose strangeness is derived from the illogical manner in which the characters move within those scenes, and their atypical reactions to them. Inception's dreams, meanwhile, are entirely linear and entirely logical, and though I accept that this is because storytelling, and not dreams, is actually the film's focus, the discrepancy only serves to highlight how strained the film's central metaphor is.
Niall, Adam and Brian argue that Inception is drawing our attention to the similar actions we perform in dreams and when consuming a story--accepting illogic as logic, filling in the interstices between 'scenes' in order to create a coherent story in our brains. But to my mind these are actually two distinct and very different acts. I mentioned the second season finale of House in one of my replies to Brian. In the opening scene, House is shot, and spends the rest of the episode trying to diagnose a patient from his hospital room. In the climactic scene, he has a revelation about the patient's illness while talking to his fellows, and the next scene shows them in a stairwell continuing to talk. House turns around and asks: "How did I get here? I was just in my hospital room," and realizes that he's still in a coma following his shooting. It's a very neat and wrongfooting moment because it draws attention to an action that the audience performs automatically--filling in the gaps in a story so that it can form a coherent, lifelike whole in our minds--but it also draws our attention to the difference between dream and story, and the reason that reading Inception as a metaphor for storytelling strikes me as empty. When House realizes the illogic of his experiences, he ceases to believe in his perceived reality, in the story happening around him. I'm sure that most people have had the experience of being immersed in a dream and, as they draw closer to consciousness, realizing some logical flaw in it, at which point the dream dissipates. Consuming story isn't like that. Momentarily wrongfooting as it is, the metafictional gag at the end of House's second season doesn't cause the audience to stop believing in the show, because the audience was already aware of the story's fictionality. Unlike dreams, we know that a story is unreal and accept that unreality. We know, even if it's not something we think about very often, that we are active participants in the creation of the story, and that we are lending our intellectual and emotional faculties to something unreal. It's a knowing, conscious act, not the unaware acceptance of the illogic of dreams. Dream isn't a parallel for story; it's the opposite of it.
The other reason that I don't like this reading of Inception (besides, as I say to Brian, that I'm really not sure what Nolan is trying to say when he compares storytelling to what is essentially a mind-rape) is that it reduces the film to this metaphor. The substance of the film ceases to matter because its purpose is merely to call attention to its own artificiality. The experience of watching the film is not the point, and therefore it doesn't matter that this experience is so leaden, because the purpose of the film is the realization that comes hours or days after one has finished watching it. This doesn't have to be an unsuccessful approach--once again I'm moved to compare Inception to Primer, which so completely avoids delivering anything like a satisfying viewing experience that it's almost necessary to watch the film twice in order to get anything out of the experience--but it does require more courage and intelligence than Inception seems to possess. I agree with Niall, in other words, that an intellectual exercise can be thrilling in its own right, without appealing to the emotion, but Inception, to my mind, isn't. That said, it's precisely because Inception is so substance-less that I'm growing more charitable towards it as I move away from it. Like a dream, the experience of watching the film has faded away almost entirely, while the interpretation offered by Niall, Adam and Brian--so much more palatable in a few, well-written paragraphs than in a two hour film--lingers on.
Niall, Adam and Brian argue that Inception is drawing our attention to the similar actions we perform in dreams and when consuming a story--accepting illogic as logic, filling in the interstices between 'scenes' in order to create a coherent story in our brains. But to my mind these are actually two distinct and very different acts. I mentioned the second season finale of House in one of my replies to Brian. In the opening scene, House is shot, and spends the rest of the episode trying to diagnose a patient from his hospital room. In the climactic scene, he has a revelation about the patient's illness while talking to his fellows, and the next scene shows them in a stairwell continuing to talk. House turns around and asks: "How did I get here? I was just in my hospital room," and realizes that he's still in a coma following his shooting. It's a very neat and wrongfooting moment because it draws attention to an action that the audience performs automatically--filling in the gaps in a story so that it can form a coherent, lifelike whole in our minds--but it also draws our attention to the difference between dream and story, and the reason that reading Inception as a metaphor for storytelling strikes me as empty. When House realizes the illogic of his experiences, he ceases to believe in his perceived reality, in the story happening around him. I'm sure that most people have had the experience of being immersed in a dream and, as they draw closer to consciousness, realizing some logical flaw in it, at which point the dream dissipates. Consuming story isn't like that. Momentarily wrongfooting as it is, the metafictional gag at the end of House's second season doesn't cause the audience to stop believing in the show, because the audience was already aware of the story's fictionality. Unlike dreams, we know that a story is unreal and accept that unreality. We know, even if it's not something we think about very often, that we are active participants in the creation of the story, and that we are lending our intellectual and emotional faculties to something unreal. It's a knowing, conscious act, not the unaware acceptance of the illogic of dreams. Dream isn't a parallel for story; it's the opposite of it.
The other reason that I don't like this reading of Inception (besides, as I say to Brian, that I'm really not sure what Nolan is trying to say when he compares storytelling to what is essentially a mind-rape) is that it reduces the film to this metaphor. The substance of the film ceases to matter because its purpose is merely to call attention to its own artificiality. The experience of watching the film is not the point, and therefore it doesn't matter that this experience is so leaden, because the purpose of the film is the realization that comes hours or days after one has finished watching it. This doesn't have to be an unsuccessful approach--once again I'm moved to compare Inception to Primer, which so completely avoids delivering anything like a satisfying viewing experience that it's almost necessary to watch the film twice in order to get anything out of the experience--but it does require more courage and intelligence than Inception seems to possess. I agree with Niall, in other words, that an intellectual exercise can be thrilling in its own right, without appealing to the emotion, but Inception, to my mind, isn't. That said, it's precisely because Inception is so substance-less that I'm growing more charitable towards it as I move away from it. Like a dream, the experience of watching the film has faded away almost entirely, while the interpretation offered by Niall, Adam and Brian--so much more palatable in a few, well-written paragraphs than in a two hour film--lingers on.
Wednesday, July 28, 2010
Making Yourself Heard: You're Maybe Doing it Wrong?
Quoting from the most recent issue of Locus, Sean Wallace reports on the voting statistics of the Locus Awards (results here), which, as we discussed a few months ago, have for the second year running persisted in their policy of counting non-subscriber votes as half of subscriber votes. The language is muddled (and continues to spin the unequal vote-counting policy as a response to alleged "ballot-box stuffing" in 2008), but a quick calculation gives us the following results:
| Year | Total Votes | Subscriber Votes | Nonsubscriber Votes | % of Nonsubscriber Votes |
| 2008 | 1012 | 385 | 726 | |
| 2009 | 662 | 357 | 305 | 46 |
| 2010 | 680 | 306 | 374 | 55 |
The good news is that the overall number of votes has remained low, and that the significant drop in nonsubscriber votes between 2008 and 2009 has not been reversed. The bad news is that there were more nonsubscriber votes in 2010 than 2009, and that their percentage is creeping back up to its 2008 levels (though this is also the result of the steady drop in subscriber votes over the last three years). I'm not sure that this sends the right message to the award's administrators--the short passage Wallace quotes certainly suggests that they think this year's numbers are something to be celebrated. If they believe that participants in their poll will tolerate being treated like second class voters, they'll have no reason to reverse this misguided and insulting policy.
Saturday, July 24, 2010
Inception
Has there ever been a film as hotly anticipated, as burdened with expectations, as Christopher Nolan's Inception? It's certainly hard to think of one, nor to credit all the things that we thought, believed, or hoped that this film would accomplish. It would rescue one of the dullest and most underperforming summer blockbuster seasons in recent memory. It would combine the best qualities of all of last year's science fiction films--the stunning visuals of Avatar, the originality of District 9, the enthusiastic fannishness of Star Trek, the detail-oriented fannishness of Watchmen, the attention to character of Moon--into a single perfect storm of SFnal moviemaking. It would prove, once and for all, that a film that both demonstrated intelligence and demanded it from its viewers could triumph at the box office. It would put an end to the plague of sequels and remakes that has blighted Hollywood's blockbuster production for the better part of a decade. It would bring balance to the Force, cure leprosy, and make peace in the Middle East. The conventional wisdom is that when you walk into a movie theater with such high hopes--and to the barrage of uninformed and unrealistic expectations the film raised you could add, this last week, its near-universal critical acclaim--disappointment it almost inevitable, but though I walked out of Inception feeling less than enthusiastic, I don't see my reaction to the film as an inevitable come-down from unsustainable build-up. That would result in a review much like the one I wrote for District 9, which took for granted the film's by-then much touted strengths and concentrated on its weaknesses. My reaction to Inception is actually something much more fundamental, and much more negative--I genuinely can't see what anyone sees in this film.
Many of the reactions I've seen to Inception have kicked off by noting that the film is less a science fiction movie than a heist film in SFnal garb. I assume that these writers are consciously trying to ape to consensus that quickly built around Nolan's previous film, The Dark Knight, that its superhero story trappings were merely set dressing on what was actually a crime story. In reality, these reviewers are making the opposite sort of statement. To say that Inception is a heist film is actually analogous to saying that the The Dark Knight is a superhero film. It's trivially true--the film's plot revolves around the main character, Leonardo DiCaprio's Cobb, assembling a crew, planning a job, and carrying it out--but for the purposes of making a meaningful statement about the film and the things it tries to do, not at all useful, if for no other reason than because Inception is a supremely bad heist film. It lacks anything like the flare and pizazz of Ocean's Eleven, The Italian Job, or Duplicity--is in fact an almost leaden experience, to the extent that when a thin joke turned up halfway through the film, the audience I was seeing it with broke out in relieved, almost hysterical laughter, glad for even the slightest leavening of tone. It completely fails not only to establish the unique personalities of its characters, but to spell out their individual roles in the heist, to the extent that at least two of them, Ellen Page's Ariadne and Ken Watanabe's Saito, join in the fun merely because they want to, not because they have an integral role to play that extends past the job's planning stages (and I'm also not clear why Yusuf, the chemist played by Dileep Rao who concocts the compounds that allow the characters to enter another person's dreams, needed to come along for the job instead of monitoring the crew from reality, though Cobb insists that he does). Most importantly, it doesn't deliver the heist film's classic reveal, the missing puzzle piece or palmed card that suddenly makes sense of the entire plot, which locks together like the gears of an intricate but perfectly functioning machine.
So no, Inception is not a heist film dressed up as a science fiction film. It's a science fiction film dressed up as a heist film, and I'm using the term science fiction here in its most literary, perhaps even Campbell-ian, sense. Though the McGuffin that allows the characters to manipulate others' dreams and, through that manipulation, to extract or plant ideas in their minds is so thoroughly handwaved away that Ariadne, the token newbie, can't even put up a token objection when the idea is suggested to her, the story that Inception tells is a quintessentially SFnal one--a story about learning the world, learning its rules, and learning how to use them to your advantage. Which may be the reason why there's been so much talk about the cleverness and convolutedness of what is actually one of the most straightforward, linearly-presented films Nolan has ever made. There is in Inception none of the playing around with timelines or plotlines that made Memento and The Prestige such twisty delights. Instead, the plot proceeds quite regularly from past to future (with occasional and very clearly signposted flashbacks). There is, of course, the shifting between different layers of dreams and dreams-within-dreams, but beyond the deliberately wrong-footing in media res opening, these are also very clearly differentiated. But for the question that lingers over the entire film and remains unanswered at its end--did Cobb ever truly make it out of limbo, or is his reality just another layer of dream--we never mistake dream for reality, or the different layers of dream for one another. It's complicated, but it's not clever, and the reason that Inception is so demanding isn't that it's asking us to piece its plot together, but that it's asking us to learn, on the fly and with only the barest consideration for our confusion, the rules of how dream manipulation works. It's info-dumping--a film made up almost entirely of info-dumps, whose characters exist primarily to ask or answer questions in a manner that provides those info-dumps to the viewer. The classic science fiction story, in other words, and one that viewers who don't have grounding in the genre may lack the protocols to properly parse and digest.
It's fashionable these days to look down on the Campbell-ian method of science fiction, and the fact that it prioritized imparting information to the reader over engaging them with plot and characters, and though I'm partial to the occasional Stephen Baxter novel I'm certainly glad that science fiction has discovered more and more complicated tools to tell its stories. But that's not the reason that Inception left me so cold. If I wanted to sum up my disappointment with the film in a few lines, they would be these: a lot of people are praising Inception for being a more cerebral version of The Matrix, another film whose main character has to learn how to manipulate a reality whose underlying laws are different from those of our reality, but I can't help but see it as a less rigorous version of Primer. When it comes to translating Campbell-ian science fiction to the screen, Primer is the still undefeated title-holder. Its characters speak pure and very nearly incomprehensible info-dump, their emotional motivations are either dimly explained or boring or both, and the film's emotional climax comes when one character, having been explained the rules of the method of time travel discovered by his friend, figures out a way to manipulate those rules and expand the technology's capablities.
Inception desperately wants to be Primer but lacks both the courage and the rigor to go all the way. Instead of completely downplaying its characters' humanity it tacks on a trite and poorly realized romantic motivation for Cobb, who is trying to break free of his guilt over the death of his wife Mal (Marion Cotillard, the only castmember with anything like a vivid on-screen presence, mainly because she's given a lot of scenery to chew--a corrupted version of Cobb's wife driven by his feelings of responsibility for her death, she shrieks and threatens, and gets to be genuinely scary). Even worse, the film's construction of its alternate reality and its rules lacks the elegance demonstrated by both Primer and The Matrix. Early scenes make much of Ariadne's ability to manipulate the physics of the dream-world, and though these are visually stunning this ability plays no part in the actual heist. There is only one sequence in which a character is seen to have fully imbibed the rules of the unreal reality--when Arthur (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), left behind in an intermediate dream level to guard his dreaming friends and wake them up when the time is right, finds himself in free-fall because in a higher dream-level, he is in a van that has just plunged off a bridge, and has to swim around, like an astronaut in a custom-tailored suit, dodging bullets from the protective manifestations of the heist target's subconscious while preparing the others to be woken up.
Worst of all, the rules of dream manipulation are self-contradictory and, eventually, just tacked on. Early on we're told that if a person dies in the dream world they wake up in reality (or the next level up). Then it's revealed that the compound the characters have taken in order to carry out the heist is too powerful, and that if they die they'll be thrust into limbo, an unconstructed dream state from which there is no escape, which will permanently scramble their brains, in part because they'll become incapable of telling reality from dream. But when the characters do end up in limbo it seems like just another layer of dream, no more irrational and no less susceptible to their manipulation, than any other. Most of them recognize that they are in limbo, and then it turns out that getting out of it is as simple as getting out of the other dream layers--you just need to die. (For the record, all of these problems could have been resolved if the heist plot were better written. Limbo only exists because Nolan needs something meaningful to threaten the characters with during the heist, having established that death will simply knock them out of the dream, but if each character had an integral role to play in the heist then their death, and disappearance from the dream world, would be a threat in its own right.) Inception thus occupies a very unsatisfying middle ground--it is nowhere near clever enough to justify the scant attention it pays to the more traditional elements of storytelling such as character and plot.
What most interests me about my reaction to Inception is how little I care that it's been so well-received elsewhere. Compared to my reactions to Avatar or Star Trek, films whose effusive reception came close to enraging me, I'm surprisingly sanguine about the praise that this film, which ultimately is so much less successful than either Avatar or Star Trek, has received. I think the reason is that though I disagree with the praise that's been heaped upon it, there's still something satisfying in hearing that praise voiced. People are praising Inception for being a science fiction film--not a Star Wars-esque fantasy in space, or a character drama that happens to take place in the future--and for doing SFnal things. I think that it does these things badly, but it's still gratifying to see the effort lauded. I don't know whether Inception is a sign of things to come--for Nolan, for summer blockbusters, for science fiction films--though in the latter two cases I suspect that it isn't, and in Nolan's case I hope not (and even if he does end up crawling up his own ass I can comfort myself with the knowledge that before he's free to do so, he has to make another Batman film), but the fact that in some small way, it has normalized some of the tools of science fiction in the minds of a much broader audience than the genre usually reaches is, I think, something to be celebrated. Maybe some day someone will use those tools to make a blockbuster that is actually good.
Many of the reactions I've seen to Inception have kicked off by noting that the film is less a science fiction movie than a heist film in SFnal garb. I assume that these writers are consciously trying to ape to consensus that quickly built around Nolan's previous film, The Dark Knight, that its superhero story trappings were merely set dressing on what was actually a crime story. In reality, these reviewers are making the opposite sort of statement. To say that Inception is a heist film is actually analogous to saying that the The Dark Knight is a superhero film. It's trivially true--the film's plot revolves around the main character, Leonardo DiCaprio's Cobb, assembling a crew, planning a job, and carrying it out--but for the purposes of making a meaningful statement about the film and the things it tries to do, not at all useful, if for no other reason than because Inception is a supremely bad heist film. It lacks anything like the flare and pizazz of Ocean's Eleven, The Italian Job, or Duplicity--is in fact an almost leaden experience, to the extent that when a thin joke turned up halfway through the film, the audience I was seeing it with broke out in relieved, almost hysterical laughter, glad for even the slightest leavening of tone. It completely fails not only to establish the unique personalities of its characters, but to spell out their individual roles in the heist, to the extent that at least two of them, Ellen Page's Ariadne and Ken Watanabe's Saito, join in the fun merely because they want to, not because they have an integral role to play that extends past the job's planning stages (and I'm also not clear why Yusuf, the chemist played by Dileep Rao who concocts the compounds that allow the characters to enter another person's dreams, needed to come along for the job instead of monitoring the crew from reality, though Cobb insists that he does). Most importantly, it doesn't deliver the heist film's classic reveal, the missing puzzle piece or palmed card that suddenly makes sense of the entire plot, which locks together like the gears of an intricate but perfectly functioning machine.
So no, Inception is not a heist film dressed up as a science fiction film. It's a science fiction film dressed up as a heist film, and I'm using the term science fiction here in its most literary, perhaps even Campbell-ian, sense. Though the McGuffin that allows the characters to manipulate others' dreams and, through that manipulation, to extract or plant ideas in their minds is so thoroughly handwaved away that Ariadne, the token newbie, can't even put up a token objection when the idea is suggested to her, the story that Inception tells is a quintessentially SFnal one--a story about learning the world, learning its rules, and learning how to use them to your advantage. Which may be the reason why there's been so much talk about the cleverness and convolutedness of what is actually one of the most straightforward, linearly-presented films Nolan has ever made. There is in Inception none of the playing around with timelines or plotlines that made Memento and The Prestige such twisty delights. Instead, the plot proceeds quite regularly from past to future (with occasional and very clearly signposted flashbacks). There is, of course, the shifting between different layers of dreams and dreams-within-dreams, but beyond the deliberately wrong-footing in media res opening, these are also very clearly differentiated. But for the question that lingers over the entire film and remains unanswered at its end--did Cobb ever truly make it out of limbo, or is his reality just another layer of dream--we never mistake dream for reality, or the different layers of dream for one another. It's complicated, but it's not clever, and the reason that Inception is so demanding isn't that it's asking us to piece its plot together, but that it's asking us to learn, on the fly and with only the barest consideration for our confusion, the rules of how dream manipulation works. It's info-dumping--a film made up almost entirely of info-dumps, whose characters exist primarily to ask or answer questions in a manner that provides those info-dumps to the viewer. The classic science fiction story, in other words, and one that viewers who don't have grounding in the genre may lack the protocols to properly parse and digest.
It's fashionable these days to look down on the Campbell-ian method of science fiction, and the fact that it prioritized imparting information to the reader over engaging them with plot and characters, and though I'm partial to the occasional Stephen Baxter novel I'm certainly glad that science fiction has discovered more and more complicated tools to tell its stories. But that's not the reason that Inception left me so cold. If I wanted to sum up my disappointment with the film in a few lines, they would be these: a lot of people are praising Inception for being a more cerebral version of The Matrix, another film whose main character has to learn how to manipulate a reality whose underlying laws are different from those of our reality, but I can't help but see it as a less rigorous version of Primer. When it comes to translating Campbell-ian science fiction to the screen, Primer is the still undefeated title-holder. Its characters speak pure and very nearly incomprehensible info-dump, their emotional motivations are either dimly explained or boring or both, and the film's emotional climax comes when one character, having been explained the rules of the method of time travel discovered by his friend, figures out a way to manipulate those rules and expand the technology's capablities.
Inception desperately wants to be Primer but lacks both the courage and the rigor to go all the way. Instead of completely downplaying its characters' humanity it tacks on a trite and poorly realized romantic motivation for Cobb, who is trying to break free of his guilt over the death of his wife Mal (Marion Cotillard, the only castmember with anything like a vivid on-screen presence, mainly because she's given a lot of scenery to chew--a corrupted version of Cobb's wife driven by his feelings of responsibility for her death, she shrieks and threatens, and gets to be genuinely scary). Even worse, the film's construction of its alternate reality and its rules lacks the elegance demonstrated by both Primer and The Matrix. Early scenes make much of Ariadne's ability to manipulate the physics of the dream-world, and though these are visually stunning this ability plays no part in the actual heist. There is only one sequence in which a character is seen to have fully imbibed the rules of the unreal reality--when Arthur (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), left behind in an intermediate dream level to guard his dreaming friends and wake them up when the time is right, finds himself in free-fall because in a higher dream-level, he is in a van that has just plunged off a bridge, and has to swim around, like an astronaut in a custom-tailored suit, dodging bullets from the protective manifestations of the heist target's subconscious while preparing the others to be woken up.
Worst of all, the rules of dream manipulation are self-contradictory and, eventually, just tacked on. Early on we're told that if a person dies in the dream world they wake up in reality (or the next level up). Then it's revealed that the compound the characters have taken in order to carry out the heist is too powerful, and that if they die they'll be thrust into limbo, an unconstructed dream state from which there is no escape, which will permanently scramble their brains, in part because they'll become incapable of telling reality from dream. But when the characters do end up in limbo it seems like just another layer of dream, no more irrational and no less susceptible to their manipulation, than any other. Most of them recognize that they are in limbo, and then it turns out that getting out of it is as simple as getting out of the other dream layers--you just need to die. (For the record, all of these problems could have been resolved if the heist plot were better written. Limbo only exists because Nolan needs something meaningful to threaten the characters with during the heist, having established that death will simply knock them out of the dream, but if each character had an integral role to play in the heist then their death, and disappearance from the dream world, would be a threat in its own right.) Inception thus occupies a very unsatisfying middle ground--it is nowhere near clever enough to justify the scant attention it pays to the more traditional elements of storytelling such as character and plot.
What most interests me about my reaction to Inception is how little I care that it's been so well-received elsewhere. Compared to my reactions to Avatar or Star Trek, films whose effusive reception came close to enraging me, I'm surprisingly sanguine about the praise that this film, which ultimately is so much less successful than either Avatar or Star Trek, has received. I think the reason is that though I disagree with the praise that's been heaped upon it, there's still something satisfying in hearing that praise voiced. People are praising Inception for being a science fiction film--not a Star Wars-esque fantasy in space, or a character drama that happens to take place in the future--and for doing SFnal things. I think that it does these things badly, but it's still gratifying to see the effort lauded. I don't know whether Inception is a sign of things to come--for Nolan, for summer blockbusters, for science fiction films--though in the latter two cases I suspect that it isn't, and in Nolan's case I hope not (and even if he does end up crawling up his own ass I can comfort myself with the knowledge that before he's free to do so, he has to make another Batman film), but the fact that in some small way, it has normalized some of the tools of science fiction in the minds of a much broader audience than the genre usually reaches is, I think, something to be celebrated. Maybe some day someone will use those tools to make a blockbuster that is actually good.
Tuesday, July 13, 2010
Recent Reading Roundup 26
Looking over this list, I see that it creates a distinctly underwhelming impression of my recent reading--even the one book I really liked proved less impressive in hindsight. That's not actually an accurate picture, because there's a whole pile of books that I'm planning to write about in the near future that I've been very pleased with. But for the time being, here are some books I wasn't too crazy about.
- The Stress of Her Regard by Tim Powers - This is only the second Powers I've read, and the first, The Anubis Gates, was more than a decade ago and thus one of my earliest forays into non-Tolkienian fantasy. That, and the fact that The Anubis Gates is a fantastic book with a twisty time travel plot that is a joy to unravel, created some high expectations from Powers, which I thought this novel, in which the Romantic poets turn out to be entangled in relationships that
are one part abusive, one part addictive with vampires who fuel their creativity and feed on their, and their families', lives, would easily fulfill. Not so, however--where The Anubis Gates's plot is twisty but, ultimately, impeccably structured, The Stress of Her Regard is a floppy, maybe even flabby book, overpopulated and unfocused. Powers introduces some interesting twists to the vampire mythology, even suggesting a strange sfnal explanation for their existence and bringing in such esoteric subjects as quantum mechanics to the heroes' struggle to escape their lovers/tormentors' attentions, but it's too much mythology for a novel as centerless as this one is. I was more than halfway into the book before I really understood the rules of how its vampires worked, and even then Powers kept piling complications, provisos, and special cases onto those rules. The novel's characters and their predicament, meanwhile, are nowhere near interesting or appealing enough to make puzzling out this mythology worthwhile. The poets who turn out to be victims of the vampires--Byron, Shelley, Keats--are all on the nondescript side. Powers is more interested in them as examples of the dissipated, doomed Romantic lifestyle than as artists and innovators (which was particularly hard to swallow in Keats's case given that the version of him presented in the movie Bright Star, where he is intelligent, driven, and serious about his poetry, is still vivid in my memory), but it takes writerly flare to create characters who are as mad, bad, and dangerous to know as the Romantics supposedly were, and Powers doesn't wield it in this novel. The poets thus become a little dull, and sadly they are not overshadowed by the novel's fictional hero, Michael Crawford. Powers deliberately constructs him as something of a loser, tormented by his many failures even before coming to a vampire's attentions, but he does too good a job, because Crawford just isn't a very interesting character even when he overcomes his self-doubt and starts kicking vampire ass, and the romance he develops in the second half of the book, which drives his final confrontation with the vampires, is unpersuasive (it doesn't help that I have a sneaking suspicion that the novel would have been a great deal more interesting had it been told entirely from the point of view of his love interest). It's possible that The Stress of Her Regard is a lesser work best left to Powers enthusiasts, or maybe my recollections of The Anubis Gates are a little too rose-tinted. I'm certainly a bit afraid to revisit it now, or to take another stab at Powers's bibliography. - Shining at the Bottom of the Sea by Stephen Marche - Marche's novel has an innovative concept that I found both exhilarating and worrisome. The book is presented as an anthology of short stories from the fictional North Atlantic island nation of Sanjania, moving chronologically through folk tales, religious fiction, and pulp-style adventure stories to the more modern form of the short story, even as the nation undergoes the traditional hardships of a former colony, passing from
colonial rule through more and less successful efforts at democracy and self-government. It's a fantastically original and instantly appealing concept, but at the same time a self-defeating one. The stories in Shining at the Bottom of the Sea are not the point of Shining at the Bottom of the Sea. Though Marche is a persuasive ventriloquist with a wide range of styles at his disposal (the blurbs on the cover compare him to David Mitchell, and though that's probably going too far the two are certainly in the same ballpark), to read any of the stories as short fiction in its own right is to miss the point of the book, which is the cumulative image they form of Sanjania. But unlike a fantastic novel taking the same tack (the most obvious comparison that comes to mind is City of Saints and Madmen) the Sanjania that Shining at the Bottom of the Sea creates isn't a creation in its own right either. Its purpose is to mirror reality, almost to the point of slavishness, and certainly to the point where any sense of unique Sanjanian-ness is lost amongst the real-world parallels. So that Shining at the Bottom of the Sea is almost an empty novel, an impressive achievement whose point escapes me--it certainly doesn't say anything about colonialism and the recovery from it that other, more traditional novels haven't already said. It's an enjoyable reading experience, both because of the audacity of Marche's experiment and because of his success at it, but leaves very little residue behind itself. - His Majesty's Dragon by Naomi Novik - Novik's bestselling, mega-successful series is by now on its sixth installment and I've only just gotten around to reading the first. Can't say that I regret the delay, but then I wasn't expecting to, and in fact His Majesty's Dragon delivered exactly what I thought it would--it is charming, very readable, a great deal of fun, and
extremely lightweight. What I wasn't expecting was just how much the novel would downplay the adventurous aspect of its alternate universe, in which the Napoleonic Wars are fought from the air on dragon-back, in favor of a comedy of manners that morphs, in the novel's long center segment, into the classic boarding school story, complete with the protagonist, Will Laurence, a naval captain who is drafted into the dragon corps when he imprints on a newly-hatched dragon captured by his ship, turning out to be preternaturally talented at his new role and being resented by the school's mean kids for outsider status and talent, only to be finally accepted by them as the bestest dragon-rider to ever ride a dragon. A cross, in other words, between Harry Potter and Anne McCaffrey's Dragonsinger, but one in which the dragon character, Temeraire, is as appealing and vividly drawn as the lead, and in which the relationship between them is sweetly devoted to the point of being almost romantic. No wonder this book was such a runaway success--it rings nearly every one of fandom's bells, and quite nicely too--though I suspect that later books in the series move away from the school setting and spend more time on aerial battles, which in His Majesty's Dragon are almost an afterthought (the climactic one is won by Temeraire suddenly demonstrating a previously unknown ability that demolishes the enemy forces). Not that I'm in any hurry to have those suspicions confirmed--I'm not sorry I read His Majesty's Dragon, but having seen what all the fuss is about I think I can give the rest of the series a pass. - The Book of Night Women by Marlon James - I'm not quite sure what to say about this novel. When I read it a month ago I thought it was one of the most wrenching, overwhelming pieces of fiction I'd read in a long time, and a sure contender for best book of the year. But only a few weeks after finishing it, I find that it's left almost no residue in my mind--I had to struggle, when sitting down to write this post, to recall its main plot points and characters. That's a damning testimonial that I'm almost certain The Book of Night Women doesn't deserve. I have no idea why it slipped from my mind so easily, and it could
simply be that it's been a busy few weeks and that other subjects have occupied me. Nevertheless, I can't recommend this book as wholeheartedly as intended to right after I finished it. That said, this is still a magnificent novel, telling the story of Lilith, a slave in a Jamaican sugar plantation in the late 18th century who becomes entangled with her master's family situation and with a plot on the part of the plantation's slave women to foment rebellion. James narrates the novel in the slaves' patois, which is initially a jarring choice that makes the novel's early chapters a challenging read, but which soon comes to suit, and amplify, its angry, visceral tone. The Book of Night Women is suffused with anger and hate--of the slaves towards their masters, whose every cruelty is described with grueling detail; of the masters towards their slaves, whom they resent for not being the docile animals they want them to be; of women towards men, who, black or white, exploit the advantages of their gender in horrific ways. In the middle of all of this is Lilith, raised in relative privilege due to her mixed-race background, but still prey to the dangers that threaten the life, well-being, and sanity of a female slave. She's a fascinating and infuriating character, at once vulnerable and terrifyingly powerful, intelligent and deliberately ignorant, proud and self-hating. Over the course of the novel she confronts the horrors of powerlessness, and the arguably greater horrors of exercising power over others, and struggles to reconcile her feelings towards the masters and overseers, who treat her with a combination of disdain, lust, and occasionally love (which she finds hardest of all to deal with), and towards the rebel slave women, who try to recruit her to their cause and bump up against her vanity and pride, but whom she also admires for their ability to find and occupy positions of power on the plantation. These are all, of course, terrifically complicated questions with no real answer, and inasmuch as Lilith can be said to grow, it is into the realization that she doesn't know how to live well--happily, honestly, and honorably--as a slave. Add to this James's rich, almost overpowering descriptions of Jamaican plantation life, of the heat and hard work and suffering that the slaves (and occasionally the masters) endure, and you get a novel that is almost too much to process. Which may be why I couldn't quite hang onto it, or maybe it's because beneath his impressive presentation James is saying familiar things about the corrupting influence of slavery, violence, and hatred. That doesn't mean those things aren't worth saying again, or that The Book of Night Women isn't worth reading. - Mythago Wood by Robert Holdstock - This is one of the foundation works of the English fantastic, and as so often happens with these milestone books I find myself more impressed than won over. Steven Huxley makes a reluctant homecoming from France, where he's been recovering from a war wound, after his distant, emotionally abusive
father's death. He discovers his brother Christian immersed in an obsession with nearby Ryhope Forest, the same obsession that consumed their father. From Christian, Steven learns that the forest is a breeding ground for 'mythagos'--living, breathing manifestations of the communal myths of the various tribes and nations that have lived in England over the millennia. One of these is a woman called Guiwenneth, whom both Christian and his father fell in love with. After Christian leaves to look for her in the forest, Steven ventures in and creates his own version of Guiwenneth, with whom he also falls in love, and when Christian returns and kidnaps her, Steven must follow him into the depths of the forest. The descriptions of Ryhope Forest, as a completely wild place in the middle of civilization, whose inside is bigger than its outside and contains living remnants of England's history, is well done, but the characters are not very persuasive. The biggest problem is Guiwenneth and the plot's focus on her romance with Steven. The very fact that all three Huxley men fall in love with this woman suggests that something ineffable, probably magical, is at work, and in his descriptions of their courtship Holdstock doesn't do much to dispel the impression that Steven doesn't so much fall in love with Guiwenneth as fall under her spell, and that Guiwenneth may have been made to love him (she is, after all, a manifestation of English racial memory activated by his presence in the forest). So it's hard to become involved in Steven's frantic search for her, and though the novel picks up whenever the narrative gets out of his Guiwenneth-obsessed head, and especially when he encounters ancient tribes in the forest who tell him their myths and legends, these instances are relatively uncommon compared to the love story, which leaves Mythago Wood a rather uninvolving work as far as I'm concerned. - The Mountain Lion by Jean Stafford - NYRB Classics has always been a terrific series, but their releases over the last year or so seem to have been calculated to appeal to my tastes and interests (and a lot of them have shown up in older, dog-eared editions at my used bookseller, which is how I came to read The Mountain Lion several weeks
before the NYRB edition is due to be released). In addition to The Mountain Lion, I've flagged Tove Jansson's The True Deceiver, Frans G. Bentsson's The Long Ships, and any one of the three short story collections by Mavis Gallant. Unfortunately, my first foray has proved a bit of a dud. The Mountain Lion, a short and lyrical novel about a brother and sister in the who come to stay at their uncle's Colorado ranch in the 1920s, has some fine qualities. Stafford's writing is lucid and beautiful, and she gets right in the heads of siblings Ralph and Molly, who don't quite fit in at home where their mother aims to raise them, as she has their older sisters, to be a gentleman and a lady, and to think of manners and politeness as the highest ideal. Ralph and Molly, however, are rambunctious, adventurous children, and are drawn to their mother's stepfather, an uncouth, uneducated rancher whom she barely tolerates. When their grandfather dies his son invites them to stay with him in Colorado, but the ranch doesn't proved to be the home they've always wanted. It's too wild and too scary for children raised, however unwillingly, in a genteel environment, and for Molly, at least, the barrier of her gender proves insurmountable, which drives a wedge between the siblings, who up until that point have only had one another. This is a promising story, but Stafford takes it in uninteresting directions--she makes the focal point of the schism between the children their shared horror of adulthood and of sexuality, which Ralph begins to question when his own sexual maturation begins. This turns The Mountain Lion into yet another story about children who don't want to grow up because the adult world seems so crude and messy to them, and populated with so many unbearable people, which I think has been done more than enough (though in all fairness to Stafford her version, published in 1947, predates the canonical entry in this subgenre, The Catcher in the Rye). It also forces Stafford in the direction of an unnecessarily melodramatic ending for Molly, who is too strong and too disgusted with adulthood to make the compromises with it that Ralph does. One senses that there is something slightly autobiographical in the character of Molly, a bright, talented aspiring writer who is frustrated and furious at the realization that she has no home and no one who truly appreciates her, and it's therefore understandable that Stafford should have wanted to give her an ending that is grandly tragic without forcing her to compromise her principles, but a more interesting novel, I think, could have been written about that compromise.
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