skip to main |
skip to sidebar
I'm generally opposed to writers who make a career out of exploiting the name of more famous writers (and famous writers who get unknown authors to pen their books for them — James Patterson, stand up please).
But when a nice lady called Judi Heath mistakenly bought a Felix Francis novel thinking it was one by his father, Dick Francis (Dick's name is huge and prominent on the cover, Felix's less so) and she offered it to me to read when she was finished — I resolved to keep an open mind about the son following in his famed father's footsteps.
My first reaction was pleased surprise. I had low expectations, but it turns out Felix is a skilled writer. The horse racing background (in this case, the television presenting side) is thoroughly researched and well evoked. Not surprising when you learn that Felix used to help his dad with the research for his novels. And I was soon involved in the story. I was actually looking forward to picking up the book and finding out what happened next.
Felix Francis has some weaknesses in comparison to his father. Felix's dialogue is a bit awkward: "I hear through the press's grapevine that he'd found out about your affair." I don't think people really speak like that. And all the talk of presses and grapevines makes me think of winemaking.
Also, he suffers from what I call the hesitation syndrome. It's a maddening tendency not to just state something explicitly, but to hedge it around with qualifications. Hence Felix writes "I could almost feel the injection of adrenaline into my bloodstream that the countdown to the start had produced." Why not have the guy feel it instead of almost feeling it? Elsewhere he describes the music at party being turned up, "making further conversation difficult if not impossible." Why not just make it impossible? You get the picture. It just bugs me.
On the other hand, Felix Francis provides an enjoyably high standard of malevolent mayhem. There is some truly shocking violence. He also generates terrific suspense and provides some first rate surprises. These are all hallmarks of his father's writing, and indicate that Felix has studied the form carefully and done an admirable job putting the lessons into practise.
The sequence which would have really made his dad proud is the bit where our hero leaves a party, gets into his car and is about to drive off when a shadowy assailant lunges from the back seat and proceeds to garrote him. He only manages to save his life by starting the car and crashing it. But the best bit comes when the police turn up and, instead of being concerned about the assault, assume our hero is drunk and set about trying to charge him.
This is the sort of set piece which Dick Francis did so well (see the aftermath of the knife attack in Banker). It really revs up a reader's emotions — those goddamn cops! — and the ability to stir us up like that is the sign of a masterful writer. Felix Francis has learned his craft scrupulously and applies it skilfully. His stuff is highly readable and I'd happily devour another of his novels.
What is missing from his work only becomes evident when you pick up another book by his dad. There is an element of poetry — of vividness and beauty in the writing — and depth and subtlety in the characters and dialogue which Dick Francis has and which Felix (so far, I've only read this one book) doesn't have.
When you consider all the excellent things Felix Francis can do — and then realise that his father could do all that and more — you begin to see just how special Dick Francis was, and what a loss he is.
(Image credits: All the covers are from Good Reads, except the green audio book which is from Down Pour. I particularly like the elegant one at the top, by the very talented artist and designer Ben Perini. This is the edition I read. Thanks, Judi.)
Continuing my pleasurable project of reading all of Kingsley Amis's fiction, in more or less chronological order, we now arrive at his fifth novel One Fat Englishman (1963). Amis's development as a writer is really quite impressive. The book is stylistically strikingly different from its predecessors, as if Amis was constantly experimenting with technique and setting challenges for himself. It's also very well crafted and confidently written.
It begins with nearly two solid pages of dialogue, with no exposition or scene setting. This reads almost like the work of George V. Higgins or Elmore Leonard (two American crime novelists who wouldn't be writing like this for another decade). So we are plunged straight into the world of Roger Micheldene, the eponymous obese Brit, an obnoxious publishing executive visiting America — the book draws heavily on Amis's experience of teaching in Princeton a year or two earlier.
And obnoxious is the word. Roger is a drunk and a rage-addict. He is a snob and a connoisseur of snuff and cigars. Although he is in America (a country he hates) on business, his primary objective is pursuing another man's wife, with whom he is deeply infatuated. Oddly, Roger is religious, saying
his prayers at night, a first for an Amis hero. Perhaps this is a nod to
Graham Greene (or 'Grim Grin' as Amis called him).
Roger is also unusual in the Amis canon in that he is utterly upper class — such types are often beautifully evoked in Amis, but up to now have always been at the periphery of the novels, never the central figure. Similarly, never before has such an entirely negative and offensive person occupied centre stage. In Take a Girl Like You, Jenny stops Patrick from throwing gravel at some chickens. In One Fat Englishman nobody stops Roger from taking a child's toy robot and throwing it away, deep into the woods. And in Take a Girl Like You Patrick wasn't always like that, nor was he the only character the novel focused on. But Roger is always like that, and he is always the character we're stuck with here.
Indeed, Roger is such a rebarbative and repellent figure that the book is virtually dead in the water from the word go. We are effectively stuck inside Roger's head, and in his world view, and since he is so thoroughly unsympathetic — and moving through a realm of characters who are equally unappealing — the novel isn't exactly a cheerful experience.
But, as you'd expect in Amis, there are moments of brilliant observation and comedy. A shirt is described as having "a pattern reminiscent of cushion-covers in typists' flats." (I suppose the day isn't too distant when no one will no what the hell a typist was.) When the girl he lusts after dons a bikini and goes swimming, "Roger sat watching like a sniper waiting for a clear shot at a general." And Roger's opinion of satire is compared to his feelings about "mentholated snuff or an African politician."
There are also a lot of moments which present a very dark view of humanity. After describing a hideously bratty child, Roger ruminates "It was no wonder that people were so horrible when they started life as children".
Amis generally writes his American dialogue very well, but occasionally comes a cropper. I doubt if any American when telling time says "a quarter of" the hour (as opposed to "a quarter to") or used the word "shan't", or uttered the phrase "I should say not," in 1963 or any other year.
One Fat Englishman calls to mind another portrait of America by a foreign writer who was a novelist of genius — Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita. It is reminiscent of Lolita in the darkly comic, acid outsider's perspective it has on the Cold War USA and its ways. And also, quite strongly, in the scene where the hero's beloved runs off with the villain of the novel. Amis would not have appreciated this comparison. He detested Nabokov in general and Lolita in particular. His son, Martin, on the other hand loves Nabokov. So perhaps it's no surprise that of all his father's novels, this is the one which seems to have had the most emphatic influence on Martin. Indeed, perhaps to the extent that he's never got over it.
One Fat Englishman is written in an unusual and striking style: sharp edged, angular, cartoonish, with a heightened sense of reality (or unreality). It would provoke a furious and venomous outburst from Roger to say this, but it is very American, resembling the work of, say, Terry Southern or John Barth from the same period. Come to think of it, it's also a work of satire.
Pass the mentholated snuff.
(Image credits: The Penguin first edition with the great hairy-belly and Union Jack snuff box cover — design by Freire Wright, photography by Karl Ferris — later a great psychedelic photographer of rock stars) is actually the copy I read, bought from eBay. The rest are from Good Reads. Except the American hardcover which is from ABE.)
I'd reached the point where my praise of Marvel comic book movies had become so all pervading and almost automatic (see recent examples here and here) that it's a considerable relief to report that one is a real stinker.
The Amazing Spider-Man 2 is a complete dud. And in discussing it I shall be revealing some plot twists so you may want to look away now.
There have always been some built in problems with Spider Man movies. For a start — unlike Batman, say — Spidey's adversaries are some of the worst and weakest super villains imaginable.
This film begins with our hero battling a stupid blue electric guy (Jamie Foxx wasted in a thankless role) and ends with him confronting a big stupid rhino guy. Other crappy Spider Man villains include Doctor Octopus and the vulture guy. Even the goblin guy is a bit dull.
Yet none of this has prevented some fine earlier films. Indeed, the first Amazing Spider-Man was well made, impressive and great fun. So why is this sequel, still starring the excellent Andrew Garfield, such a comprehensive failure?
Well, it's the script I'm afraid. It gives me no joy to say this because two of the writers involved, Alex Kurtzman & Roberto Orci are among my favourite writing partnerships while James Vanderbilt wrote the superb White House Down. (The fourth name on the screenplay credits is Jeff Pinkner who was, like Kurtzman and Orci, involved in the TV shows Alias and Fringe.)
But this movie is a mess. And boring. A whole bunch of big noisy stuff happens but the audience (or at least this audience member) remained completely uninvolved. There was nothing to invoke sympathy or interest. It was a long dull slog. The only brief flickers of relief were the scenes about Peter Parker and his girlfriend Gwen Stacy (Emma Stone). They are an appealing, engaging couple with great chemistry.
So when Gwen is perfunctorily bumped off at the end of this film, the only possible source of interest is cut off. Oh well, now we need never watch one of these abjectly apathetic arachnid adventures again.
(Image credits: Not surprisingly, no shortage of pics available for this mainstream multiplex blockbuster. All courtesy of Ace Show Biz.)
Let the Right One In — sorry, Låt den rätte komma in — was a Swedish film. It was written by John Ajvide Lindqvist, based on his own novel. And it was directed by Tomas Alfredson, who would go on to direct Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, one of my favourite movies of all time.
Without beating about the bush, Let the Right One In is a vampire movie. It tells the story of a lonely, bullied pre-teen boy, Oskar, who befriends what appears to be a lonely pre-teen girl called Eli. But I bet you can guess what Eli really is.
They develop a rather touching relationship and, in a mindblowing sequence at the end, Eli saves Oskar from the bullies. It's a terrific little film and made quite an impression. Inevitably an English language remake followed. It was produced by the resurrected Hammer films, written and directed by the talented Matt Reeves and was re-titled Let Me In.
It was a good film, but there was something lacking compared to the original, as exmplified by the duller and more obvious choice of title. (a title which, incidentally, refers to the old vampire myth that you have to invite them in before they can cross the threshold. And bite you.)
But you can't keep a good vampire down, and now Let the Right One In is back, with it's proper title intact, as of all things a West End stage production. Adapted by writer Jack Thorne and directed by John Tiffany, the action has been relocated from a deprived semi-urban wintery Sweden to a ditto wintery Scotland, which makes very good sense.
Indeed, Jack Thorne's adaptation is smart, economical and full of good choices. It is also a miracle of compression, bringing an astonishing amount of the film into a stage production with a single set. An impressive feat.
That single set is also a miracle of compression. Consisting of an eerie forest of tall trees, other spaces are illuminated or defined by props as required. There is also a playground climbing frame which brilliantly doubles in a surprising way at the end of the play and — astonishingly — allows the swimming pool climax of the movie to be reproduced on the stage.
But, despite being impressed by the set, the acting, the staging and intermittently caught up in the plight of the bullied Oskar, I remained uninvolved and unmoved by the action. I was even a little bored.
Tremendous imagination and effort have gone into attempting to replicate the narrative contours of the original film on stage. And miraculously they've succeeded. Yet I walked out of the theatre feeling neither particularly entertained nor engaged.
In the end it irresistibly brought to mind a quote by Dr Johnson: it was "like a dog walking on its hind legs. It is not done well, but you are surprised to find it done at all."
Sorry folks, I know this production is highly regarded. Maybe I just caught a duff matinee.
(Image credits: The movie stills of the Swedish film are from Ace Show Biz. The Let Me in posters are also from that same useful site. The Swedish poster is from Fan Pop. The photo of the groovy stage set is from the Beautiful Dundee blog. The theatre poster — bloody difficult to get a halfway decent image, this was the best I could do — is from the Apollo Theatre site.)
Continuing my project to read all of Kingsley Amis's novels (albeit slightly out of sequence), inspired by Zachary Leader's biography, I have now reached Amis's second book, That Uncertain Feeling.
It's the story of John Lewis, a Welsh librarian, who is torn between his wife and the Other Woman: "How reprehensible yet pleasant it would have been to make a pass at her."
The wife, Jean, is very engagingly drawn by Amis, rather in the mode of the wife in I Like it Here — and also apparently in the mode of Hilly, Amis's real life wife.
The Other Woman, Elizabeth, resembles some of the hilarious secondary characters in Take A Girl Like You, his fourth novel and one of his masterpieces. Elizabeth is also, in her own way, extremely engaging. So you can see why John Lewis is torn.
That tug-of-war is also between Lewis's innate decency and his Welsh working class roots and the immoral Anglicised upper class milieu in which Elizabeth operates. The book is, to quote an Amis catchphrase "full of fun" and also full of the sharp, yet tender, observations about married life and child rearing which distinguished I Like It Here.
The novel is, stylistically, a step forward from Lucky Jim, showing the judicious concision and gift for eliding material with the almost cinematic cutting from scene to scene which distinguishes Amis's writing at its best. Unlike Lucky Jim, it is told in the first person, a technique which the writer would return to with The Green Man, my favourite Amis novel.
That Uncertain Feeling is marked by the keen, witty observation of character which is an Amis hallmark. Lewis's wife walks out her front door and glances quickly around "as if fearful of snipers." Or a man evading Lewis's gaze in a pub: "he turned away like an alcoholic sighting a pink rat." Great descriptions of inanimate objects, too. Such as the "ship's siren out in the bay, a low-pitched, harsh moan like an ogre breaking wind."
One interesting aspect of the book is how science fiction creeps into it. Like Amis himself, Lewis is an SF fan, a regular reader of Astounding magazine and this allows Amis to use science fiction imagery in his prose. Tormented by his longing for infidelity, Lewis thinks how nice it would be if he were like a creature on "one of the outer planets of Vega, where life... was transmitted by asexual reproduction."
This novel does, however, have a serious flaw. There is a sequence where Lewis is around at her house with Elizabeth, the other woman. They think they have plenty of time alone, but Elizabeth's husband returns unexpectedly. Lewis tries to flee the house but gets lost (it's a large mansion). After various misadventures he ends up in Elizabeth's dressing room where he finds an antique traditional Welsh woman's costume (Elizabeth has been putting on a play). Then Lewis for no discernible reason decides to put on the traditional Welsh woman's costume.
He isn't drunk, he isn't a cross dresser, he isn't crazy. Elizabeth hasn't dared him to do it (which I think would be the most plausible motivation in an admittedly thin field). He just puts this costume on, for no reason. Or rather, there is a reason — the author wants him to. It's an entirely arbitrary — and deeply unconvincing — act. And of course events conspire to force Lewis to flee the house still wearing the costume. And catch the bus home in it. And "hilarious" events ensue.
It's an unfunny episode, which falls completely flat. Because it's completely unbelievable. As John Lewis himself might say, "There's no bloody reason for it, man." And it almost sinks the whole book. Almost but not quite. It's a considerable tribute to Amis's skills as a novelist that he manages to regain lost ground. Subsequent set pieces involving some brilliant use of minor characters and very dry humour enabled me to forgive.
And, as is becoming customary with Amis, I learned a new word: amphisbaenic (spelled or perhaps misspelled "amphisboenic" throughout the Penguin edition). It means resembling a (mythical) serpent with a head at both ends. That's what Elizabeth's fancy car looks like.
(Image credits: The recent Penguin with the Nicholas Garland cartoon cover, which is the edition I read, the Penguin Modern Classic with the nice cover painting (peering through bookshelves) and the Panther up-skirts photograph are all from Good Reads. The yellow jacket Gollancz original hardcover is from an ABE seller. The US hardcover with an attractive cartoon cover is from another ABE seller. The rather cool Australian paperback, published by Horwitz, is from yet another ABE seller. Thanks to all concerned.)
Continuing my modestly ambitious project of reading all of Kingsley Amis's novels (inspired by Zachary Leader's admirable and definitive biography of Amis), I have just finished Take a Girl Like You. This is Amis's fourth novel, after Lucky Jim, That Uncertain Feeling and I Like it Here and it is widely regarded as one of his best.
I'd go along with that, though it isn't about to unseat The Green Man as my personal favourite. (Actually, there is an interesting foreshadowing of The Green Man here. The male protagonist of Take a Girl Like You is given to panic attacks of an almost hallucinatory intensity, like this: "Some configuration of the leaves under the slight breeze formed, as he watched, a shifting face in profile, the eye blinking slowly." That will ring a bell with anyone who has read Amis's classic ghost story.)
One thing I've noticed in my Amis-reading project is the extent of his vocabulary. It's an education to read his books. You can generally count on at least one word you've never heard before. This time it is "carphology" which means the plucking of the bedclothes by a delirious patient. Here Amis uses it to refer to some frenetic modern jazz he doesn't like (Coltrane, I suspect): "carphology in sound."
Take a Girl Like You is Amis's own favourite among his novels. It is lovingly crafted and took a long time to write, started in 1955 and set aside for I Like it Here, it was finally published in 1960.
It is also Amis's longest novel, carefully planned in terms of characterisation and structure. He made 80 pages of detailed notes in a notebook, begun while he was in Portugal (also incidentally gathering the material for I Like it Here). It's a notable step forward in Amis's craft, depicting the action from two character's viewpoints. It starts out as a pure account of Jenny Bunn and what happens to her, then follows Patrick Standish's point of view, alternating chapters between the two of them. But it remains essentially Jenny's novel (16 chapters for her, 11 for Patrick).
Jenny is a delightful character, a ravishing Northern virgin. She is largely inspired by Amis's wife Hilly (though she wasn't from the North of England) and it is a highly sympathetic portrait, although it is easy for the modern reader (and indeed the 1960 reader) to get fed up with Jenny's silly insistence on trying to retain her virginity in the face of Patrick's (and others') onslaughts and stratagems.
But, as Zachary Leader points out, it is easier to mock a desire to retain virginity than a wish for fidelity, and in the real world that was the true tension between Hilly and Amis — they loved each other but he was running around (to put it euphemistically) with every available, attractive women who crossed his line of sight.
This is a beautifully observed novel and very sympathetic to the plight of women suffering unwanted attention. For instance when Amis describes the anxious sweaty dud nerving himself himself up to try and put his arm around Jenny's shoulder, "like a golfer preparing for a tricky shot."
This brilliant observation extends to other characters, like posh Julian the flamboyant rich rake. As he serves drinks, Jenny observes "It was funny to see him with something in his hands that was for other people."
And the character of Julian's mistress Wendy is a comic tour de force, delivered almost as a three page monologue: "Is he pissed or something? ... He's absolutely stark raving mad. Darling, what happened to him to make him behave like that, do you suppose? Do you think he was brought up in the most weird morbid sort of way by some ghastly old maiden aunt or something, you know with all harmoniums and aspidistras and antimacassars and things?"
Take a Girl Like You is also hilariously funny: "he quietened down, like somebody who knows he has let on to being a bit too interested in how they manage the floggings in prisons."
Amis himself said of the novel, "I hope they'll go on laughing, but this time... I'm saying something serious. I don't mean profound or earnest, but something serious."
And, true enough, Take a Girl Like You is wildly funny, but it is also surprisingly dark — perhaps the first sign of a tendency which would become increasingly emphatic in Amis's fiction. And, like many of his novels, it has a real sting in the tail.
The ending of the book is rather shocking, for a number of reasons which obviously I won't go into here, since I don't want to spoil it for you. I will just say that it's no surprise that Patrick Standish is capable of being a bastard — we see plenty of examples of that throughout the novel — but it is jarring to discover that the previously sympathetic Miss Sinclair, the headmistress at Jenny's school and her boss, is capable of being such a complete bitch.
Classic Amis.
(Image credits: The cover of the copy I read, the Penguin with the neat repeating graphic design by Lou Klein is from ABE. As are the great sexy Signet, the later Penguin (lecher in scholar's robes) and the Gollancz original hardcover. The lovely Quentin Blake Penguin is from Good Reads.)
I saw Noah again the other day, thinking that any new thoughts I had about the film could be added to my earlier post. However, there was so much to say that it justified a whole new entry.
One thing I only briefly touched on last time was the issue of meat eating (stay with me on this)...
Noah and his family are gentle vegetarians and horrified at the notion of eating the flesh of living animals. Other creatures are regarded as sacred, and this is powerfully embodied in the movie.
There's a great scene early on when the bad guys (the Sons of Cain) are hunting an animal (a strange kind of scaly hound) and fatally wound it with an arrow. Noah goes to the rescue and the baddies try to kill him. Russell Crowe proceeds to dispatch them in an enjoyable action-hero scene which is reminiscent of Gladiator. (Gentleness has its limits.) But he's too late to save the scaly hound, so Noah and his sons wrap it in a shroud and respectfully burn it on a funeral pyre. The bad guys are presumably left to rot.
But there's no hypocrisy here, because Noah is very clear that animals are innocent whereas the Sons of Cain — in fact, humans generally — are knowingly wicked. This kind of Old-Testament-Apocrypha animal rights stance strikes a powerful chord with viewers, or at least it did with me. Noah isn't going to be ordering a Big Mac any time soon.
Indeed, it is the sequence in which he sees the Sons of Cain tearing living animals apart and devouring them that prompts Noah to wash his hands of humans once and for all, abandon any notion of finding wives for his sons, and try for a world wiped clean of mankind. It's worth hammering this point home because the geniuses who wrote the Wikipedia entry think this scene depicts Noah "witnessing cannibalism by a starving mob." It's not cannibalism, boys. They are not eating people. They're eating animals, and that's enough for Noah.
As I said, this is powerful stuff and it is reinforced in a shocking scene where the chief bad guy, Tubal-cain (played by an awesome Ray Winstone) stows away on the ark and sustains himself by snacking on the lovingly stowed living beasts. Even Ham — Noah's son but Tubal-cain's confederate — is shocked. "There's only two of each," he protests. "Well, there's only one of me," says Tubal-cain, ever the pragmatist. We're really glad when Noah kills him.
Other things that struck me about the film on a second viewing was the magnificent, and unusual, use of CGI. Normally computer effects in Hollywood blockbusters are devoted to space ships, giant robots, exploding cities. Here the special effects are breathtakingly deployed to show us the animals coming into the ark — storm-clouds of birds, a slithering river of snakes, a stampede of beasts.
And one of the clever new wrinkles dreamt up by Darren Aronofsky and his co-writer Ari Handel is the way these animals are put into hibernation by having them breathe the smoke of burning herbs. So all the critters settle down peacefully in a space-saving state of suspended animation, perhaps inspired by the cryogenic sleep of starship passengers in science fiction movies. It's a smart new idea, and definitely the way to go if you ever want to build an ark of your own.
This second viewing also emphasised just how great Anthony Hopkins is as Methuselah. He kept reminding me of Merlin for some reason, and I realised that the whole movie has a kind of Arthurian feel, in particular evoking John Boorman's film Excalibur.
Any other fresh observations? Yup, Clint Mansell's score is terrific. Brooding, scary, rousing, folky, glorious. I first noticed how good Mansell was with his music for Stoker and I'm going to be paying him a lot more attention.
This is, as you will have gathered, a striking piece of film making. It's full of subtle, potent moments. Like when the apocalyptic deluge starts to fall, and the first rain drops sizzle on the forge where Tubal-cain is hammering out the red hot metal of his weapons of war.
(Image credits, as with the previous post, all the posters and stills are from Ace Show Biz.)
