Chris Chelser's Blog, page 25
August 14, 2015
August 11, 2015
The Bare Bones of…”The Bloody Chamber” (short story coll.)
What: “The Bloody Chamber” by Angela Carter.
Why: Because it demonstrates perfectly the one aspect of what makes a story work that is so often overlooked.
Spoiler Alert: Low | Medium | HIGH!
Summary:
When starting on the work of a writer I haven’t read before, I try to go in blank: I avoid reviews and background info on the writer, so their work can speak for itself, without me being biased. That is how I bought, read and evaluated “The Bloody Chamber”, a collection of dark paranormal short stories with a similar story structure and a central theme. To some a quite scandalous theme.
Every story in this collection is a fairy-tale retelling. Or rather, a reinvention of the fairy-tales we know. The title story is a reinvention of Bluebeard, where the beleaguered bride is saved not by her brothers (as is the original version), but by her mother. The rest of the stories includes two retellings of Belle and the Beast with alternative endings, a lewd version of Puss-in-Boots (that is so close to Antonio Banderas’ character in the Shrek-movies that this story probably was the principle inspiration for it), and no less than three wildly different reimaginations of Little Red Riding Hood, of which I liked “The Company of Wolves” best.
The fairy-tale format is an ancient a story structure in itself and not particularly interesting beyond their almost wide-spread and well-known application.
But when it comes to fairy-tales, rarely is the common denominator among stories sex: sex as the highest form of love, or sex as a female tool of power of men. Gratuitous sex, either thinly veiled by purple prose, or so in-your-face that it becomes crass and no longer adds to the story. On the contrary. In one case, the sexual act is not only obscene, but completely pointless to the plot. I have read more porn-without-plot than I care to admit, but this managed to quirk my brows.
Story Skeleton:
When I looked up more info about Angela Carter, her focus on sex did make more sense: written for the most part in the 1960’s and 1970’s, her stories are about feminism and convey the values of the sexual revolution taking place at the time. Unfortunately, that message comes across in the title story and in “The Company of Wolves,” but in most others it seems to have been supressed by its own weight.
This effect I have rarely seen before: the writer’s message and intention was pasted onto the story so blatantly that at times it ceased to be a natural part of the story’s arc and flow. The result is that the message is lost entirely in bewilderment (“The Snow Child”) or a story component, such as the denouement or essential character building, are incomplete or missing because more attention when into the message that to its presentation (“Wolf-Alice”, “The Werewolf”). Either way, the story lacks vital ingredients to reach and touch its reader.
And therein lies the often overlooked aspect of what makes a story work: the reader.
I was born after the heydays of sexual revolution, when literature wasn’t literature unless it contained explicit and tasteless sexual acts and references. To me, sexual liberation – or sex for the sake of sex/shock in general – plays no part in my worldview, because gender equality, especially in a relationship, is my default state of mind. As such, while I love dark paranormal stories and magical realism as a genre, I am not one of the readers Angela Carter wrote for and whom she wanted to reach. No doubt her work and her message continues to be important to new and old readers alike, but to me it feels like pressing home a thumb tag with a sledge hammer.
Lesson learnt:
Whether a story’s structure, theme and its various element ‘work’, is as much up to the reader as it is up to the writer. What is a life-altering story to one, can be drivel to another. For all human equality, we are all different nevertheless. So whenever someone closes a book while denouncing the story within as boring or stupid, that is not necessarily the writer’s fault.
August 7, 2015
August 4, 2015
The Bare Bones of…”The Imitation Game” (movie)
What: “The Imitation Game” (2014 movie)
Why: Alan Turing was a very interesting man who had had greater impact on modern life than most people know – and still the writers needed to take liberties for his story to be an interesting one.
Spoiler Alert: Low | Medium | HIGH!
Because for this historical tale, they didn’t tamper with the actual outcome.
Summary:
Alan Turing was a brilliant British mathematician, these days reasonably well known for his work on breaking Enigma, the cipher used by the German forces to encrypt their communication during World War II. Even before the war, he worked on mathematical models that would eventually become the very foundation of modern computers. However, even geniuses have secrets. Devastating secrets.
The movie, an adaptation of Turing’s biography as written by Andrew Hodges, focusses on Turing’s struggle with Enigma, taking only short trips to the past (the loss of his first love, Christopher) and the future (Turing’s conviction for homosexuality, and later his death).
The story itself is at first very digestible for anyone who is not offended or estranged by open references to homosexuality or stereotypical depictions of Asperger’s syndrome (a type of autism best known for brilliant intellect aside social awkwardness), the latter being what the movie relies on for second-hand embarrassment disguised as ‘a light note’.
Story-wise, the movie shows Turing’s arrival at Bletchley Park, where the British decoders were stationed, his assignment to a team of cryptologists and how he fails to fit in from the start. He has very clear ideas of what he wants to do to solve the problem – namely Enigma, the code which changes every day at the stroke of midnight – and sets about doing just that in a singular fashion. By himself, if need be.
His talents not go unnoticed, and soon he is put in charge of the team, much to their dismay. And he receives permission to construct a machine that will aid the decoding process. He also selects and hires two new people, one of them being a woman: Joan Clarke. She accepts Turing’s strange behaviour, but the budding romance is nipped in the bud by his homosexuality.
Meanwhile the machine is finished and works, but not fast enough. Facing impatient superiors now out to fire him, Turing receives unexpected support from his team members and they solve the problem, using the German code’s inherent patterns to save their machine – a very crude but effective computer – essential time.
The day seems saved for the Allied Forces in Europe, but while the movie over-simplifies the process of finding the key to Enigma, they take time to explain the consequences of finding this key: if the Allied Forces act on every bit of intelligence that is captured from the Germans, the German will change their cypher completely, rendering the decoders’ work useless. And thus is born operation Ultra: Turing and his team select what intelligence is or isn’t passed on to the army and navy, based on statistics. How many people can they save without the Germans discovering that the Allied Forces can read Enigma? It is a balancing trick that take a high toll.
The movie glosses over the time between the end of the war and Turing’s arrest for homosexuality (then illegal) eight years later. The secret he only told Joan Clarke now comes out, with devastating consequences. Convicted, Turing is given the choice between prison and chemical castration. He chooses the latter. Joan Clarke, now engaged to another man, comes to visit and finds him in shambles due to the hormones he is injected with. His suicide a year later is announced, but not shown on screen.
Story Skeleton:
As a genre, the historical biography doesn’t have much of a story arc. Generally the audience already knowns what happened to the person in question and what the main events in his or her life were, and these much be highlighted to appease the audience’s expectations. But that same audience also wants to be entertained. So the story must be satisfying.
In this case, the movie caters to this demand by Turing showing clear symptoms of Asperger’s syndrome. Although Turing’s kind of genius (which manifested early in his youth), natural aptitude for mathematics and related sciences, and general materialistic outlook on life is – at least in my personal experience – often seen in people with Asperger’s, it remains to be seen whether he was an autist. And if he was, whether his social awkwardness was truly as bad as the movie portrays it.
The same goes for the subplot of Joan Clarke. It is true that the real Turing proposed to the real Clarke and that his revelation of being a homosexual cut their engagement short, but whether he was truly in love with her, as the movie suggests he was, is less likely for the same reason.
While introducing these emotional complications, the adaptation also removes a lot of intricacies from Turing’s story. Most of those pertain to his work – which was and still is far beyond the comprehension of us non-specialised mortals – but where Turing’s death is concerned, we are shamelessly guided to believe that his distress over the chemical castration are what caused his suicide.
However, to this day, it is not at all certain that Turing’s death was intentional: he was notoriously sloppy with the chemicals he worked with, including the cyanide that was confirmed to have caused his demise. On the other hand, if his death was intentional, there are those who believe it was not suicide but murder, instigated by the British secret service or a similar government body. Either way, sources claim that he was not depressed and that the chemical castration had been stopped a year prior to his death. That is quite some artistic license to take.
Lesson learnt:
Real life does not follow the rules of good storytelling. This is a simple and irrefutable fact. While this means that dramatized biographies tend to be blessedly void of melodrama, excessive explosions and other pointless plot inserts, it also means that a person’s life story is often outright boring. As a consequence, all dramatized biographies cannot help but be inaccurate. The only question is: how much?
July 31, 2015
July 30, 2015
Kalbrandt Institute snippet
Kalbrandt lowered himself over the edge of the ridge, carefully sliding down the fifteen feet that separated him from the bushes on crevice floor. Only at the last moment did he spot the deeper fissure hidden by the branches. He managed to wedge himself with his feet between the two slopes before he could fall any further.
The body of the unfortunate soul had: only the feet were visible. It took Kalbrandt great effort to dislodge the corpse from the sharp branches, both wood and bones breaking as he pulled it half-way free. That proved to be enough. Given the modest weight of the body and the lack of flesh around the midsection, this man had been dead long enough to dry out after the scavengers had had their fill.
“Is it him?” Angela called from the ridge.
“Would it be that it was,” Kalbrandt muttered, and went in search for distinguishing features. There were none. Heat and animals had cleaned the skull of anything resembling a face and the rags on the body were the same non-descript working clothes that all farmers in this part of Greece wore.
From File F/15046/KC
This story is progressing sloooooooooooowly. I’m used to stories and characters putting up a fight, but this one is exceptionally stubborn. It will yield, though. In the end, they all do… *insert evil laughter*
July 28, 2015
The Bare Bones of… “Three Bags Full” (novel)
What: “Three Bags Full” by Leonie Swann.
Why: Because I never thought this premise would work as well as it did.
Spoiler Alert: Low | Medium | HIGH! I’m not going to spoil the fun.
Summary:
George Glenn, the shepherd of a herd of sheep in the (fictional) Irish village of Glennkill, is found dead with a spade in his body. The sheep discover the body – as do the humans of the village, eventually. But Miss Maple, the smartest sheep of the herd (possibly in the world), investigates why their shepherd is dead.
The rest of the flock help her, if for no other reason that they will be sold to Gabriel, another shepherd who may not be as good an benevolent as they want to believe him to be. But then, George Glenn had his share of secrets, too.
A rival for his wife, an estranged daughter he wrote to the night before he died. And a very good reason not to want the attention that drawing more tourists to the village will bring. The sheep discover it all, even when they don’t always understand what they have discovered.
A bigger problem, however, is how to convey what they have learned to the humans. A trail of ‘breadcrumbs’ paves the way for Rebecca, the estranged daughter, to discover the secrets of her father, while a play in the local pub explains to the villagers the circumstances of his death. A play with very special actors indeed.
Story Skeleton:
On the surface, the plot of the novel is a whodunit comprised of the usual complications to the story of ‘what happened’. The interesting twist is that the whole story and all the clues are revealed through the eyes of the sheep.
Leonie Swann shows the world and the humans consistently as the sheep see them, with their expectations and understanding. That makes for weird analogies at times, but more than that, it requires the reader to pay close attention to every detail. Descriptions that seem to make no sense at first glance still fit together to form a whole that is comprehensible to our human frame of reference. Swann doesn’t make the puzzle too difficult – just enough to be entertaining and pose a different challenge from the usual whodunit puzzle.
Lesson learnt:
Good stories have something unexpected. Even a standard story in an overdone genre can become interesting and fresh by a well-executed twist in its telling.
