F.R. Jameson's Blog, page 35

Wizard and Glass by Stephen King

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In anticipation of the film coming out, here – week by week – are my reviews of THE DARK TOWER novels.

Coming off the forward momentum of THE WASTE LAND, this wasn’t the book I was expecting.

But then, is that necessarily a bad thing?

Surely part an author’s job should be to subvert expectations, to take the reader to new and unheralded places. Yes, there’s the argument that Agatha Christie is hugely successful because she served the reader exactly the same dish again and again (but even there, something like THE MURDER OF ROGER ACKYROYD is a huge jolt to expectations). So it’s a good thing for a (constant) reader to be challenged, to be taken in a new direction, but it still relies on that challenge meeting its own expectations.

Instead of a continuation of the quest of Roland, Eddie, Susannah, Jake and Oy, we have in WIZARD AND GLASS a digression, a diversion, a flashback. The majority of the tale follows the young Roland, his adventures with the oft mentioned Cuthbert and Alain, his first love and the origins of the obsession with The Dark Tower.

I suppose when writing a long tale that takes years and only has a distant ending far in the future, taking a little holiday to write a story within that universe – with the same major character – that does have an actual bloody ending, must be most pleasant. And for the main part I was vastly entertained by this Spaghetti Western mixed with mysticism, witchcraft – including tastes of EL TOPO, THE WILD BUNCH, THE WICKER MAN and latterly THE WIZARD OF OZ.

Film imagery abounds here.

And yet there’s a sense that this challenge isn’t really met. This tale is related by Roland over the campfire to his Ka-tet (his posse, if you will), and yet King still retains his much loved floating narrative. How Roland can know what happens when he isn’t present, or indeed the thoughts of other characters, is explained away by magic (but then anything in THE DARK TOWER universe can be explained away by magic), but that means the whole ends up feeling something less than magnificent.

As much as I enjoyed it, as much as I was grabbed by the thrills and suspense, I would have liked King to rise to the challenge of one man telling his story. And not just any man. Roland of Gilead narrating a tale in that halting voice of his, putting his bruises on display and exposing his heart to the world. This is a good story, but I just feel that within it was the material for a great story.

So, my journey towards THE DARK TOWER moved on, but with – in Stephen King’s mind at least – a little leap. THE WIND THROUGH THE KEYHOLE was written after all the others, but King himself has placed it next in the chronology. But it’s another flashback tale and the consensus was when I was reading them, that it was a book I could skip. So next week it’s onwards to the WOLVES OF THE CALLA…

Doctor Who Reviews – World Enough and Time

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Written with no prior knowledge of what’s going to be in the episode – I watch the ‘Next Time’ trailer and make sure I see, hear and read nothing else – and written immediately after my first viewing. This is my unfettered, emotional response to this week’s DOCTOR WHO fare.

Poor Bill.

Bill has been an absolutely magnificent companion. Genuinely terrific. And if this is the way she departs, then it’s going to be the most tragic story arc in DOCTOR WHO history. The kind of story arc that would surely be traumatising kids in a way likely to scar them for the rest of their lives.

I can only hope that Moffat – a man who, lest we forget, ended his first DOCTOR WHO story with The Doctor gleefully declaring “Everybody lives!” – has a clever way to save her.

A bit different this week, as reviewing the first episode of a two-parter is always going to be harder than a single forty-five minute story (or a loose three parter, like the one we had earlier in the series). It’d be like switching ALIENS off after forty-five minutes and saying: “Tell us what you think…” I can’t properly review it until I know how it all plays out. So, with that caveat in mind, here are my initial impressions.

Once again Moffat, like two series ago, tries to write a great Cybermen & Missy/Master vs The Doctor story. Almost like he’s turning to conjure up the Pertwee classic that never happened.
The pre-credits sequence, I thought P-Cap – mainly down to the hair – looked so much like Jon Pertwee.
And then he went and performed some Venusian Akido as well, which did make me laugh out loud.
While somewhere below decks The Master hung around for what must have been years in a very Master-esque disguise.
Pertwee. Pertwee. Pertwee.
Actually that last one might be more of a trope from The Davison years, as there was really no need for The Master to be in disguise, was there? He was a Prime Minister on Earth rather than Mondas, wasn’t he?
Although the disguise he wore was much better than the kind given to Anthony Ainley in the 1980s.
Mrs Jameson did guess who it was though, which did mute our surprise somewhat. But imagine how we’d all have reacted if nothing had been spoiled in the ‘next time’ trailers. It would have been THE number one most startling moment in DOCTOR WHO history.
Back to the beginning: Moffat has tried on a couple of occasions to land a joke about people referring to The Doctor/The Doctor referring to himself as ‘Doctor Who’. He’s never really succeeded though.
I did enjoy when Missy was pretending to be The Doctor, Michelle Gomez let her natural Scottish accent out.

Earlier in the week I posted my thoughts on ‘Spare Parts‘, a different ‘Genesis of the Cybermen’ story. This so far lacks the incredible humanity of that one, choosing instead to really ramp up the body horror. I imagine that’s what will live in my memory about ‘World Enough and Time’, that it’s the kind of horror movie you can put on at teatime on a Saturday night, which is – of course – one of the things DOCTOR WHO has always tried to be.

But it is obviously possible that my entire opinion could be changed by whatever lies ahead next week.

Fingers crossed for Bill!

The Strange Fate of Lord Bruton by F.R. Jameson

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Published today!

And available free on Amazon, my tale of the gothic: THE STRANGE FATE OF LORD BRUTON.

Here’s my introduction:

I can remember the exact moment this story came to me. I woke up in my parent’s house one morning about five years ago and it was all full and vibrant in my mind, like it had bled through from a particularly vivid dream.

But that’s not really where this story started.

If I had to pick the real moment for that, it would be in the early 1990s (maybe 1990 itself) when BBC2 showed a season of Roger Corman’s Edgar Allen Poe adaptations at nine on a Monday night.

By that point, I’d of course seen the Hammer films numerous times – but I was more familiar with the source material for those. I had read the real DRACULA, the real FRANKENSTEIN, and so knew the massive deviations from the source material they were taking. I understood already that these were practically pastiches.

Poe I was much less familiar with. I’d never really read the stories, never seen any of these adaptations before and I just soaked them up.

I still get a tingle when I think of Vincent Price’s menacing gaze, or Ray Milland’s paranoia, or Barbara Steele being locked in an iron maiden, or Peter Lorre expressing no surprise whatsoever that his host would keep his wife’s corpse in a glass coffin in his hallway.

In my introduction to my first novel, THE WANNABES, I wrote about how much I loved the way the walls changed colour in THE MASQUE OF THE RED DEATH. This is the first time I saw that movie.

There are seven Corman/Poe films in total, and BBC2 actually only showed six in that season. (The thought occurs that I still have never seen THE TOMB OF LIGEIA. I really must rectify that).

I now had a certain image of melodramatic gothic fixed in my mind.

Later, at University, I studied the fin de siècle novels and the images and themes of those were gobbled up and stored in the marble mausoleum I was building in a dark, foggy corner of my mind.

And it’s from that place of darkness and occasionally frighteningly vivid reds, that THE STRANGE FATE OF LORD BRUTON comes from. It was not just conceived that morning. It’s a culmination of those movies I watched, those books I read, a certain kind of gothic melodrama that exists constantly in my head.

If you get chance to read it, I hope you enjoy.

For the next couple of days, THE STRANGE FATE OF LORD BRUTON is available absolutely FREE through Amazon.

You can buy it through these links:

Amazon UK

Amazon USA

Amazon Canada

Amazon Australia

Me, Writing, in 2017

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Let me paint you a picture.

Something which may have happened Tuesday lunchtime this week.

A bespectacled man in his early forties sits down in one of the many Pret A Mangers in The City of London. He’s purchased a can of lemonade and nothing more. (But even that’s just for form, buying it essentially to buy his table space.) He isn’t there to have tasty freshly made sandwiches. He isn’t there for a business meeting, or to chat to friends. He is there to start rewriting his new novel.

Under his arm as he walked in was a black laptop bag. Inside the bag is his bright red Sony laptop and four pages of A4 lined paper, stapled together and covered in his blocky scrawl. These aren’t just any old scribbled pages though, these aren’t just random notes. At the top of the first page is the legend: ‘Chapter One’.

Recently his process has changed. Hitherto he’d written everything straight into the computer, trying to hit the grand total of 2,000 words every day. He was a single man the last time he finished writing a novel though, and he knows to get it done now is going to require some alterations.

Since the end of February he has been making use of his commute, making use of his lunchtimes  – writing really rough drafts of chapters in a little notepad and getting to the end of the story that way. Then going through each and rewriting them all in an A4 pad. Starting to polish them, strengthening the themes, trying to more fully realise the characters. Putting it all into a more legible hand.

Once he’d finished that he put it away for a month/six weeks (actually a bit longer than he’d have ideally liked) while he finished up some other writing projects.

But now his focus is fully back.

He is writing the next draft of the book, typing it this time, moving it ever closer to the final product.

Whether anyone else in that Pret can guess what he’s doing he doesn’t know and doesn’t really care. Perhaps the excitement that buzzes off him marks him out as not just the normal city worker getting a change of scenery from his desk, maybe he even silently mouths a sentence when he really likes it (he thinks he catches himself doing that once or twice).

It doesn’t matter if they do notice him though. He’s back Wednesday and Thursday lunchtimes doing exactly the same, getting through the second and third chapters, trying to punch things up as he goes, making notes on things he could improve in the future. He doesn’t care what anyone thinks. He just knows he is making progress and it makes him so happy. Only spending time with his wife and daughter is any better.

The man looks up, maybe allows himself to beam a big smile and then takes a long sip of lemonade. The rest of the world inconsequential while he’s there, he ploughs on.

A Very English Scandal by John Preston

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It seems that you have to be of a certain age to know about The Jeremy Thorpe Affair. From talking to people younger than me – or even the same age – it appears to be a cultural memory of the 1970s which really hasn’t survived.

That seems bizarre. You’d have thought that the leader of one of the main British political parties standing trial at the Old Bailey for paying a hitman to kill his secret gay lover is the kind of juicy bit of scandal that would stand there magnificently gaudy in the cultural memory.

Apparently not.

Maybe it’s the fact that Jeremy Thorpe – who had until recently been Leader of the Liberal Party – was actually found not-guilty at the trial. He and his co-conspirators walking innocent from the dock after one of the most bizarre summing ups given by a judge in British legal history.

[image error] Jeremy Thorpe, found innocent.

Theoretically this should have meant Thorpe going on and reclaimed his place in public life. But instead he was buried in a grave of yellowed news print and forgotten about. The establishment, which seems to have gone out of its way to help its own, preferring that once the deed was done, Thorpe just be politely shunned.

Equally theoretically, it should have stopped the press from reporting the case as if he was a guilty man. Certainly while he was alive and the threat of a libel action was in place. But that’s not the way I remember it growing up. The consensus was that he was guilty as hell, and no one seemed too worried about saying it.

(Although I do wonder whether a book like this would have got past a publishing house’s legal team if he was still alive.)

John Preston gives us here a gossipy, witty, and ultimately frothy version of what is a bizarre tale – one that involves two MPs up to various skulduggeries, an inept hitman afraid of dogs and even a cameo from bloody Jimmy Saville. He and Thorpe apparently appeared together on TV and straight-faced advised people not to break the law.

My favourite detail though – and this is for entirely personal reasons – is that the man who actually procured the hitman was a carpet salesman from my home town of Bridgend, who went by the name, John Le Mesurier. Although obviously not the one who was Sergeant Wilson.

[image error] Not him

Without a doubt it’s highly entertaining, although it does make the odd omission of not mentioning Peter Cook’s judge’s summing up sketch, which is an absolute classic and was a direct response to this case.

If you get chance, do watch it. It’s hilarious, and – incredibly – not that far from what the actual judge said.

 

The Waste Lands by Stephen King

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In anticipation of the film coming out, here – week by week – are my reviews of THE DARK TOWER novels.

In the afterword to THE WASTE LANDS, Stephen King writes about his difficulty in entering Roland of Gilead’s world, how the episodes of his immense fantasy saga were harder to create than his other fiction.

In a way that surprises me, as THE WASTE LANDS feels a much more assured and confident effort than either THE GUNSLINGER or THE DRAWING OF THE THREE.

THE GUNSLINGER still seems to me vaguely inconsequential and almost defiantly un-epic, a shaggy dog story with many loose ends; while in the sequel, the marrying together of Roland’s world with New York City is just too confusing and jarring, King seemingly taking the wrong way to try and root his vision in an understandable reality.

This volume though strides forward much more confidentially, wearing its ambition like a shield. It gives vistas of epic forests with mad robotic bears, friendly villagers and a terrifyingly mad city. Even the New York segments which make up the early sections are handled better here, with NYC itself given almost a sheen of fantasy so that it marries well into the narrative.

There are some flaws. King’s fondness for floating narration can become head-spinning as the reader tries to work out who is thinking what now; while the characters beyond the central foursome rarely rise above the level of cardboard cut-out.

(Okay, that last point might be an unfair nitpick, as in old John Wayne/Clint Eastwood westerns, how many of the supporting characters can really be described as rounded?)

In the main though, this is a confident and genuinely entertaining read, which – finally and assuredly – brings the Constant Reader into the vastness of a whole other world.

 

Doctor Who Reviews (extra) – Spare Parts

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The Mondasian Cybermen are back on our TV sets this weekend!

To celebrate, and out of curiosity (as it’s been a while), I went back and listened to Big Finish’s ‘Spare Parts’ again. The origin story of the Mondasian Cybermen.  And it occurred to me that this might be the only Cybermen story which is universally hailed as a classic.

Nothing in the new series has ever really got to grips with the Cybermen. No matter if they’ve had a Cyber-King in Victorian London, or been really fast in a futuristic amusement park, or been defeated by James Corden’s love, they’ve always not quite worked.

In the classic era: undoubtedly ‘Tomb of the Cybermen’ has its fans, but there are too many people who’ve noticed its inherent racism for it to really seem like a bona fide classic,

‘The Invasion’ is great, but it’s really Tobias Vaughan and The Cybermen rather than a Cyberman story.

‘Earthshock’ suffers from Beryl Reed and Adric’s terrible death scene.

‘The Moonbase’ and ‘Revenge of the Cybermen’ are both frequently dull.

If anyone wants to make a case for ‘Attack of the Cybermen’ or ‘Silver Nemesis’ as classics, I look forward to hearing it.

(I know I’ve left out ‘The Wheel in Space’, but I have a fondness for that one. I might be totally alone in that though.)

So that leaves ‘The Tenth Planet’, which has the regeneration and the Mondasian Cybermen, but still isn’t great, is it? It lacks human characters to care about and relies on spectacle alone to push itself into our memories.

And so having done that ridiculously quick dismissal of The Cybermen on TV, I find myself left with the Big Finish audio adventure, ‘Spare Parts’, and ‘Spare Parts’ is flipping great!

There are flaws undoubtedly, for example, a preponderance of coincidence as characters run into each other again and again. It’s a small society, but surely not that small.

But where it really works is as a human story. And that perhaps more than anything else is the genius of the Mondasian Cybermen. They are the most human of DOCTOR WHO monsters.

With other versions of The Cybermen, it’s too easy to ignore the inherent body horror of the concept, and just see them as stompy robots. But the voices of The Mondasian Cybermen – and here the voices are all production has to work with: that weird up and down modulated lilt, as if it’s a human voice were being fed through a machine – reasserts constantly that what we’re dealing with here are people. These are men and women who have had a terrible fate befall them, rather than evil cyber robots.

That humanity of the tale really sets it apart, and it’s a theme reflected in the cast of characters. The protagonists are a rat/mat catcher and his family in a small, insignificant house. No one seemingly important, no one who the fate of the world hinges upon, They are just everyday people in an everyday house and the cruelty of society demands they are swept up in this tragedy. This is some of the most affecting DOCTOR WHO ever created.

The Proletariat nature of the story is particularly apparent when you look at the two other possible versions of the same material.

Cybermen co-creator, Gerry Davis submitted ‘Genesis of the Cybermen’ to the production team in the 1980s. His plot sees The Doctor and companion entangled with Mondas’s ruling family. It’s aristocratic factions with little notion of the real people of Mondas.

The other version came after ‘Spare Parts’ (and even gives credit to it), but Nu Who’s ‘Rise of the Cybermen’/’Age of Steel’ is far more interested in captain of industry, John Lumic, and Mickey Smith’s revolutionary army, than it is in everyday life and everyday people.

Both versions miss the fact that – ironically as it may seem – a tale about stripping away humanity really allows you to tell a distinctly human story.

The Mondasian Cybermen return this Saturday, and if it’s even half as good as ‘Spare Parts’, I will be giddy with joy.

 

Doctor Who Reviews – The Eaters of Light

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Written with no prior knowledge of what’s going to be in the episode – I watch the ‘Next Time’ trailer and make sure I see, hear and read nothing else – and written immediately after my first viewing. This is my unfettered, emotional response to this week’s DOCTOR WHO fare.

A lot of the reviews I read of last week’s episode talked about how classic series WHO it felt. The same could equally be said of this one. There’s no timey-wimey stuff, there’s the single threat that’s defeated when bickering opposing parties come together, while even the pacing allows for a longueur in the middle.

Yet, I definitely liked this more than last week’s.

Maybe it’s the case of matching expectations. ‘The Empress of Mars’ I knew was going to a Victorian soldiers vs Ice Warriors grudge match by Mark Gatiss, and I thought it was going to be fantastic but it wasn’t. ‘The Eaters of Light’ though, I knew nothing about and I found myself positively charmed by it. It’s not the best episode of DOCTOR WHO this series, but I think it will be one that will reward multiple viewings.

First off, I’m always going to be a sucker for a threat like this. Weird pan-dimensional creatures likely to destroy the fabric of reality is so Lovecraftian I’m going to find it difficult to resist it. But unlike last week, the script made some attempt at creating some actual characters to face this threat. And characters who had a neat kind of symmetry. There was the guilt-ridden Pict chief who realised she had to carry out her destiny; and on the other side the guilt-ridden Roman soldier who knew he had to face his. This could have been trite, but the fact that it was all done with actors and characters who were little more than children made it so much more affecting. I didn’t expect it to be, but this was DOCTOR WHO to tug at the heartstrings.

The resolution of it all was a bit ham-fisted, and – seriously – it’s taken until now for someone as bright as Bill to question why everyone in the universe speaks Twenty-First Century English? It’s not a perfect forty-five minutes of TV. But in its more measured pace, it’s A to B to C storytelling and it’s archetypal characters, it has a charmingly old fashioned feel to it. A tantalising look at what Twentieth Century DOCTOR WHO would look like if they were still making it – and making it well – now.

All of the above perhaps shouldn’t be too surprising, as Rona Monro is the one person to write for both Classic WHO and Nu WHO. Her last story was ‘Survival’ which turned out to be the final ever tale for the classic incarnation (and she must be delighted that there are at least more episodes next week). It’s a long time since I’ve watched ‘Survival’, but I saw definite echoes of it here – the lost youth, the alternate dimension, a sense of other worldly wildness. So, I think the thing I’m going to do is watch this again and watch ‘Survival’ right after it. Already, it feels like a worthy double bill

Yes, all in all I think I can say I was pleased by this episode.

End notes:

As Mrs Jameson pointed out, popcorn is never that loud.
She did like the reason for crow-kind’s modern-day call though.
Seriously BBC, if you wanted a true WTF moment, this trailer should have been the surprising appearance of John Simm’s Master, not the first one. What, oh what, were you thinking?

Portent by James Herbert

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James Herbert’s worst novel is THE SPEAR. An overblown international thriller about a private detective taking on Nazis which is preposterous at every level (If memory serves, it has a sentient tank). PORTENT is nowhere near as bad as THE SPEAR, but as I trudged through its 400 pages it became clear it shares a lot of the same flaws.

From reading both, it’s obvious that trips aboard really scuttled James Herbert as a writer. Here he manages to conjure foreign locales with all the depth of a holiday brochure. Making it seem like the author had been to these places, but for two hours sight-seeing in between duty-free shopping. There’s zero depth to the portrayal, instead – in the various depictions of poor non-white people around the world – there is the unmistakable whiff of casual racism.

So little in the way of meaningful world-building does Herbert achieve that when a grand apocalyptic moment happens late in the novel – with so many cities and countries torn apart – I found myself turning the pages in a bored stupor, which is surely not the effect the narrative is going for.

The plot in this globetrotting muddle of an adventure?

To be frank, by the time we got to the perfunctory, rushed ending I had kind of lost my interest in it. But there’s all kinds of natural disasters and a sense that they’re all connected and it takes a grizzled scientist to work out what’s going on, and to stop an evil witch from New Orleans who’s thrown into the mix for some reason.

When I was a teen I can remember reading Clive Cussler. Now maybe I’m doing a disservice to nautical Clive, but for me he became the benchmark of this kind of uninspiring thriller.

Clive Cussler writing is glamorous locales, a maverick hero and the pretense that it’s all so interesting and unique, when really it’s a set of clichés thrown together. No matter what kind of quirks you give him, no matter what terrible backstory he has, your maverick hero is always going to be a cliché no matter what. While if you can’t make your glamorous locations breathe, they just feel little more than matte painted backdrops.

As he proves here, and certainly proved when he hit a really low bar in THE SPEAR, James Herbert just wasn’t cut out for that type of book. He was at his best writing dark cynical gory tales set in London and the Home Counties. Once he gets on a plane, once he leaves our small scepetred isle that really is his natural stamping ground, then it all goes wrong and you end up with a book as painfully middling as PORTENT.

Me, Writing, in 2017

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I wrote last time that I was going to begin typing-up/rewriting the new novel this week.

Well, I didn’t do that.

But I’m not going to smash myself in the face over it, as despite me breaking my word it has been a productive week.

The edits came back on my short stories, and so I’ve been working on them most of the week. The six I’ve had edited have been made sharper and tighter and I’m really happy. It’s fantastic when you can genuinely see improvement.

One of the stories – my tale of the gothic – will be published imminently. While the others will appear in a collection in a couple of months’ time. That works to my advantage as one of the suggestions the editor made – and a thought which had already occurred to me – is that the four tales that at the moment comprise it are quite bleak when seen as a whole. So the suggestion was that I insert a couple of extra stories to break up that bleakness a bit.

So, as well as the edits, I’ve also written two more short stories this week. I’m going to say that they’re both lighter pieces, although since one centres on a man being buried alive, lightness is a relative term. So far I’m quite pleased with them, and they’re nearly done to a state where I can edit them and rework them, before I send them to the editor.

All that though will happen in between and around me working on the new book. Experience has taught me this week that I can do about a thousand words a lunchtime while sat in a café. Hopefully then, with evenings thrown in as well, I should see it swiftly take shape in front of me.

The book is not all I’m aiming for though. While I’m on my morning and evening train rides, I intend to actually write my Welsh story in my notepads.

If I take a step back and look at all I want/have to do, then it is extraordinarily daunting. I’m frankly amazed my hair isn’t getting whiter by the day. The thing is though, I’m relishing it.

Allons-y!