Nicci French's Blog, page 5

Was Frankenstein the guy or the monster?

We watched Frankenstein last night. It says something about the status of the film in the culture that even while watching it I couldn't remember whether I'd actually seen it before. Because even if we haven't seen the film we know about the villagers with flaming torches, about the hunchbacked assistant called Igor (who is actually called Fritz) and above all Boris Karloff's monster, with the bolts in his neck. A few thoughts about the film:

1) Boris Karloff isn't credited. In the credits, the monster is played by '?' Perhaps this was to convince audiences that Universal Pictures had created a real monster out of dead body parts.

2) In the credits it says that the film is 'based on the novel by Mrs Percy B. Shelley', which caused hissing from some of my fellow viewers.

3) Despite some wild acting, the film stands up really well, with its nightmarish architecture and sweeping, long camera movements that Kubrick must have admired. 

4) Karloff's performance has been parodied and mocked and set to music and turned into multiple TV sitcoms. It still clearly remains one of the great performances of the cinema.

I just read the novel as well, which has amazingly little in common with the movie. For example, Mary Shelley is weirdly vague about what Frankenstein actually does to bring the monster to life. And the monster itself is a sort of strange romantic (though murderous) outcast, who learns to speak and philosophize.

Frankenstein is certainly flawed in all sorts of ways, but it is clearly one of the great creations of literature. It is one of that very, very short list of characters that everybody knows about, even if they haven't read the books in which they appear: Don Quixote, Robinson Crusoe, Gulliver, Alice, Frankenstein (and his monster, with whom he is often confused), Dracula, Sherlock Holmes. I can't think of many others. Frankenstein is the only one created by a woman, and Mary Shelley was only nineteen when she started writing it!

PS The headline comes from James Thurber's anecdote about the first editor of the New Yorker, Harold Ross. He allegedly came out of his office and asked: 'Hey, was Moby Dick the guy or the whale?'

 

 

 

 

 

 

It'll End in Tears

After just watching something like this, I need to lie down in a dark room.

Shelley the Murderer

I've just finished Young Romantics, the really terrific book by Daisy Hay about the circle that had Percy and Mary Shelley at its centre. (It's a curiosity, by the way, that you can talk about John Keats and William Hazlitt, but nobody talks about Percy Shelley or George Byron.)

There's so much to say about that whole circle. But one thing that struck me while reading the book is that you could write a thriller about someone like Shelley. Almost everyone who knew him talked about his kindness, his generosity, his goodness. But for a kind, generous, good man, he was sure responsible for a lot of people dying. My rough tally goes as follows:

1) After he abandoned his first wife, Harriet, she drowned herself in the Serpentine.

2) Mary Shelley's sister Fanny also committed suicide, largely, it seems because she had been brutally abandoned and shut out by Mary and Percy.

(Shortly afterwards, Shelley virtually moved in with Leigh Hunt and then Hunt's sister-in-law, Bess, attempted suicide. Daisy Hay sees a clear connection with Shelley's very demanding presence. Anyway, she survived.)

3) Three of the Shelley's four children died young, and Hay suggests that the death of the second, Clara, was substantially due to Shelley's flagrant disregard of the baby's health.

4) You only need to read Shelley's poems, to realize that he wouldn't be much troubled by the idea of getting into an unseaworthy sailing boat, with no competent sailors and a storm coming. But on the reckless sea journey that killed him, he took with him a devoted friend, Edward Taylor, and an eighteen-year-old boy, Charles Vivian. 

Five people. That's the same as Jack the Ripper. Great poet, though. (Shelley, that is.)

 

You have to be strong to be old

Nicci: As my mother - 80 years old, registered blind, arthritic, disabled, eighteen in her heart and a young girl in her hopes and fears - often tells me: you have to be strong to be old. 



We've just watched Mid-August Lunch, Gianni di Gregorio's adorable, respectful, generous-hearted homage to old people, in which (as well as being writer and director) he plays the part of a man in his late fifties, out of work because looking after his ninety-year-old mother, strapped for cash, run off his feet, a bit melancholy but cheerful and without a whiff of self-pity. The film takes place over 24 hours during which Gianni allows himself to be persuaded to take in three other old women in their late eighties and nineties for the August holiday. He drinks, cooks, smokes, makes up beds and at night goes from room to room to watch them sleeping, like a tender mother. 



These weren't actresses pretending to be old; they were old women whom di Gregorio had cajoled into playing the part of themselves. They really were in their nineties. The camera settled on their wrinkles, sags, liver spots. And it was almost shocking to spend 75 minutes in their wonderful company, because we are so unused to doing so. We gaze at the young and turn away from the old. We don't see them - it's the next civil rights movement. 



There was a moment I found particularly poignant, when one of the women, lying in bed, talks to the exhausted Gianni (who's trying to get her to go to sleep) about her memories of being a child - about looking after her own grandmother. A very old woman remembering being young and watching over a very old woman. We contain all the ages we have ever been: young, old and in-between.

Personality Test

Take a look at this.

Do you think it is:

a) Awesome, or

b) Really rather juvenile.

If the answer is a) you are Sean French; if b) you are Nicci Gerrard.

The Theatre Formerly Known as Comedy

We went to see the revival of Alan Ayckbourn's Absent Friends. I wonder if Ayckbourn's reputation suffers a bit from his sheer, horrifying productivity (seventy-six of them - like the trombones), and also from the slightly trivial titles - Absurd Person Singular, Sisterly Feelings, Intimate Exchanges - which sound more like slightly naff newspaper headlines than major plays? For me, Absent Friends is not just funnier than most comedies, but - whisper it softly - a more penetrating portrait of marital despair than Arthur Miller's All My Sons. 

The one slight irritation I felt was that the Comedy Theatre has now been renamed the Pinter Theatre. Too many things are being named after people. We should start unnaming them. Kennedy Airport should go back to being Idlewild. I do hope the story is true that, when Pinter himself was lobbying for the name change, Tom Stoppard wrote to him saying: 'Wouldn't it be easier to change your name to Harold Comedy?' 

It must be true. It's in Wikipedia.

Everything can be pickled

We've been trying to get back to our Swedish roots - well, Sean's Swedish roots - by pickling things. It's so easy. You just heat vinegar and sugar and spices together and pour the liquid into the jars of whatever you're pickling. First came cucumbers with sprigs of dill (dill is the most Swedish ingredient that there is), now officially gherkins in their jars. A scrumptious green colour. Then came spiced beetroots, with star anise. Next, chillies - the last from our crop. But we still had brine left over - we started rooting round in the fridge and freezer for things to pickle. We've found some herrings. We've got some old-looking carrots - perfect. Radishes! The sharp crunch of them. And it feels so virtuous and thrifty, as if we're preparing ourselves for a long cold winter, instead of emerging into balmy spring.



For anyone who's interested, here's what you do for the gherkins: chop four cucumbers into fairly thick slices and pack them tightly into large jars with lots of springs of dill. Then bring 400g of caster sugar, one litre white wine vinegar, two and a half teaspoons of salt, the juice of two lemons and a tablespoon of whole peppercorns to the boil, stirring until the sugar has dissolved. When cool, pour into jars - and there it is. Ready to eat in two days.

Warnings that Came too Late

In today's Guardian, the veteran theatre critic, Michael Billington, writes a guide on how to spot 'second-rate theatre'. He gives his own 'list of contemporary signs...that audiences are in for a rough evening'.

In case you're curious, number one is:

'Any play in which a character aggressively masturbates within two feet of the front row.'

I'll try to remember that. And number ten (though it should be number two) is:

'Any play in which defectation is used to cover up dramatic defects.'

I can imagine whispered conversations in the stalls between Guardian-reading couples:

She: Is that man doing what I think he's doing?

He: Not only that. He's using it to cover up blatant dramatic defects. I think we're in for a rough evening.

 

 

 

 

Something Rotten in the State of Denmark

We've just finished watching The Killing 2, gulping it down two episodes at a time. My feelings about it are much the same as the ones I had about the first series - but even more extreme.

The good bit about it - which is much the most important - is very good. The portrayal of Copenhagen is wonderfully bleak - even the daytime scenes seem to be at night. The characterization is bleak as well - even the nice characters are weak and flawed. (By the way, from this point on there is almost nothing but spoilers.) The lovely, faithful wife of the unjustly imprisoned Raben turns out to be unfaithful. We last see the incorruptible politician, Thomas Buch, in a shot quoting grimly from the last shot of The Godfather. The plot has the visceral forward momentum of a show like 24. 

Above all, Sofie Grabol's Sarah Lund is one of the screen detectives: driven, flawed, borderline insane, utterly compelling.

However...

The story sort of makes sense as you watch it. But, at the end, when you go back over it from the villain's point of view it becomes almost insane. (This is an important issue for anyone planning a thriller, by the way. If you tell the story from, say, the detective's point of view, you still have to imagine the story from, say, the murderer's point of view. Why did he or she do what they did? What was their plan? Is it remotely plausible?)

The crime is this (spoilers, obviously): A maverick Danish special services soldier kills a family in Afghanistan, because he thinks the father is a Taliban informer. For some reason that is far from clear, he kills them in front of a unit of Danish soldiers. Back home, he 'covers this up' by killing them all one by one, along with their lawyer, and disguising it as the work of Islamist terrorists.

Oh, and (as we finally discover) the killer's other job is as a policeman investigating the murders himself as partner to Sarah Lund. When Lund is about to be taken off the case because she is the one person who doesn't believe the fake motive he himself has confected, he - utterly bafflingly in retrospect - says he doesn't believe it either and demands she be kept on. 

After watching the series, you can play a sort of game, working out in your head all the stuff that the murderer managed to do as part of his dastardly plan while still holding down a full-time job as a policeman - creating fake Islamist websites, stealing explosives from military bases, planting bombs in Sweden. The man is a genius. He makes Hannibal Lecter look like a shoplifter.

Great fun, though. Roll on part three.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Reading our lives

Nicci:

I've just read, very belatedly, a feature by James Wood in last November's New Yorker, in which he describes sorting through his dead father-in-law's library of books and asks how much we can tell of a person's life and self from what they have on their bookshelves. In Wood's case, he concludes that we can tell less than we might imagine (although in a piece that was a curious mixture of intimacy and cool dispassion, his father-in-law emerges as a fierce lover of learning, a prickly and fervent self-educator).



But it made me wonder what someone would make of our bookshelves, were they to walk round them like a detective looking for clues. Although we repeatedly attempt to cull them before they overrun the house, we own a lot of books and we try to put them in categories - otherwise the best place to loose a book is among crowds of books. It's not what individual books you own that describes you, but the categories that speak. Apart from obvious ones - classics, modern novels, thrillers, biographies, poetry - it is clear from a cursory glance someone (Sean) reads a lot of books on moral philosophy and history, particularly modern history. He has dozens and dozens of books on the Second World War. Adrienne Rich and Kate Millet and Germaine Greer and Ellen Moers and books about the backlash and about pornography jostle together. We obviously make more resolutions than we can keep: there are several feet of often untouched teach-yourself-language books (Swedish, Italian, Spanish, Russian, Modern Greek….). It could be deduced - from all the literary criticism, as well as from earnest pencilled remarks written next to Eliot's poetry or down the margins of Ulysses - that one or both of us studied English at university. We like cooking - far more cookery books than we could ever need. We like roses, birds, English trees. We like maps. Grammar. Graphic novels. We probably have a greenhouse. We like biking and walking. We like wild swimming. When we go to an exhibition we tend to buy the catalogue. There are chess players in the house. We have children who are now grown up - there's a set of shelves in the corridor full of beloved children's books, with cracked spines and pages coming loose: The Mousehole Cat, all of Dr Seuss, the Moomintroll books, The Owl Babies, All Join In… read aloud over and over again. Next to Sean's side of the bed is an entire bookshelf devoted to the hundreds of books he is in the process of reading: each one of them has a bookmark of some kind showing where he's got to. Books I read are stained and battered, with turned down pages: Indian mud and Greek sand and Swedish lake water are held inside the covers. 



Then there are numerous odd shelves: books on mountaineering (for writing Killing Me Softly), memoirs by people who were stalked (Beneath the Skin), Freud, Jung, Klein, police handbooks, forensic medical books. Books about London. About dreams. About night. About pain and death. About hidden rivers.  



Recently I helped my parents moved from the family home. They never throw anything away - there were seed catalogues from the Seventies and B&B guides from the Eighties, text books dating back to my father's university days. There was a Guinness Book of Records from decades ago, school atlases of the world before vast countries split apart and spawned dozens of new ones. My father doesn't read much anymore, except poetry, and my mother's blind and so can only listen to audiobooks. Yet these old books have taken their place on the new shelves because somehow they seem to represent the lives of the people who have owned and loved them.