Nicci French's Blog, page 7

Now I Get It

There's a completely new kind of film criticism, in which you expose a cliche just by editing together lots and lots of examples of it. It's been done with losing your mobile phone signal. And who, until now, would have thought that the most lazily repeated line in film history is: 'You just don't get it, do you?'

I've been racking my brains and I'm afraid I can't guarantee that we haven't used it in our novels. Possibly more than once. 

In My Dreams

Nicci was away, everybody was away, so I finally watched Buried, in which Ryan Reynolds wakes up and discovers he has been buried alive and the whole film - the whole film - takes place in a small wooden box.

What did I think of it? Well, let me answer that by describing the dream I had that night: Quentin Tarantino was torturing me for information I didn't possess. That was the effect the film had on me.

PS Why Quentin Tarantino? I only realized a day or two later. A few years ago Tarantino directed a special double-episode of CSI in which one of the main characters is buried alive. Even my sub-conscious is a film geek.

 

Not In Front of the Children

We're having my mother's 80th birthday dinner this evening, so I was intrigued to read the following reminiscence in today's Guardian by Judy Carver of her parents, one of whom happened to be William Golding: 

    'When my father was 75, he had a big party in London to which we were invited. I enjoyed it tremendously and felt I had been rather a success, an impression supported by a slightly mordant appraisal from my mother. When my father's 80th birthday approached in 1991, I assumed I would be included too. But I learned that my mother had decided not to invite me or my brother. Unusually, I protested. She remained adamant.

    'My father phone me and offered to "make a fuss". But I could see there was no point. It wouldn't be much fun going to a party where the hostess doesn't want you, especially when the hostess is your own mother. My mother said: "It's really a very small party."'

    So now we know what the parents were doing, while the children were on the island in Lord of the Flies. They were having a birthday party.

 

 

Yes I said yes I will Yes

I've developed a bit of an obsession with audiobooks over the last year or so and I've loved many of them but I've just finished what is quite definitely and without any doubt the best of all (for the moment): Ulysses, read by Jim Norton and Marcella Riordan. James Joyce always said to people who had problems understanding the book that they should just read it aloud. That's not quite enough, to be honest. Declan Kibberd's Ulysses and Us: The Art of Everyday Living is a great help. His introduction and notes in the Penguin edition are useful as well. 

The thing is, if you're English, and you tackle Ulysses, you read it with a general Father Ted-like Irish accent. Jim Norton brings the book alive with about a hundred, entirely separate Irish accents. I thought it was the most brilliant performance of a novel I'd ever heard - until I got to Marcella Riordan's performance of Molly Bloom's soliloquy at the the climax. It's a staggering achievement. I hope they won lots of awards for it. 

Just one quotation from the book. It's very famous, but even so. When Bloom and Dedalus step out of Bloom's house, into the garden, they see: 'The heaventree of stars hung with humid nightblue fruit.' 

PS The headline is composed of the last seven words of the book.

 

 

 

 

Oddball Thrillers

A few months ago, Rachel Cooke wrote an interesting piece in the Observer about ten 'neglected literary classics'. I've just read two of them: The Blank Wall by Elizabeth Sanxay Holding, first published in 1947, and The Victorian Chaise-longue by Marghanita Laski, first published in 1953. 

    They both start off deceptively like conventional, realistic domestic stories about a deliberately dull married woman and then each of them takes a really creepy turn, but in completely different ways. The heroine of The Blank Wall is a suburban wife, trying to keep her family life going in wartime while her husband in the military. She stumbles across the dead body of her daughter's lover and decides to get rid of the body herself. Bad idea. It's the subject matter of Patricia Highsmith but - all the more chillingly - written in the romance novel style of Sanxay Holding's earlier books. There are actually two good film versions: The Reckless Moment (1949) and The Deep End (2001). Odd that it should be out of print. Boring title and an unspellable author's name. But still...

In Laski's novella, a woman convalescing on a titular chaise-longue suddenly and horribly finds herself inhabiting the body of the original owner, a Victorian woman with a guilty secret. At first it feels like a bad dream but its worse than that. This macabre fairy story would be impossible to film. It all takes place in the consciousness of the main character (or characters), but it's a small classic. 

Both books have been republished very elegantly (and rather pricily) by Persephone Books. As of today, they have republished ninety-three books, including such intriguing oddities as a serious book by Richmal Crompton, one of those that we've always told are no good at all compared with her William books. But this one sounds very good. Oh dear. So many books, so much money, so little time.

 

Why 'The Killing' Works (Even Though It Shouldn't)

We're probably the last people in Britain to watch the Danish cop thriller, The Killing - and we've been as hooked on it as everybody else. It's got a crack-like narrative drive, which is slightly reminiscent of 24. In fact, with its 200-day high concept structure, its rather like 24 as remade by Lars von Trier. It really is very bleak.

What's striking about how well it works is how much is wrong with it. I don't mean this as an insult. One of my favourite sayings is Randall Jarrell's definition of a novel: 'a prose narrative of some length that has something wrong with it.' I think what he meant is that once you get beyond a miniature work like a lyric poem or a short song, all your choices imply things that you are choosing not to do. 

I'm just going to jot down a few random flaws that struck me as I watched it and then the virtues that outweigh them (by the way, this means that the following is FULL OF SPOILERS - and The Killing is really not something you want to watch if you've been told who did it):

1) In order to sustain tension over twenty separate episodes characters are constantly having to withhold information simply to tantalize the viewer. A blatant example is the Muslim teacher, Rama, who is the first significant suspect. He has a perfectly good alibi which (for an extremely implausible reason) he doesn't reveal, even to his own wife, while he is driven out of his job, beaten up, vilified in the media. If only he'd revealed it before...well, they'd have lost about four episodes.

2) Before I get on to why Sarah Lund is a wonderful character, it should be said that she is the world's worse detective. She conducts her investigation like a toddler with Attention-Deficit Disorder. Every time she suspects someone of the crime, she doesn't just investigate, but accuses them and broadcasts her suspicions. This clumsiness repeatedly tips off the real killer while causing at least two deaths of innocent people, ruining careers, breaking up relationships. I thought this aspect of her non-professionalism would be dealt with, but it never really was.

3) I know that the detective who wrecks their own personal life is a staple of the genre but Sarah Lund's utter hopelessness as mother, daughter, fiancee, ex-wife, friend, colleague (and any other relationship I've forgotten about) really bordered on the comical. 

4) A danger of a 20-part thriller is that ideas are raised and then dropped, or half-dropped. For example, a powerful early moment is when Lund's Swedish boyfriend (a forensic psychologist) looks at the file and announces that this is the work of someone who has done this before. But when, in the final moments of the final episode, we learn of how the murder was actually committed (ie the murderer couldn't bear to actually do the murder himself), this makes no sense. The murderer seemed to have two different kinds of motivation that didn't fit together.

5) And then there were other random questions: why was there so much blood in the Party flat (it looked like the aftermath of the Manson murders) when we later learned she was kept in another house overnight and then taken to the forest, where she was still strong enough to escape - albeit temporarily.

6) And maybe I missed something, but what was the role of the cabdriver/removal man? Why did he flee? Why did he kill himself? 

7) Nicci disagrees with me about this, but I felt the whole political plot and the whole school plot was too much of a cross between a red herring and a shaggy dog story. Compare it (very unfairly, since it's the best thriller that's ever been on TV) with Edge of Darkness. Unlike Troy Kennedy Martin's masterpiece, but very like 24, this isn't a series you could watch again.

However, and this is a big however, The Killing was an extraordinary achievement, and sustained itself amazingly well over twenty episodes. Because:

1) It was superbly cast and acted. Sofie Grabol's Sarah Lund is as remarkable as everyone says she is. I found even the way she chewed gum weirdly compelling (but she or the director must have got tired of it because she stopped doing it in the later episodes). And she had an intriguing, flickering smile when she interviewed suspects which made her hard to read. But she didn't stand out, the way Hugh Laurie does in House or Kiefer Sutherland did in 24. All the characters were given their due. 

2) More than that, it is almost startling to see a drama that is about middle-age people. More than that, middle-aged people with middle-age faces. Compare Sofie Grabol or Anne Eleonora Jorgenson (as the victim's mother) with their US equivalents. It reminds me of a line of dialogue in a Steve Martin movie: 'You're breasts feel strange.' 'That's because they're real.'

3) The grim, almost nightmarish portrayal of Copenhagen, which surely won't do much for Danish tourism. It was claustrophobic, lowering, grubby, sordid - but in a good way.

4) And accompanying this was a grim society - of drug takers, sexual exploiters, corrupt politicians, ruthless politicians, corrupt and ruthless politicians ex-criminals, depressives, liars - in which you believed that any of them, even the women, could have participated in the rape and murder of an innocent young woman.

5) They stolen ideas from the right places. The political intrigue was pure Michael Corleone (in the final episode I expected people to kiss his hand and call him Godfather). The mini-thriller style of each episode was effectively lifted from 24. (Each episode of 24 is full of lines like, 'I want the money within the hour'; this was full of lines like, 'I'll meet him this evening'.)

6) I know we're supposed to like our thrillers dark, but, God, they had the courage to make every single character unsympathetic. Except for Lund's poor partner, Meyer. 

7) And the music was great.

The Killing is like a roller coaster ride. It picks you up, drags you along a hair-raise set of curves and loops and tosses you out the other end thinking to yourself 'Wow!' and then, 'hang on a minute...' Still, does anyone know when series two comes out?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

And Even More Cuts

Nicci (Gerrard) debating the arts cuts in today's Observer. 

Cuts, cuts, cuts!

During this last week, I have been preoccupied by the threat to the arts in many directions. Amidst all the cuts, the flood of things that are being lost or put out to the mercy of the 'big society', it is too easy to loose sight of small organisations that are going under. I am on the board of the Poetry Book Society, a widely-respected and unique organisation that supports poets, poetry readers and poetry publishes and who, for what amounts to a tiny amount of money, has an influence that ripples across our culture. It administers, for example, the high-profile T S Eliot Prize for poetry which in January attracted 2,000 people, young and old, to the Royal Festival Hall to listen to the shortlisted poets reading from their work - an extraordinary and moving occasion, especially because of the large number of children and teenagers in the audience, who queued in the foyer afterwards to buy signed copies. Last Wednesday, it lost its entire funding from the Arts Council and its future is now imperilled. It's impossible to be objective about cuts like this - how can one compare them? What about shelters for women who have been domestically abused, or meals on wheels, or educational maintenance allowances for students from poor family, or tuition fees .... But poetry fares badly on the open market. it's a fragile from, and yet so precious. I keep thinking that for ten per cent of a rich man's bonus, it could flourish.



Then, on Saturday, I joined the march against the cuts to Suffolk Libraries - there are 44 of them and 29 have been marked for closure. I started using the libraries when I was a young child, and used to go every Saturday morning to take out my six books for the week. I've read in libraries, borrowed from them, studied in them, written in them, gone to readings in them, given readings in them; Sean and I have attended readers' groups in prison libraries, where books can for a time give prisoners a kind of imaginative freedom. Libraries are where books are not owned but shared; they are common spaces where everyone can go: children and old people, the poor and jobless, the lonely and the aimless. Libraries are at the heart of a community. People who feel they are outsiders, belong to a community when they step into one. It seems to me that if we could save our forests, we should also be able to save our libraries.



But the march - however sorry the reason for it - was a joy. Hundreds and hundreds of people (the children dressed in their favourite fictional characters) walking slowly through Ipswich on a sunny morning; making friends with strangers; feeling the sense of a common bond. It made me think that this is how we should always be - open and communicative and optimistic about our power to change things. Anne Lesley said on 'Any Questions' that marches don't achieve anything, they're just nice for the people who go on them. They are nice for the people who go on them, it's true, uplifiting, but I think they are also important. We should all let our voices be heard.

Solitary Pleasures

I just read an interesting article about the effect that the ipod has had on the way we listen to music, which had a terrific quotation from a ninety-year old edition of the Gramophone. The writer was confronting the new embarrassing idea of someone sitting and listening to music on their own. Catching them at it would be 'as if you had discovered your friend sniffing cocaine, emptying a bottle of whisky, or plaiting straws in his hair. People, we think, should not do things "to themselves," however much they may enjoy doing them in company.'

Straw-plaiting? I think the correspondent may have had something else in mind. Be that as it may, the quotation made me think, not of the things I'm ashamed to do on my own, but on the things I have to do on my own, because I cannot or dare not get anyone else to do with me. Namely:

1) There is a fairly long list of TV shows that I can't get anyone to watch with me. They include Dexter, the drama whose hero is a serial killer (because its hero is a serial killer and because of its violence); Battlestar Gallactica (because of the basic taboo of SF, space, all that sort of boys' stuff in a basically female household); Breaking Bad, the disturbing comedy about a terminally ill chemistry teacher who becomes a drug dealer (because it is considered disturbing, creepy and generally yucky); Life on Mars, of which I've only just started the second series, and that was about a year ago (I'm not sure exactly why, but no one else in the family liked it).

2) Rock documentaries (with a few exceptions, we all watched and loved DiG!). Considered boys' stuff.

3) The Battlestar Gallactica exclusion zone applies to almost all SF films. 

4) Buried (just look it up, or read the title).

5) Horror, especially gross-out horror. I watched Drag Me to Hell alone (great ending, by the way).

6) There are things to listen to alone as well. Even if I could get anyone to listen to Yessongs with me, which I couldn't (and it's so inviting, a triple live prog album!), I think it's a pleasure to be experienced alone, like straw-plaiting. Anyway, I think if you didn't hear Yes by 1973, then it's too late.

7) The Tunnock's Tea Cake. How can anyone not like the Tunnock's Tea Cake? It's a marshmallow, it's a biscuit, and it's covered in chocolate.

8) Sparkling red wine. How can anyone not like sparkling red wine? It's red, it's bubbly, it feels strangely ironic and forbidden. I've found an article describing it as a grown-up pleasure. Not in this house.

Too Good to Check

There are certain stories that are like the killer in a slasher movie - they just won't lie down and die, however often they are refuted (and I mean refuted, not rebutted). Mama Cass died choking on a ham sandwich, Walt Disney was cryogenically frozen. Not true and not true. Only a few days ago I told some people at dinner about how a drunk Clark Gable once drove into and killed a pedestrian in his car and how MGM got an employee to confess to the crime. (There's a particularly interesting article on snopes.com demonstrating the falsity of that particular myth.)

Back when I was a teenager, we used to whisper to each other: 'You know that sex scene in Don't Look Now, the really good one? It was actually real. Julie Christie and Donald Sutherland really did it.' It was so exciting. It was also, needless to say, untrue. Even back then Donald Sutherland was denying it in interviews. And now today, there is a report that the ex-editor of Variety, Peter Bart has written a book in which claims to have been present on set and witnessed them 'really doing it'. And poor Sutherland, 38 years after the event, is denying it again. It won't do any good.

Incidentally, in the report Simon Reynolds describes it as the 'infamous' scene. As I understand it, that means famous in a bad way. I think 'celebrated' or 'fondly recalled' or 'much enjoyed' would be more appropriate.