Nicci French's Blog, page 8

Sharps and flats

Nicci:



Today, driving in the car together, Sean put on Chopin's 'Ballade', saying that if he could play one piece, this would be it - some of it so quick that the notes merge into a ripple and rumble of music, and it seems impossible that human fingers can be that deft and delicate. There's a theory that states that everyone can become great at a subject if they devote ten thousand hours to it, but I don't entirely believe it. If I devoted ten thousand hours to playing the piano, I might achieve a moderate level of fluency (actually I doubt even that), but no more. I know this because I'm a rotten musician. I can't sing - I make a noise like a frog. At school, i was made to mouth the words so as not to ruin the group sound and now just the sound of my voice trying to make music brings me out in a sweat of shame. I can't play any musical instrument, either. I've tried. I had violin lessons in my early teens and was so bad my parents made me move bedrooms to the end of the house, where i would inflict less pain on the rest of the family. I tried again when our youngest daughter started learning - we thought we should learn together, but it was a bad idea and although I slogged away for a year or two, dutifully practising scales, drawing my bow with a wail and a shriek along strings that i never quite managed to tune, standing in front of the mirror with the violin tucked under my chin and seeing how rigid and uncomfortable i looked, it was clear from the start that i was going to fail. I couldn't hit the right note: I could hear it was wrong, appalling, but I didn't know if it was too sharp or too flat. 



Sean is a far better musician than I am. He used to play the piano and even now can pick out a tune (I can't understand how two hands can move in different directions simultaneously; I have a flat and linear approach to music - one line of melody is all I can comprehend). He learned the violin and viola for a bit, in order to make up the string quartet he dreamed we would miraculously turn into. But he remains far far away from Chopin's 'Ballade'.



All of which is a way of saying that music is at the heart of our most recent book, Complicit, in which a music teacher and several friends form an impromptu bluegrass-type band in order to perform at a friend's summer wedding - with deadly consequences.... And that Complicit is out this week in paperback.

The Suffolk Chainsaw Massacre

Nicci and I were using the chainsaw this morning. (I should have included a photograph of Nicci wielding it - there's something about a woman with a chainsaw...well, enough of that). The thing about rural mechanical equipment is how dangerous it is if it goes just a little bit wrong. A neighbour of ours in Sweden built his own mechanical log splitter. One day, the strap on his dungarees got caught on it and he was pulled into it. He survived, just about. 

I was thinking of films that make use of this potential horror. There's The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, of course, a film that was banned by the British Board of Film Censors largely for its wonderful title (the film itself has remarkably little violence). A chain saw also plays a grisly part in Brian DePalma's remake of Scarface. Pauline Kael described it as a 'Keystone Kops' sequence, but it didn't make me laugh, though admittedly I only saw it through my fingers. There's the famous wood chipper scene in Fargo. 

But still, this machinery is so scary: you can fall into it, it can fall on you, you can lose your grip on it, fall off a tree holding it. It should be used more than it is.

 

For all ages

Nicci: Today I was signing one of our books for a young woman, who asked me to dedicate it not to her, but to her grandmother's boyfriend. At which point I had to lay down my pen and find out more. It turns out that they have only recently met. They are in their late seventies, in love and very happy. It reminded me of a time when Sean and I were at a party and the host's mother arrived. She was in her late eighties, even early nineties, and was accompanied by her new partner, who was the same age, and whom she had known when they were both young and had re-met a few months previously. There is something particularly optimistic about people falling in love towards the end of their lives - and it reminds us what we all too often forget: that you can be old and grey, have failing eyesight or find it hard to hear - but inside, you're the same as you ever were. Romantic, ambitious, needy, urgent, buoyant, full of fresh affections and desires.



PS. A few minutes ago, very casually and matter-of-factly as if it was no big deal, Sean said to me: 'I think that it's about a seventy-five per cent possibility that in 200 years, mankind won't exist.' Then picked up his book again.

Blast from the Past

I just watched Rosemary's Baby with a couple of young(-ish) people. There's always something a bit worrying about revisiting a film you've loved years ago.

I can report that it has entirely maintained its power to creep people out. The key is that remarkably little emphasis is given to the nitty gritty of Satanism and the presence of Satan himself. All the horror comes out of the ordinary domesticity. The main characters are very much like the cast of a Sixties sitcom: the young couple, the husband who's having problems at work, the nosy neighbours, the avuncular doctor. It works wonderfully as a young pregnant woman's paranoid fantasy: what if the husband your having snappy rows with the the couple next door who get on your nerves and the doctor who you don't feel properly listens to you - what if they were all conspiring to steal your baby?

For a few movies, Repulsion, Rosemary's Baby, Chinatown, Roman Polanski had the ability to portray London or New York or Los Angeles as if he'd arrived from another planet. He also had the weirdest sense of humour. Like calling the horrible neighbour Roman Castavet, a strange combination of his own name and that of John Cassavetes, who incidentally gives the most wonderfully nasty performance.

All the best horror, even vampires and zombies, comes out of the fears under the surface of our everyday lives. Lesson one for anyone writing suspense or horror: start from the ordinary and work out rather than the other way round. This is even true of movies like The Birds and Jaws. These seem like entirely exterior threats but Hitchcock and Spielberg managed to make you feel that they were manifestations of some strange communal anxiety.

It's interesting the movies that do and don't stand up. We watched the Hal Ashby/Robert Towne, Warren Beatty movie, Shampoo, the other day. It felt horribly dated. The problem with Warren Beatty is that he was always really a 1950s swinger with a 1970s hairstyle.

I've tried Beatty out on my daughters (as it were) and they really can't fathom what their mothers and grandmothers saw in him. Although we loved McCabe and Mrs Miller (which Beatty himself loathed), partly perhaps because he is entirely hidden behind a vast beard and drowned in a Leonard Cohen soundtrack. On the other hand, the young Marlon Brando is a bit hit with our household's younger women - and older woman, for that matter.

Five Easy Pieces stands up. The Godfather movies get better with each decade - I think some of the weaker, TV-movie sort of performances of some minor characters don't stand out so much. I'm worried about Apocalypse Now, though, especially after the disastrous extended version, with those awful 1970s sex scenes. 

PS Sorry about the lay-out problems in my previous post. I wasn't drunk. I thought I'd worked out how to lay out verse on the page. I was wrong.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Do Angels Have Sex? (Yes)

The latest book I'm listening to is Anton Lesser's truly superb reading of Paradise Lost. I haven't read it since I was at university and I'd forgotten almost all of it. Including, for example, how much attention Milton gives to the awkward question of sex. Do Adam and Eve have sex before the Fall? Do they feel desire for each other? If so of what kind? And, then, almost shockingly, there is the moment when Adam turns the tables on the angel Raphael and says, what about you? Do you have sex?

 Love not the heavenly spirits, and how their love                                                                          Express they, by looks only, or do they mix                                                                            Irradiance, virtual or immediate touch?

    And, rather charmingly, Raphael blushes as he answers that yes, they really do:

 To whom the angel with a smile that glowed                                                                            Celestial rosy red, love's proper hue,                                                                                      Answered. Let it suffice thee that thou know'st                                                                              Us happy, and without love no happiness.                                                                                    Whatever pure thou in the body enjoy'st                                                                                        (And pure thou wert created) we enjoy                                                                                          In eminence and obstacle find none                                                                                              Of membrane, joint, or limb, exclusive bars:                                                                                  Easier than air with air, if spirits embrace,                                                                                    Total they mix, union of pure with pure                                                                                    Desiring; nor restrained conveyance need                                                                                      As flesh to mix with flesh, or soul with soul.

Sounds good to me.

 

Two Wheels Good

In the old days, a columnist would write some vaguely controversial opinion and maybe the newspaper or magazine would receive some letters and nothing much would happen. Now things are very different. On 8 March, John Cassidy (a writer I normally like very much) begins a post on his New Yorker blog, thus: 'At the risk of incurring the wrath of the bicycle lobby...' and then mounts an attack on the increase of bike lanes in Manhattan. His Jaguar gets stuck in traffic, he complains. He can't find anywhere to park when he has a restaurant reservation.

In the old days nothing much would have happened, but as the old song puts it, that was then but this is now. All hell breaks loose. There's not just an outpouring of rage and grief from New Yorker readers in the comments section, but responses from Felix Salmon (here and here), Nobel Prize-winner Paul Krugman, Ezra Klein and even the Economist, all worth reading and all devastatingly critical.

By 12 March, the New Yorker has a special bike-lane page on its website, including a robust defence of bike lanes by political editor, Hendrik Hertzberg. 

It's democracy in action. The disappointing bit is that Cassidy returned twice to the debate (here and here) and tetchily and rather self-pityingly re-states his position, taking no account of the rebuttals at all. How often in your life have you ever seen anyone presented with evidence, accept it and change their mind?

 

 

Food for Free

Nicci, preparing lunch, earlier today. But why is she wearing gloves?



One of the pleasures of spring is Nettle Soup, when the nettles are bright green, tiny and tender. 



Fry some chopped onion and a clove of garlic. Add a bowl of nettles and a few handfuls of spinach. Fry until it reduces to a green mushy pulp. Add some stock, salt and pepper. Simmer for ten or fifteen minutes. Liquidize. Eat. Feel virtuous.



PS Nettles are delicious just fried as well.



Thanks to John Naughton for the photo.

Grate Expectations

Is this the most interesting drain in London?



Well, maybe one of them. I've had a lifelong relationship with the Fleet River, the greatest of London's hidden rivers. It flows past my parents' house. The two houses I lived in as an adult lacked basements because the river ran under them. A few hundred years ago, you could have rowed down it, from Hampstead Heath to the Thames. Today, if you go to Ray Street, just next to Farringdon Road, and stand outside the Coach and Horses, and kneel down by this grating, you can hear the river flowing underneath. (Don't get run over by the white vans that use it as a rat run.)



The place features in our next book, Blue Monday, which is published in June. More of that later.

 

I've Just Read...

Nostromo by Joseph Conrad. Or, to be more precise, listened to the audiobook version, superbly read by Nigel Anthony. 

Are people still reading Conrad? I have a feeling that people start with Heart of Darkness, and then finish there, because it's a strangely disappointing book. The best scene is the framing episode at the beginning, on the Thames. Well, Nostromo is a far more successful attempt at the same subject, which is, partly at least, the failure of our liberal ambitions in the chaotic world of human reality.

Robert Hughes once praised Auden for achieving 'what all writers envy: a prophecy that came true.' Conrad achieved this three times. In The Secret Agent he anticipated the nihilistic urban terrorism of the 20th and 21st century. In Under Western Eyes he portrayed the nihilists who were going to end up running totalitarian states. 

And in Nostromo he uncannily captures the violent disasters of European and US involvement in the developing world. Costaguana is an imaginary South American country but it could be Libya, it could be Zimbabwe, it could be Cuba. It's more than that as well. It's as if a Kipling story were rewritten by Nietzsche. The leading characters are plagued not just by political problems but by existential problems about the nature of their own selves once their social roles are stripped away. It's a novel full of Mr Kurtz's, always on the verge of seeing the essential nothingness of existence.

It's also a dazzling piece of narrative which reminds me of Jean-Luc Godard's dictum that every story should have a beginning, a middle and an end - but not necessarily in that order.

It's my new favourite book.

 

 

 

Dipping My Toe in the Water and Getting It Bitten Off

Or at least chewed a little...

In all the years I've been reading other people's blogs I've posted comments maybe twice. I've generally felt that reading the comments is like watching dogs fighting. If you try and interfere, you're likely to get bitten yourself.

I'm a regular reader of the blog by Ken Levine, a TV comedy writer on shows like Cheers and Frasier. 

Yesterday he wrote a blog titled 'Writing Room Etiquette' about the 'ribald' behaviour that goes on during the writing of a sitcom. He described the obscene humour that the writers use not as material but as a way of letting off steam. He told the story of a temporary secretary (engaged as stenographer) who didn't understand the culture. The showrunner (the man in charge of the writers) was being deliberately gross in his humour when she suddenly said in a stern voice: 'Can we just confine our comments to the script?' 

The other writers expected him to shout at her but instead he just said: 'Alright. Take this down. "Fade in. Interior apartment - day. Fred enters. Fred says..."' 

You can see what's coming, can't you? He dictated an extremely, ultra-obscene monologue, which she had to take down. Then he said: 'Okay, now read that back to me.' Levine recalls that she 'had to recite the entire offensive speech. By now we [the team of writers] were on the floor, holding our sides.'

For once, I thought, I'll leave a comment. It was only thirteen words long: 'Sounds like there's a fine line between writing room etiquette and office bullying.'

Mine happened to be the first comment. Now there are forty-seven more. They did not uniformly agree with. Nor did they address the issues I raised. Instead, it seems that I'm a prude, I don't understand writing, I think (sorry, 'whine') that comedy should be 'nice and polite'. Oh, and I have a stick up my butt.

If anyone is interested in the full context, it's here. 

It's interesting that Levine was a write on the TV version of MASH, because, on reflection, his story reminds me of a scene in the movie version. There is a nurse (played by Sally Kellerman) who is a humourless square who doesn't appreciated the coolness of the guys. When I saw the film as a teenager, I was immensely amused by the scene in which she is watched in the shower by all the male doctors and then the sound of her having sex is played across the camp tannoy. And then I watched the film a few years later and felt like I'd been part of a bullying mob.

Anyway, feel free to leave comments.