Andrew Cartmel's Blog, page 36

An Amazing Spider Dud

I'd reached the point where my praise of Marvel comic book movies had become so all pervading and almost automatic (see recent examples here and here) that it's a considerable relief to report that one is a real stinker.

The Amazing Spider-Man 2 is a complete dud. And in discussing it I shall be revealing some plot twists so you may want to look away now. 

There have always been some built in problems with Spider Man movies. For a start — unlike Batman, say — Spidey's adversaries are some of the worst and weakest super villains imaginable.

This film begins with our hero battling a stupid blue electric guy (Jamie Foxx wasted in a thankless role) and ends with him confronting a big stupid rhino guy. Other crappy Spider Man villains include Doctor Octopus and the vulture guy. Even the goblin guy is a bit dull.

Yet none of this has prevented some fine earlier films. Indeed, the first Amazing Spider-Man was well made, impressive and great fun. So why is this sequel, still starring the excellent Andrew Garfield, such a comprehensive failure?

Well, it's the script I'm afraid. It gives me no joy to say this because two of the writers involved, Alex Kurtzman & Roberto Orci are among my favourite writing partnerships while James Vanderbilt wrote the superb White House Down. (The fourth name on the screenplay credits is Jeff Pinkner who was, like Kurtzman and Orci, involved in the TV shows Alias and Fringe.) 

But this movie is a mess. And boring. A whole bunch of big noisy stuff happens but the audience (or at least this audience member) remained completely uninvolved. There was nothing to invoke sympathy or interest. It was a long dull slog. The only brief flickers of relief were the scenes about Peter Parker and his girlfriend Gwen Stacy (Emma Stone). They are an appealing, engaging couple with great chemistry.

So when Gwen is perfunctorily bumped off at the end of this film, the only possible source of interest is cut off. Oh well, now we need never watch one of these abjectly apathetic arachnid adventures again.

(Image credits: Not surprisingly, no shortage of pics available for this mainstream multiplex blockbuster. All courtesy of Ace Show Biz.)

Swedish Vampires on Stage

Let the Right One In — sorry, Låt den rätte komma in — was a Swedish film. It was written by John Ajvide Lindqvist, based on his own novel. And it was directed by Tomas Alfredson, who would go on to direct Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, one of my favourite movies of all time.

Without beating about the bush, Let the Right One In is a vampire movie. It tells the story of a lonely, bullied pre-teen boy, Oskar, who befriends what appears to be a lonely pre-teen girl called Eli. But I bet you can guess what Eli really is.

They develop a rather touching relationship and, in a mindblowing sequence at the end, Eli saves Oskar from the bullies. It's a terrific little film and made quite an impression. Inevitably an English language remake followed. It was produced by the resurrected Hammer films, written and directed by the talented Matt Reeves and was re-titled Let Me In.

It was a good film, but there was something lacking compared to the original, as exmplified by the duller and more obvious choice of title. (a title which, incidentally, refers to the old vampire myth that you have to invite them in before they can cross the threshold. And bite you.)

But you can't keep a good vampire down, and now Let the Right One In is back, with it's proper title intact, as of all things a West End stage production. Adapted by writer Jack Thorne and directed by John Tiffany, the action has been relocated from a deprived semi-urban wintery Sweden to a ditto wintery Scotland, which makes very good sense.

Indeed, Jack Thorne's adaptation is smart, economical and full of good choices. It is also a miracle of compression, bringing an astonishing amount of the film into a stage production with a single set. An impressive feat.

That single set is also a miracle of compression. Consisting of an eerie forest of tall trees, other spaces are illuminated or defined by props as required. There is also a playground climbing frame which brilliantly doubles in a surprising way at the end of the play and — astonishingly — allows the swimming pool climax of the movie to be reproduced on the stage.

But, despite being impressed by the set, the acting, the staging and intermittently caught up in the plight of the bullied Oskar, I remained uninvolved and unmoved by the action. I was even a little bored.

Tremendous imagination and effort have gone into attempting to replicate the narrative contours of the original film on stage. And miraculously they've succeeded. Yet I walked out of the theatre feeling neither particularly entertained nor engaged.

In the end it irresistibly brought to mind a quote by Dr Johnson: it was "like a dog walking on its hind legs. It is not done well, but you are surprised to find it done at all." 

Sorry folks, I know this production is highly regarded. Maybe I just caught a duff matinee.

(Image credits: The movie stills of the Swedish film are from Ace Show Biz. The Let Me in posters are also from that same useful site. The Swedish poster is from Fan Pop. The photo of the groovy stage set is from the Beautiful Dundee blog. The theatre poster — bloody difficult to get a halfway decent image, this was the best I could do — is from the Apollo Theatre site.)

That Uncertain Feeling by Kingsley Amis

Continuing my project to read all of Kingsley Amis's novels (albeit slightly out of sequence), inspired by Zachary Leader's biography, I have now reached Amis's second book, That Uncertain Feeling.

It's the story of John Lewis, a Welsh librarian, who is torn between his wife and the Other Woman: "How reprehensible yet pleasant it would have been to make a pass at her." 

The wife, Jean, is very engagingly drawn by Amis, rather in the mode of the wife in I Like it Here — and also apparently in the mode of Hilly, Amis's real life wife. 

The Other Woman, Elizabeth, resembles some of the hilarious secondary characters in Take A Girl Like You, his fourth novel and one of his masterpieces. Elizabeth is also, in her own way, extremely engaging. So you can see why John Lewis is torn.

That tug-of-war is also between Lewis's innate decency and his Welsh working class roots and the immoral Anglicised upper class milieu in which Elizabeth operates. The book is, to quote an Amis catchphrase "full of fun" and also full of the sharp, yet tender, observations about married life and child rearing which distinguished I Like It Here. 

The novel is, stylistically, a step forward from Lucky Jim, showing the judicious concision and gift for eliding material with the almost cinematic cutting from scene to scene which distinguishes Amis's writing at its best. Unlike Lucky Jim, it is told in the first person, a technique which the writer would return to with The Green Man, my favourite Amis novel.

That Uncertain Feeling is marked by the keen, witty observation of character which is an Amis hallmark. Lewis's wife walks out her front door and glances quickly around "as if fearful of snipers." Or a man evading Lewis's gaze in a pub: "he turned away like an alcoholic sighting a pink rat." Great descriptions of inanimate objects, too. Such as the "ship's siren out in the bay, a low-pitched, harsh moan like an ogre breaking wind."

One interesting aspect of the book is how science fiction creeps into it. Like Amis himself, Lewis is an SF fan, a regular reader of Astounding magazine and this allows Amis to use science fiction imagery in his prose. Tormented by his longing for infidelity, Lewis thinks how nice it would be if he were like a creature on "one of the outer planets of Vega, where life... was transmitted by asexual reproduction."

This novel does, however, have a serious flaw. There is a sequence where Lewis is around at her house with Elizabeth, the other woman. They think they have plenty of time alone, but Elizabeth's husband returns unexpectedly. Lewis tries to flee the house but gets lost (it's a large mansion). After various misadventures he ends up in Elizabeth's dressing room where he finds an antique traditional Welsh woman's costume (Elizabeth has been putting on a play). Then Lewis for no discernible reason decides to put on the traditional Welsh woman's costume.

He isn't drunk, he isn't a cross dresser, he isn't crazy. Elizabeth hasn't dared him to do it (which I think would be the most plausible motivation in an admittedly thin field). He just puts this costume on, for no reason. Or rather, there is a reason — the author wants him to. It's an entirely arbitrary — and deeply unconvincing — act. And of course events conspire to force Lewis to flee the house still wearing the costume. And catch the bus home in it. And "hilarious" events ensue.

It's an unfunny episode, which falls completely flat. Because it's completely unbelievable. As John Lewis himself might say, "There's no bloody reason for it, man." And it almost sinks the whole book. Almost but not quite. It's a considerable tribute to Amis's skills as a novelist that he manages to regain lost ground. Subsequent set pieces involving some brilliant use of minor characters and very dry humour enabled me to forgive.

And, as is becoming customary with Amis, I learned a new word: amphisbaenic (spelled or perhaps misspelled "amphisboenic" throughout the Penguin edition). It means resembling a (mythical) serpent with a head at both ends. That's what Elizabeth's fancy car looks like.
 
(Image credits: The recent Penguin with the Nicholas Garland cartoon cover, which is the edition I read, the Penguin Modern Classic with the nice cover painting (peering through bookshelves) and the Panther up-skirts photograph are all from Good Reads. The yellow jacket Gollancz original hardcover is from an ABE seller. The US hardcover with an attractive cartoon cover is from another ABE seller. The rather cool Australian paperback, published by Horwitz, is from yet another ABE seller. Thanks to all concerned.)

Take a Girl Like You by Kingsley Amis

Continuing my modestly ambitious project of reading all of Kingsley Amis's novels (inspired by Zachary Leader's admirable and definitive biography of Amis), I have just finished Take a Girl Like You. This is Amis's fourth novel, after Lucky Jim, That Uncertain Feeling and  I Like it Here and it is widely regarded as one of his best.

I'd go along with that, though it isn't about to unseat The Green Man as my personal favourite. (Actually, there is an interesting foreshadowing of The Green Man here. The male protagonist of Take a Girl Like You is given to panic attacks of an almost hallucinatory intensity, like this: "Some configuration of the leaves under the slight breeze formed, as he watched, a shifting face in profile, the eye blinking slowly." That will ring a bell with anyone who has read Amis's classic ghost story.)

One thing I've noticed in my Amis-reading project is the extent of his vocabulary. It's an education to read his books. You can generally count on at least one word you've never heard before. This time it is "carphology" which means the plucking of the bedclothes by a delirious patient. Here Amis uses it to refer to some frenetic modern jazz he doesn't like (Coltrane, I suspect): "carphology in sound." 

Take a Girl Like You is Amis's own favourite among his novels. It is lovingly crafted and took a long time to write, started in 1955 and set aside for I Like it Here, it was finally published in 1960.

It is also Amis's longest novel, carefully planned in terms of characterisation and structure. He made 80 pages of detailed notes in a notebook, begun while he was in Portugal (also incidentally gathering the material for I Like it Here). It's a notable step forward in Amis's craft, depicting the action from two character's viewpoints. It starts out as a pure account of Jenny Bunn and what happens to her, then follows Patrick Standish's point of view, alternating chapters between the two of them. But it remains essentially Jenny's novel (16 chapters for her, 11 for Patrick).

Jenny is a delightful character, a ravishing Northern virgin. She is largely inspired by Amis's wife Hilly (though she wasn't from the North of England) and it is a highly sympathetic portrait, although it is easy for the modern reader (and indeed the 1960 reader) to get fed up with Jenny's silly insistence on trying to retain her virginity in the face of Patrick's (and others') onslaughts and stratagems.

But, as Zachary Leader points out, it is easier to mock a desire to retain virginity than a wish for fidelity, and in the real world that was the true tension between Hilly and Amis — they loved each other but he was running around (to put it euphemistically) with every available, attractive women who crossed his line of sight.

This is a beautifully observed novel and very sympathetic to the plight of women suffering unwanted attention. For instance when Amis describes the anxious sweaty dud nerving himself himself up to try and put his arm around Jenny's shoulder, "like a golfer preparing for a tricky shot."

This brilliant observation extends to other characters, like posh Julian the flamboyant  rich rake. As he serves drinks, Jenny observes "It was funny to see him with something in his hands that was for other people."

And the character of Julian's mistress Wendy is a comic tour de force, delivered almost as a three page monologue: "Is he pissed or something? ... He's absolutely stark raving mad. Darling, what happened to him to make him behave like that, do you suppose? Do you think he was brought up in the most weird morbid sort of way by some ghastly old maiden aunt or something, you know with all harmoniums and aspidistras and antimacassars and things?"
 
Take a Girl Like You is also hilariously funny: "he quietened down, like somebody who knows he has let on to being a bit too interested in how they manage the floggings in prisons."

Amis himself said of the novel, "I hope they'll go on laughing, but this time... I'm saying something serious. I don't mean profound or earnest, but something serious."

And, true enough, Take a Girl Like You is wildly funny, but it is also surprisingly dark — perhaps the first sign of a tendency which would become increasingly emphatic in Amis's fiction. And, like many of his novels, it has a real sting in the tail.

The ending of the book is rather shocking, for a number of reasons which obviously I won't go into here, since I don't want to spoil it for you. I will just say that it's no surprise that Patrick Standish is capable of being a bastard — we see plenty of examples of that throughout the novel — but it is jarring to discover that the previously sympathetic Miss Sinclair, the headmistress at Jenny's school and her boss, is capable of being such a complete bitch.

Classic Amis.

(Image credits: The cover of the copy I read, the Penguin with the neat repeating graphic design by Lou Klein is from ABE. As are the great sexy Signet, the later Penguin (lecher in scholar's robes) and the Gollancz original hardcover. The lovely Quentin Blake Penguin is from Good Reads.)

More Thoughts on Noah

I saw Noah again the other day, thinking that any new thoughts I had about the film could be added to my earlier post. However, there was so much to say that it justified a whole new entry. 

One thing I only briefly touched on last time was the issue of meat eating (stay with me on this)... 

Noah and his family are gentle vegetarians and horrified at the notion of eating the flesh of living animals. Other creatures are regarded as sacred, and this is powerfully embodied in the movie.

There's a great scene early on when the bad guys (the Sons of Cain) are hunting an animal (a strange kind of scaly hound) and fatally wound it with an arrow. Noah goes to the rescue and the baddies try to kill him. Russell Crowe proceeds to dispatch them in an enjoyable action-hero scene which is reminiscent of Gladiator. (Gentleness has its limits.) But he's too late to save the scaly hound, so Noah and his sons wrap it in a shroud and respectfully burn it on a funeral pyre. The bad guys are presumably left to rot.

But there's no hypocrisy here, because Noah is very clear that animals are innocent whereas the Sons of Cain — in fact, humans generally — are knowingly wicked. This kind of Old-Testament-Apocrypha animal rights stance strikes a powerful chord with viewers, or at least it did with me. Noah isn't going to be ordering a Big Mac any time soon. 

Indeed, it is the sequence in which he sees the Sons of Cain tearing living animals apart and devouring them that prompts Noah to wash his hands of humans once and for all, abandon any notion of finding wives for his sons, and try for a world wiped clean of mankind. It's worth hammering this point home because the geniuses who wrote the Wikipedia entry think this scene depicts Noah "witnessing cannibalism by a starving mob." It's not cannibalism, boys. They are not eating people. They're eating animals, and that's enough for Noah.
 
As I said, this is powerful stuff and it is reinforced in a shocking scene where the chief bad guy, Tubal-cain (played by an awesome Ray Winstone) stows away on the ark and sustains himself by snacking on the lovingly stowed living beasts. Even Ham — Noah's son but Tubal-cain's confederate — is shocked. "There's only two of each," he protests. "Well, there's only one of me," says Tubal-cain, ever the pragmatist. We're really glad when Noah kills him.

Other things that struck me about the film on a second viewing was the magnificent, and unusual, use of CGI. Normally computer effects in Hollywood blockbusters are devoted to space ships, giant robots, exploding cities. Here the special effects are breathtakingly deployed to show us the animals coming into the ark — storm-clouds of birds, a slithering river of snakes, a stampede of beasts.

And one of the clever new wrinkles dreamt up by Darren Aronofsky and his co-writer Ari Handel is the way these animals are put into hibernation by having them breathe the smoke of burning herbs. So all the critters settle down peacefully in a space-saving state of suspended animation, perhaps inspired by the cryogenic sleep of starship passengers in science fiction movies. It's a smart new idea, and definitely the way to go if you ever want to build an ark of your own.

This second viewing also emphasised just how great Anthony Hopkins is as Methuselah. He kept reminding me of Merlin for some reason, and I realised that the whole movie has a kind of Arthurian feel, in particular evoking John Boorman's film Excalibur.

Any other fresh observations? Yup, Clint Mansell's score is terrific. Brooding, scary, rousing, folky, glorious. I first noticed how good Mansell was with his music for Stoker and I'm going to be paying him a lot more attention.

This is, as you will have gathered, a striking piece of film making. It's full of subtle, potent moments. Like when the apocalyptic deluge starts to fall, and the first rain drops sizzle on the forge where Tubal-cain is hammering out the red hot metal of his weapons of war.

(Image credits, as with the previous post, all the posters and stills are from Ace Show Biz.)

Locke by Steven Knight

Steven Knight is a British screenwriter — and now a director. I first became aware of his work with his script for Dirty Pretty Things, directed by Stephen Frears, an unusual and intriguing film. But he really registered on my radar with Eastern Promises, a tale of Russian gangsters in London directed by David Cronenberg and one of my favourite films of recent years.

Knight has a highly unusual background. He was primarily a TV comedy writer and created and scripted a successful comedy cop show for the BBC called The Detectives. Then he hit the jackpot by creating the game show Who Wants To Be a Millionaire. Not my cup of tea, but a huge success on British television and replicated around the world. At this point Knight was wealthy beyond the dreams of avarice and could have put his feet up and relaxed — he certainly never needed to work again.

Instead he began writing, then directing, an increasingly challenging string of movies, the latest of which is Locke, a masterpiece and one of the best films of 2014.

I had no idea what it was about when I went to see it, beyond a vague notion that it featured Tom Hardy at the wheel of a car. I'd assumed it was a thriller. But instead it's a startling portrait of a man whose life is falling apart, as he drives through the night towards London from a northern city, taking and making phonecalls as he goes.

Locke is an honourable man, under immense pressure, trying to do the right thing. The movie is suspenseful, deeply involving, and often hilarious. Tom Hardy, who has made a big impression in Inception and Lawless (not to mention as the masked baddie in the last Batman flick) is terrific.

He is the only person we see on screen, although there are some distinguished actors and fine performances on the other end of the phone. Knight's script is unremittingly brilliant, with superb dialogue, wonderful characterisation and profound emotional impact. An amazing and moving film, it takes place almost in real time (the movie runs 84 minutes, the drive to London takes something under two hours).

Shot with Hardy actually behind the wheel of a car, it's an impressive and beautifully crafted film. You can read about the making of it here. Don't miss this movie.

 (Image credits: the posters and stills are from Ace Show Biz, where the pickings were very thin compared to your average Hollywood blockbuster.)

Noah by Aronofsky & Handel

I've been wary of Darren Aronofsky ever since his amazingly wayward movie The Fountain. But Black Swan was excellent and now his latest Noah is nothing short of a masterpiece. 

Working with his regular screenwriting partner Ari Handel, Aronofsky has jettisoned the conventional Christian framework of the Noah story (good work guys) and opted for a fantasy approach.

This means, for instance, that there are fallen angels called the Watchers who look like Transformers made of chunky rock fragments. 

When I saw these ungainly galoots I thought the movie was in deep trouble. But I was wrong, and elsewhere the CGI effects (as when the animals come into the ark) are magnificent.

So is the acting. Ray Winstone is breathtaking as the descendant of Cain who is the chief bad guy in the movie and represents the evil in humanity which has despoiled the Earth and which the coming flood is specifically designed to get rid of. And Russell Crowe as Noah has never been better.

The script is remarkably good. Despite ladling on special effects, spectacle and battle, Aronofsky and Handel understand that the essence of the film is human and simple — Noah's son Ham being torn between the charismatically evil Winstone character and loyalty to his father.

Noah is specifically designed as a powerful ecological parable about how we are destroying the world through exploitation, pollution and climate change. 

In the movie the animals are the good guys — Noah and his family are vegetarians, Ray Winstone's mob are meat eaters — and the most emotionally forceful and profound moments of the film concern Noah's tormented attempts to decide whether humanity should be allowed to survive the floods at all — or whether we should just leave the world to the animals, who won't screw it up.

A great movie, and an important one.


(All the images are from Ace Show Biz.)

Kingsley Amis by Zachary Leader

Early in Kingsley Amis's novel Take a Girl Like You, the hero Patrick Standish is reflecting on the enticing, eponymous heroine Jenny Bunn and thinks, "He wanted more than his share of her before anybody else had any." It's a remark which becomes even more amusing when you learn that it originated from Amis on a visit to America, when he and a bunch of friends were hurrying towards a fried clam joint. "Oh, good," declared our man. "I want more than my share before anybody else has any." Which became a catch phrase in his circle of friends.

Kingsley Amis had more than his share in life. More than his share of talent, literary success, fun, booze, money and — very definitely — women. He was, as another character refers to Patrick Standish, "A veritable king of shaft." 

On that same American sabbatical which gave rise to the fried clam remark, Amis's wife Hilly received an anonymous phone call. "You realise your husband's screwing every dame in Princeton?" said the woman. "Every one but you, evidently," replied Hilly, and hung up.

I know all this because I've just finished reading Zachary Leader's excellent biography of  Amis which I mentioned in last week's post. It's a huge book, literally a doorstop, but constantly readable and seldom less than utterly gripping. Leader is a gifted author and the book is unlikely to be bettered soon, or indeed ever.

What was particularly fascinating was the discussion of how Amis's childhood gave rise to the themes and subjects of his fiction. Often with biographies I'm tempted to skip past the early years and start in at the point where, say, Count Basie joins his first band. In this case I'm glad I'm resisted the temptation to forgo the early sections and dive in when, say, Amis began writing Lucky Jim. I would have missed a huge amount of valuable material.

Also eye opening was the discussion at the other end of Amis's life, of his final work. As I've said elsewhere Russian Hide and Seek is my least favourite Amis novel. I'd assumed the book marked the beginning of a terminal decline and that nothing after it would be worth reading. 

On the contrary, Leader (who agrees about Russian Hide and Seek) makes clear that it's just a blip in the graph and that there are some impressive and hilarious novels — and quite possibly a venomous masterpiece or two — among those that followed, which include Stanley and the Women, The Old Devils (a Booker Prize winner), Difficulties with Girls (a sequel to Take a Girl Like You) and The Folks That Live on the Hill.

Also priceless are the excerpts from Amis's correspondence, particularly the letters to Philip Larkin and Robert Conquest, which are often convulsively funny. I am now tempted to get Zachary Leader's giant volume of The Letters of Kingsley Amis. Hell, the excerpts from Amis's poems are so beguiling I'm tempted to read some of the poetry.

I said I'd finished reading Zachary Leader's biography. That's not quite true. I skipped the detailed description of most of Amis's novels. I'll go back to them after I've read the books themselves. Lots of reading pleasure in store.

(Image credits: The book covers are from Good Reads. The shot with the wine bottle is from Mans-Womans. The photo of Kingsley with his cat is from the Observer Archive. The splendid caricature by Mark Waghorne is from the artist's own Caricatures Gallery, where you can buy signed prints.)

I Like it Here by Kingsley Amis

Kingsley Amis is one of my favourite novelists and I am currently working my way through Zachary Leader's massive (one thousand page), engrossing and definitive biography of him. One side effect of reading the biography is a desire to re-read — or sometimes read for the first time — the Amis books under discussion. So I keep setting Zachary Leader aside and reaching for Amis.

I Like it Here is Amis's third novel. The author himself dismisses it — 'by common consent, my worst novel.' But I disagree. The worst novel by Amis that I've read (and I have yet to read them all) was Russian Hide and Seek. The set up (an alternate history story in which Soviet Russia has taken over Britain) suggests an exciting and fascinating tale, but the book is somehow lifeless and deeply dull (Anthony Burgess agrees with me on this).

I Like it Here, by contrast, is never dull and full of life. It also had me laughing out loud more than once. It concerns an Amis-like writer who goes on holiday in Portugal with his family. He also has a journalistic assignment, some literary detective work. He is supposed to determine whether the reclusive Great Novelist living in Portugal, who has just renounced anonymity, is actually the real bloke, or an impostor. 

Zachary Leader calls this a "creaky and contrived literary mystery" but I liked it, and it's essential to give the book some purpose. Otherwise it would read like a series of witty sketches of a family holiday — which is exactly what it is. Amis based it very closely on his experiences in Portugal. His annoying landlord Barley is accurately depicted here, renamed "Oates" (get it?) and so on.

The great novelist is named Wulfstan Strether and he is an enormous bore. Amis took the name Strether from a character in Henry James, whom he regarded as an overrated and deeply boring novelist, while Wulfstan was the most boring of Anglo Saxon writers — Amis frequently referred to early Anglo Saxon poetry as "ape's toilet paper" or variations thereof.

I Like it Here is impressively well written. Amis cuts from sequence to sequence with a kind of cinematic decisiveness, ruthlessly dispensing with unnecessary exposition and transitions. The writing is vivid, with excellent dialogue and it's frequently hilarious. 

Here Amis is describing how the landlord Oates is warning our hero Bowen that Oates's emotionally unstable Portuguese mother-in-law ("she sometimes flies into terrible rages") will be moving into the tiny and already massively over crowded house with the long-suffering Bowen and his family:

"In Bowen's mental projection-theatre an exophthalmic hag with a knife of traditional Portuguese pattern was chasing him round and round Oates's 'garden', for some reason at Chaplin-revival speed and with corresponding intensity of gesture."

I first read this novel decades ago and I'd always thought the title referred to Bowen's reaction to Portugal. But thanks to Zachary Leader, and closer attention to the text, it's clear that the "here" Amis refers to is back home in Britain. And this story is all about the perils of going Abroad not being outweighed by the benefits.

Not a sentiment I agree with, but I enjoyed I Like it Here hugely. The only real flaw in the book is an American tourist who, in amongst some otherwise very convincingly rendered dialogue, uses the word "shan't".

If your worst novel is I Like it Here, then you are one hell of a novelist. Amis was just that.

(Image credits: The Four Square edition at the beginning of the post, with the beautiful cartoon cover by Kirby is the edition I read. The cover image is from ABE. The Gollancz hardcover is also from ABE. The American hardcover is yet again from ABE. The Panther edition with the billowing skirt is, for a change, from a blog by Michael A Charles. The foreign edition from Portugal (appropriately enough) is from Good Reads. Oh, and by the way "exophthalmic" means with bulging eyes. Surely you knew that?)

Bringing Out the Dead by Joe Connelly

I only knew Bringing Out the Dead as a Scorsese movie — a very disappointing Scorsese movie with an inert script by Paul Shrader which featured Nicolas Cage as a tormented New York paramedic. 

It came from what I think of as Scorsese's wilderness years which began after the excellent Casino and now, thankfully, have ended with the even more excellent, in fact downright magnificent, Wolf of Wall Street.

I wasn't even aware, or I had forgotten, that Bringing Out the Dead was based on a novel. So when I discovered a copy of the book by Joe Connelly I was intrigued enough to buy it. I'm really glad I did.

I was gripped from the first few pages where the ambulance crew is summoned to treat a man with cardiac arrest. His family is desperately trying to give him CPR and the narrator bleakly informs us that they're wasting their time because they're performing it on a bed — you have to do CPR on a hard surface like the floor.

Joe Connelly really was a paramedic and his priceless inside knowledge infuses the novel with authenticity. He describes the way the steering wheel of the ambulance vibrates when the life support equipment is turned on in the back of the "bus".

And he writes beautifully, too. Here he is describing receiving intravenous meds: "the drugs were cold, like steel worms crawling over my elbow." And he has a nice dry wit. "The city that never sleeps had taken a pill." The book is full of a feeling of doom, very effectively evoked: "I watched these events unfold like a twister across the plain."

If there is a flaw to the novel it is that it's excessively bleak. The superb writing and the humour never quite compensate for the defeated nature of the hero and the hopeless situation all around him. The story is too unremittingly nightmarish — and too focused on a single individual — to constitute an urban MASH. But that doesn't stop this being a notable and impressive novel... particularly impressive since it's a first novel.

And vastly more memorable than the movie — though I'm going to give that a second chance now, on the strength of this outstanding book.

(Image credits:  rather thin pickings at Good Reads. The orange cover at the beginning of the post — the edition I read — is from Amazon.)