Author: David Hebblethwaite

One by Conrad Williams (2009)

11th June 2009 / / 2 Comments

Conrad Williams‘ The Unblemished was one of my favourite books of 2008; sadly, his new novel, One, doesn’t reach the heights of that earlier work — but it’s an interesting read with some very fine moments nevertheless.

The novel is divided into two distinct parts. In the first, ‘Births, Deaths and Marriages’, Richard Jane is a saturation diver working on an oil platform off the coast of Aberdeen, when the apocalypse occurs. Eventually making his way back to land, Jane’s only thought is to travel to London in the hopes of finding his young son, Stanley. He sets off, gaining along the way a number of fellow-survivors as companions, notably a hospital radiologist named Becky, and a five-year-old boy named Aidan. After the requisite trials and tribulations, the party reaches London, and the first part ends. The novel’s second part, ‘Lazarus Taxon’, takes place ten years later. Jane still hasn’t found Stanley, but he is now part of a group of survivors in the capital who call themselves the Shaded (because some form of shade, or depth, is what apparently saved them from the disaster). They have to contend with not only the pitfalls one might imagine would be found in a collapsed society, but also with something unimaginable — the Skinners. These are creatures grown from the spores that came with the apocalyptic ‘Event’, spores that invaded the bodies of the dead, distorted and animated them. Even a minor wound could turn you into one of them. There are rumours of a raft floating off the Kent coast, built by scientists and waiting to rescue people. Is it true? And what rescue could there be in this world anyway?

One is the kind of work which makes plain that genre distinctions (in this case, science fiction and horror) are ultimately limiting and artificial. There is a scientific underpinning to the ‘Event’, but it’s never explained in the story itself; Williams’ acknowledgements page refers to gamma ray bursts, so one assumes that’s what did for us here. But Williams is noted as an author of ‘dark fiction’, and his novel is tilted firmly towards that end of the spectrum; which, I think, is just as it should be — after all, if the average person got caught up in the aftermath of an apocalypse, they probably wouldn’t understand what had happened; and what wouldn’t matter nearly as much as what next? There are also scenes of great horror and carnage, that one is wary of visualising, in case they turn out to be even more horrifying in the mind’s eye than they are on the page. But this too is appropriate: One is horror because its subject is horrific, because there could be no response to what happens other than horror. Williams is not a writer of gore for gore’s sake; he understands the gravity of horror, and makes one feel its pull.

What I particularly like about One is that it’s intensely personal, despite the vastness of its backdrop; the novel is very much about relationships and character, and especially those of Richard Jane. There’s a pleasing complexity to his depiction; he’s not a straightforward heroic figure, but can decry selfishness in others whilst at the same time being willing to put his search for Stanley ahead of anything else (and if he’s doing this for his son, is it selfish or not?). Making Jane a diver was an interesting choice on the author’s part, as it automatically generates a certain amount of difference. It’s not just that the image of Jane wandering through the devastated landscape in his protective gear makes him seem like an astronaut exploring an alien world. It’s that being a diver (according to the novel) changes you, subjects you to pressures (figurative and literal) that others don’t experience, involves being away from home and in isolation for long periods, could lead to sights that others would never see (like the bends: ‘All the limbs withdrawn into an impossible core of pain. The welter of blood at every orifice, fizzing bright red. Bubbles opening in the jelly of the eyes’). The demands of his profession have driven a wedge between Richard and his (now ex-)wife Cherry; and Williams skilfully shows the thoughts and feelings of both parties, even as he writes only from Richard’s viewpoint — and the author is just as adept at writing about the personal as he is at depicting epic disaster.

Of the novel’s two parts, I think the first is the better: what could have been just a repetitive trudge through lists of examples of destruction and scavenged foodstuffs (I did wonder how long it would really be possible to survive in such an environment without proper medical facilities, having to travel mostly on foot and live off whatever tinned food you could find — but the strength of the telling soon put such concerns to one side), instead gains genuine power, most especially from Williams’ ability to evoke the reality of the situation, the sense that, whether or not Jane succeeds in attaining his goal, there can be no lasting escape.

The second part of One is still good but, as it’s necessarily more fantastical, it doesn’t have quite the same resonance — it doesn’t allow one to feel that this is how the world could become, not in the way that the first part does. Still, Williams once again creates that profound sense of unease which is the true affect of horror — an affect born not from blood and guts, but from the utter and irrevocable destruction of what we know. And the ending (which I’ll admit I didn’t fully comprehend) returns to the personal — which seems entirely appropriate for this very human view of world’s end.

Special Topics in Calamity Physics by Marisha Pessl (2006)

4th June 2009 / / 1 Comment

Blue van Meer has lived a peripatetic existence with her father Gareth, a professor of political science (her mother having died in a car accident several years previously), until her senior year of high school, when he deigns to let the two of them stay in the same town for the whole year. At her new school, Blue becomes drawn into the world of the glamorous, captivating film studies teacher, Hannah Schneider; and the select circle of students, nicknamed the Bluebloods, whom Hannah keeps close. Then, on a camping trip later that year, Blue finds Hannah’s body hanging from a tree — apparently suicide, but could it have been murder? What Blue discovers subsequently may draw into question everything she thought she knew. This is her story, in her own words.

I had never heard of Special Topics in Calamity Physics before seeing it in a bookshop on holiday, but it seems that it caused quite a stir on publication, being lauded as the startling debut of a young, talented author. I’ll be honest and say that I was half expecting the book to be insufferably pretentious — and, in some ways, it does try one’s patience. But it’s actually quite fun to read once you get into it; and there is much to admire within — which may be the novel’s main problem: plenty to admire, but less that’s easy to truly love.

First, the prose. Blue van Meer is a very bookish girl — very bookish, and it shows in the volume she has ‘written’. All the chapters are named after books, the text is full of quotations from books (many of which, in keeping with the novel’s playfulness, have been made up by Pessl — even one of the chapter-title books exists only in the pages of Special Topics), and Blue has a habit of making comparisons by referring readers elsewhere: ‘Jade was the terrifying beauty (see “Tawny Eagle”, Magnificent Birds of Prey, George, 1993)’. Pessl also writes Blue as tending to overdescribe and digress; in short, the narrative voice is full of quirks that become wearying over 500 pages… but not as much as you might think. If these quirks get tedious, they’re quite easily ignored; and for the most part, they make the book sparkle.

What’s less easily ignored is the voice of Gareth van Meer. We often get to hear what he thinks of this or that (he’s usually critical), in his pompous drone that makes one feel almost like tuning into some mindless, lowest-common-denominator TV show, just out of spite. Blue does come to question whether all her father’s ideas are as right as they appear; but that doesn’t stop his interjections dragging the book down. A bigger problem, though, is that, for all Pessl’s undoubted verbal dexterity, she comes up with some real clunkers. I like some of her insights and images, such as ‘Dad picked up women the way certain wool pants can’t help but pick up lint’; more often, though, we get lines like ‘[a] gold, five-tiered chandelier at the center of the room hung like an upside-down duchess shamelessly exposing to the paying public her ankle boots and froufrou petticoat’. It works insofar as you can see what the author means; but it doesn’t half feel awkward.

Moving on from the prose, the characterisation in Special Topics is an interesting issue. I’ve read an interview with Marisha Pessl in which she says she deliberately wrote the novel to be ‘larger than life’, and this it certainly is. Would any teenager be as immersed in books as Blue van Meer, or as beuatiful as the Bluebloods? Would any teacher be as extraordinary as Hannah Schneider, or any academic as relentlessly intellectual as Gareth van Meer? Probably not, but then again… I remember how adult some sixteen-year-olds semed to me when I started high school; and I’ve encountered my share of people who seemed as remarkable as Hannah Schneider does. They might not have been so in real life, but that’s what these characters are like: not real people, but mental images of people viewed at a distance — not how they might really be, but how one could imagine them to be.

Of course, there’s a trade-off associated with larger-than-life characters, which is that the author has to work harder to make us care about them. It’s a task that Pessl doesn’t always succeed in: for example, a scene where Blue confronts her father, and ends up throwing books at him, ought to be one of the most emotionally charged in the book; but Blue lists every single book she throws (complete with author and year of publication), and it comes across as absurd. So, although it’s possible to make real people in one’s mind out of these extraordinary characters, and it’s possible to see Blue in particular learn, grow and make mistakes; one has to dig pretty deep to be able to do so.

And then there’s the plot. Special Topics is very cleverly plotted, with many apparently incidental details brought back and reinterpreted in the final act. The trouble is, the solution to the mystery hinges on information not known to the reader in advance — information that, moreover, is entirely fictional in nature. There’s absolutely no chance of ‘playing along’, no feeling of ‘I wish I’d noticed that’, because you could never have noticed. It’s like watching someone else completing a difficult jigsaw puzzle, rather than being involved yourself.

So, as I said at the beginning: there’s plenty to admire here, but not so much of what can bring a book close to my heart. It’s possible to admire Pessl’s ability to make words dance, but not necessarily what she says with them. It’s possible to admire her depiction of extraordinary characters, but less easy to fully care about them. It’s possible to admire her ability to construct a detective puzzle, but not necessarily to enjoy that puzzle. In the end, I like Special Topics in Calamity Physics, but I don’t love it. It will, however, be interesting to see what Pessl writes next.

Replay by Ken Grimwood (1986)

4th June 2009 / / 4 Comments

Jeff Winston is 43, his life at a dead-end, when he dies suddenly — and wakes up back at college in 1963, with full knowledge of the intervening twenty-five years. He has the chance to create a better life for himself, and Jeff seizes the opportunity with gusto, placing bets and making investments that leave him a very wealthy young man. Jeff makes a hash of trying to impress his old wife this time around, and isn’t really keen on the heiress he eventually partners; but Jeff does love Gretchen, the daughter resulting from that relationship. So Jeff has pretty much made it — until he reaches the age of 43, dies at exactly the same moment, and returns to 1963, with the previous quarter-century erased from all reality, except in Jeff’s own memories.

And so the cycle repeats, with Jeff living out his life anew, able to remember each iteration but not to make any lasting change — until, in one ‘replay’ (as Jeff calls these iterations), the anomaly of a blockbuster movie he’s never heard of before leads Jeff to Pamela Phillips, the film’s maker and a fellow replayer. Perhaps inevitably, as the only two who know (or could ever understand) what the other is going through, they fall in love. But they discover a pressing issue: the beginnings of each replay are becoming ‘skewed’; though the moment of death for both Jeff and Pamela remains the same, the time their awarenesses return to is growing later and later — so much so that they may only have a handful of replays left.

I came to Replay with a certain amount of anticipation: it won the World Fantasy Award, and was reprinted in Gollancz’s Fantasy Masterworks series a few years ago, so clearly it had a high reputation. There was also the general sense of apprehension one often has on reading a ‘classic’ (even one that’s only twenty years old), wondering if it will stand the tests of time and of familiarity with its themes. Well, there was no need to be concerned this time — Replay is a wonderful book that deserves all the praise it has been given.

It’s important to say first what Replay is and isn’t about: it’s a time travel story, but not one about time travel per se; Grimwood attempts no real explanation of why the replays are happening. Rather, he is much more interested in the emotional ramifications of the premise on his characters, and it’s here that the novel really shines. Each replay is different, as Jeff chooses different paths through his life; and these never feel arbitrary — there’s a logic to their progression. He starts off, as one might in his situation, using his knowledge of the future to improve his lot materially. Then he moves to trying (unsuccessfully) to change history for the better; learning from his first replay to create greater contentment in his second; descending into hedonistic nihilism in the third when it becomes clear that nothing he does will last; and so on. And it rings true at every stage.

The interplay between Jeff and Pamela also changes subtly each time they meet, as their different experiences change them; and this too remains believeable throughout. There’s a moment towards the end that particularly made me smile (I’ll not elaborate on it, to preserve the effect), when Pamela reacts to Jeff in a way he isn’t expecting; and, as readers, we can see the matter from both sides — and have sympathy for both characters. The final position of the protagonists’ relationship is also unexpected and yet, with hindsight, is probably just as it would be in reality. It’s this emotional authenticity that makes Replay such a joy to read.

Something else that makes Replay a joy is the way it’s written — not so much individual nuggets of prose (though it has its share of them, such as the passage describing what goes through Jeff’s mind as he dies for the first time), as the way the novel is structured, and its general tone. There are a few times when the book gets tedious (Jeff’s hedonistic period drags in particular); but, generally, Grimwood knows exactly when to throw something new into the mix to move the story forward, whether it’s Jeff’s discovery of other replayers, or… well, find out for yourself. There’s also a very welcome lightness of tone to the book — not an absence of seriousness, but an energy to the telling. One useful function of this is to stop this moral tale feeling too preachy. There were a few a moments when I felt that Grimwood-the-author was lecturing me-the-reader, but they are few; even the ending, with its moral of ‘make the most of the life you have’, doesn’t really feel didactic, because the story has made the case for that viewpoint so persuasively.

Apparently Grimwood was working on a sequel to Replay when he died (at the sadly young age of 59). I’m ambivalent towards the idea of a second book: on the one hand, if he could have made it as good as this, I would love to find out what he had planned. On the other hand, Replay is fine as it is, needs no embellishments, and deservedly puts its author’s name down in history as one of the greats. Replay was not the first text to examine the question ‘what if you could live your life again?’, and it certainly wasn’t the last — but, in its elegance and eloquence, it must surely be one of the best.

BOOK REVIEW: The Little Sleep by Paul Tremblay (2009)

24th May 2009 / / 0 Comments

A detective novel with a narcoleptic PI. Sounds gimmicky, I know, but Tremblay mostly (though not entirely) avoids the pitfalls that might be associated with that device. The prose and narrative voice are great, the plot less so; which is why I gave the book 3 stars over at The Zone.

Read the review in full here.

Mars in their Eyes by Colin Pillinger (2006)

14th May 2009 / / 0 Comments

One of those serendipitous finds I had in a charity book sale, this is the catalogue for an exhibition at the Cartoon Museum a few years ago. ‘Scientists are human too and enjoy a laugh as much as anybody, even if it is at their own expense,’ says Colin Pillinger in his introductory note, and I suppose he needed a sense of humour more than most.

I was surprised and impressed by the range of different kinds of Mars-themed cartoons on display here: there are political cartoons, cartoons about the search for alien life, cartoons about scientists, about missions to Mars (including, naturally, plenty concerning the ill-fated Beagle 2).Some of my favourites include Martians hurriedly scrawling ‘H.G. Wells Was Here’ on a rock before a satellite looks their way; a scientist taking great pains to stress the tentative nature of the evidence they’ve foudn that suggests there might have been life on Mars in the astronmically distant past — which has journalists screaming, ‘We’re not alone!’; and the Martian cup final being interrupted by the crash-landing space-probe that those hooligans from Earth sent up.

The cartoons are organised into chapters (some themed more loosely than others), each of which begins with a selection of facts about Mars and our exploration of the planet. Each cartoon also has its own piece of commentary by Pillinger; some of these are linked more tenuously than others, and the ‘flow’ between commentaries can feel disjointed at times.

But the cartoons make me wish I’d seen the exhibition; and Pillinger is a passionate and persuasive advocate of space exploration. His closing words ring true: ‘we should not discourage our children from asking difficult questions.’ And the cartoon accompanying this? Father-and-son aliens stand alone on a barren rocky world, looking up at the stars. The son asks, ‘Dad, do you think there’s life on other planets?’ ‘I dunno,’ comes the reply.

Personal reflections on books and gender

13th May 2009 / / 3 Comments

This post has been inspired by an entry in Juliet McKenna‘s LiveJournal asking whether publishing is sexist. It may turn out to be more a series of fragments than a properly coherent argument, and I doubt that I’ll offer any original insights; but I’ve never written about this topic before, so we’ll see how it goes.

To start with my own experiences as a reader: yes, most of the books I have read in my lifetime have been by men, and most of the books I have reveiwed have been by men. Yes, I was surprised by the ending of The Turbulent Term of Tyke Tiler when we read it at school; and no, I didn’t read ‘books for girls’. But then, I didn’t read many ‘books for boys’ either — the closest I got were all the adventure gamebooks I read (the vast majority of which were written by men; and which had, I would surmise, a largely male readership). Mostly, though, I just read books — the gender of the author was genuinely never a concern to me. As an adult, I notice an author’s gender more; and, if I see that I’ve read a few books in a row by male authors, I do often think, perhaps it’s time I read a female author or two. I’m not entirely sure whether that’s a good way of looking at it; I think there’s something to be said for the free-spirited way I read as a child, picking up anything and everything with no regard for any criteria other than that it sounded good.

…

There has been quite a pause between my writing the last paragraph and this one, as I’ve confronted the fact that I probably do have a real gender bias in my choice of reading matter. It’s quite hypothetical, but it’s there. I would never reject a book on the basis of its author’s gender (gender might affect the order in which I read a group of books, but that’s different); I would reject it on the basis of whether I thought I’d like it. Now, I don’t tend to read books that have been explicitly written for a particular gender, of any sort — chick-lit, lad-lit, whatever, they generally don’t appeal to me (though I’m sure I could find exceptions if I looked); but if I had to choose one (and I’m talking about the really hackneyed, stereotyped stuff here), I’d go for a book written for my own gender. Hopefully there’s enough out there to read that I’ll never have to resort to making such a choice, but there it is.

So, I can understand (as I previously thought I couldn’t) how readers might prefer authors of one gender over another.  But I think the issue is also tied up with other factors. One of the commenters on Juliet’s post, Maura McHugh, says that, in the fantastic genres, we still have some people viewing some kinds of fiction  as more ‘suitable’ for women to write than others (i.e. fantasy rather than hard SF or horror), and cites as an example ‘paranormal romance’ being excluded from definitions of horror. Now, I think she conflates two different issues here. Yes, some people do think that women can’t or shouldn’t write particular kinds of fiction (in my view, all such opinions are wrong). The thing is, though, I wouldn’t classify ‘paranormal romance’ as ‘horror’. But I wouldn’t classify ‘paranormal detections’ (which are often written by men as well as women) as horror, either. And I would exclude these kinds of fiction not because of their authors’ gender, or because I think they’re intrinsically inferior (which, by the way, I don’t); but for the same reason I wouldn’t call Count Duckula horror — because I think (broadly speaking — of course there’s some overlap) they try to do different things and work in different ways.

Finally, to answer Juliet’s question: is publishing sexist? I have nothing to do with the industry, so I can do no more than speculate. I don’t think it is, not conciously anyway; but I do think there is a bias towards male writers — yet the majority of readers are female. Perhaps it is not so much one gender being favoured deliberately over another as the industry seeking to maintain a preconceived pattern of gender. A few years ago, Mark Morris wrote Fiddleback (known as The Lonely Places in the US), a psychological thriller with a female lead. It was published under a gender-neutral name to make it more appealing to women. That doesn’t excuse any biases against female writers, but it does demonstrate that ‘gender expectations’ can work both ways. Perhaps it’s that the publishing industry likes it when one set of books appeals to one gender, and another set of books appeals to another gender, and doesn’t like to rock that particular boat.

Over to you — yes, for once I’m going to explicitly invite comments (which are always welcome in any case). Do you prefer to read authors of one gender over another? What’s your take on the whole issue?

Super Furry Animals – Dark Days/Light Years

10th May 2009 / / 1 Comment

darkdays

If anything I wrote about on this blog were ever likely to make me lose all sense of detachment, a new Super Furry Animals album would be it. After all, they are my favourite band — I don’t think any act recording today can match them in terms of breadth and consistency; and I’d recommend that anyone reading this who is not familiar with their music gets acquainted as soon as possible.

And there is a lot of music to get acquainted with. Dark Days/Light Years is SFA’s ninth studio album and, as usual, it’s very different from the last one. Their previous album, 2007’s Hey Venus!, was short, sharp, and concise; this, in contrast, is the longest yet — but it’s a wonderfuly expanisve hour of music. Each song is different, so the only way to do the album justice is to take it one track at a time…

1. ‘Crazy Naked Girls’

Every SFA album starts differently, and Dark Days/Light Years continues that tradition. Whereas the opening track of Hey Venus! was over in 45 seconds, ‘Crazy Naked Girls’ doesn’t even get underway until after almost a minute of studio chatter, and then continues for another five meandering minutes that I just cannot get into. Gruff Rhys sings the verses in an oddly breathless, high-pitched fashion that I don’t think really works, before guitarist Huw Bunford comes in for the chorus, and the whole thing goes on too long.

2. ‘Mt.’ [link to audio]

Grumbling over: the rest of the album is fine. With ‘Mt.’, keyboardist Cian Ciaran takes lead vocals on a fast song for the first time; he should do so more often, because this is fantastic. A song that might seem at first to be too restricitive and repetitive in structure for its own good turns out to have a real swinging groove and momentum.

3. ‘Moped Eyes’

Another song with a groove, though one of a rather different sort, ‘Moped Eyes’ gives the album its title (‘Dark days seem light years away’) and simmers along nicely for four minutes; and you may well find yourself, as I did, nodding along to the beat.

4. ‘Inaugural Trams’ [link to audio]

This is the kind of SFA song that, if you try to describe it, sounds ridiculous. Here goes… A song about town planning (chorus: ‘It’s the first day of the integrated transport hub’), that sounds like the theme to a cartoon, and has guest rapping by Nick McCarthy from Franz Ferdinand — in German. It shouldn’t work, but it does.

5. ‘Inconvenience’

A straight-ahead (for SFA) rock song that almost defies you not to sing along with the chorus. Which is exactly what I ended up doing.

6. ‘Cardiff in the Sun’ [link to audio]

Now this is an example of why I think Super Furry Animals are such an extraordinary band, because their music ranges so widely. SFA go almost ambient with chiming guitars, treated vocals, and trademark ‘sha-la-las’. It’s compelling for all its eight minutes, and sounds completely otherworldly.

7. ‘The Very Best of Neil Diamond’

Rather more serious than its title might suggest, this is another electronic song, though more aggressive tham the previous track. Gruff’s vocals are perhaps even more distorted, making them so distant the effect is almost hypnotic.

8. ‘Helium Hearts’

The closest thing on Dark Days/Light Years to a ballad, this song poses the question: with all these body parts that do such useful things, what is the chin for? The answer, we learn after three minutes, is that it helps you smile. Lovely stuff.

9. ‘White Socks/Flip Flops’

Apparently, the title refers to ‘the type of footwear one needs to write a good novel’ (never having tried to write one, I must reserve judgement on whether that is so). Vocals by  Huw Bunford, and I think this is his best song to date; again, it has a nice ‘groove’ to it (can’t you tell I’m not very well-versed in describing music?).

10. ‘Where Do You Wanna Go?’

The shortest song on the album, at two-and-a-half minutes, and also the most straightforward. A great showcase for the Beach Boys-style harmonies that SFA do so well.

11. ‘Lliwiau Llachar’

Here’s a neat trick: this song uses the same melody as the previous one, only this time the lyrics are in Welsh. But it’s not the same song (the title translates as ‘Intensely Bright Colours’), and the structure is different enough that it doesn’t feel like a carbon copy of the last song, which is an even neater trick. Incidentally, this is the first Welsh-language song to appear on an SFA album in nine years.

12. ‘Pric’

And here’s another one (I leave the translation of the title to your imagination). Actually, this is almost an instrumental, apart from brief vocal sections. A suitably chaotic way to end the album, ‘Pric’ is a stew of guitars, whistling and who-knows-what-else that goes on for six minutes, then spends another four slowing to a halt. Rather over-indulgent, yes; but, after all that’s gone before, I’ll let them off.

So, that’s another reliably dazzling SFA album. Ah, why can’t all music be as good as this?

An Inspector Calls (April 2009)

6th May 2009 / / 0 Comments

My first experience of J.B. Priestley’s 1945 play An Inspector Calls was — as I imagine it will be for most people these days — studyinging it for GCSE English. We read the play in class, we watched the BBC’s television version from 1982 — but I never actually saw it performed. Until now, that is, because a production is currently on tour.

For those unfamiliar with the play, it is set in 1912, in the house of Arthur Birling, a wealthy self-made industrialist. As the play begins, the family is celebrating the engagement of Birling’s daughter Sheila to Gerald Croft, whose artistocratic family own a competitor firm of Birling’s. Into the happy gathering comes one Inspector Goole, there to question the family about the death of a young woman who was taken to hospital having drunk some disinfectant. Over the course of the play,  it transpires that each person present contributed to the chain of events that led the girl to take her life — though they disagree about how guilty it makes each of them. And then come the final twists, that turn what has gone before on its head — and back again.

Having only seen the TV version, which sticks pretty closely to the printed script, seeing Stephen Daldry’s production of An Inspector Calls (which, I learn from the programme, weas first staged in 1992) came as quite a shock. It begins with air-raid sirens, and children dressed in 1940s garb running up on stage and tugging at the curtain — which then rises to reveal (in a mightily impressive piece of theatrical effects) that it is ‘raining’ outside the Birlings’ house. The thing is, the play is set entirely in the Birlings’ front room; yet in this production, the family are enclosed in what is effectively an oversized dolls’ house. I was concerned that we’d never get to see them properly; but, when Birling asks the maid to ‘giive us some light’, that’s the cue for the house to open out,  in  another very striking display.

What’s the reasoning behind this elaborate stagecraft? It has to do with one of the key messages of the play: that the Birlings’ complacent attitude that we shouldn’t be responsible for each other was disproved by subsequent history. The programme notes explain that, although it’s 1912 inside the house, the outside represents 1945; and, when the Inspector (who mostly stays outside) draws out the occupants for questioning, they’re stepping into the future, as it were — being made to face the consequences of their actions and views.

I like the idea and, as noted, am impressed with the effects (I haven’t mentioned the most spectacular of all, to preserve the surprise); but I can’t help thinking that the production lays the message on too thickly. It seems to me that the play as written works by demonstration: it shows the shortcomings of the opinions it criticises; and the characters who insist on keeping those opinions make fools of themselves, whilst those who change their minds emerge from the interrogation with more dignity. But Daldry’s production seems too keen to tell its audience the message, as loudly as possible — in some senses, literally so.

The lines in this production are ovten delivered overly ‘theatrically’ — quite why, I’m not sure. Sometimes this works: Sheila (played by Marianne Oldham) initially resembles the Queen Elizabeth character from Blackadder (or, come to think of it, the vile niece Millicent from Blackadder’s Christmas Carol); but she is the character who learns the Inspector’s lesson best of all, and her manner becomes more sober and serious as time goes on. It’s entirely appropriate there.

But sometimes the effect of the delivery is jarring. Louis Hilyer’s Inspector Goole often shouts his lines in a way that robs them of subtlety; and, when he faces the audience (as the characters in this production sometimes do when addressing each other) to deliver his final monologue prophesying ‘fire and blood and anguish’ if we don’t heed the error of our ways, it feels like what (in effect) it is — a lecture. These unusual methods of delivery aren’t accidental (they’re referred to in the progarmme notes); but whatever their aim is, they didn’t work for me.

So, this was certainly an unexpected interpretation of An Inspector Calls, and I do wonder what my impression of the play would have been had I known absolutely nothing about it beforehand. As it is, my impression is that this production isn’t entirely successful, can be infuriating and entertaining in equal measure… but I’d still recommend you go and see it.

DVD REVIEW: How to Lose Friends & Alienate People (2008)

3rd May 2009 / / 0 Comments

My second review at VideoVista this month is of Simon Pegg’s comedy about a British journalist trying (and, as the title suggests, largely failing) to make his way at a New York glossy. Not quite as sharp as perhaps it would like to be, this is still good fun and very amusing — so it gets 7 out of 10.

Read the review in full.

DVD REVIEW: They Wait (2007)

3rd May 2009 / / 0 Comments

Time for this month’s update to VideoVista, and I have two reviews there. They Wait is a tale of vengeful spirits and buried secrets, set in Vancouver’s Chinatown during the festival of Hungry Ghost Month. Alas, it’s not particularly scary, creepy, or atmospheric; and I think the ending contradicts the beginning. It’s a mediocre movie, and so gets a rating of 5 out of 10.

Read the review in full.

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