While Kurt Loder at MTV.com (does anyone take that seriously?) is somewhat gentler in his appreciation of Mr Nolan’s work, he couldn’t ‘parse’ it. Too bad for him.
AO Scott at the New York Times and David Edelstein at the New York Magazine seem to have gone to the movies together. Or perhaps they shared a beer after or took a stroll around Gramercy Park and discussed this one. Their reviews are uncannily similar.
Scott:
Mr. Nolan’s idea of the mind is too literal, too logical, too rule-bound to allow the full measure of madness …
Edelstein:
Nolan is too literal-minded, too caught up in ticktock logistics, to make a great, untethered dream movie.
Edelstein uses exclamation marks too (at least six), and to reinforce his view that the film is “clunky and confusing” and nothing like 2001: A Space Odyssey, also throws in this little jewel:
Slap! Wake up, people! Shalalala! Slap!
So much for being even passably literate.
Scott mentions Blade Runner and 2001 as durable cult classics, and says Inception does not come close. How would he know not two days after its release? Neither of those films was born a cult classic. Films gain a cult following and classic status with time; not, thankfully, from Mr Scott’s pronouncements. Edelstein bemoans the lack of nimbleness, something he saw in Spielberg’s Minority Report. Nothing by Spielberg has ever been ‘nimble’. In a film with Tom Cruise in it, that’s just impossible.
These reviews are just prattle, much of it nonsensical. Pinkerton claims that “the center of Fischer Jr.’s labyrinth is the intersection of Citizen Kane and 2001”. What on earth does this mean? Where does Citizen Kane come into it?
Scott feeds us verbiage:
But though there is a lot to see in “Inception,” there is nothing that counts as genuine vision. Mr. Nolan’s idea of the mind is too literal, too logical, too rule-bound to allow the full measure of madness — the risk of real confusion, of delirium, of ineffable ambiguity — that this subject requires. The unconscious, as Freud (and Hitchcock, and a lot of other great filmmakers) knew, is a supremely unruly place, a maze of inadmissible desires, scrambled secrets, jokes and fears. If Mr. Nolan can’t quite reach this place, that may be because his access is blocked by the very medium he deploys with such skill.
And the limitations of “Inception” may suggest the limits not only of this very talented director, but also of his chosen art form at this moment in its history. Our dreams feed the movies. The movies feed our dreams. But somehow, our imaginations are still hungry.
Mr. Nolan should ignore every one of these reviews. Memento, Insomnia, Batman Begins, The Prestige and The Dark Knight were all exceptional movies. In each of them Nolan undertakes an exploration of the mind and the human condition. The Dark Knight — trashed by some of the reviewers I’ve mentioned — is a searing indictment of our growing acceptance of the deliberate and studied dismantling of the rule of law by a corrupt and venal administration. What might have been just another comic-book movie is a reflection on a philosophical question that goes back to Plato, Socrates and Juvenal.
Besides, there’s an equally vocal lobby of critics and reviewers who liked the film. Katey Rich at CinemaBlend has an excellent write up.
Inception is an exploration, too, as anybody who, on waking, has tried to recapture a dream of the night before knows. Dom Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) is a thief: he steals dreams, the kind of stuff that is seminal, the kind of stuff that hits you in deepest sleep, the kind of stuff that is game-changing. If you get hurt in the dream, you feel pain; if you die, you just wake up. Cobb has his team: Arthur (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), a sort of point man, and an ‘architect’ named Nash (Lukas Haas) who handcrafts the look-and-feel of the dream world. As the film opens, they are in the midst of an extraction in the mind of Saito, a character played by the always riveting Ken Watanabe. But Saito is playing them for fools, and is turning their plan inside out: he wants to commission a reverse caper. Instead of extracting information, he wants to plant an idea in the head of a dying competitor’s (Pete Postlethwaite’s) son, Robert Fischer (Cillian Murphy). Cobb is wanted in America for the murder of his wife, Mal (Marion Cotillard). He longs to be with his children again. Saito can get him back into the country with a single phone call. Cobb takes the assignment. He recruits Eames (Tom Hardy), someone who can ‘forge’ identities within dreams. With the help of his father (Michael Caine), Cobb also recruits a young architect Ariadne (Ellen Page). Also on the team is Yusuf (Dileep Rao) who prepares chemical compounds to alter states of consciousness. Peter Browning (Tom Berenger), young Fischer’s godfather, is likely to be an obstacle. The ensemble cast holds it together: DiCaprio has developed an intensity that makes you forget his pretty-boy beginnings. Cillian Murphy is at once vulnerable and threatening; the arrogance of great wealth is considerably dampened by his need for paternal approval. Tom Hardy’s Bondish character fits the role perfectly and Ellen Page, young, uncommonly sharp, is a stabilizer to DiCaprio’s rollercoaster edginess.
To make the ‘inception’ work, the team needs Robert Fischer to believe that the idea is his own; and to do this, they must construct several levels, one below the other, each a dream within the one before or above it, each successfully more difficult to exit. At each level, time slows exponentially. At the lowest level is a state of limbo, an indefinite existence in a dream-world. The complication is Mal who is a recurrent disruption. If there is a hinge on which the story revolves, it is this relationship, convoluted, strange, enigmatic and constantly self-referential.
As they enter the first level, the action begins and then never lets up. It is stunningly mounted. The hand-held camera work and rapid-fire editing reminds you of Paul Greengrass’s recent work, especially in the Bourne franchise. As the team descends from one level to the next, the action gets increasingly frenzied. The moments between, when you feel you can catch your breath, are illusory: they barely give you to time to respond before you’re sent hurtling into another jaw-dropping, gut-wrenching sequence.
Cobb and Mal have devised a way of distinguishing dream from reality: they have a totem, a heavy object. If it falls over, what they are experiencing is real; if it doesn’t, they are still in the dream. Cobb has a spinning top. At the end of the movie, he sets it going.
And?
And go see it.
To anyone who has ever experienced that sensation in deepest sleep of being in constant free fall, of circling endlessly down into a bottomless whirlpool, of floating, and all this in time that has slowed to a crawl and then, jagged, without tangible beginning, explodes into some frenetic action, the film will seem strangely familiar. People have chosen or refused to confront it because it takes something elemental, visceral, and pushes it in your face. This is a movie about dreams, and about dreaming of being in a movie, and about a dream that is a movie.
Dreams have incongruities. Dreams are non-linear. Inception visualizes both. The film folds in on itself again and again, both visually and in its progression. There is a sense of being sucked in and swallowed whole. All the telltale icons of a dream are here: Penrose steps, constantly going up or down, depending on the direction in which you’re going; impossible triangles; time shifting; and sly innuendo: is it a mere coincidence that Cillian Murphy’s character is called ‘Robert Fischer’, a possible reference to Bobby Fischer the brilliant and tragic chess master — a man who knew how to deploy his pawns?
Inception’s influences are far wider than the pedestrian examples from cinema (2001, Blade Runner, Michael Mann) offered by many reviewers. One of these is almost certainly the work of Douglas Hofstadter and his Pulitzer Prize winning Godel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid. Like that book, Inception is about mathematics, symmetry, intelligence and beauty; but not only about those things. What the film attempts is an explosion of the ‘myth’ that we consider reality. Elements are weighted with substance, and patterns, rhythms and this constant referring back, lend meaning to things that, in themselves, are apparently meaningless. How is knowledge represented? How is it stored, and where? How is that knowledge best ‘extracted’ and used? What do symbols mean? The infinite regressions pose the logical conundrum most easily traced to Lewis Carroll’s brief dialogue, What the Tortoise Said to Achilles.
This is a film about cognition, consciousness, awareness. It is a journey through neurological mechanisms to find a coherent, ‘extractable’, worthwhile “thought”. An idea, perhaps only half-formed, but one of value. But that finding, and its validity, is always being doubted; and the doubt increases with each level of recursion and self-referencing. Hans Zimmer’s score is a constant auditory reminder of what we are experiencing: a booming sound, strong in the lower register, constantly repeating itself with subtle variations followed by sharp shifts, only to move back again to the beginning.
This is a film of and about layers: layers of consciousness, layers of meaning, layers of truth and falsehood, reality and dream. It is also a film about language, symbols and representations, information, communication and the human brain. Where do we store the data that is most vital to us?
Diane Ackerman has this wonderful passage in An Alchemy of Mind:
“Even after the brain folded in, under and around itself, it still needed to add important skills. The only solution was to drop some abilities to make room for more important ones.
What the brain really needed was space without volume. So it took a radical leap and did something unparalleled in the history of life on Earth. It began storing information and memories outside itself, on stone, papyrus, paper, computer chips and film.”
This is exactly what Inception recognizes, and then looks at the fragments still left behind in the brain. What if these could be harvested and taken out into the ‘real’ world — in the language of the film, extracted?
As much as language, this film is also about architecture and the language of architecture. The Dark Knight and Batman Begins both saw Nolan envisioning the urban form. In Inception he pushes the envelope. Here, he conceives spaces, stacks of spaces, and structures. Once built, they are folded on themselves, blown apart, reduced to caricature forms, and then clothed in realism. A city’s landscape bends; mirrors reflect endlessly; an entire block around a café, with all its set pieces, explodes. The architect designs the form of the dream that Cobb enters. But each design is inherently vulnerable and susceptible to mutation by external forces. The architect is a set designer, one whose sets are constantly under threat from the lot next door. The leaps of imagination that inform the greatest architecture are the stuff of which dreams, and great movies, are made.
When I saw the movie, there wasn’t an empty seat in the cinema. There wasn’t one still when the movie ended, and the collective gasp at the last shot said everything. For 148 minutes, Nolan takes us on the wildest of rides and he does it with panache, style, confidence and, most of all grace. Here is a director with a profound respect for his audience, one who carries his audience with him, but is yet willing to challenge that audience and to do it without being preachy or antagonistic.
In her hysterical rave about The Last Tango in Paris, Pauline Kael claimed that Bertolucci and Brando had altered the face of an art form. She was wrong; they hadn’t; and I have little doubt that, with her peculiar nonsensibility, she would have shredded Inception. But what she said of Tango is undoubtedly true today of Inception. It takes an art form, demonstrates a complete mastery of all aspects of the medium and then changes everything we’ve come to take for granted about film. There are epochal points in the history of all art, and this is one of them.
(This review first appeared on blogcritics on Sunday, 18 July 2010)
Postscript: Both in A.O.Scott’s review and in a comment over at blogcritics there is a mention of “madness”; and the complaint seems to be that the film is too tightly structured, has too much definition, to fully capture insanity.
This criticism is incomprehensible. This film is not about madness. It is about dreams. And dreams do have a structure; we see that structure very clearly, but it is infinitely malleable, and its state-changing nature is something we try and control but often cannot. The mind, and dreams, have rules, but these bend or can be bent. Sometimes we will the bending; sometimes it is forced on us. But that does not mean that the mind is a place without structure, rules or order. It’s just that all these are like Play-Doh. Rules change. Structures fall apart; fragments are reconstructed. This is not the world of madness or lunacy. This is the ‘real’ world of the tangible dream. It is the world of Tantalus, where the desirable is just out of reach. This is exactly what Nolan says and delivers.
Reviewers and commenters may like to pretend otherwise, but these delusions are their own. They have nothing to do with the film; and like all criticism that attacks a case that has not been made, are ultimately worthless.
]]>Why was Solanda incarcerated at all? Apparently, she killed her own children (shades of Medea?) and now lives in her own dream world in the Berkshires, treating all around her as postmen, policemen and other seemingly ordinary denizens of a seemingly ordinary life.
There’s nothing ordinary about the hospital, or the island itself. In fact, everything is just a little bit off-kilter, just a shade too extraordinary. About a third of the way through, we find that this is true of Daniels himself — his motives for being there at all are not what we believed. There is definitely something extremely sinister going on behind the scenes at the hospital. Solanda leaves a code, apparent gibberish; but Daniels unravels it and with that unravelling comes the unravelling of his own persona. What really is going on here? Is this some top-secret installation that is permitted to experiment on patients with new drugs and surgical procedures? The two Marshalls are mystified by the stonewalling from the hospital staff: no, they can’t see some records. No, they can’t look at some logs. Everything seems shrouded in mystery: codes; missing records of a recent inmate; the inaccessibility of “Ward C”, spoken of only elliptically and in hushed tones, covertly; a lighthouse that apparently treats sewage, yet is surrounded by an electrified fence and guards.
A hurricane hits the island. Communication goes down, all of it. Now even the ferry back to the mainland is out of the question. Daniels and Aule are stuck here and, it would seem, being slowly driven mad.
Lehane has an uncanny ear for dialogue and conversation. It’s not just accurate. He actually uses to define characters, moods and relationship and to move his plot along. Particularly good is the exchange between Daniels and the hospital director: we are left with several tantalizing glimpses. Does the director have a Nazi past (he “hits his consonants a tad hard”)? Is he some master of the ultimate mind-game?
Similarly, the relationship between Daniels and Aule actually evolves and unfolds mostly through conversation. We learn that Daniels lost his wife in a tragic fire; that Aule is being hounded because of his relationship with a Japanese American woman.
Lehane uses several well-known set-pieces but, to my mind, succeeds in preventing them from becoming mere trite contrivances. The storm sequence, for example, is stunning and yet it’s been done to death (perhaps from Shakespeare’s The Tempest, King Lear, Macbeth or even before). It’s a full-blown hurricane and Daniels is out there on his own, uprooted trees flying past. When it comes to building atmosphere and tension, it just doesn’t get better. There’s a creepiness in the whole set-up that somehows seems to seep deeper and deeper; you’re hooked and you’re chilled. You know, too, that clues are being flung at you and scattered around — but which is the clue and which the red herring?
This is the ultimate mind-game. There’s enough horror and tension here to satiate the most blood thirsty and yet there’s no gun play, no bullets whanging around and the body count is next to zero. Much of this might have been contrived in other hands, but Lehane deals his cards deftly — dropping just enough to keep the reader off-balance while he sinks his hook in deeper. Even the title is a giveaway you realize only too late: why Shutter Island? Is this the mind’s shutter? Or one in a camera that catches discrete, disjointed images?
The denouement is stunning in itself but, finally, slightly disappointing. Not very many writers in the genre can sustain such a high note of mesmerizing horror and tension. Thomas Harris did it, once, with The Silence of the Lambs and, I thought, with Hannibal, but there are plenty of people who would disagree with that assessment. The difference is that Harris created a single monster and allowed him to sprawl, with the utmost depravity, indulging his every exquisite obscenity, over several books. While also playing mind-games, Harris throws in a more than generous serving of bloodiness, especially in Hannibal which lacks the subtlety of Lambs, almost as if Harris is saying well, look, see how well I can do this, too. Sequence after sequence in Hannibal scales new heights of grotesquery: being eaten alive by wild pigs or boars, raised for just that to the sound of blood curdling screaming; a man who skins his own face under the ‘gentle’ persuasion of the good Dr Lecter Hannibal; the doctor’s dissection (live, of course) in a church or museum of a cop who gets too close; and the truly extraordinary finale that seems to me to redefine obscenity: when Hannibal serves up a gourmet meal of brain, prepared absolutely fresh, except that it’s human brain and he is performing a lobotomy even as he cooks. I believe this is one of the reasons Jodie Foster refused to do the film and even Riddley Scott knocked it off and substituted it with an altogether weaker self-mutilation — a sort of self-sacrificial offering that was supposed to accentuate Hannibal’s finer sensibilities but only succeeded in weakening the entire structure.
This is perhaps easier to do than what Lehane sets out to achieve. After all, the sheer shock value of a Harrisian set up can drive you through far enough. It’s much more difficult to put a dampener on the book and still lift it out of the ordinary. Lehane very nearly pulls it off, and misses only narrowly. I’m not quite sure why. It’s shocking enough, in its own way, but not, I think, adequately ambiguous. There’s a good ten pages or more in which the reader is allowed to acclimatize and there follows a sense of inevitability. This is thin line, certainly, a delicate balance between mere contrivance and plausibility. Lehane seems anxious to avoid the former but, in the bargain, might just have compromised the book, ever so slightly. But this is perhaps just cavilling, and not reason enough to skip the book.
]]>The infamous love affair between Wilde and Lord Alfred “Bosie” Douglas, the Marquess’ son, flourished clandestinely but was doomed the moment it became public — and it did so at Wilde’s own hands.
On 18 February 1895, the Marquess sent a note to Wilde at the Albemarle Club, addressing it to “Oscar Wilde, posing as a somdomite” [sic]. Blinded by rage, deceived by his infatuation and actively encouraged by Bosie Douglas, Wilde issued notice to the Marquess claiming damages for libel.
It proved to be a tragic mistake. Within days, Wilde went from being adored to reviled by Victorian London, the literary lion turning to accursed cur, in what was the biggest scandal of its time.
The fall from grace was quick and deadly. Wilde lost everything. He lost the libel action and was prosecuted and incarcerated in Reading jail (where he wrote The Ballad of Reading Gaol). Insolvency followed and he fled to Paris, abandoning his family, which he never saw again.
Holland is a well-known researcher, scholar and archivist and he has unearthed the original transcript of the Wilde trial. The book contains the unexpurgated record of a case, the details of which, in 1895, London’s Central Criminal Court Sessions Papers said “are unfit for publication.” Holland’s introduction is both poignant and perceptive, masterly in its own right.
There were actually three trials of Oscar Wilde. It began with his criminal charge of libel against the Marquess, prosecuted on Wilde’s behalf by the legendary Edward Clarke. Despite advice from his peers (including George Bernard Shaw), Wilde persisted with the charge. The Marquess was represented by Edward Carson, a rival of Wilde from college days. When Carson began questioning Wilde on his relationships with younger men, Wilde moved from discomfiture to a state of near breakdown. The next day, he withdrew his case.
The Marquess countered, getting a warrant issued for Wilde’s arrest, on the basis of the statements of several young men proposed to have been called as witnesses for the defence in the earlier case. Wilde was arrested and stood trial. The prosecutor, Charles Gill, another classmate of Wilde’s from Oxford, was determined to prove the charges. However, the jury was deadlocked on all but one of the 25 charges and Wilde got bail and a temporary reprieve. A few weeks later, the criminal charge was retried and Wilde convicted.
From a purely literary perspective, perhaps the most astounding exchange between Gill and Wilde takes place when Gill, perhaps hoping for something elementary, asks Wilde, “What is ‘The Love that dare not speak its name?’”
Wilde’s response is worth quoting in full:
“‘The Love that dare not speak its name’ in this century is such a great affection of an elder for a younger man as there was between David and Jonathan, such as Plato made the very basis of his philosophy, and such as you find in the sonnets of Michelangelo and Shakespeare. It is that deep, spiritual affection that is as pure as it is perfect. It dictates and pervades great works of art like those of Shakespeare and Michelangelo, and those two letters of mine, such as they are. It is in this century misunderstood, so much misunderstood that it may be described as the “Love that dare not speak its name,” and on account of it I am placed where I am now. It is beautiful, it is fine, it is the noblest form of affection. There is nothing unnatural about it. It is intellectual, and it repeatedly exists between an elder and a younger man, when the elder man has intellect, and the younger man has all the joy, hope and glamour of life before him. That it should be so the world does not understand. The world mocks at it and sometimes puts one in the pillory for it.”
The relentless cross-examination and the record of the trial, presented by Holland complete and uncensored, is not only devastating but highlights the fatal cleft between literary license and flourish and forensic exactitude. Under the brutal onslaught of the latter with its relentless probing for a nugget here and a piece there, with which to build the whole, the literary cause falters and ultimately perishes.
“Perhaps he was too clever for his own good”; “hoist by his own petard”; “too clever by half” — these thoughts are unavoidable as one goes through the transcript. In the dock stands the foppish Wilde, confident in his wit and his mastery of the mot juste, his epigrams, able to “strike an attitude” on demand. The prosecutor, Charles Gill, is, in contrast, pedestrian, plodding and utterly dogged. There is much thrust-and-parry here, cat-and-mouse games, Gill biding his time and evaluating every opening. Then comes the definitive moment, when Wilde, too clever for his own good, blithely responds to Gill’s question if he kissed that boy. “No, he was far too ugly,” says Wilde — and seals his fate.
This exchange is, of course, well-known. But what Holland’s book shows is that Wilde was only arrogant and cocky in the first case, his own libel action. As that deflated, he lost his hubris and was soon reduced to whingeing and appealing for help to his own Counsel and even the judge. Gill managed to rattle him much earlier.
The book is astonishingly vivid and has a powerful dramatic balance to it. The entire era is brought alive and it is almost a sense of despair that we watch Wilde literally talk himself into jail and exile.
]]>People are odd, some more than others; it’s as simple as that. We are all products of multiple influences, often conflicting, but each of which makes us what we are. Every influence has its own potential. This makes every person unique. Some, in whom the influences are more pronounced, are more eccentric than others and it is in these people that we glimpse reflections of the “potentialities, both comic and tragic, of human nature”. This is what fascinates Calder and it is difficult to disagree when he says that “mongrelism is our common lot” and that “we are all mongrels”. There is no reason to exclude deities from this procession, either; they are, after all, to a greater or lesser extent, projections of human wants, desires, needs and beliefs and it is in them that the eccentricities can be allowed to run riot without fear of confinement to a padded cell. How else could one explain such a bizarre pantheon? Of course, if oddness is the overarching criterion for selection, the result is bound to be lopsided and Calder quickly acknowledges this and apologises for it. I think the mea culpa is unnecessary. No one could really expect consistency or completeness in as subjective a book as this and, indeed, the sheer eccentricity of the selection only emphasizes Calder’s thesis.
Structurally, the book is uncompromising. The entries are arranged alphabetically by surname, but there is no table of contents. You have to either read it through or know what you’re looking for. The index, though it exists, is singularly (and unabashedly) unhelpful. “I hope that if you are frustrated in some particular search you will nevertheless be intrigued by oddities and interconnections and might pursue them back into the text, where you will, I hope find instruction, amusement, or indeed both at once,” says Calder and that pretty much sums up his entire approach.
In fact, there isn’t any definable consistency to the book as, indeed, there shouldn’t be. Calder’s selection is itself mongrel and the result of whatever or whoever seems to have caught his fancy. These are not authorised biographies, or even potted biographies. These are essays that limn Calder’s abaxial perception of foibles. Calder doesn’t look so much at the personalities—many of the entries are obscure non-entities—as at their eccentricities. This is unlike most biographies or reference texts which take prominent persons and incidentally may (or may not) cover their idiosyncrasies. Calder entirely inverts this approach by choosing the quirk and then examining the persona behind it. Take, for instance, the piece on Babe Ruth, a figure on whom there is surely a surfeit of material. Calder’s interest in him springs first from the legendary called-shot home run in the 1932 World Series between the New York Yankees and the Chicago Cubs. Did he really call that shot by pointing his bat to the bleachers? Calder seems to argue that perhaps this doesn’t matter for all it did was add to the sheen and allure of a figure who was already an icon, not just in the sport, but for the nation, as a “surrogate for hope” and a “redeemer” when the nation needed one in a time of depression, organised crime and cynicism. It is this, and the bundle of Babe Ruth’s own personality—drinker, womaniser, setter of impossible records—that makes him a true mongrel. There is no one quirk that marks an individual apart or worthy of Calder’s notice. His gaze is directed, rather, to people of many parts, the sum of which exceeds themselves. Thus, Calder includes Bill Tilden and Henri Cochet in tennis but not Connors, Arthur Ashe, McEnroe or Borg; the celebrity chef Alexis Soyer; the writer B Traven; Herbert Ironmonger and Gregor MacGregor in cricket and so on.
Clearly, the selection is not just idiosyncratic, it is personally quirky; Calder chooses the ones that are appealing to him, and it is this whole-hearted subjectivity that gives the book it’s appeal. In his piece on MacGregor, for instance, Calder writes:
“Which brings me to the reason why MacGregor is in this book. Firstly, while a very great deal of cricket has been played in Lowland Scotland for a couple of centuries, we have produced damn few top-class heroes, and amongst these only MacGregor could be classed as ‘legendary’. Furthermore, I kept wicket for years myself, at ‘good club’ second eleven level, and had my days of success. The courage of MacGregor fascinates me—because, perhaps even with cut hands, he ‘stood up’ to Sammy Woods’ bowling.”
The book makes compelling reading. Calder writes with his tongue set very firmly in his cheek and is irrepressibly and delightfully irreverent, especially when he treads on hallowed ground. Yet, he can write with intense feeling—the pieces on Billie Holiday and Lester Young are tragic masterpieces.
At a personal level, I was taken by the surprising number of entries connected with India (Ganesha, Kali, Victoria, Annie Besant, Shaikh Adam, Mirza Sheikh I’tesamuddin), jazz (Lester Young, Billie Holiday) and movies (Hedy Lamarr, Merle Oberon). That’s not to suggest that there’s any particular slant to the book, because there isn’t. As eccentric books go, this can’t be bettered.
]]>Richard Hendel’s “On Book Design” is a marvellous book, and superbly produced. In just a few minutes of skimming, the reader learns much of value. Hendel seems to prefer a Garamond family font (Galliard, Bodoni, Bookman) for print, and it’s easy to see why: these fonts are gentle, easy on the eye, flow smoothly and are totally unobtrusive. He uses some wonderful typography for his titles and sidebars, too, and the leading is just right for each of these. It’s sad that so few pay any attention to this.
In stark contrast is that wretched, wretched book by Mortimer Adler, “How to Read a Book”. Without doubt, it’s the most absurd and over-rated book on the subject. It takes all the magic and pleasure out of reading and reduces it to an oppressive act of bureaucratic nit-picking. Adler is a pedant and an auto-didact, and has probably never enjoyed a book in his life. No place for the emotive, visceral response here, for atmosphere or mood or plot or empathy. Instead, we are exhorted to squiggle all over our books (imagine!). I can understand the odd underlying or sidemark, but Adler would have us make an index at the back, a précis in the front and use at least five types of marks throughout. This is not just a conceit — to show the person who picks it up next that you have read it with such care, that you are so much brighter than him — but it is also selfish, cruel and inconsiderate. No one wants to read a book that is marred, tortured, tormented and violated like this. Above all, books are about sharing — or they wouldn’t have been written in the first place, nor would anyone buy them. Sharing good books between friends is a sure sign of quiet amity and respect. This, of course, never occurs to Adler who evidently doesn’t give a fig about book design, white space or the sheer pleasure of turning smooth, creamy new pages, of smelling the binding and the spine. I can see him now, ‘reading a book’, thumb and two fingers tracing the lines for his eyes, making notes in the margin, notes on the endpapers, notes on the frontispiece and front papers, on the title page (which he says is wasted space), in fact just about everywhere and even on loose sheets of paper (what does he do with these notes, I wonder?), but never once smiling or feeling his pulse race or breath come short. He’s too busy, I guess, ‘reading’ the book.
Having said that, I must confess that my copy of “Eats, Shoots and Leaves” is hopelessly marred and quite useless for anyone else. I have dozens of markings and notes all over the book, but I really couldn’t help it. That book warrants a second and even a third reading. Full of insights and sharp observations, all set in an irresistibly wacky narrative that engages history, literature, technology and poetry, Truss’s book (I trust she approves of the apostrophe here) is not just amusing and entertaining. It is an eye-opener. She explains why punctuation is necessary, how it was invented (contrived might be a better word) and then gives us wonderful examples of the carnage that follows when language is badly punctuated, or not punctuated at all. I loved the one about the “pickled herring merchant”: nasty, that, casting aspersions on his drinking habits, when you really meant “pickled-herring merchant”. What she says very early on, though, is not just true but, sadly, too often overlooked — that punctuation is a courtesy designed to help readers to understand without stumbling. “It is the stitching of language.” If only the customers who post reviews at Amazon would understand that.
]]>The other central character in the book is a teacher in Christopher’s school. Of her, we learn nothing. The third major player is, of course, Christopher’s mother, who makes a clumsily contrived entrance towards the end of the book. The plot is so thin that the book is unlikely to be spoiled for anyone who knows it in advance: Christopher’s ‘care-giver’ is his father. His mother is apparently dead, or so Christopher is led to believe. Christopher finds his neighbour’s dog impaled on a pitchfork in front of his house. Whodunnit? Christopher sets off to find out. In the bargain, he makes a solitary trip to London to find his mother and then the book sort of turns in on itself and begins to spill its emotional guts as it moves inexorably towards a conveniently neat conclusion.
The book irritates. Haddon’s attempt to make Christopher awkwardly likeable only makes him precious. Arguably, Haddon is unfair to autistic children. His book bursts with stereotypes: about selfish, violent behaviour (how is that any different from about 99.99% of mankind, I wonder?); an unusual felicity with things scientific and mathematical (quite incorrect, actually; I believe many autistic children tend to high skills in other areas, e.g., fiction); an inability to deal with others; a lack of fear of violent behaviour in others, and so on. This is routine stuff and Haddon deploys several contrivances to cover this terrain: Christopher’s endearing character, his seemingly profound insights into books and fiction, his grasp of science and maths and, of course, the feel-good ending. For example, when Christopher writes, he often capitalizes unexpectedly. He begins Detecting. You read this and, instinctively, you say, “how sweet!” You are Charmed. This is just Too Easy.
I am not suggesting that Haddon should have written something more hefty or that the book is badly written. It is competent, but only that, and its consistently puerile. Certainly it’s very far from the profundity that McInerney makes it out to be.
]]>One can only hope that this book is not meant to mirror her own life, though certainly the parallels are inescapable. Like her protagonist, Suzanne Vale, Fisher has battled a broken home, several odd relationships and a rainbow of substance abuse. I didn’t like Postcards From the Edge and I like this ‘sequel’ considerably less. Ok, she was sort of cute as the feisty twisted-mouthed Princess Leia in the Star Wars movies, despite the ridiculous Danish pastries clapped to her ears, but the journey from that cinematic puerility to accomplished authorship isn’t easy. Fisher is a singularly poor traveller.
You know you’re in serious trouble the moment you start skimming the book. There is an acknowledgements page. Fine. But hold on. There’s a second acknowledgments page, too, at the end of the book. Neither is remotely comprehensible.
For my brother, Todd — we’ll always have lockup. Remember that time Debbie got pregnant with us and our whole lives happened? … I’m not worthy (my name is Lisa). … For Kim Painter — for the translation, transcribing, train spotting and lap dancing. … For Tracey and Johnny — thank you both so — bullocks — much for your continued — tits tits tits — support. Without the two of you — cockring — these lingering coughs would be more difficult to — wanker — bear.
What on earth is this supposed to mean? More importantly, who cares? And, just by the way, it’s bollocks not bullocks. The latter are draught animals. This is pretty much an indicator of what follows (or even what precedes if you take into account the totally incomprehensible title). Fisher scales great heights in demonstrating just how irritatingly over-precious she can be. Even the ‘About the Author’ isn’t spared: “…[S]he has a daughter, Billie. They want to see the aurora borealis.” Well, golly, gee, isn’t that the sweetest.
The Best Awful brings back Suzanne Vale, she of Postcards From the Edge notoriety. Vale is, very early on, a ‘breadwinner with a very yang personality’. She opens the proceedings with a spin on an old Woody Allen line (“My wife left me for another woman”). Her husband, also the father of her daughter, leaves her for another man. Vale comforts herself with bipolar medication. Vale’s anguish, if you can call it that, arises from her failure to detect her husband’s sexual preferences. This seriously dents her self-esteem. Apparently, this is a must-have skill for all married women. Having discovered her shortcoming in that department, Vale sets out to compensate by engaging in determinedly heterosexual sex and promptly runs through three men including (but of course) one who is several years younger. Unsurprisingly, this does nothing either for Vale or the narrative and Fisher shifts into four-wheel substance-abuse overdrive in (but of course) Tijuana among other places. That can’t be sustained either so it’s back to LA and the location scouts have now zeroed in on a psychiatric clinic. But how to get Vale there? The answer leaps to mind: An overdose (but of course). By now, we’ve reached a total dead end and Fisher, evidently scrabbling for some foothold to drag the book out of this hole, settles for a pseudo-Harlequin Roman finale which I’d love to wreck here but won’t.
Fisher, unfortunately, has very little to say that is truly original. She therefore deploys linguistic camouflage — mostly awkward contrivances. But even that can’t relieve the tedium. Suzanne Vale’s disintegration is so predictable that it’s almost laughable: medication-pointless sex-nervous breakdown-overdose-clinic and, ultimately, resurrection and salvation Hollywood style. You can almost hear the chorus. But even that doesn’t work. Like the rest of the book, it remains arid and ferociously tiresome. This is a book that exhausts you because Fisher just tries too hard for too much. She tries to make her heroine not herself and to make both her heroine and herself likable. It doesn’t work. It’s just words, words, words being flung at you, as I said, over-punctuated and often redundant. This is like being had by Hannibal and his elephants. At the end, frankly, my dears, we really don’t give a damn.
Even apart from the sheer narcissim and self-obsession of the entire narrative, there’s something more fundamentally objectionable about Fisher’s projected take on life and what makes it worth living. Vale’s collapse is triggered by one thing and one thing only — her husband abandoning her for another man. What follows is an odyssey of self-discovery to prove one thing and one thing only — that Vale is actually appealing to the male of the species. This is reinforced by the awkward ending. Vale’s self-image and persona are, according to Fisher, inherently and totally dependent on how she is viewed by the men in her life. Somehow, this is not just silly and plain wrong, but coming from someone like Fisher, quite unacceptable. I don’t buy into the theory that women need men to be ‘fulfilled’ or ‘complete’. At its heart, and despite all the posturing (and that’s all that it is), Fisher’s book is horribly misogynistic.
Unless you’re a real glutton for literary punishment, or you’re seriously starved of good reading matter — and you’ve got to be marooned on some island — don’t bother. Or, as Fisher might say … don’t — bother …
A somewhat gentler and very accomplished review appeared in the Guardian/Observer.
]]>Vacuity is not something of which one can accuse Frankenheimer. He, too, can pull off tremendous action sequences (the entire car chase in Ronin), but his action is quieter, less in-your-face and far less contrived. I’ve always held his 1965 B&W The Train to be a complete masterpiece in the action/thriller/war genre. He’s made several films since, and having seen most (not all), I’d be hard to put to point to one that I didn’t actually like or which didn’t leave me with something for later.
Recently I stumbled on Path to War, a film he made for HBO and which seems to have been largely ignored, for reasons I am quite unable to fathom. It’s not even seriously reviewed at Rotten Tomatoes and many of the other movie review sites don’t even mention it.
That’s a shame, because this is a very fine film. Frankenheimer takes a subject that, in the hands of a lesser director, could have gone in one of only two directions: A pseudo-documentary made from a predetermined perspective (Oliver Stone), or an outright war film (too many contenders). Instead, Frankenheimer breaks completely new ground. He’s dealing with Vietnam in the LBJ days, pre-Nixon, post-Kennedy. That was possibly the most difficult period of the Vietnam war when things could have gone either way. In 1963, at the end of the Kennedy administration, Vietnam was at a turning point. By the time Nixon came in, America had made its choice and was too heavily committed to allow for any quick or easy resolution. That road, that path to war, was chosen in the time of the Johnson administration. It was a tragic and terrible mistake that cost far too much for far too little. Other things, too, equally became casualties of the war: LBJ’s magnificent dream of a ‘Great Society’, which might have changed the face of the world we live in, was in complete shambles and quickly forgotten.
LBJ was a man much misunderstood by his own times and by immediate history. It is only now that we are seeing a more considered re-evaluation of the man, his concerns, motivations and priorities. In the dubyaspeak regime, they assume even greater importance; and comparisons between McNamara and Rumsfield might lead to terrifying conclusions. Was Lyndon Johnson misled? It can’t be easy being the Chief Executive of the United States of America (unless you’re George W. Bush in which case everything is neatly black or white and nothing between) and Vietnam presented what was probably the most distressing of questions before that administration. Johnson was undoubtedly a most astute statesman. His political play in resolving burning race issues is perhaps an object example of how a determined leader with complete clarity of vision and true breadth of mind can outflank his strongest opponents (in this case George Wallace). Though ending racial inequality and establishing affirmative action was just one of the several issues on LBJ’s front burner, Vietnam overshadowed them all. Much that is of lasting value even today, or is now firmly entrenched in the American polity, was the work of two or three Presidents of the 20th Century, FDR and LBJ being perhaps the most important. It is therefore not just sad or tragic to see the Bush administration’s attempts at systematicaly dismantling environmental safeguards, economic and fiscal equity measures and even that most fundamental of all freedoms, the freedom of choice; it is without doubt a fatal blow to the future of mankind.
This is crucial. The achivements of the great Presidents of the United States had an impact well beyond America’s territorial boundaries. America became, under them and after them, the lodestar to follow and the yardstick by which other regimes were measured and found wanting. In a sense, this became a self-fulfilling prophecy: Those who did not adopt the American standard, or at least attempt to, became the ‘enemy’. The tirade against communism is but the most startling instance. Later Presidents were cautious in deploying this argument too prominently on the world stage. 9/11 and Iraq has changed all that, for the worse. The world will never be the same again and neither will the United States of America.
What is happening today is a rank betrayal of some of the ideals that Lyndon Johnson, among others, strived and struggled to integrate into the reality of ‘the American Dream’. Frankenheimer sees this clearly. His film is a calm, dispassionate and studied attempt to understand the man and, perhaps, come to terms with some of the catastrophic decisions that were taken during his tenure. Frankenheimer does not ‘do’ the war at all. He remains in the White House with just the occasional documentary footage from Vietnam. There are no scenes of war, no graphic violence and not despite this but because of it, the film is both and chilling. Was this really the way we were? How did that come to pass? And, in an era of critical assessments of LBJ and accusations of mutton-headedness in leading America into a war which was doomed to failure from the start, is there simply no other understanding possible of the man?
The film is long, at over 2½ hours but you don’t sense it once. Michael Gambon turns in the performance of a lifetime, certainly one that could have got him an Oscar had there been one for this class of film. Alec Baldwin is an appropriately plump McNamara, a sleek-headed man such as those who sleep o’nights. Donald Sutherland’s Clark Clifford had me perplexed at first but he played his character with his usual dexterity, slowly fleshing him out. This film is just not to be missed.
Postscript Ten minutes after I began watching the film, my 11-year-old daughter came in and sat with me. I expected she’d watch a bit, get bored, and leave. She sat through the whole of it, totally engrossed. She’d ask me questions now and then and we paused while I explained what little I know. It was pretty much a potted history of the Vietnam war. To work a historical theme, without graphic visuals and yet to be able to hold even one that young and at such an enormous physical remove in time and place (we live in Bombay, India) — I can’t think of a better commendation. Thank you and salud, John Frankenheimer.
* Actually, the really marvellous Van Damme movie is JCVD with JCVD playing a down-at-heel, ragged and wonderfully human JCVD.
]]>]]>Great blog!
I read this book by Nielsen, and his “Designing Web Usability” a while ago and both have been very influential. Not just in terms of web design — I don’t do much of that — but regarding design and publishing style generally. Nielsen is sound and sensible for the most part.
Unfortunately, and this comes through very strongly in “Designing Web Usability”, he is also extremely conceited and has very, very fixed ideas. His notions of hyperlinking, for example, on which he is utterly rigid. Hyperlinks must be solidly underlined, and in blue, always. The search button must be near the top — sort of like a car’s steering wheel: the horn must be in the center, that’s where God wanted it to be, not on a lever to the side as Ford once attempted. But what would Nielsen say about stereo controls on the steering wheel? Good? Bad? Usable?
Nielsen is worth reading if only to understand fundamental rules of web design. Today, with so many web authoring programs so easily available, everyone is a designer and yet very few understand design, or the limitations and advantages of the medium (in contrast to print especially). Too many designers throw everything, including the kitchen sink, into their designs. Nielsen correctly points out that much of this is rubbish and only alienates the viewer. His comments on how people read on the Internet (they don’t read, they scan) are revelations. As other authors explain, in reading print, the eye moves across the page, left to right and then down, line by line, till the page is turned. On the Internet, the eye is relatively static and the page scrolls up and down. This is not how humans read at all and that is why so many of us who use computers extensively still work better on paper. I am a practicing lawyer, and, despite all my work on a computer, I still find it easier to work on paper.
Having said all that, however, I must say that, at some point, I began to feel that much of what Nielsen says can safely be ignored and, sometimes, he is plain wrong. Take the two examples above. I don’t any longer believe that links must be in blue and underlined. Increasingly, Internet users are able to easily distinguish links and follow them even when they are not so identified. In a trade-off between design and usability, with a given design you can break the Nielsen rule on linking without any sacrifice of usability.
Similarly, the search button. Why should it be at the top? Where it should be placed depends on the nature of the site. I went off to bookofjoe, and, frankly, my only comment is that perhaps the “syndicate this site (XML)” link could be dropped lower down the page; but the rest can be left as it is. It’s completely logical: on that page, one wants to know who you are; to get a quick link to send you an email (you’re sure you want this?); to see your archives; and, since this is a blog, not a formal research site, the search button is, in the natural progression of things, rightly placed below the archives. Please stick with the design: it’s clean, it’s simple, it’s eminently readable and it’s very, very usable. Forget Nielsen.
Nielsen is very much ‘old guard’ when it comes to these matters. He tends to see his ‘rules’ of web usability as punctuation. Breaking them, he seems to claim, leads to a drop in usability. This is quite evidently incorrect. The Internet is constantly evolving. Users are increasingly adept, comfortable and proficient. They don’t need the hand-holding Nielsen advises. See the redesigned Hotmail inbox, or Yahoo’s mail interface, for example. Many of Nielsen’s rules aren’t followed at all and yet there’s no real drop in usability.
I still do what I call a basic-Nielsen test on my own designs, though. The test is really simple. Forget you’re the designer. You’re an outsider. You come in. Can you quickly identify (1) what the site’s about; (2) what you’re likely to find; (3) dig deeper if you need to; (4) hit the right links on the page accurately?
The real beauty, though, is this:
“Despite having ascended to the most powerful political office in the world, President Zachary Herney was average in height, with a slender build and narrow shoulders.”
I didn’t realize that becoming a President gave you wall-to-wall muscles. Or that you needed to be a block of walking concrete to get the Presidency. I thought Arnie was an aberration. How very perspicacious of Brown to note, years ahead, that pumping iron is the siné-qua-non of presidential or gubernatorial aspirations.
But what I really disliked about both books is their deliberate dumbing-down of their protagonists. This isn’t a concession to the reader at all; it’s talking down to the reader, and it’s humiliating. In “Digital Fortress”, for instance, Susan Fletcher is supposed to be a very highly educated, blindingly intelligent mathematician working in code-breaking. She’s not just a pretty face. She is a Brainy Person. So how is it that she has no Latin at all?
Hale nodded thoughtfully. “Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?”
Susan looked puzzled.
“It’s Latin,” Hale said. “From Satires of Juvenal. It means ‘Who will guard the guards’?’”
“I don’t get it,” Susan said. “‘Who will guard the guards?’”
Oh, come on, Mr Brown. We realize you were bothered that many of your readers wouldn’t know the prhase, but did you have to turn your mathematician into a dimwit to explain it? Surely she would know, with her fancy degree and all? And the dilemma that confronts Susan Fletcher is, in the world of computers and even more acutely in the world of the Internet, as old as the hills. Anyone working in code-breaking and snooping knows that policing the police is a fundamental conflict in information technology regulation. It can’t be a first for any code-breaker working for a top-secret US agency.
On the whole, “Digital Fortress” works better than “Deception Point”. In the former, the world is under threat (naturally) because a renegade code-breaker threatens to release into the public domain an encryption of a kind never seen before. This will jeopardize the work of an US agency which constantly monitors global information flow. Along the way, Brown takes a swipe at the EFF, portraying it as a bunch of misguided zealots. That the EFF is actually fighting a rear-guard action to protect citizens’ rights against state-sponsored invasion of their privacy and that this is something to be supported totally escapes Brown. He sees anarchy as the only alternative to state spying. Anyway, the story races on, with a secret ring (the Tolkien influence) being chased down in Spain while havoc is unleashed in the US. It’s all exciting stuff with wonderful echoes of “The Matrix” films: towards the end, as the ‘shields’ start to go down, the ‘sharks’ and the ‘snakes’ start busting through the agency’s firewalls, all vividly projected on their screens.
In contrast, “Deception Point” is dull, uninspired and hopelessly contrived. Here, we have a Presidential race on our hands. The challenger is brash, arrogant and anti-NASA. The incumbent (he of the slender build and narrow shoulders) is determinedly NASA prone and fixated on the idea that there is intelligent life elsewhere in the Universe. Which, as someone said, is very likely given that none of it has tried to contact us yet. The director of NASA, in a wild attempt to shore up the present administration, plants a meteorite in a Polar ice-cap and claims that embedded in it is a huge prawn or some such, proof of extraterrestrial life or, at any rate, an alternate food supply. Cracking open this hoax is Rachel Sexton, daughter of aforementioned challenger. Her involvement in the whole thing is doubtful throughout and even Brown does not seem fully convinced: he tries to explain it repeatedly with diminishing success in each round. This is a book in which Brown ties himself in knots. In his desperation to add twists and turns, he jettisons the plausible completely and we have the most absurd situations piling on top of each other. Escaping from an ice-floe by banging on it so that the sonar of a nuclear sub conveniently cruising nearby hears it. A gunfight on a rig with a helicopter gunship above and hungry sharks below. Incompetents from Delta Force who can’t seem to accomplish the simplest termination. We get just about everything except credibility and, after a point, that’s really tiresome. At the end of both books, of course, the threats are neutralized, all is well with the world and the American Way of Life is virgo intacta (if not infacta).
Incidentally, has anyone noted the link between “The Da Vinci Code” and the “The Matrix”? In the second part of “The Matrix” trilogy, there is a character called The Merovingian. Everybody in the film is called ‘The’ something or the other: The Architect, The Keymaker, The Oracle, The One — this is possibly the most over-articled film of all time. But it’s possible that the Wachowski Duo read the same material as Dan Brown. One of the theories in “The Da Vinci Code”, and in “Holy Blood, Holy Grail” (by Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh and Henry Lincoln, a best-seller of the 1980’s) on which the Dan Brown book is based, is that Mary Magdalene was Jesus’s wife. Also, she was pregnant when he was (allegedly; no real proof of this, it seems) crucified. She fled to France and became the figurative chalice, or Holy Grail, in which Christ’s blood was preserved. Their descendants married with the locals, to conceal their identity and eventually founded a dynasty of Frankish kings who, being lineal descendants of the Christ, apparently had the healing touch and were called — you guessed it — the Merovingians.
]]>So when QT goes for broke with the violence what is he doing or saying, really? The simplistic answer is that he’s ‘paying homage’ to the King of B-Grade movies, Leone. But that’s just too facile. He’s doing more than that. He’s showing us the emptiness of, say, the Wachowski duo, with their balletic but increasingly absurd action sequences in the ‘Matrix’ trilogy. He’s telling us that, in his view, violence is one of the natural states of human existence and that revenge (‘a dish best served cold’) is peculiar to humans and, like cutlery, is what separates us from animals. Finally, he says that if you strip away the social morés, you’re left with something primal, compelling, bewitching — and perfectly understandable. That’s the point. Does any viewer go away feeling he didn’t understand the compulsions that drove QT’s characters in KBV1? He may not like their portrayal, but didn’t he believe?
There are those who say they didn’t ‘sympathise’ or ‘empathise’ with any character. Get a life, ladies. You weren’t meant to. No more than you were meant to in ‘Pulp Fiction’. These are not your friendly neighbourhood characters. They are the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad (or didn’t you get that)? That’s the second thing QT does. He takes comic book characters (see the anime in the film) and shows us that the nexus between art and reality isn’t tangential or tenuous. It exists, and the grim terrors of life reflect in the horrors that art shows us. Perhaps this is stretching it, every single work of art with any horror, terror or grief in it, from Munch through Picasso to Copolla, has been solidly relatable to a reality.
A hundred years from now, they won’t be watching GWTW or the Sound of Music to understand their past. They’ll watch Pulp Fiction. Reservoir Dogs. Kill Bill.
]]>The film has some exceptionally powerful lines, though, worth reading. Here’s the strongest, by Spacey when he is teaching.
]]>According to the Lacan, fantasies have to be unrealistic. The moment you get what you see, you don’t want it any more. In order to continue to exist, desire must have its objects perpetually absent. It’s not the it that you want, it’s the fantasy of it. Desire supports crazy fantasies. According to Pascal, we are only truly happy when daydreaming about future happiness. Therefore, “the hunt is sweeter than the kill.” Also, and therefore, be careful what you wish for; not because you’ll get it, but because you’re bound not to want it once you do. As Lacan says, leading by your wants will never make you truly happy. Therefore, to be fully human, you have to strive to live by your ideals and ideas, and not to measure your life in terms of what desires you have gained but by those small moments of integrity, compassion, rationality and self-sacrifice. The only way we can measure the significance of our own lives, therefore, is by valuing the lives of others.
About half-way through the book, the reader is suddenly plunged into diaries of our hero’s dad who is even worse than his son: charlatan, murderer, philanderer, pederast, this man, Francisco Falçon is supposed to have indulged in every depravity known to man and more. You wonder, at first, whether this is going anywhere or if this is just another novel that somehow meandered into this one. There’s a little postscript by Wilson at the end that says that he sat down and wrote out these journals for three months, but only some of them have been included, the rest being irrelevant, but available on the publisher’s website. Actually, the whole of it is totally irrelevant and hampers the story, such as it is.
At some point, Wilson goes into his Hemingway routine with a needlessly bloody description of a bullfight; the bull wins this round. The book is apparently endless and certainly seems to lose its way; we plough on and then Wilson rushes into an absurd and thoroughly unsatisfactory conclusion that is so contrived it’s actually laughable and evidently written with one eye firmly aimed at Hollywood.
But perhaps the most irritating thing about the book is that a good quarter of it isn’t in English at all. Wilson peppers every line, or every other line, with some wildly esoteric Spanish phrase, and not just names of places: there are medical terms, legal terms, forensic terms, type of coffee, the works. You need a phrasebook and sooner or later you tire of guessing what the heck he’s talking about and just skip ahead, feeling cheated and increasingly angry. All this foreign-phrase-dropping adds zip to atmosphere, if that’s what was intended, but a considerable amount to the reader’s discomfort and annoyance. Apart from anything else, it seems to show a complete lack of concern and respect for the reader. We understand that it’s set in Seville, but it’s supposed to be written in English isn’t it? Or did Wilson miss that?
]]>The writing here is taut, spare, even sparse. We do not know if we are actually in the house or in the mind of the widow and perhaps that is just as well (“the cheap motel of my mind”). The story has the dark foreboding of Henry James, set in an utterly contemporary context. We do not, at the end, know for sure how much of truth there is in the widow’s reconstruction and deconstruction of her own life and its ruin. Was she responsible for her husband’s death, the ultimate act of revenge? You begin to want to believe this but cannot and that is where Millhauser leaves us: “You let me know. You just let me know.”
From this point on, the book shifts into a higher gear. The second novella, “An Adventure of Don Juan” is rich and luscious, like succulent fruit that, when you bite into it, is tart in the mouth with its sadness and melancholy, yet drips sweetly down your chin with its honeyed tongue. After conquering Venice in a delightfully musketeerish and cavalier manner, Don Juan finds himself bored and accompanies a quintessential Englishman to his country estate. The host, Augustus Hood, is that archetypal Renaissance man of England — builder, gardener, scientist, philosopher and, as it turns out, philanderer and adulterer. In a piquant variant, the legendary lover finds himself at the receiving end as he begins to fall in love with a woman he thinks he cannot stand; and only to find that the woman who loves him is herself betrayed. Deception springs from every page, slight, nuanced, like the subtlest sidelong glance that pierces and is gone.
The culmination has got to be the title novella, a retelling of the tragedy of Tristan and Ysolt. Here the writing assumes the richness of medieval tapestry and Millhauser catches all the atmosphere and spirit of the age with castles and hunts and horrendous punishments and wandering minstrels and incessant court intrigue. Through all this runs a powerful undertow of relentless, unstoppable desire, lust and betrayal and, again, Millhauser uses subtlety, metaphor and innuendo like a rapier. The story is narrated by Thomas of Cornwall, advisor to the King and, ultimately, a protector of love and of the king despite all his self-doubt: “I, Thomas of Cornwall, prince of parchment, lord of black ink, king of all space, summoner of souls, guardian of ghosts, friend of the pear tree and the silence of waves, companion to all those who watch in the night.” Is this a cameo of Millhauser himself? Certainly he is the guardian of ghosts, the lord of black ink, the prince of parchment and a summoner of souls.
This book is excruciatingly beautiful. It sets a standard by which, surely, all writing must be measured and most of today’s publishing can only be found wanting. Here is everything: craft that is not just impeccable but pitch perfect, thoughts and expressions of thoughts that are incisive and wounding, characters that, set eons apart in time, are real and palpable, perceptions and insights into the human psyche that leave you open-mouthed in awe.
]]>This is an exquisite, utterly griping discourse on the nature of friendship, fidelity, betrayal, love and honour. Given that it’s entirely either conversation/dialogue or narrative, the book captures the fin-de-si?e era with astonishing clarity, economy and lyrical precision, never once flagging or losing its grip on the reader. Everything is fully and sharply realized, almost with cinematic brilliance. You can see the characters, the rooms, the table setting, the fine wines and the exquisite meals, even feel the warmth and crackle of the fire.
This masterpiece, written in 1942, was forgotten till its resurrection. Apparently, Márai survived the second World War only to be persecuted by the Communist régime that followed. His books were banned and burned. He fled Hungary in 1948 and died in virtual obscurity in San Diego in 1989. Just a year later, Embers was reprinted in Hungary. It was then discovered by another writer and brought into print.
Sándor Márai’s “Embers” is impossible to let go, in any sense. It is one of those rare books that stays with you.
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