the fifth-last book I read

Under The Banner Of Heaven by Jon Krakauer.

Imagine, if you will, the set of circumstances that would have led you, yourself a husband and father, to enter the house of a family personally known to you and to brutally murder a young woman (your sister-in-law) and her one-year-old daughter by cutting their throats with a razor-sharp kitchen knife. And not in an uncontrollable crime-of-passion kind of way, either - slowly, even apologetically, just doing what must be done. 

I would hope, unless you are literally some sort of professional assassin or psychopath, that you would find it difficult to imagine what set of circumstances would motivate you to such a course of action, and you might throw your hands up and say, well, I would literally have to have LOST MY FREAKIN' MIND in some way. 

Ron and Dan Lafferty had a slightly different explanation for carrying out the crime described above, and the background underlying that motivation, and a more detailed description of the crime and its aftermath, are the primary subjects of this book.

At this point we need, as the book does at about the same point in its narrative, to do a deep dive into the origins of the Mormon religion or, more properly, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. No disrespect but you can see why people use the shorter form, which derives from the name of a key prophet and supposed author of some of the religion's early sacred texts which were later dictated to Joseph Smith in the 1820s. 

As I've said elsewhere, Mormonism provides a fascinating insight into how religions develop, occupying as it does a sort of sweet spot between the two-thousand-years-ago respectability of mainstream Christianity and the fairly-obviously-loony (to most, anyway) ultra-modern stuff like Scientology. One of the obvious things that Mormonism and Scientology have in common is a foundational figure (Joseph Smith and L Ron Hubbard respectively) claiming a series of personal revelations via a sort of hotline to God, and in possession of enough personal magnetism and charisma to persuade an early group of adherents of the truth of his revelations.

I'm very conscious of not wanting to re-mount an old hobby-horse here in regard to religion (though my views on it have changed very little from when I used to post about it more frequently), but I think the quote generally attributed to physicist Steven Weinberg is relevant here: 

With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.

One of the things it also takes, or, to put it another way, one of the things a religion requires to really take hold, is a foundational figure with enough charisma and persuasiveness to tip people past their normal self-imposed moral limits and do stuff like the Mountain Meadows Massacre and, subsequently, use it as a means of cementing a tribal them-against-us mentality among the converted. 

The other thing Joseph Smith brought to the table in the early days of Mormonism was an intense desire for young women and a general inability to keep it in his britches. In an entirely coincidental and unrelated development, around this time Smith received some further divine revelations including an unequivocal thumbs-up for the practice of polygamy; Smith himself selflessly volunteered to set an example in this regard and is generally reckoned to have had between 30 and 40 wives by the time of his death in 1844. 

The polygamy business, which the mainstream Mormon church keeps trying to disavow and distance itself from, and various fundamentalist Mormon sects (including the one the Lafferty brothers were adherents of) keep reviving, is probably the main thing that keeps Mormonism a fringe concern except in certain hot-spots in the USA, the other being the inherent ludicrousness of the foundational texts and their method of being brought into being. Now as a non-judgmental utilitarian liberal type you'd have to say well, look there's nothing actually wrong with polyamory or polygamy per se if that's what everyone involved wants, everyone involved has a clear picture of what's going on and no-one's getting hurt, unless of course that's specifically what they want. The trouble with the Mormon version is that it's tied up with a bunch of other much less palatable stuff, firstly a fairly grim set of attitudes to women in general and secondly a disturbing penchant for older men marrying extremely young girls. 

A case in point - Warren Jeffs features as a fairly peripheral character in Under The Banner Of Heaven, having only recently (on the book's publication in 2003) become the head of the FLDS, the largest of the fundamentalist polygamy-endorsing splinter groups. Only a year or so later, in 2004, a series of lurid allegations started to emerge and (and I'm skipping quite a lot of detail here) Jeffs is currently in prison in Texas serving a life sentence for a series of sex abuse charges against underage girls.

Back to the Lafferty case, though - once the law caught up with the Lafferty brothers a key consideration in the ensuing trial was this: could they plead insanity? Devoid of any other context you would think there'd be a strong argument: hearing voices in your head telling you to go and off and murder your sister-in-law (Brenda Lafferty was married to Ron & Dan's younger brother Allen) for no actual real-life crime other than being a bit more feisty and outspoken than your religious upbringing would have liked her to be, and her daughter for no real-life reason whatsoever (what possible reason could there be, after all). 

Once you yoke that imaginary friend telling you to KILL stuff to an actual religion, it all gets a bit more tricky, though; after all, while most people don't slit anyone's throat as a result many religions claim some or all of their adherents have a personal hotline to God down which messages may occasionally be transmitted, and we don't say all religious adherents are by definition insane, do we? Hahahahaha my goodness no. 

The slightly paradoxical effect of this special pleading for religion is that as a result Ron & Dan Lafferty received harsher sentences than they would have if their lawyers had been able to make an insanity plea stick, something neither brother seemed especially bothered about, both taking the view that they'd done their appointed task and that some misguided real-world punishment by Godless heathens was an inconsequential price to pay in comparison with an eternity at God's right hand with Joseph Smith beaming down approvingly while they marry as many twelve-year-olds as they liked.

Jon Krakauer is probably best known for his book Into Thin Air (mentioned here), which recounts his involvement in the 1996 Mount Everest disaster. Under The Banner Of Heaven can't hope to be anywhere near as viscerally thrilling as that, and some of the deep dive into the early days of Mormonism, as essential as it is, meanders a bit when what the reader really wants is to know what made the Laffertys tick and why they did the unthinkable things they did. Of course none of that is really forthcoming, their motivations being bafflingly opaque right to the end; none of that is the author's fault of course. 

Speaking of bafflingly opaque motivations, Krakauer's earlier book Into The Wild was filmed in 2007 and tells the true story of the last days of Chris McCandless. Despite being much less obvious material Under The Banner Of Heaven was also adapted into a loosely-fictionalised TV mini-series in 2022.

incidental music spot of the day

We're still doing, when we're at home and not away doing other things, the Saturday pizza-and-movie nights we instigated as a desperate effort to stay sane during the dark days of the early COVID-19 lockdowns in spring and summer 2020. You can do your own maths here: six-and-a bit years times 52 weeks minus a few weeks when (more frequently outside of lockdown periods obviously) we were away doing exciting holidaying or something equals quite a lot of movies to get through. We have certainly repeated ourselves a few times as well, but I imagine there'd still be somewhere between a hundred and two hundred movies. 

A lot of other things have happened during those six years, of course, the most obvious one being that the kids are now fourteen, eleven and nine respectively, compared with eight, five and three when we started. So Nia and Alys are now old enough to want to watch things like The Hunger Games, something that they wouldn't have wanted to do (and nor would they have been allowed to) during 2020. 

Anyway, the loosely-related point of that lengthy preamble is: a couple of weeks ago we (or rather the kids; I don't get a say in this, my goodness no) decided to watch The Adam Project, a time-travel science-fiction thing that looked at least mostly kid-friendly. I will confess to being slightly resistant to the acting charms of Ryan Reynolds with his ultra-21st-century ironic knowingness and fourth-wall-breaking, but it was fine, all the usual annoyances about time-travel movies notwithstanding - the impossible looping causality paradoxes, the awkwardness of meeting your future self and discovering you'd turned into some cartoonish supervillain, accidentally becoming your own grandfather, as well as some, erm, other, more gnarly stuff.

Anyway, I noticed a couple of interesting uses of classic rock tunes during the course of the movie: firstly Led Zeppelin's Good Times Bad Times, the canonical track one, side one, album one as mentioned here (also featuring a movie link), and secondly Boston's Long Time, usually played with its lengthy intro Foreplay attached. As an aside, I've never been entirely sure whether the title of that section is a pun given that it features a long and extended bout of organ-twiddling. Anyway, you'll have noticed that both songs feature the word "time" in their titles; I would imagine that this is not a coincidence. Just to ruin (or at least partly undermine) that theory, the film also featured Pete Townshend's 1980 solo hit Let My Love Open The Door over the closing credits.

the last book I read

Turtle Diary by Russell Hoban.

William G. (not this guy, just to be clear) is a quiet unassuming type of guy; lives alone in a flat in a shared house, works in a bookshop, keeps himself to himself. We learn that he was previously married, or at least in a relationship that lasted long enough to produce two daughters, who we gather he doesn't get to see any more for reasons that are never elaborated on.

Neaera H. (I would go with something like knee-airer pronunciation-wise) is an author of children's books, most notably the ones featuring cute anthropomorphic character Gillian Vole, and is nervously contemplating a move to writing books for an adult audience. 

Both of these two solitary people randomly end up at London Zoo at separate times, and moreover both end up gazing at a tank of sea turtles, contemplating the clarity and precision of their lifecycle in the wild (swim thousands of miles round the world's oceans, return to a specific beach to lay and bury eggs, philosophically accept that most of the hatchlings will get eaten before they ever reach the sea), comparing that with the aimlessness and stagnation of their own lives and considering the crazy idea of stealing the turtles, taking them to the sea and freeing them.

William and Neaera eventually meet and realise that they've been having the same thoughts about the turtles, and gradually hatch a plan, with the help of George Fairbairn, the surprisingly amenable guy at the zoo who takes care of the turtles. And so they build some makeshift turtle crates, hire a van, spirit away the turtles - no small feat as the adults weigh more than an adult human and you can't just walk them out of the zoo on a lead - drive to Polperro and release them into the sea there. 

And so, the turtles liberated and the two protagonists' quest fulfilled, the book ends, right? Well, no, actually - it turns out that while the turtular quest was both exciting and satisfying, and gruelling and frustrating, it hasn't been an instant fix for all the deep-seated problems in the two main characters' lives. That said, maybe some of the turtles' relentless and instinctive sense of purpose has rubbed off after all - Neaera finds herself having a relationship with George the turtle guy, and William has a brief fling (which doesn't last) with his fellow bookshop employee Harriet and then finds himself resolving some domestic disputes with house-mate Sandor with some uncharacteristic physical violence. Bizarrely, this seems to thaw William and Sandor's previously wary relationship and they start to become friends, and just as well, as they soon have to help deal with another in-house domestic situation - their quiet house-mate Miss Neap has hanged herself. 

This is the seventh Russell Hoban book to appear on this list, the others occupying a period of roughly six years between Kleinzeit in August 2010 and Pilgermann in December 2016. Those six books cover a pretty wide range of subject matter but all have in common a sort of ineffable strangeness, and Turtle Diary (one of Hoban's earlier works of adult fiction, published in 1975) is no different, despite the relative prosaicness of the subject matter and lack of supernatural elements. Is it actually about two people rescuing turtles? Well, sort of, but not exclusively: it's also about middle age, coming to terms with who you are and being comfortable with that, even if that means consciously limiting how much interaction with other people you do (with Miss Neap's suicide presumably intended to illustrate the consequences of never quite coming to terms with all that stuff). The turtles, as well as being actual turtles, act as a sort of metaphor for freedom and adventure and purpose. Neaera's career arc going from author of anthropomorphic animal tales for kids to adult fiction is of course a mirror of Hoban's own. 

My favourite Hobans are probably the early-1980s pair of Riddley Walker and Pilgermann, both set outside the contemporary London setting of most of his other novels (Turtle Diary included) in both space and time. But they're all good, very readable, fairly short and recognisably the product of a singular style and vision. The seven Hoban novels that feature here equals the number of books by William Boyd on the list, joint second only to Iain (M) Banks with eleven. 

Turtle Diary was made into a film in 1985 starring Glenda Jackson and Ben Kingsley (the whole thing seems to be available here). That makes it (as far as I know) the second book on this list whose film adaptation stars Ben Kingsley, the other being House Of Sand And Fog. It's also (again, as far as I know) the second book on this list whose film adaptation was written by Harold Pinter, the other being The French Lieutenant's Woman. The cover art of my Penguin Modern Classics edition is by Eduardo Paolozzi, who also got a mention here. 

chapter and curse

Bored with the lack of challenge involved in picking off eighty- and ninety-something authors as it has been recently, The Curse Of Electric Halibut has decided to pick off someone from the slightly lower age bracket, just to keep everyone on their toes, those who haven't just turned up their toes, anyway. And it is Daniel Woodrell, most famous for his 2006 novel Winter's Bone and its 2010 film adaptation. That's the only thing of his I've ever read, back in early 2016, but that was enough for the beady eye of death to swing slowly in his direction. Woodrell's age (72) and the curse length of a whisker under ten years are respectively about ten years below and a couple of years above the current averages.

 

Author	Date of first book	Date of death	Age	Curse length
Michael Dibdin	31st January 2007	30th March 2007	60	0y 59d
José Saramago	9th May 2009	18th June 2010	87	1y 40d
Beryl Bainbridge	14th May 2008	2nd July 2010	77	2y 50d
Russell Hoban	23rd August 2010	13th December 2011	86	1y 113d
Richard Matheson	7th September 2011	23rd June 2013	87	1y 291d
Iain Banks	6th November 2006	9th June 2013	59	6y 218d
Elmore Leonard	April 16th 2009	20th August 2013	87	4y 128d
Doris Lessing	8th May 2007	17th November 2013	94	6y 196d
Gabriel García Márquez	10th July 2007	17th April 2014	87	6y 284d
Ruth Rendell	23rd December 2009	2nd May 2015	85	5y 132d
James Salter	4th February 2014	19th June 2015	90	1y 136d
David Cook	24th February 2009	16th September 2015	74	6y 205d
Henning Mankell	6th May 2013	5th October 2015	67	2y 152d
William McIlvanney	7th September 2010	5th December 2015	79	5y 90d
Umberto Eco	30th June 2012	19th February 2016	84	3y 234d
Anita Brookner	15th July 2011	10th March 2016	87	4y 240d
William Trevor	29th May 2010	20th November 2016	88	6y 177d
John Berger	10th November 2009	2nd January 2017	90	7y 55d
Nicholas Mosley	24th September 2011	28th February 2017	93	5y 159d
Helen Dunmore	10th March 2008	5th June 2017	64	9y 89d
JP Donleavy	21st May 2015	11th September 2017	91	2y 114d
Ursula Le Guin	6th December 2015	22nd January 2018	88	2y 49d
Anita Shreve	2nd September 2006	29th March 2018	71	11y 211d
Philip Roth	23rd December 2017	22nd May 2018	85	0y 150d
Justin Cartwright	7th September 2008	3rd December 2018	75	10y 89d
Toni Morrison	18th July 2010	5th August 2019	88	9y 20d
Charles Portis	3rd April 2018	17th February 2020	86	1y 320d
Alison Lurie	24th March 2007	3rd December 2020	94	13y 254d
John le Carré	21st February 2008	12th December 2020	89	12y 295d
Joan Didion	14th December 2010	23rd December 2021	87	11y 12d
Hilary Mantel	22nd October 2010	22nd September 2022	70	11y 338d
Greg Bear	4th October 2021	19th November 2022	71	1y 48d
Russell Banks	4th December 2018	7th January 2023	82	4y 35d
Isabel Colegate	24th October 2009	12th March 2023	91	13y 140d
Cormac McCarthy	22nd September 2009	13th June 2023	89	13y 265d
Milan Kundera	27th March 2008	11th July 2023	94	15y 105d
Christopher Priest	6th January 2015	4th February 2024	80	9y 26d
Paul Auster	22nd April 2012	30th April 2024	77	12y 8d
Kinky Friedman	19th December 2007	27th June 2024	79	16y 191d
David Lodge	4th March 2008	1st January 2025	89	16y 301d
Jennifer Johnston	23rd July 2012	25th February 2025	95	12y 215d
Mario Vargas Llosa	12th April 2007	13th April 2025	89	18y 1d
Frederick Forsyth	8th November 2021	9th June 2025	86	3y 214d
Daniel Woodrell	12th January 2016	28th November 2025	72	9y 320d

criclebrity lookeylikey of the day

Here's a timely one with the Ashes series in Australia about to kick off (tonight, in fact) and all England supporters filled with a mixture of trepidation (the last three Australian Ashes series have finished 5-0, 4-0, 4-0 in Australia's favour) and that most crippling and corrosive of all emotions, hope. I suppose a good start would be the series not being effectively over after the very first ball as it was last time. 

Anyway, here's England's unexpected nemesis from last time Scott Boland and actor Wes Bentley, one of the breakout stars of the multi-Oscar-winning American Beauty, a film which seems to have had a sharp (and probably partly Spacey-related) drop-off in critical regard in the last couple of decades but which I recall seeing a couple of times and quite enjoying, while noting that it seemed to think itself slightly cleverer and deeper than it probably actually was. One odd thing about it, though, is that all three of the young actors who were shot to stardom after playing major roles - Bentley, Thora Birch and Mena Suvari - have, while continuing to work in films, receded into relative obscurity since and not become the major stars that everyone predicted they would be. Bentley seems to have navigated the standard actorly route of sudden colossal stardom -> drug addiction, extreme mental derangement -> sobriety, return to regular film work prototyped by Robert Downey jr. among others. The only thing I'm aware of having seen him in since American Beauty is the remake of Pete's Dragon which also starred Robert Redford.

I'm not going to do a separate post for it, but we haven't done an "incidental music spot of the day" for a while so I will just draw your attention to the trailer linked above making use of Baba O'Riley by The Who, a song which has featured here before, back in 2007. 

the last book I read

The Anubis Gates by Tim Powers.

Brendan Doyle is just quietly minding his own business being a professor of English literature when a man comes to him with a modest proposal; join me on an assignment - a well-paid assignment, moreover - wherein your interest and expertise in the works of 19th-century poets will be of immense practical value. 

Well, that all sounds great, but what could the nature of this assignment possibly be that would require the services of an expert in early-19th-century English poetry? Ah, well, I'm glad you asked: I, elderly and eccentric millionaire J. Cochran Darrow, have somehow discovered a series of portals that permit travel between different locations in time and space. The nature of this wavily-defined thing is such that you don't have total control over the when and where, and it just happens that I've found a portal that will shortly (literally in a few hours from now) be accessible from our current location in 1983 Los Angeles and which links for a period of time with 1810 London and will permit a small group of customers, paying lavishly for the privilege, to travel there/then, hear an in-person lecture by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, with extra context and biographical detail supplied by you, and then return home again. Pretty cool, huh?

A bit of exposition is offered by Darrow in the course of explaining the assignment to Doyle, and the reader also gets the benefit of a brief prologue set in 1802 wherein a couple of mysterious wielders of sorcery attempt to summon up the ancient Egyptian God Anubis, as you do, and succeed only in inflicting harm upon themselves and opening up a series of rents, "gates" if you will, in space-time radiating out in both directions from 1802 and allowing those possessed of the relevant arcane knowledge to travel between them.

So anyway, Darrow, Doyle, and various millionaire enthusiasts get dolled up in suitable period garb and travel back to 1810 to hear Coleridge speak; all goes pretty smoothly for everyone except Doyle, who is coshed senseless and abducted by mysterious persons who turn out to be, among others, Doctor Romany, one of the magicians associated with the 1802 shenanigans who is keen to understand and contain what's been unleashed. Doyle, having missed the window of opportunity to return to 1983, escapes and flees back into London.

But how to survive in early-19th-century London? Doyle finds his way into a loose guild of beggars and street thieves and is taken under the wing of the slightly Artful Dodger-esque Jacky. Meanwhile he is hatching a plan to make contact with another poet of the time, William Ashbless, whose more obscure oeuvre he has made a special study of, and whose documented movements he is familiar with to the extent of knowing that he'll be in a particular tavern in a day or two's time. 

Lots of plot strands here that we'll just summarise to save time: the mysterious Dog-Face Joe, seemingly able to swap bodies with unsuspecting individuals (who inherit the ruined shell of whatever body he was previously in, usually for a short period ended by its death) and the odd outbreak of seemingly insane short-lived hairy individuals attacking people around London all turn out to be aspects of the same thing, the continued existence of the other 1802 magician, Amenophis Fikee, after the events of that night evicted him from his original body. The first magician, Doctor Romany (the one who briefly abducted Doyle in 1810), is running a pickpocketing and murdering guild of his own, headquartered in some subterranean caverns connected to the sewer system and the Thames, and continuing his attempt to conjure up various Egyptian gods. Finally Darrow, Doyle's mysterious benefactor from 1983, has returned to 1810 and is using his knowledge of stock market performance in the intervening 173 years to make a fortune and negotiating with Dog-Face Joe aka Fikee to make use of his body-swapping knowledge to achieve eternal youth.

Keeping up? Excellent. So Doyle gets to experience first-hand knowledge of some of this when he is forcibly body-swapped in the tavern he'd gone to to meet Ashbless (who didn't show) and wakes up in a different body which has just taken a large dose of strychnine. Luckily Doyle has enough knowledge to be able to vomit up the poison and after a day or two is as right as rain and, moreover, inhabiting a body that's considerably younger and physically more imposing than his old one. Doyle soon realises that in some weird paradoxical time-travel accidentally-becoming-your-own-grandfather way he is actually William Ashbless. He's not sure what the magicians are up to but resolves to thwart them, with some help from some locals who are in the know. This involves a bewildering series of trips including a time-hop to 1684 and a brief trip by sea to Cairo to meet (and subsequently kill) the chief magician. Upon returning to London, Doyle/Ashbless, Jacky and, slightly bizarrely, a laudanum-crazed Samuel Taylor Coleridge are abducted into the subterranean caverns and, after some odd encounters with some of the mysterious creatures who also live down there (remnants of some botched magical experiments) and a couple of telling interventions from the Egyptian gods who the magicians have been bothering (notably the snake-god Apep), Jacky and Doyle/Ashbless are vomited out into the Thames while the magicians and their various minions are consumed by Apep and Ra and various other entities not best pleased at being bothered from their centuries-long slumber.

Doyle is now in the odd philosophical position of being free to live out the rest of his life as Ashbless while knowing, from his 20th-century studies, most of the biographical details up to and including the date and manner of his death (thankfully a few decades off yet). He also knows the name of his future wife and WAIT A MINUTE Jacky reveals to him that she's been a woman disguised as a man all along and her real name is, well, I expect you can join the dots here. Ashbless and the future Mrs. Ashbless link arms and head off to enjoy their future together, with only the small inconvenience of Ashbless already knowing pretty much all of it.

That was quite a long synopsis and you can see I had to skate over some of it - and omit some of it altogether, including the rationale for Jacky actually being an upper-class young woman disguised as a street urchin - lest this become the longest blog post ever. The TL;DR version would be: there's a lot going on here, possibly a bit too much to allow every plot contrivance to be tied up satisfactorily at the end. The nature of how the gates work is hand-waved away and while they're obviously important to the plot (important enough to give the book its title, after all) they're arguably just a contrivance to insert Doyle in 1810 where the rest of the action takes place. 

The important thing is not to worry about any of that too much and just be swept along by the action, and as long as you do that then this is generally a hoot. The committee that awards the annual Philip K Dick Award evidently thought so too, as The Anubis Gates was the winner in 1984. Powers won it again in 1986; his two wins sandwich the only other recipient I've read, William Gibson's Neuromancer. Powers is also known for his 1987 novel On Stranger Tides which was loosely adapted into the fourth Pirates Of The Caribbean film. 

Many echoes of other fictional works here, as you can imagine - here's a few:

• there is an odd parallel with the only other novel in the Gollancz Fantasy Masterworks series to appear on this list, Time And Again, in that both start with our protagonist being approached by someone he doesn't know and offered a large sum of money to make use of some ill-defined time-travel device to travel to the 19th century and carry out an assignment.
• a couple of weird parallels with the work of Douglas Adams: firstly the use of Coleridge as a plot device, with the suggestion that some of his experiences may have bled through (facilitated by his heroic opium intake) into his later poetry, is similar to what happens in The Long Dark Tea-Time Of The Soul, the second Dirk Gently novel [postscript: it was actually the first one, Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency. In my defence it's a long time since I read either of them]. Secondly both The Anubis Gates and the later novels in the Hitch-Hiker's Guide To The Galaxy series feature a plot device of the main character having foreknowledge relating to his own death. In Ashbless' case it's the date and circumstances, in Arthur Dent's case it's knowing that he can't die yet because he hasn't visited the nightclub on Stavromula Beta where he carries out one of his multiple accidental murders of the creature Agrajag.
• the idea of a ka as a sort of disembodied vital essence is familiar from the works of Dennis Wheatley, in particular his 1956 novel The Ka Of Gifford Hillary (which I have never read). In the particular context of The Anubis Gates its meaning is extended to a sort of animated copy of a person conjured from the usual blood/hair combo and therefore a bit more like a golem. It was also used (with some further twisting of its original meaning) by Stephen King in the Dark Tower series.
• the body-swapping thing, in particular - as I put it elsewhere - the "unceremonious yeeting" of the body's previous occupant, is a device used in Ancillary Justice and more briefly in Transition.

Tim Powers provides the latest in a shortish series of different authors on this list who share a surname. Here are the ones I've spotted on a brief trawl of the archives, in no particular order:

• Tim Powers and Richard Powers
• Iain (M) Banks and Russell Banks
• Jim Harrison and M John Harrison
• Graham Swift and Jonathan Swift
• Ali Smith, Alexander McCall Smith and Michael Marshall Smith - depending of course how your surname-classification rules work
• F Scott Fitzgerald and Penelope Fitzgerald - as above

slider way, give it all you got

Here's a crackpot theory for you, and, as all the best theories do, it has to do with Robert Redford, who died last week at the age of 89, and shoes.

The only films in which Redford starred which I could say with complete confidence that I've seen are Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kid, The Sting, All The President's Men, The Great Waldo Pepper, Out Of Africa and Pete's Dragon. The first three there are obviously classics, the fourth is a bit of fluff with some surprisingly dark moments thrown in (such as Susan Sarandon falling off an aeroplane, or when Redford's character has to cave a fellow aviator's head in with a hunk of timber to prevent him burning to death in his crashed plane), the fifth is a bit turgid for my taste and I can't honestly remember Redford even being in the last one, presumably because I was distracted by a giant furry green CGI dragon.

Anyway, the central point made in a number of the obituaries was that it was easily to be distracted from his acting ability by how absurdly handsome he was, something easy even for a tediously vanilla heterosexual bloke such as myself to appreciate. That is something that Redford himself complained about (but not too much; I mean, come on) in the context of it limiting his range of roles. The quote that was circulating on the internet after his death was this one from director Mike Nichols in relation to Redford being considered for the role that eventually went to Dustin Hoffman in The Graduate:

“I interviewed hundreds, maybe thousands, of men,” Nichols explained. “I said, ‘You can’t play it. You can never play a loser.’ And Redford said, ‘What do you mean? Of course I can play a loser.’ And I said, ‘O.K., have you ever struck out with a girl?’ and he said, ‘What do you mean?’ And he wasn’t joking.” 

What you might be asking at this point is: yes, but what does all this have to do with shoes? Well, I'll tell you. I was at Newport Leisure Centre the other day taking the girls to a swimming lesson, and there were several people there sporting what these days seems to be quite a common footwear combo of shortish white sports socks pulled up quite tight, and sliders. I assume the original idea was to give some sort of post-training-session Premiership footballer vibe, but it seems pretty ubiquitous now. One of the Dads who was supervising the activities of his child in the showers even had socks and sliders on and must have been getting wet socks. 

So, getting to the point, my thesis is this: there are two sorts of people in the world, with two fundamentally different sorts of outlook on it, and life. The first sort either apply absolutely no thought whatsoever to what might happen beyond two minutes from now, or have a sort of blithe assurance that all will be well, nothing can or will go wrong, and they won't ever get into a position where they get stranded (e.g. if the car breaks down) on the way home from the swimming run and have to hike across a field in the dark in sliders, flip-flops, whatever. The other group of people assume that these things may well happen and that some more robust ready-for-anything footwear may be required. I myself for instance do own a pair of flip-flops, but they are strictly for home or holiday use and never worn in any situation where I might be required to do anything involving walking any significant distance or driving a car. I might wear my Converses or Vans if I'm in a cazh mood and the weather is warm and dry, with the caveat that I probably wouldn't wear the Converses for the swimming run as the thin canvas material and those two little instep holes mean they suck up water pretty effectively.

Looking at it another way I think this probably also divides down the nerd/jock boundary, where the nerd contingent might be slightly more inclined to get into the habit of wearing shoes that facilitate a quick getaway in the event of trouble. To put it another way, people who might feel a need to escape from other people (anyone who was ever bullied at school, for instance) might be more inclined to wear escape-facilitating footwear than those who might more generally expect other people to run away from them.

The pursuer/pursuee (yeah, I know, not really a word) model works for linking this back to Robert Redford as well - imagine (if you can) being someone who looked like him. I don't want to use the phrase "beating them off with a shitty stick" but it seems pretty appropriate here; it's hard to imagine him ever having to expend very much effort to be in the company of someone who wanted to get into his pants. The only advantage for the rest of us who might have to work slightly harder is that (this is what I choose to believe, anyway) since we had to work a bit harder at attracting a partner in the first place, and additionally might have more of an incentive to keep them around, we might be more inclined to generosity and attention to detail in the bedroom department, if you know what I mean, ladies. 

the last book I read

Desperate Characters by Paula Fox.

Otto and Sophie Bentwood are a couple of forty-ish middle-class New Yorkers, living in a nice apartment in Brooklyn full of nice stuff, eating nice food and generally having a nice life, albeit a bit removed from what coarse earthy proletarian types like you and me might call the "real" world.

Reality intervenes, though, as it always does - Charlie, Otto's partner in his legal practice, wants to dissolve their partnership and this (hardly surprisingly) has made their personal relationship a bit frosty, especially with all the inevitable jockeying for who gets to keep which lucrative clients.

Around the same time, Sophie is feeding one of the various stray cats that roam the local area and is unexpectedly bitten quite severely on the hand. Rather than do what normal non-neurotic people do and go to a doctor for treatment and perhaps a rabies jab, Sophie instead binds the wound up and does her best to ignore the swelling and constant ache. 

So we can see a theme developing here: the Bentwoods' nice cosy middle-class life being invaded and disrupted by external "real-world" factors. Sure enough more weird shit starts to happen: a wordless late-night phone call, which turns out to be from Charlie (and which prompts a slightly bizarre late-night meet-up between him and Sophie while Otto is asleep), a rock being thrown through a window while the Bentwoods are at a party at a friend's house, a tense episode where a black man calls at the apartment and requests the use of the Bentwood's phone and eventually some money, and finally their discovery on visiting their holiday house on Long Island that it's been burgled and vandalised and the perpetrators have taken a nice big shit on the lounge carpet.

Eventually all of this starts to take its toll on the Bentwoods' equilibrium: Sophie has a shouty exchange with her friend Tanya who's phoned up for a gossip about her (Tanya's) latest love affair, and Otto angrily throws a bottle of ink at the wall after Charlie phones him up wanting to sort out some details of the dissolution of their business partnership.

So what are we to make of this? Has the disruption to their hermetically-sealed lives allowed the Bentwoods to get back in touch with their actual feelings? Or have they just been pushed over the edge and GONE MENTAL (and possibly, in Sophie's case, RABID)?

You won't get a definitive answer on any of that from me, as it happens, as this is one of those books I felt must have some significance that just eluded my grasp. It'd probably be too harsh to describe it as just a book about annoying privileged people being privileged and annoying, but I couldn't help but admit to a pang of sympathy with whoever it was took a colossal dump on their living room carpet. To put it another way, it's a very skilled writer who can make a novel work that contains pretty much no likeable characters whatsoever, and for all that Paula Fox clearly was (she died in 2017) a very skilled writer I'm not sure she quite manages it here. It's very clever and perceptive in its own way, though, and I can see the sense of the comparisons to John Updike; I guess I just found it a bit cold and uninvolving.

One of the things the Guardian obituary linked above doesn't mention, incidentally, is that via her daughter Linda, whom she gave up for adoption, Paula Fox is Courtney Love's grandmother. Moreover, if certain lurid but plausible showbiz rumours are true, Marlon Brando may have been Courtney Love's grandfather. 

Desperate Characters was filmed in 1971, starring Shirley Maclaine as Sophie and Kenneth Mars as Otto. This seems odd to me as the only two things I've seen Kenneth Mars in were the two Mel Brooks films The Producers and Young Frankenstein, in both of which he does a scenery-chewing turn as a comical nutter. I'm sure he was an actor of range and subtlety if the part demanded it, though. My Flamingo paperback copy contains an introduction by Jonathan Franzen, whose advocacy of Fox and of Desperate Characters in particular was instrumental in its being reissued after many years out of print. This provides another instance of a book on this list carrying a foreword by another author who appears on the same list; a non-exhaustive list of the handful of previous instances appears at the end of the 2018 review of True Grit.

incidental music spot(s) of the day

It seems that Adriano Celentano's 1972 single Prisencolinensinainciusol is the advert music of choice at the moment, as I've seen (or more accurately heard) it used in two places lately, firstly this easyJet advert and secondly this advert for Poretti beer. 

I first encountered Prisencolinensinainciusol while watching this episode of QI, which was first broadcast in December 2014 - I couldn't say whether I watched it "live" or not; probably not. Anyway, Adriano Celentano seems to occupy a similar niche in Italian popular culture as Serge Gainsbourg occupied in France - massively popular and influential in his own country, little-known outside it. Celentano is still alive (at 87), however, Gainsbourg very much is not.

Just to recycle a couple of observations from this tweet (plus a couple of new ones):

• it's an absolute banger and somewhat ahead of its time for 1972
• its influence on Yello's The Race in particular seems clear to me: insistent beat, semi-spoken lyrics, parpy horn stabs and all
• Mike Reid's cover version Freezin' Cold in 89 Twoso was released not, as you might have assumed, in 1989, but in 1974 and is not significantly more comprehensible than the original despite presumably containing some actual English words. He definitely says THAT'S TRIFFIC at one point, though
• Celentano is name-checked (at about 2:05 here) in Reasons To Be Cheerful, Part 3 by Ian Dury and the Blockheads

The other thing I noticed this week was during a viewing of Beethoven's 2nd, the vastly-inferior sequel to the barely-tolerable Beethoven, featuring a dead-eyed Charles Grodin, phoning in a performance while presumably looking forward to paying off his mortgage, and also some "endearing" kids and a large St. Bernard dog, which we Brits, as custodians of English as she should be spoke, would pronounce St. BER-nard in the proper God-fearing way. The Americans, however, pronounce it as St. Ber-NARD with the emphasis on the second syllable in a slightly weird and jarring way. This is by no means my biggest gripe with the movie, just to be clear.

One of my many other gripes is the seemingly arbitrary use of Jimmy Olsen's Blues by the Spin Doctors as musical overlay to some sort of comedy montage. I have fond memories of the Spin Doctors being A Thing for about five minutes back in the early 1990s and I did at one point have a copy of their album Pocket Full Of Kryptonite, which has a few rockin' tunes on it, along with some more questionable stuff. The good stuff includes the hit singles Two Princes and Little Miss Can't Be Wrong, as well as the opening track Jimmy Olsen's Blues. Now I had no idea who Jimmy Olsen was, but it's pretty clear from the subject matter of the song that he's part of the Superman universe, that being what the song is about, and one of the lines in the song provides the album's title. A song with that clear and specific a set of subject matter is a bit of an odd choice for a film sequence completely unrelated to it; to put it another way, it's a bouncy tune and I guess it works fine as long as you don't listen to the lyrics, something I concede the film's target audience of under-10s probably don't do. 

I should add I also remember seeing the Spin Doctors at Glastonbury in what this clip tells me was 1994 - my principal memory is of some crunchy renditions of the hits and a bit too much free-form guitar noodling from the undoubtedly very talented Eric Schenkman, which I evidently had not taken enough drugs to fully appreciate. 

celebrity lookeylikey of the day

Today's pair are author Harlan Coben and actor, author, amateur chef and mixologist Stanley Tucci.

The only Harlan Coben book I have ever read is Tell No One, which I read a copy of owned by my then-girlfriend shortly after its 2001 publication in a desperate holiday running-out-of-books frenzy, something I would obviously never allow to happen nowadays. I would describe it as enjoyable, gripping and utterly ludicrous, which is all absolutely fine for a fairly pulpy thriller. Like many primarily plot-driven things it and its many successors in Coben's oeuvre are prime material for film and TV adaptations, and sure enough there have been a whole raft of them, most recently the Netflix series adapted from Run Away, which seems to feature a cast of mainly British actors.

Stanley Tucci, meanwhile, is probably right now deep in some method-acting preparation for the plum role of me in the movie of my life. For him to be a perfect fit appearance-wise I probably need to get slightly balder, something which I'm pretty sure will happen all too imminently. 

did an icebreaker at a work meeting the other day where the question was "who would play you in a movie of your life". panicked slightly trying to think of bespectacled bald fiftysomethings and said Stanley Tucci. increasingly convinced of the genius of the idea

— Dave Thomas (@electrichalibut) July 17, 2023

the last book I read

The Leopard by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa. 

Yes, it's a man's life in 1860s Sicily. Well, if you happen to be a Prince commanding a substantial kingdom. all the quails you can eat, etc., anyway. The man in this happy position is Fabrizio, patriarch of the aristocratic Salina family, and a generally impressive and physically imposing individual (as befits the leopard which is the family crest), knocking on towards middle age but still capable of taking a carriage down to the local village for a bit of recreational whoring, coming back to the family castle and after nothing more than a quick reviving limoncello administering a teeth-rattling seeing-to to the wife as well before a hearty breakfast.

Italy at this stage in its history doesn't really exist as a nation-state in the modern sense, being instead a series of contiguous kingdoms controlled by various aristocratic families. But changes are afoot - various coarse and malodorous proletarian types are agitating for the formation of a united Italy, including a group under the leadership of Giuseppe Garibaldi, taking some time off from inventing biscuits to do a bit of the old revolution. 

The Prince is an intelligent and thoughtful man, and realises that the changes that are probably inevitable will have a major impact on him and his family, but also recognises that there is little he can directly do to influence the tide of history. In any case, there are local and family matters to attend to, including the betrothal of his nephew Tancredi to Angelica, the daughter of the local mayor. Tancredi is marrying a bit below himself socially here, but the complex calculations involved in making a good and mutually beneficial marriage have to take into account the fact that Angelica's father is absurdly rich, while the Salinas, despite possessing aristocratic pedigree up the wazoo, are a bit strapped for cash.

With the possible end to his family's rule over their portion of Sicily in sight, Fabrizio has cause to reflect on questions like: what is the point of any of it, really? The strategic marriages, the endless social whirl, the dinner parties that no-one particularly enjoys and which serve merely as an opportunity for the hosts to show off their wealth and their cooks to show off their abilities to slaughter various items of local wildlife and stuff them inside each other. 

Fast-forward 25 years or so to 1883 and we find Fabrizio contemplating the end of his life as he sits in a bath-chair on a hotel balcony. Suffering what we are probably meant to infer is a series of strokes, he drifts further into his own internal thoughts as people rush around him moving him onto the bed and administering the last rites. Has Tancredi's marriage to Angelica been of any benefit politically, since it seems not to have been as happy as they'd hoped personally? Will he, Fabrizio, be the last of his line as Prince? What will become of Sicily and the new Italy? 

Finally we jump another quarter of a century to 1910 and see what is left of the Salinas dynasty: basically not much except Fabrizio's elderly daughters overseeing what remains of their property. The ruthless utilitarian march of progress is represented here by the state overseer of religious relics who visits and conducts an audit of the family chapel, declares most of the supposed relics housed there to be worthless (and in some cases blasphemous) and orders their removal. 

As always, write about what you know is a good maxim for a first novel; in this case an only novel as The Leopard was published a year or so after Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa's death in 1957. He was himself the last of a line of Sicilian princes, a line which ended in 1946 when Italy abolished its monarchy and became a republic. Its posthumous publication adds it to a short and ill-defined (and quite possibly incomplete) list on this blog which certainly includes Notice, The Book Of Ebenezer Le Page and all three of the Stieg Larssons. Previous books on this list which were originally published in Italian include Invisible Cities, The Name Of The Rose and Foucault's Pendulum. A not-particularly-up-to-date list including other languages can be found here. Lastly, the themes being explored here of privileged types contemplating the end of an era about to be swept away by momentous events are a bit reminiscent of The Shooting Party. 

Anyway, it's very good, wryly and slyly humorous and doesn't wed itself to any particularly firm position on the regime that Fabrizio represents or the one which is about to replace it: sure, the whole idea of inherited ruling privilege is a bit absurd, and while Fabrizio himself is a benign and (relatively) progressive figure the system has nothing in place to prevent the odd insane tyrant popping up in the line of succession. But is the alternative better? And even if it is, does it justify the inevitable upheaval and bloodshed in bringing it about? The fact that it's taken me over a month to read a relatively short book (just over 200 pages) shouldn't be taken to mean that it's indigestible or forbidding, more that it's been Christmas and solitude (and therefore reading opportunities) has been hard to come by. 

The Leopard was famously made into a film in 1963 starring Burt Lancaster, something which might make you think: wow, I didn't know Burt Lancaster spoke Italian. Well, he may or may not have done, but his lines were delivered in English (and dubbed into Italian for the Italian version) while most of the cast delivered their lines in Italian (which was dubbed into English for the English version), something I would imagine might have made the filming a bit confusing. Like many people I became aware of Luchino Visconti's oeuvre through the potted summary delivered by Inspector Leopard here. 

the last book I read

The Prestige by Christopher Priest.

Pick a card; any card: wrong! But seriously, I mean, we all love a magician, right? Rabbits out of hats, card tricks, watermelon piercing, firing a series of crossbow bolts at your own head, it's all good. 

So here are two magicians, in late-19th-century England: Alfred Borden and Rupert Angier. Bit of a golden age for stage magic and cabaret stuff, you'll be saying, plenty of room for two magicians to operate without conflicting with each other, no reason for them to be trying to eat each other's lunch, still less do more nefarious acts of mutual sabotage. Well, yes, you'd think, but that wouldn't make for much of  a story, so here we are.

They first come into conflict when both are just starting their careers and Borden, something of a purist in matters of the prestidigitative arts, becomes aware that Angier is making his living doing séances in the homes of paying customers, complete with spooky banging on the table, rattling of curtains and maybe a bit of the old ectoplasm on special occasions, all of course produced by some pretty straightforward techniques available to the illusionist. Borden objects to the deception implicitly involved here and infiltrates one of Angier's engagements with the intention of unmasking and debunking his trickery. In doing so, and subsequently being thrown out on his ear, there is a scuffle during the course of which Angier's wife is knocked to the floor, which results in her losing the baby she is carrying. And so a feud is initiated which will eventually persist beyond the lifetimes of its protagonists.

We are invited to infer that Borden, of relatively humble origins, is a more naturally talented and instinctive illusionist than Angier, who is from an aristocratic family, but that Angier is nonetheless a man of great determination and persistence. Borden is the talk of London with a trick called The New Transported Man wherein he appears to disappear and reappear almost instantaneously on the other side of the stage with no means of getting from one place to the other. Angier secretes himself in the audience but can't work out how Borden achieves the illusion. Well, says Angier's assistant, that's because you're missing something that's right under your nose: Borden must use a double, someone who looks like him. Impossible, says Angier, it's literally the same guy. And so Angier devises a scheme to uncover the truth: have his assistant (and clandestine lover), Olivia, "defect" and go and work as Borden's assistant and gain access to his secrets. This plan partly backfires when Olivia falls in love with Borden, but as a last favour to Angier gets Borden to write a note explaining the trick, which is revealed to contain a single word: TESLA.

And so Angier heads off to Nikola Tesla's laboratory in Colorado Springs to persuade him to give up the secret of whatever he had done for Borden. Two things become apparent fairly quickly - firstly that Borden's note was a red herring, as he and Tesla have never met, and secondly that Tesla may be able to help, as long as Angier can cough up a substantial wedge to finance the work. And indeed it turns out that he can, after a long period of development and experimentation, although the finished product doesn't quite work as Angier had envisaged: instead of some sort of teleportation device, it seems to be some sort of duplication device capable of producing an exact copy at a pre-defined distance away from the apparatus. But, hey, a few minor considerations aside, it works for the purposes of an illusion that will surpass Borden's, so we'll take it. 

Angier arranges for the transportation of the disassembled device back to England and soon, after a lengthy period of rehearsal, starts performing his own Transported Man illusion around the country, to great acclaim and profit. This one outdoes Borden's because in addition to all the exciting electrical arcs and sparks (especially thrilling to a Victorian audience just getting to grips with the idea of mains electricity) Angier's miraculous reappearance is at a much greater distance than Borden's - all the way at the back of the theatre, or up in the stalls, whichever provides the most dramatic effect. 

Borden is aware of Angier's new celebrity, of course, and soon devises a way of sabotaging the act - show up in disguise, get invited on stage as one of the people who inspect the apparatus before it's used, and then slip off backstage and cut the power halfway through. What Borden has failed to realise, though, is that there's no illusion here: the Tesla device really does duplicate living things across distances, and cutting the process off part-way through has catastrophic effects: the original Angier is left in a weakened state, and there is a partially-materialised Angier roaming the corridors of the theatre like a ghost.

Borden's understandable assumption that the whole thing was an illusion, it should be added here, derives partly from the nature of how his own illusion was achieved: there really are two Bordens, a pair of identical twins, who, by an act of remarkable discipline and deception, manage to live as if there were only one of them and take turns being "Alfred Borden". 

Angier (or the non-ghostly part of him, anyway) heads off to his ancestral home in Yorkshire to recuperate, and it soon becomes clear that he will never perform again. The spectral Angier left behind spends a bit of time scaring people, including Borden himself, one of whom he scares enough to induce a fatal heart attack, before heading north to be reunited with his other self and attempt one last use of the Tesla apparatus to resolve their separation.

We now zoom back out to the framing device, in some version of the present day, where Andrew Westley, born Nicky Borden before being adopted, visits Kate Angier in the ancestral Angier home, ostensibly as part of some journalistic assignment but actually to satisfy his curiosity about the backstory of their respective families, and the historical feud initiated by their respective ancestors. Andrew has always had the odd feeling that he has a twin somewhere, with all the odd telepathic communication that twins are reputed to have. This isn't quite true, as it turns out, but it transpires that Andrew and Kate's respective parents met at the house when Andrew (then Nicky) was very young and during some argument Nicky was flung into the Tesla apparatus, with inevitable results. Andrew ventures down to the cellar and finds a gigantic carved-out cavern containing all of what Angier referred to euphemistically as the "prestige materials" - shelves and shelves of Angier's inanimate bodies, emptied of consciousness at the point when they were put into the Tesla machine, but still "alive" in some weird way. There is also the body, in a similar state, of a small boy, Andrew's childhood self. He decides to take this away with him (though it's extremely unclear what he's going to do with it) but then also becomes aware of something moving around at the end of the cavern. Has Angier's divided and possibly reunited self lived on in some way?

The Prestige is probably most famous for its 2006 film adaptation, directed by Christopher Nolan and featuring Hugh Jackman as Angier, Christian Bale as Borden and a stellar supporting cast. This retains most of the central plot but diverges in a few key ways:

• the thing that initiates the feud is a botched bit of knot-tying by Borden (while he is acting as Angier's assistant) which results in the drowning of Angier's wife
• the present-day framing device is dispensed with completely
• the Angier that goes into the Tesla device comes out completely normal (rather than as a consciousness-free shell) and has to be killed off each time, generally by drowning
• the ending is different: instead of Angier being partly split in half the trick proceeds normally and Angier engineers Borden being framed for his murder, for which he is subsequently hanged (or, rather, if you've been paying attention, one of him is)

The book was the recipient of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize on its publication in 1995; there is a list of previous blog featurees in the review of Harvest (though I note that that list omits Master Georgie which won in 1998). It also picked up a couple of major fantasy fiction awards, including the World Fantasy Award; like the only other recipient on this list, The City & The City, I would say it fits rather awkwardly into that genre, if at all. 

This is the third Christopher Priest novel to appear on this list after Inverted World and The Affirmation (and the first since his death in February of this year), and it's quite different from either: Inverted World was fairly hard sci-fi (though set on Earth and with minimal technology) and The Affirmation was a strange dream-like fantasy. The Prestige is much more of a "normal" non-genre narrative than either, although of course there is the whole duplication/teleportation thing which is arguably a science-fiction device. Anyway, it's extremely good and I recommend it, whether or not you've seen the film (which, to be clear, is also excellent). It's also the second book since August (and fourth overall in this list) to be adapted into a film starring Christian Bale, following American Psycho. As far as I can recall the only other book in this series which features magicians and stage illusions as a major theme is, erm, The Illusionist. 

all right, smart alec

You might recall that when I reviewed Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy here a while ago I mentioned that I'd seen the highly-regarded 2011 film (starring Gary Oldman as George Smiley) in the cinema when it came out, and furthermore that I'd never seen the 1979 TV series, which famously starred Alec Guinness as Smiley. 

Well I'm just checking in here to tell you not only that the full seven-part series is now available on BBC iPlayer, but that I have spent a few days, as I believe the kids say, binge-watching it. I mean, a proper binge-watch would have done the full thing in a single five-hour sitting breaking only to occasionally go for a wee and buy more Pringles, whereas I managed about an episode a day for a week.

Anyway, you'll be wanting a verdict, I imagine. It's worth making the point first that order is important here, and mine is: 2011 film, book, 1979 TV series. Obviously the TV series, occupying over twice the screen time of the film, has a bit more space to stretch out and luxuriate in the detail, and even include some stuff from the book that the film didn't have time for. As far as the actors go I'd say Mark Strong is a better fit for Jim Prideaux, Ian Bannen being a bit too old and not physically imposing enough, and Colin Firth's Bill Haydon has a slightly more brittle and less reptilian charm than Ian Richardson's. Yes, yes, but what about Smiley? Well, Alec Guinness is slightly more twinkly and charming than Gary Oldman, and you get more of a sense of his penetrating intelligence. Oldman's Smiley is grey and cold almost to the point of anonymity, which of course is what makes him such a dangerous adversary. That said, and with the caveat that Smiley's age in the various books he appears in is a bit elastic, Guinness was probably a bit older than the book's version of Smiley. Of course both versions can exist without either detracting from the other, or there having to be a definitive verdict about which one is better. On the other hand, this is the internet, so people will of course get all aerated about it. 

The other Alec Guinness series, 1982's Smiley's People, is also available on iPlayer. They missed out the second book in the loose trilogy, The Honourable Schoolboy, apparently for cost reasons, presumably because it features some exotic overseas locations that they couldn't afford to film in. I have some tentative aspirations to read all three books so I may defer watching that series until I've done so.