Sunday, November 24, 2024

aged blogger smells rat, headline meaning

Here's an interesting headline from Rolling Stone which I spotted the other day. Nothing so weird about that one, you'll probably be saying, it's just confirming that Steve Howe really did sue someone (it's not clear who) for some sort of copyright infringement over a song.


The key to smelling a rat and subsequently the real meaning of the headline here is actually knowing who Steve Howe is, something which probably divides sharply along lines of musical preference and, depressingly, age. Anyway, Howe is the guitarist with British progressive rock band Yes, who, rather remarkably, are still a going concern, albeit with only Howe as an "original" member. I say "original" as even Howe wasn't in the very early incarnations of the group, only coming on board for the making of their breakthrough album The Yes Album in 1970. I suppose what I mean is he's the only member from their "classic" period which ran from about 1970 to about 1974.

Anyway, despite what the surface reading of the headline might suggest, it is in fact Howe and the current incarnation of Yes who are being sued for copyright infringement by a guy called Riz Story. To be fair the sub-headline makes that reasonably clear.


Have I heard any of the songs in question? No. Do I, in fact, give a fuck? Not really. The point is the headline, and some odd American conventions regarding headline structure, in particular the use of a comma to splice words together in place of the word "and". This is jarring to the uninitiated and highly satirisable even to the presumably initiated (both the fictional headlines below are from The Onion). 



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

Tuesday, November 19, 2024

celebrity lookeylikey of the day

I experienced a jarring moment while reading about the upcoming change in presenter on the Radio 2 breakfast show. I should make it clear that while I do listen to the show, in very specific circumstances that we'll come to in a second or two, I don't really care who presents it, and I find both Zoe Ball and Scott Mills fairly uninspiring as radio presenters. The reason I listen to it at all is that it's the noise that my alarm clock/radio is programmed to make at the appointed hour in the morning, on weekdays anyway. I can't say I actually pay much attention to the show's contents, but instead generally whack the snooze button once and then when it goes off again heave myself out of bed, mostly drowning out the radio with a cacophony of groaning and creaking and farting noises. 

But why Radio 2? The rudimentary reasoning goes as follows: Radio 4 might either be not loud enough to wake me up, or the topics discussed on the Today programme might distract me into shouting at the radio or something and make me late. Radio 1, on the other hand, is probably a bit brash and noisy and inclined to Young People's Music which, honestly, is just shouting with a beat. What about craftsmanship? Ballads? Anyway, Radio 2 it is. The added advantage of Zoe Ball's show in its current form is that she does a sort of version of Thought For The Day (called, if you please, Pause For Thought) just after the first snooze interval elapses, so that gives me a good incentive to get up and turn the radio off before Kate Bottley or someone similar comes on and tells us all about how if Jesus were here today (and of course he is, in a very real but also not actually real sense) he'd be down at the local multi-storey car park doing some sick parkour in baggy shorts and a hoody, or something.

Anyway, I seem to have gone on a bit, but no harm done. The point is that the article on the BBC News website included a picture of what appeared to be a crude and slightly cruel effigy of Scott Mills hewn from shiny pinky-orange wax and then left in a room that was slightly too warm for a couple of hours, but was in fact, it turns out, the actual Scott Mills. The first thought I had was that he looked a bit like those two guys who'd had their chins extended (among various other procedures) so that they ended up looking a bit like Vic & Bob's The Ponderers, only with more terrifying hair and teeth. The trouble was, I had no idea of their names. Luckily I am pleased to be able to report that a Google search for "weird plastic surgery guys" proved instantly fruitful and revealed their identity: Grichka and Igor Bogdanoff, both of whom died within a week of each other of COVID-19 in early 2022. That's Grichka in the photo below, or so the internet tells me, but it doesn't really make much difference.

Thursday, November 14, 2024

the last book I read

Who's Sorry Now? by Howard Jacobson.

Marvin Kreitman and Charlie Merriweather are old friends, despite being very different characters, which creates some occasional friction between them but on the other hand provides some rich material for a comic novel. Charlie is a slightly posh, tall, bumbling, generally pleasant sort of chap, who makes a fairly comfortable living from writing children's books in collaboration with his wife, confusingly also called Charlie. Marvin, on the other hand, is shorter, chronically and serially unfaithful to his wife Hazel, extravagantly Jewish (as befits a fairly transparent authorial alter ego) and also the pretty successful owner of a handbag and general leather goods business.

Charlie is experiencing a bit of middle-aged restlessness after twenty years of marriage to Charlie (who people seem to call Chas to distinguish her from her husband) and the raising of two grown-up children. He's still in love with his wife, and they still have nice albeit occasional sex, but he craves something a bit more...exciting? transgressive? dangerous? Moreover he feels like his old friend Marvin is a bit of an authority on excitement, transgression, danger, and (to put it more bluntly) facilitating sex with people whom you're not married to. 

The conversation has just taken a bit of a left turn into Charlie suggesting that Marvin let him have a go on Hazel when, as they stagger out into the Soho night, Marvin is run down and hospitalised by a cycle messenger.

No permanent physical damage, fortunately, but Kreitman has doctor's orders to do a bit of rest and recuperation and so arranges some time off in a hotel on the edge of Dartmoor, where he and Hazel are soon joined by the Charlies. Strange things soon start to happen - Kreitman's cycling assailant, Nyman, an odd and enigmatic character who seems to exert a strange pull on everyone, also turns up and soon has Chas exerting a "strange pull" on him by giving him a furtive handjob in the hotel garden. Meanwhile Hazel and Charlie seem to have disappeared. Where can they be?

And so a new routine is settled into - Charlie and Hazel blissfully entwined while Kreitman, after a period of solitary moping, manages to persuade Chas into some sort of reciprocal arrangement. So after a bit of a lumpy period facilitating the swap and getting used to the new normal, everyone's happy, right? Weeeeeelll, up to a point: once Charlie's initial transgressive thrill has worn off he finds himself settling into the same routine of occasional nice sex with Hazel but without the satisfying working relationship and the twenty-odd years of shared experience that he had with Chas. So, perhaps she'd like to swap back? But where does this leave Kreitman and Hazel? 

As I said here and here I read a few of Howard Jacobson's early novels (in particular Coming From Behind, Peeping Tom and Redback) quite a long time ago and remain of the opinion that they are his best work, for all that Who's Sorry Now? is fine and has some sly things to say about male-female relations in general and long-standing marriages in particular. There are some odd things, though: the Nyman character's odd sexual fascination to everyone is never adequately explained, and his sudden turn into an abusive girlfriend-beater at the end of the book is a bit jarring. It's nice that the novel avoids the easy way out of having Kreitman and Hazel get back together, but the specific circumstances are a bit odd: first the thing with Nyman beating up Kreitman's daughter Juliet, and then the even more bizarre business in the last chapter where Kreitman punishes himself by visiting a dominatrix and having his balls squeezed. It's as if the novel is hijacked by a different author for the last couple of chapters who just stomps on the gas and drives it wildly off the rails. There does also seem to be a dearth of characters who behave like actual real humans in a way that might make you warm to them; Hazel comes closest, which I suppose is what makes her defiant rejection of a nice cosy reconciliation with Kreitman at the end quite pleasing.

So it's funny, occasionally perceptive and highly readable throughout, but I still maintain that the first few books are the best. John Crace's Digested Reads version can be found here

Sunday, November 10, 2024

stinky diedman

So obviously that last post prompted a more general review of the list and an attempt to come up with some sort of shortlist of potential future victims, not in a who's next Dead Pool kind of way, but just as a reminder for names to look out for in the obituaries, while wishing each and every one of them a long and happy life on an individual basis; I mean, I am not a monster.

Even this isn't exhaustive, as I eyeballed the list for people to check up on and may have missed people who are either a) older than I think they are and/or b) already dead in a way that makes them eligible for this list. 

Anyway, rather than list individual ages in a tedious and time-consuming way I've grouped everyone over 80 (at the time of writing) into three groups:

  • 90 and over: Alan Garner, Penelope Lively, Frederic Raphael, Michael Frayn, David Malouf
  • 85-89: Renata Adler, Margaret Drabble, E Annie Proulx, Frederick Forsyth, Thomas Keneally, Don DeLillo, Joyce Carol Oates, David Lodge, Mario Vargas Llosa
  • 80-84: Marilynne Robinson, Barbara Trapido, Isabel Allende, Anne Tyler, John Irving, Paul Theroux, Margaret Atwood, Susan Hill, JM Coetzee, Peter Carey, Howard Jacobson, Richard Ford, Michael Ondaatje

Frederic Raphael at 93 is the oldest person in that list. What I also discovered is that I missed another authorial demise, this one much more recent - mystery novelist and country music artist Kinky Friedman, who died in June of this year at the age of 79. This requires another addition to the list, as below: note that Friedman claims the longest curse length title from Milan Kundera at around sixteen and a half years. The two Friedman books to feature here were Spanking Watson all the way back in December 2007 and A Case Of Lone Star in July 2011. 

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

colegate: a brush with death

While I do my best to keep up with the steady snuffing out of the lives of novelists wreaked by this blog on an ongoing basis, I'm a busy man and I will occasionally miss one. It's happened a couple of times before that I've had to retrospectively insert a couple of lines in the list, here in 2019 for instance, and again here in 2021. 

Anyway, it came to my attention during some random perusing of the internet (definitely not for porn, I deny that completely) that Isabel Colegate died back in March 2023. She was a double featuree here with 1981's The Shooting Party (her most celebrated novel) in 2009 and again in 2016 with 1964's Statues In A Garden, which (as I see I sort of said at the time) reads as an earlier and slightly less brilliant draft of the later book.

Colegate was 91, which is towards the higher end of the scale in terms of people featured on this list (Milan Kundera remains the oldest victim). The curse length is one of the longest ones (Kundera holds the record here too); to move the needle significantly on the average age of death (which remains around 82, or, if you prefer a median, 86) at this stage - there are 38 names on the list, all between 59 and 94 - a novelist would either have to die while still in the womb, or live to about 500. Not saying it can't happen, but it's unlikely.

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

Friday, November 01, 2024

wordy num num

I was reminded by seeing Freedom juxtaposed with its immediate predecessor Candide that I'd done a post a while back about one-word book tiles. Here it is, and at the time (i.e. in early 2018) there had been 54 one-word book titles in this list; Freedom takes the current running total to 84. You may also recall (or just get off your arse and go and read the post now) that I also mentioned that the run of three consecutive one-word titles was unique; well, so it was, and so was the eventual run of four (Stick, Matter, Exposure, Nausea). I can tell you, without giving too much away, that the current run will end at two, so that record will stand for a while yet. 

Here's a more general survey of book title length over the lifetime of this blog:

Some way to go to crack the world record for greatest number of words in a book title, though, as this apparently stands at 4,558. Maybe next year. 

the last book I read

Freedom by Jonathan Franzen.

Berglunds, meet the Berglunds, they're a Minnesotan family. In the town of St. Paul, they're about to be in this story. So there's Walter and Patty and their teenage kids Jessica and Joey. Walter is a lawyer, Patty is a former teenage star basketball player, now a "homemaker". We meet them just as some destabilising changes are afoot, mainly prompted by Joey's involvement with Connie, the girl down the road. The friction this creates causes Joey to eventually move out of the family home and into Connie's home, where he comes into the orbit of Connie's Mum's new boyfriend Blake, a man of robustly Republican political leanings, another thing that doesn't sit well with the Berglunds, who are classic middle-class liberals. Eventually, with Joey seemingly moved out for good and both kids coming up to college age anyway, Walter and Patty decide to up sticks and move to Washington.

And so ends the first section of the book. The next section takes the form of an autobiographical memoir written by Patty Berglund, apparently at the prompting of her therapist as some sort of act of catharsis or exorcism. It details her early life, her brief years of sporting stardom, the knee injury that ended them, and her meeting with Walter and his charismatic friend Richard Katz. It also includes some details about her that are not commonly known, even by Walter, such as her being raped at a party when she was seventeen, or the on-and-off affair she's been conducting with Richard Katz at various times during her marriage to Walter.

Speaking of Walter, he has jacked in the old lawyering game for a job doing something closer to his heart - nature conservancy and eco-activism. Not something you'd think there'd be a ton of money in, but Walter has found a super-rich benefactor whose methods are a bit, erm, unconventional, but who is prepared to throw a large wedge at some of Walter's pet projects. He has also provided Walter with an assistant, the young and super-efficient Lalitha, who also appears to be in love with Walter, much to Patty's chagrin. 

Walter and Lalitha are tasked with facilitating the purchase of a large area of mountain country in West Virginia in order for it to be turned into a bird sanctuary by the unorthodox method of mining it down to the bedrock, trousering the profits and then re-landscaping it, planting a few trees, and designating it a haven for the cerulean warbler, whereupon those guys will presumably move in and warble away to their hearts' content. Needless to say among those who aren't sure about the whole idea are the current occupants of the land and the local and national media, who are further riled by Walter's rather blunt approach to public relations.

Joey, meanwhile, is at college, still in a relationship with Connie despite adopting a fairly lax attitude to fidelity, and, while disdaining much contact with Walter, regularly accepting cash gifts from Patty, much to Walter's annoyance. Richard has become a minor rock star off the back of an album of songs inspired by his fling with Patty. Richard also has some involvement as a figurehead for some of Walter and Lalitha's eco-work and notices their obvious attraction to each other. Eventually, pissed off at Patty's avoidance of his attempts to rekindle their relationship, he leaves some of Patty's confessional writings where Walter can find and read them, which results in Walter throwing Patty out. 

Patty moves in with Richard for a while but quickly realises it isn't going to work out. Freed of any obligation to Patty, Walter and Lalitha quickly start going at it like knives, also finding some time to expand their eco-activism into population control, in particular trying to persuade people to voluntarily stop having kids. On her way to do some setup work for an upcoming charity concert Lalitha's car is involved in an accident on a mountain road and she is killed.

Six years pass, with no contact between Walter and Patty. Patty, after moving out of Richard's place, has got a teaching job in New York, while Walter lives a reclusive and irascible life in his family's old lakeside cabin, formerly gloriously isolated but now just down the road from a new housing development whose inhabitants' cats wreak havoc upon the local bird life and whom Walter soon comes into conflict with. Patty unexpectedly runs into Richard in New York and he suggests that she get over herself and make contact with Walter, and so she takes herself off to Minnesota and parks herself on his doorstep in the cold until her lets her in. Eventually Walter relents and a reconciliation is effected, helped by another section of confessional memoir from Patty which Walter reads while she is thawing out.

You might recall I read The Corrections back in the fairly early days of this blog - that was Franzen's big breakthrough novel and he took nine years to follow it up, probably being a bit busy raking in the royalties and having pointless feuds with (and subsequently making up with) Oprah. For what it's worth, despite Freedom being a bit less garlanded with awards (and with the caveat that I read The Corrections 17 years ago) I enjoyed it more. Some of Franzen's discomfort about the whopping success of The Corrections was connected to the whole balancing act between wanting a large readership (which novelists, with very few exceptions, do) and the purity of your Art. If you don't want to get into a pointless discussion about the distinction between Important Literature and Just Books then you might just observe that both The Corrections and Freedom tick the boxes of being highly readable multi-generational family sagas with characters you care about while also being smart, occasionally funny and engaging with some topical issues of the day while (mostly) avoiding shoehorning stuff in in an obvious and clunky way.

The topicality in Freedom is around ecological issues like deforestation and population growth, which oddly echoes some of the main topics in The Overstory (though it's worth pointing out that Freedom was published eight years earlier), but with perhaps slightly less of a manic evangelical gleam in the eye. Besides, Freedom has other fish to fry as well, like the main family saga - love, aging, betrayal, the mutual delights and disappointments that parents and children inflict upon each other. There is the usual tricky balance to be struck when large sections of the narrative are supposedly written by one of the characters - Patty's memoir(s) in this case - i.e. they've got to be readable but not displaying a totally implausible level of literary merit. I think Patty's voice comes across pretty convincingly in these bits, as befits the most rounded and interesting character in the book.

Anyway, it's certainly not perfect but I enjoyed it very much, and it's pretty easy to scoot through despite being only a couple of pages short of 600 in length. By an odd coincidence I read The Corrections (which was itself 600+ pages) immediately before a very short book (Bonjour Tristesse) and here I'm reading Freedom immediately after an even shorter book (Candide). Life, oh life, etc.

Friday, October 25, 2024

celebrity lookeylikey of the day

Special recently deceased sporting celebrity slash dreadful 1980s music throwback edition today, as we see recently deceased former Olympic shot putter, World's Strongest Man and budgie enthusiast Geoff Capes face off against Joe Fagin, singer of various songs soundtracking the hit TV series Auf Wiedersehen, Pet (a show I should say I have never seen even a single minute of) one of which, That's Livin' Alright, gave him his solitary chart hit in early 1984. 

Despite the one-off nature of this brush with the charts, Fagin had the barefaced chutzpah to entitle his 1996 compilation album All The Hits Plus More. The cover images available on the internet for his earlier album Time Is A Thief reveal an amusing typo in the title of the song Love Hangs By A Thread which puts a whole new Berlin leather bar spin on it:


Thursday, October 24, 2024

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.