Advent 15 Canon

My tentative efforts to address the chasms in my reading have proved fruitful. I came to E.M. Forster with no great expectations. As it turns out I should have turned to him at an earlier time. Where Angels Fear to Tread is a concise, clever and provoking novel. It says much about the nature of prejudice and the daftness of English bourgeois attitudes. It contrasts such attitudes to the looser codes of Italian behaviour, though that is to over-simplify the text. It can be light and comedic which makes the intrusion into the plot of tragedy all the more telling. I quote a quite briliant passage on the allure of Italian cafe society, at least for the male of the species. I'm not sure this is quite what that old romantic Tony Blair had in mind.

Italy is such a delightful place to live in if you happen to be a man. There one may enjoy that exquisite luxury of socialism - that true socialism which is based not on equality of income or character, but on the equality of manners. In the democrarcy of the caffe or the street the great question of our life has been solved, and the brotherhood of man is a reality. But it is achieved at the expense of the sisterhood of women.

A guilty part of me might admit that this is a good description of the milieu of the old-fashioned rugby clubhouses I used to frequent. 

 

 

Twelve Films At Christmas - 3 & 4

Hollywood is an industry -  a very peculiar one tainted by much dross and rescued by occasional artistry. But today is about the dignity of filmic labour and artistry capably inserted into unashamed commercial product. It is a reflection on the work of two directors who are sometimes dismissed as mere technicians, their very capability masking their extreme gift. 

Ron Howard directs Solo: a Star Wars Story with particular panache. Not that it matters very much but this is an origin story for Han Solo, the best and most nuanced of the franchise heroes. It is, as with all the Star Wars episodes, at its best as a fast-paced shoot-em-up. These films are generic descendants of the Westerns that Hollywood used to churn out but importantly these are related to those special (and there are more than you might think) cowboy films that admit of nuance (there's my favourite word again). Great fun - and, oh, it hardly needs saying but Woody Harrelson is excellent. When is he not? 68/100.

Hans Detlef Sierck fled Germany in 1937. He was married to a Jewess. He was already established as one of Germany's leading film directors. Via neutral Europe he wended his way to Holywood where he changed his name to Douglas Sirk. He directed all manner of product but became best known for what were then regarded as schlocky melodramas, belittled as 'women's pictures'. Later criticism came to see the value of these films - fast-paced and touching on troublesome emotions - masterful product. Starring the estimable Barbara Stanwyck, All I Desire is a good example of his work. 69/70.  

Advent 14 Fiction

I am not an unbiased man but I feel the time has come for me to heap some grudging praise on an Old Edwardian. For those of you not of the cloistered world of the King Edward VI Foundation, an Old Edwardian is an alumnus of King Edward's School Birmingham, a private school of some standing. I am a lesser type of Edwardian (I say this with tongue firmly in cheek like a proper grammar school boy) that is to say an Aston Old Edwardian - state educated to the hilt!

Enough of such drivel and on with the praise. Gavin Lyall is the Old Edwardian in question and the particular novel in focus today is Shooting Script. I have read a few of Lyall's books and this is the best I have yet encountered. It has no pretensions to high literature but is fast-paced (I would say Chandleresque) and concise. Lyall's work attracted praise from the ultimate professional wordsmith P.G. Wodehouse. Praise does not come any higher. Try this for a slab of colour:

I'd cheerfully said I'd 'see' him up in the 24th floor bar, but I'd forgotten the lighting they went in for there: a small frosted-glass lamp parked in front of each drinker. Just enough light to make every woman look beautiful and every bar bill unreadable. A big hotel thinks of such things. 

Twelve Films At Christmas - 1 & 2

Let us start on a high. We re-watched two brilliant seasonal films last week. I cannot promise that this annual thread will continue at such an exalted level but I urge you to catch both of these movies. Both have been reviewed here before, the second as recently as 2 January this year. The first of the two is a hackneyed choice but, as I have said before, there is usually a good reason why a cliche becomes a cliche.

It's A Wonderful Life earned the highest score I have ever given to a film. I stand by that.

I have revised my opinion about The Holdovers. I raved about it in last Christmas's thread. I was wrong. I should have raved even more noisily. It is a marvellous film and I underrated it. 89/90. Who would have thought it - OG has a change of mind. I am not guaranteeing that any precedent has been set but I recommend that you keep reading to check this out. I don't get paid but your attention feeds my vanity - a very hungry beast.

 

Advent 13 Non-Fiction

Tall Tales, Test Match Special. Now, let's be clear, I bow to no man (or woman) in my love for Test Match Special, one of the last great remaining pillars of public service broadcasting. But this book of sketches (for that is what it is) is a mildly disappointing hotch-potch of retold favourite stories, and, most criminally, some of those are even repeated within the confines of the text. Badly edited, enjoyable enough but best read when drunk.

Advent 12 Canon

At the last canonical entry on this year's calendar (Advent 9), I made so bold as to compare Trollope and Dickens. I made the insolent (not to mention pseudish) comment that I find Dickens a little de trop. Well today I find myself only three days down the line and having to walk back my prejudice. I have actually read A Christmas Carol. It is, of course, nigh on impossible to come fresh to this text, besieged as we are by any number of adaptations and parodies of it. However I find myself able to say that the original is terrific. 

Dickens is a sentimentalist but a master of the cleverly inserted authorial voice. Take this passage for example where he affectingly draws us in so as to be at his very shoulder as the story unfolds itself. If I were to teach on writing (which thank the lord I do not have to do) I would be very tempted to get my students to excavate this passage for technique and meaning:

The curtains of his bed were drawn aside, I tell you, by a hand. Not the curtains at his feet, nor the curtains at his back, but those to which his face was addressed. The curtains of his bed were drawn aside; and Scrooge, starting up into a half-recumbent attitude, found himself face to face with the unearthly visitor who drew them: as close to it as I am now to you, and I am standing in the spirit at your elbow. 

God Bless Us, Every One! 

Advent 11 Fiction

If he was wrong about the man, it didn't matter. And if he was right, whether the man turned out to be his contact or a mere look-out, it had been foolish to expect anything else; if he was a look-out then he, Roche, was the one person on earth who wasn't worth a second glance; and if he was the contact then the empty roadside was the last place on earth for a comradely embrace and the exchange of confidences. It made him positively ashamed of the new Roche's naivete; the old Roche, that veteran of a hundred successfully clandestine meetings, would never have let his imagination set him off so prematurely.

In matters of fiction, I long ago learned to respect the judgement of one of the best-read men I have known - my late father. He was a man of catholic tastes but he liked a tale that rattled along, preferably with a twist in the tale. Modern(ish) crime and spy fiction fiction fits the bill, Anthony Price most particularly. I have pilfered a few dog-eared Price novels from Dad's shelves (I also got my second-hand-bookshop mania from him) but I found Soldier No More for myself and paid 50p for it. Bargain.