Twelve Films At Christmas - 7 & 8

Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning, Parts I and II. We watched these two films a day apart which probably helps in keeping-up (well to some extent) with the labyrinthine plot. I came to them with no great expectations other than for superb stunts and effects, and indeed you get plenty of those. However, much to my pleasant surprise, bubbling beneath all the crashing and banging there is a serious point trying to get out. I was put in mind of the stunning ending of the original Planet of the Apes, and of the gut-wrenching denouement in Fail Safe, two superb movies. Now the final fling of the MI franchise is not quite in the league of those classics, there is too much clowning inbetween the action for that, but on balance you have to say that this is adventure film-making with its brain left switched-on. No spoilers from me. You do need to watch both parts to get the full benefit. 75/100 each. To use my favourite word when it comes to criticism - these films have nuance.  

Advent 24 Canon

When you stop to think about it, reading is one of man's many remarkable skills, arguably the greatest. The act of writing gives words a portion of permanence and the reading of that script allows reception and adaptation to mediate the text. Reading is a singular experience - yet it opens up to communal reception. It is in that context that compiling this year's Advent calendar has been a privilege. Not all of the books reviewed have been of the first rank but even the feeblest of them has provoked thought and added to my sum of knowledge.

A year in which you read The Leopard and Behind the Scenes at the Museum can be nothing but a good one. These are remarkable novels. It is then all the more notable that neither of those offerings is quite the best thing I have read this year. That accolade belongs to a book I had been running scared of for too long. Booker Prize winners can disappoint and Midnight's Children is probably the most trumpeted of those victors. It is a six-hundred page slab of a book, a size that can be forbidding. If you have not read it yet, don't delay any longer. For once the back-cover blurb is right, quoting the New York Review of Books, 'One of the most important books to have come out of the English-speaking world in this generation'. This is a generous, mordant, uplifting and magical history of the miracle that is modern India. It defies easy definition.

So: there were knees and a nose, a nose and knees. In fact, all over the new India, the dream we all shared, children were being born who were only partially the offspring of their parents - the children of midnight were also the children of the time: fathered, you understand, by history. It can happen. Especially in a country which is itself a sort of dream. 

That is it for another year. It has been a blast. Happy Christmas and may your god go with you. 

 

    

Advent 23 Fiction

Just occasionally you come across a novel that achieves that metaphorical feat of blowing your socks off. Kate Atkinson's Behind the Scenes at the Museum is one such. It is brilliant. That it was a first novel defies belief. Simply staggering - not just one of the the best novels I have read this year but one of the best I have ever read.

A modern (and better?) stylistic cousin to Tristram Shandy, the digressive narrative is carried along with winning skill. Its penultimate paragraph builds to a philosophical crescendo with one of those sentences you just wish you had conceived yourself:

In the end, it is my belief, words are the only things that can construct a world that makes sense.

Tomorrow we reach the crescendo of this calendar. Given how I have raved about Advent 23, you may (correctly) judge that you are in for a real treat tomorrow. 

Advent 22 Non-Fiction

I started this Advent thread with the shameless promotion of my own thesis. But now Christmas Day is hard upon us and it is time for the really good stuff. Concise, provocative and eminently readable, Kenneth Minogue's Politics: a Very Short Introduction is the best non-fiction book I have read this year. Period.

 

I quote at length Minogue's explanation of how constitutions function. My thesis (at greater length and far less ably) tries to touch on these matters. As you read the brilliant paragraph below, just imagine trying to explain it to the closed mind of the Donald. Be afraid. Be very afraid.

The set of offices by which a polis was governed, and the laws specifying their relation, are the constitution. Government without a constitution would lack the very kind of moral limitation which distinguishes politics. Constitutions function in two essential ways: they circumscribe the powers of the office-holders, and as a result they create a predictable (though not rigid and fixed) world in which the citizens may conduct their lives. It is constitutions which give form to politics, and the study of them led to the emergence of political science. 

Advent 21 Canon

Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa was an Italian nobleman who lived the life of a literary dilettante. He published nothing in his life but left behind his sole completed novel (though even that was accompanied by additional fragments) The Leopard. It stands for some critics as the greatest novel of the twentieth century. It is a superb evocation of the death of a particular kind of nobility.

I cannot recommend this book too highly. That it is not the best book I have read this year is merely an indication of how fortuitous I have been on my journey. I read it in the Vintage edition, translation from the Italian by Archibald Colquhoun and replete with foreword and afterword that help open up this great literary achievement. I choose one of the gentle elucidations of the dwindling status of an aristocracy to illustrate the precision of the novel's analysis. All you need to know is that Donnafugata is a place:

And he added, turning to the others, "And after dinner, at nine o'clock, we shall be happy to see all our friends." For a long time Donnafugata commented on these last words. And the prince, who had found Donnafugata unchanged, was found very much changed himself, for never would he have issued so cordial an invitation: and from that moment, invisibly, began the decline of his prestige. 

Advent 20 Fiction

If pressed (go on, press me) I confirm I would describe the late John le Carre's spy fiction as canonical, most particularly The Spy who Came in from the Cold; Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy; and A Perfect Spy. These are brilliant literary novels that evoke an underworld born of the dangerous times in which I grew up. Le Carre's later, post-cold-war novels I find a little overwrought and marginally too polemical. That is probably just me.

Nick Harkaway is le Carre's son and a very accomplished writer (this is an understatement) and he doubtless comprehended the dangers in penning a novel that fills in the gap in the dramatic timeline between The Spy who Came in, and Tinker Tailor. Karla's Choice is that book and Harkaway succeeds supremely - the three novels now stand as a captivating trilogy. I will not run any spoilers in case you have yet to encounter le Carre's (and now Harkaway's) George Smiley. I envy you the journey. For those of you who are already acquainted with Smiley, I hope the following description of this most unlikely super-spy will reassure you how well Harkaway has inhabited his leading character:

Without  a tie and with several pairs of spectacles distributed around his reading-room lair, you might have taken him for anything from a schoolmaster recovering after the term time's excessive use of restorative alcohol to a bibliophile ticket collector newly pensioned from the Cornish Riviera Express. 

  

    

Advent 19 Non-Fiction

I have to admit that even reading books that I rate can sometimes feel like a chore. It is probably a fault in my mental disposition. I like reading but sometimes it is just easier to switch on the tele and watch one of my precious documentaries. Alan Bennett's Writing Home presents no such problem. It positively flows off the page and swims in your mind. It is witty, urbane and highly educated, a collection of essays, diaries and prefaces.  

I must confess that I have carried a mild and guilty prejudice against Bennett - a prejudice I now judge to be thoroughly wrong and born out of an unseemly jealousy. Bennett gives every impression of wearing his education (a substantial one) lightly. In the past I took this to be a deliberate affectation on his part. I regret that I felt that way. Writing Home is a damned good read. Here is a nice bit of self-effacement from Bennett's diary on 20 August 1988:

Watching Barry Humphries on TV the other night I noticed the band was laughing. It reminded me how when I used to do comedy I never used to make the band laugh. Dudley [Moore] did and Peter [Cook], but not me. And somehow it was another version of not being good at games.