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. 

Twelve Films At Christmas - 5 & 6

Denzel Washington and Russell Crowe directed by Ridley Scott, no wonder American Gangster is such a good film. How had it passed me by for so long? Oh well, rectified now. Watched it at Plas Piggy (where I accidentally found out that the tele-box thing can record) in the company of a nice Italian red - is there any other sort, certainly when exposed to my stray-dog palate. The film seems to be in rotation on Film 4 so if you haven't seen it yet, set aside some time to do so. Some have incorrectly characterised it as the 'Black Godfather'. That is unfair to both films - The Godfather is a better film (but, of course, better than most other movies) and American Gangster is not a mere derivative. A fine take on the warping of the American Dream. 86/100.

Our children are of exactly the right age to have been caught up in the maelstrom of Harry Potter mania. DN1 and DN2 both read the books and I feel no shame in saying that I read them as well. There is some ghastly snobbery about these books but as ripping yarns they know few equals and if they brought a new generation to reading then so much the better. What about the films? Not quite on the same level but they do capture some of the atmosphere and for me they always have a Christmas resonance because I remember the excitement of taking the girls to see Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone on a chill winter's day. This is the first of the eight films and the child acting is patchy but not such as to stop you enjoying it. 64/100.

 

Advent 18 Canon

This is a slight cheat on my statement that in the canonical sliver of this enterprise, I am reading books that I ought to have read but have been too lazy to take on. T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land and Other Poems did cross my way when I was at school. I wasn't ready for it, come to think of it probably still am not. No matter, this is dynamite stuff. Elusive, allusive, beguiling. Two extracts stand out for me. First from The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, comes one of those passages I wish I could pass-off as my own:

In the room the women come and go / Talking of Michelangelo.

More striking still is this that served as the inspiration for the title of Waugh's brilliant novel, A Handful of Dust:

And I will show you something different from either / Your shadow at morning striding behind you / Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you; / I will show you fear in a handful of dust.

  

Advent 17 Fiction

Sunday lay so heavily in the air as to become almost nauseating. Maigret used to claim openly, half seriously, half in fun, that he had always had the knack of sensing a Sunday from his bed, without even having to open his eyes. 

Translation is a form of adaptation. Whenever I read a book in translation I am troubled by the thought that something will have been lost in translation. It never occurs to me that something may have been gained. Well, my French is not close to good enough to read Simenon in his native tongue so my introduction to Inspector Maigret is in Nigel Ryan's translation.

Simenon published over four hundred novels. I repeat that - four hundred! Bloody impressive. My Friend Maigret (1949, translation 1956) is a rattling good read and, so far as this uneducated critic is concerned, a laudable translation. It captures a world of instinctive (and occasionally brutish) police work that is long gone.  

Advent 16 Non-Fiction

I love Len Deighton's fictions. He is not, I suppose, canonical in the manner of Le Carre (whose spy fiction I deeply admire) but Deighton has a pace and lack of political pretension that I find enviable. If (and this will never happen I know) I were to teach a course on creative writing I would set my students to read his Game, Set, and Match trilogy as an exemplar for good professional writing.

But today is not about fiction. We are in the non-fiction aisle  of my little library and it is Deighton's excellent account of the Battle of Britain that I want to recommend. Deighton loses none of his stylistic pace and tells the story of an epochal conflict with a commendable freshness. He is not afraid to slay some myths along the way. Fighter is as good as popular history gets. I particularly enjoyed Deighton's pithy evisceration of the reputation of the dreadful Joe Kennedy:

When the election came, Kennedy gave Roosevelt all the support he needed to win. The mystery of his turn-round has never been satisfactorily explained. On the matter of Britain's imminent defeat, Kennedy also changed his mind, but now Britain no longer cared. Robert Vansittart - Halifax's Chief Diplomatic Adviser - wrote, 'Mr Kennedy is a very foul specimen of double-crosser and defeatist. He thinks of nothing but his own pocket. I hope that this war will at least see the elimination of this type.

Now which modern leader does that put you in mind of? Plus ca change .... 

 

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.

Advent 10 Non-Fiction

Francis Fukuyama may or may not regret having written The End of History? What I would say is that his prognostications under the banner of that title have been wilfully misunderstood, vey often by people who did not trouble to read the text. But that is not my concern today. Instead the slimmer volume, State Building, catches my eye. It was written in 2004 when even the most jaundiced commenatator could surely not have predicted the Trump phenomenon. However Fukuyama's defence of the properly constituted nation state as the bedrock of decency and the rule of law, makes particularly poignant reading as Trump tramples the rule of law underfoot whilst ironically (ironic because his small mind could not fathom the truth) uncovering the importance of the nation state. 

A great deal of both international and national law coming out of Europe consists of what amounts to social policy wish lists that are completely unenforceable. Europenas justify these kinds of laws by saying they are expressions of social objectives. Americans say, correctly in my view, that such unenforceable aspirations undermine the rule of law itself. 

Advent 9 Canon

The irony of that socialist Roy Hattersley being a snob seems to have been lost (as was much else on this undeniably educated man) on the man himself. Hey ho. I remember a television programme celebrating the novels of Anthony Trollope in which the editing had cleverly inserted Hattersley right after an enthusiastic commendation of Trollope by John Major. Hattersley ventured that Trollope was enjoyed by people who didn't really like/understand literature. Now that I have read The Warden, I am afraid that I must confess myself of Major's persuasion. I must also repeat my confession that I find much of Dickens rather de trop. Hey ho.

The Warden is the first of the Barchester novels and I was rather surprised to find it witty, readable and rather enchanting. There is none of Dickens' intricacy and hectoring. Does this make me a bad person - or perhaps a mildly thick one? Hey ho. How about this on the act of writing:

It is indeed a matter of thankfulness that neither the historian nor the novelist hears all that is said by their heroes or heroines. Or how would three volumes or twenty suffice! In the present case so little of this sort have I overheard, that I live in hopes of finishing my work within 300 pages and of completing that pleasant task - a novel in one volume.     

Advent 8 Fiction

That Ben Elton's Stark was written the best part of four decades ago is quite staggering. I won't spoil the plot for you but some of its more extreme prognostications are now echoingly pertinent.

Elton's early writing is like his early comedy - noisy, profane and driven by anger. It can at first be unsettling but once you have submitted to the authorial voice, this is an important book. I read it at the same time as I was conquering my fear of Jane Austen (see Advent 6) which made for quite a contrast. I do not share Elton's politics (no shit Sherlock) but I do have to admire his evisceration of the capital markets. Has anyone articulated the true socialist's bafflement better:

And so the house of cards came tumbling down. That fragile global structure behind which we all shelter. A castle, built on shifting sands from little more than faith, hope and greed, came tumbling down with a crash that shook the world. A mighty crash indeed, considering that the castle was not made of anything of any substance. In fact, it was a castle that existed only in the minds of men. Constructed from nothing more solid than the financial pages in newspapers and the blips on a million computer screens. It was not a castle built from iron, or steel, nor cotton, oil or food. It did not fail because there was no more coal left or because all the cows and sheep had died. There was no physical reason for its collapse, because it was made of nothing at all. You couldn't touch it, smell it or climb it, but without its shelter, despite the appalling heat of the southern summer and the mildest ever winter in the north, the world turned suddenly cold. 

 

Advent 7 Non-Fiction

I'll let you in on a very badly kept secret. The bibliography in my doctoral thesis runs to thirty pages. I haven't read every page of everything cited. I know, shocking isn't it. I don't speak for all academics when I say this but my guess would be that I speak for a majority. The way things work is that your first port of call when faced with a learned text is the index to check for direct references to the item you are researching. This is only the same as the way one uses legal texts when advising on a topic. It's not cheating.

Anyway, I mention all of this because as part of my reading this year I pulled a critical text off the dusty shelf and read it from start to finish. The lucky text was Lucie Armitt's Fantasy Fiction: an Introduction. This one doesn't get a mention in the aforementioned thesis, rather it was acquired for a module on the degree course. It's surprisingly readable if a little on the dry side. I was going to quote a pseudish passage about homoeroticism in Lord of the Rings, but that sort of thing is too easy a target for the cynical. Oh and we should say that Armitt has a point about Tolkien. No, here is a nice take on how fantasy fiction justifies its place in Genre Studies and the wider world of literary criticism:

There is no more pertinent or influential question in the current field of fantasy than the question of the role genre plays in it. We have established fantasy, here, as the type of writing that questions what happens beyond the horizon, but in doing so we remain defined by that boundary, even in the act of crossing it. In effect, the boundary marks the point at which the worlds begin and end - the Primary World versus the Secondary World, the point at which sleep becomes dream. In realism we never reach those boundaries, and so are less conscious of their presence. As a result the realist world gives the illusion of being boundless, but only because we never get the chance to test its limits.       

 

Advent 6 Canon

It says something of both our education system and my own laziness that a man can flaunt a doctorate in English Literature without ever having had the stamina to finish reading a Jane Austen novel. This has been rectified and I will confess that it was at times a chore - Austen is just not my cup of tea. I spent a good part of Sense and Sensibility merely wishing that the worthy Elinor would give her sister Marianne a good slap. 

However it is the way of these things that you get to the very end of a book (Chapter Fifty in this case) and a paragraph leaps off the page and assaults you with its concise beauty. This is writing of luminescence and the journey is worth the toil:

Her family had of late been exceedingly fluctuating. For many years of her life she had had two sons; but the crime and annihilation of Edward a few weeks ago, had robbed her of one; the similar annihilation of Robert had left her for a fortnight without any; and now, by the resuscitation of Edward, she had one again.

Advent 5 Fiction

I would like to have met Kurt Vonnegut. I have raved previously about his masterwork Slaughterhouse 5, and also about the Sky Arts documentary on him - use the search engine at the top of the blog and you'll trace my ravings. Aren't computers clever? And just a tad frightening.

Today we consider Vonnegut's Breakfast of Champions. Definitely one of the best books I have read this year. It is coruscatingly funny yet laden with deadpan tragedy. Its point-of-view is artfully all over the shop. Mesmerising. I will set out a sample below. Those of you paying close attention may trace an echo of another (and on balance slightly lesser) novel mentioned later in this Advent strand.

I had no respect whatsoever for the creative works of either the painter or the novelist. I thought Karabekian with his meaningless pictures had entered into a conspiracy with millionaires to make poor people feel stupid. I thought Beatrice Keedsler had joined hands with other old-fashioned storytellers to make people believe that life had leading characters, minor characters, significant details, insignificant details, that it had lessons to be learned, tests to be passed, and a beginning, a middle, and an end.  

  

  

Advent 4 Non-Fiction

Maurice Garin

The First Tour by Isabel Best is a short and rather shoddy account of the first ever Tour de France, staged over six gargantuan stages in 1903. The competitors covered an unimaginable 3000 kilometres in those six instalments on fixed gear bikes and were responsible for their own repairs - no support cars or domestiques. The winner (by what remains a record margin of two hours and fifty minutes) was Maurice Garin. Notwithstanding the infelicities of the text, this booklet does just about manage to do justice to the super-human efforts of Garin and his competitors.

Henri Desgrange called him The Bulldog, but Garin, a chain smoker, was also known as 'Le Petit Ramoneur' - the little chimney sweep - owing to his job prior to turning pro. He was one of nine children born in a French-speaking village on the Italian side of the Alps. Legend has it that his parents swapped him for a large round of cheese when he was 14, possibly in order to smuggle him into France. Ten years later he set up a bike shop in Roubaix with two brothers, one of whom supported him at the 1904 Tour. Garin was tough enough to survive the harsh realities of early cycle sport. As an amateur in 1893, he grabbed another rider's spare bike when he punctured in Namur-Dinant-Givet, riding on to win.   

Advent 3 Canon

I am more than occasionally of a mind to reach into my ancestral Welshness. One of these moods overtook me when at Caernarfon Castle last year and I duly purchased a copy of The Mabinogion from the gift shop. An English translation you understand - I'm not even remotely equipped to read it in Welsh. The translation is by Sioned Davies. I will quote from the translator's own Introduction and you will get a flavour of what this collection of twelve tales is about:

Brothers transformed into animals of both sexes who bring forth children: dead men thrown into a cauldron who rise the next day; a woman created out of flowers, transformed into an owl for infidelity; a king turned into a wild boar for his sins - these are just some of the magical stories that together make up the Mabinogion.

These stories hark back to an ancient oral tradition. The constant couplings and killings can be a tad wearying when read - I suspect the whole thing would be a load more fun if delivered in the voice of, say, Richard Burton or, here's an idea, Tom Jones. If you liked the film Excalibur with its atmosphere of dark magic, then you will get something out of The Mabinogion.  

 

 

  

Advent 2 Fiction

If you have endured my pergrinations through the blogosphere for any time, you would not expect this year to pass without a reference to the man who, in my scabrous moments, is my favourite author, that old rascal Simon Raven. I am not a great one for re-reading any more than I re-watch many films. These are rules to which there are lots of exceptions. Most particularly I am probably in my fourth joyous saunter through Raven's Alms for Oblivion sequence. In mid-ramble I happily let Places Where They Sing entrance me. It is the sixth volume in the sequence.

Raven puts these words in the mouth of Robert Reculver Constable, a priggish don of whom he does not, I judge, wholly approve. Typical of Raven however the sentiments that Constable spouts would find favour with Raven. Nuance is all my dear.

So much for Tom and Daniel. There remains the question of the left-wing joker ... The Rev. Oliver Clewes, the College Chaplain. He is one of those new progressive clerics who hardly seem to believe in God at all and apparently picture Christ as some kind of revolutionary guerilla from South America. As a nominal Christian, Clewes is mistrusted by most of the left, while as a declared socialist he is mistrusted by all of the right. The few people remaining merely despise him as an equivocating opportunist. The one important thing to be said of him, therefore, is that he will discredit whatever cause he may adopt in the eyes of everybody, so that one can only hope he will not support a good one.         

Advent 1 Non-Fiction

Now don't go saying that I never treat you. Today we open with a volume of non-fiction (well, two volumes to be precise, but they come as companion pieces) and you are offered the chance to read it free and gratis, courtesy of the open access section of the library of Birmingham City University. I make no recommendation of it but I confirm that I have this very year re-read it for the umpteenth time and, at the last count, I found six typographical and/or grammatical errors. I apologise for this for I am the author. This is the thesis that earned me my doctorate - Shakespeare and Bagehot  

I will save you the effort of reading my leaden prose and just give you the concluding paragraph which I hope conveys some idea of what the whole academic shenanigans is getting at: 

The future (as Harootunian reminds us) is part of history. Possibly we may discover, with Shakespeare's unparalleled insight, that there is a form of sovereignty beyond Bagehot's contemplation and yet still within an Age of Discussion. For now and for my own deliberately limited purpose, Bagehot's writing is an analytical tool we can profitably use. Within the confines of his own tragedy, Coriolanus is wrong when he asserts that for him, 'There is a world elsewhere' (3.3.159). We are more fortunate. Bagehot gives us the skills to understand where we have got to. Shakespeare may help unlock the future. 

The Announcement You've All been waiting For - Ex Libris Piggy - An Advent Calendar

A habit I belatedly inherited from my dear father is to have several books on the go at once. This year I have decided to give it some formality and to read around three categories - the canonical (or in other words stuff I really ought to have read already); less exalted fiction (stuff I like); non-fiction. Now my discipline slips and at various times I have been reading multiple volumes from one category, however my efforts have been controlled enough to make this tripartite plan of attack the basis for this year's OG Advent Calendar. I will treat you to eight books from each category. I offer no favourites other than the final three doors of the calendar through which I will reveal the best of each type that I have read this year. All of the books can be found on the shelves of Casa Piggy - books do furnish a room.  

Out Of Ireland, Out Of Wales, Of England

I married my way into the Irish diaspora. It is a nice place to be. I was born into the Welsh diaspora and, despite the turmoil in Welsh rugby, that is also a nice place to inhabit. I am though English and there are aspects of that that concern me. Let me illustrate.

On Friday I took a journey to the doctors surgery I have used since the Groupie and I first married. We have moved three times since then but have never felt any urge to transfer to a surgery that occupies the same supposedly rarified area as Casa Piggy. The service I receive from my doctors is superb and I can say that they have played a central part in keeping me alive. The National Health Service at its best is a thing of wonder. 

My drive to the surgery (I had requested a PSA test and they had readily agreed - no symptoms but I am of the age) takes me through Kingstanding Circle, a place with tender memories for us because we lived round the corner when first married in a lovely little house that cost us the princely sum of £15000. The Circle has been ambush-swathed in Union Flags and Crosses of St. George. I am at heart a patriot but this sort of display has come to feel threatening and somehow indicative of division and rancour. I cannot tell you how sad this all makes me feel as I hunker down in my middle class redout. I feel vaguely estranged from my own homeland.

After my blood sample had been given and I had admitted that, yes, my blood pressure remains stubbornly a bit too high, I drove on down Short Heath Road and up Station Road to Erdington to see my aged mater familias. As I waited for the temporary lights on Station Road to change I observed a slattern coming out of a convenience store dressed in pyjamas and a seedy dressing gown. It was half-ten in the morning. It may be a little thing and I may be a terrible snob, but really is this what we have come to?

Back to Ireland and a question springs to mind. How can that sainted isle produce two such contrasting products as Mrs Brown's Boys (which I'm sorry but I have to say this, is pitiful) and Leonard and Hungry Paul, which in case you haven't seen it is delightful, a sort of Napoleon Dynamite meets Derry Girls.

I don't usually approve of early Christmas trees but tomorrow is a working day for our decorator in chief (the Groupie of course) and next Saturday will be a tad late, so our trees have gone up this weekend and this afternoon I will mount the step-ladder and put up the outside lights (for switching on tomorrow) - all is well, mostly all anyway.

That blood pressure thing - I have been out running on both days since my test.           

A Black Wednesday

When troubles come they come not single spies but in battalions. Well perhaps not battalions but certainly double spies last Wednesday. On that day I heard of the death of two men who profoundly influenced me. One was the best of a very good bunch at school and the other a university teacher (though this was only a minor specimen of his achievements) who was responsible for the start of this blog.

John G. Smith succeeded my father as Head of English at King Edward VI Aston. He took up post two terms before I arrived at the school in 1971 and stayed there until his retirement in 2002. In me he burnished the love of literature already encouraged by my father and his rough wisdom still patterns my thinking to this day. On top of that he was the greatest influence on my rugby both as a player and as a coach. The instinct to ruck rather than to maul was hammered home to me and from JGS I learned the desirability of educated roughness. A great man taken too soon although I am selfishly pleased that he lived long enough to know of my doctorate in English. I supect he found it balls-achingly funny and a proper expression of my pomposity.

Ian Marchant

And it was near the start of that journey to my PhD that Ian Marchant comes into the frame. He lectured/encouraged me in Life Writing in the second year of my second degree and if you go to the very first entry in this blog (27 January 2010) you will get the gist of what he instilled in us. He was novelist/author of critically accalimed non-fiction/broadcaster/scurrilous performer and an all-around good egg. He was only two years older than me but aeons ahead in wisdom.

God rest you both. 

Not Everything Is About Me

The Groupie (the wisest person I know) frequently advises me not to keep reading about Donald Trump - it only makes me angry. She has a point. America's very public psychosis feeds my own.

All of which comes back to me as I contemplate, inter alia, five films recently watched. Four of them are American movies, one British. You  might not believe it but I do actually give it some thought before I put metaphotical pen to to virtual paper with these film commentaries. And recent cogitation has brought home the fact that any trace of decency in any film that analyses the human condition merely provokes me into observing either that Donald Trump should be made to watch it, or that he wouldn't get the point.

So here are those five films. First up is Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, a picture that has that ubiquitous Tennessee Williams atmosphere of strangulating heat. Has cinema ever deployed a more beautiful leading couple than Elizabeth Taylor and Paul Newman? They fight and tear at each other in the cage of their doomed marriage. Burl Ives plays the vile American patriarch with portly panache - I will resist the deployment of a Trump reference - oh no, I've done it already. In truth this film never fully escapes from its stage roots but it smolders nicely. 69/70. 

Burl Ives gives us another display as the vile patriarch in The Big Country. On this occasion he got an Oscar for his efforts. This film lives up to its name - it is big. The landscapes are big, the stars are big, the cinematography is big (Technirama), the fights are big. The humans almost fade to insignificance against the backdrops. It has pretensions to talk about the truth of Manifest Destiny and, given its age (made in 1958) it is probably making some heavy-handed points about the Cold War. Altogether glorious to look at. Its denouement suggests that bad men must die to allow civilisation to grow. Trump ... no too bloody obvious. 69/70. 

3.10 to Yuma (the 1957 original not the 2007 remake) is a taut Western notable for a superb performance of smooth menace by Gelnn Ford. Its ending is a surprising concession to decency in the midst of vicious singularity. [Insert Trump reference here]. 70/100. 

I will set the British film aside for now and instead turn to a very good American movie from a master of the medium that, for me, sits in the middle ranks of his oeuvre. Casino sees Martin Scorsese repeating much of the narrative technique of his (for me) masterpiece, Goodfellas. This time it is the Las Vegas casino industry of the mob-dominated 70s and 80s that comes under Scorsese's acute microscope. Joe Pesci, gives us his best Joe Pesci, Robert De Niro is compelling as the uber-clever gambler who becomes a casino boss but who finds himself undone by love and by the advance of the junk-bond ecnomy (a voodoo economy in which Trump crashed and burned but by the immoral rules of the game lived to fight on). However the star turn comes from Sharon Stone as de Niro's booze-addled nemesis. Great soundtrack as well - a recurrent element in Scorsese's films. 80/100.

I have bitter-sweet memories of a family holiday in Denmark. Sweet because I love my family and because I happened at that time to think (wrongly as things transpired) that I was at the peak of my powers as a businessman. At our coastal lodge I would rise early, go for a run, then swim in the sea before making myself some proper coffee and reading a management tome. Bitter because I returned to England and my professional life collapsed. That is s story for another day - or, perhaps better, a story never to be told. Denmark struck me as a peaceable country at ease with itself. Again I may be wrong. No matter, those memories were stirred by the modest British production, Denmark. Rafe Spall plays a down-at-heel Welshman who resolves that his best hope of a comfortable life is to earn himself a spot in Danish prison. From this unlikely conceit is spun a nicely beguiling redemption tale. 72/100. I'm pretty sure Trump wouldn't get it, but who am I to say.  

       

Tempus Fugit - And Takes Automotive Technology Along For The Ride

As you will know if you have been with me on this blog's meanderings for the past decade and a half, I own my Precious Jag - a beautiful Jaguar XK8 that spends most of its life sleeping idly in the garage. It may be a small and stupid thing but it is, for me, a piece of automotiive pornography. It is getting on for thirty years old and runs beautifully. 

Overgraduate with his Canyonero

But enough of such mild boastfulness because today I am saying goodbye to the more prosaic car that has been my main vehicle for eleven years. It is a Kia Sorento, it has done a shade under one hundred thousand miles and has been hardly any trouble. I shall miss it - the Canyonero as Daughters numbered One and Two and I dubbed it - you have to be a Simpsons devotee to get the reference.

 

Krusty with his Kia

 

And let me tell you how to measure automotive sophistication/progress. The Precious Jag has a CD player which I had to have specially fitted. Canyonero came with a CD player as standard and also has a bafflingly unreliable digital radio which I had to buy as an extra. Canyonero has been superseded by a Dacia Bigster (terrible name I know but a lot of car for the money) and that has an efficient digital radio and Android Autoplay so that I can listen to Spotify via my (also new as it happens) phone. No CD player in sight - so last century!

I like the new car  and here's a thing - it's a hybrid. Will that be defunct by the time I next change cars? 

The Myth Of Those Italian Trains

I'm afraid that it is not true to say that Mussolini got the trains running any more efficiently than before he seized power. I know this to be the position because various search engines and a touch of AI have told me so. As any fule kno, the internet never lies.

I mention this nubbin of information only because it has robbed me of a ready cliche to deploy in making my reaction to the recent editions of the television spectacular that is The Donald Saves the World. Now before you go scurrying off to check-out this programme, no it doesn't exist (although I would confess that I can't be arsed to check out this statement), it is merely my glib way of wrestling (as I have been for weeks) with the self-proclaimed saintliness of Donald J. Trump as he goes around the world stopping wars and generally dispensing balm.

My (highly unoriginal but it cannot be said often enough) point is that truly bad men can do good things. So I might have started by saying that Mussolini made the trains run on time, but we have already established that this was not actually the case. No matter, what I will say is that Hitler revived a moribund German economy and that nice bloke Stalin galvanised Russia to defeat said Hitler. Either or both may have made trains run on time.

So here's the thing, Trump's peace accord in the Middle East (actually it's that most annoying of legal things - an agreement to agree) is to be welcomed. Hamas and Likud are, how should we put this, both bat-shit-crazy and would happily have carried on their wanton acts of destruction and desecration until the sacred cows come home. So an abeyance is good. We might carp that Trump could have brought Netanyahu to heel fifteen months ago but better late than never. Will it hold? Let us pray so - though to which version of God we should pray is a matter of contention.

As I say, truly bad men can do good things. Trump has done such a thing. He remains a malignant narcissist whose driving passion is that we should all love him as much as he clearly loves himself. Fat chance.    

A Suitable Obsession For The Old

JTC was a wise and amusing man, much my elder. He was a stalwart member and Honorary Life Vice President of our rugby club and, in his more decorous moments, a member of that great seat of affluenec, Little Aston Golf Club. Many years ago I was chatting to him at the bar and mused out loud that I might play more golf. Jim counselled me against this and uttered the sage words, 'play team games for as long as you can'. In this, as in so much else, Jim was right.

I played rugby until a week short of my forty-eighth birthday, by which time I was held together by strategically applied tape and over-medicated on anti-inflammatories. I loved close to every minute of it. I had played my last game of 1st XV rugby at forty and thereafter grew old gracelessly.  

I mention this only because I spent a fun two hours this morning on the practice ground at Clwb Golff Ynys Mon. I was merely tatting around and it was only when I switched on my computer just now that I noticed the date (a boon in being elderly is that the date is a matter of only passing import) - tomorrow is the fifty-first anniversary of my first game of golf. Founder's Day 1974. I love golf in all its infuriating detail but my advice, should you choose to hear it, remains, play team games as long as you can. 

Spirit Of Monochrome

The first time I saw Alastair Sim's performance as Scrooge was in a lamentable 'colorized' version of the movie. I next saw it in a sharp, restored monochrome edition. The second viewing was all the better for restoration to its original format.

I mention this only because I am a bit of a fan of black and white film stock. Amongst the many things I tell myself I am going to get around to doing, is to buy a decent camera and use it to take atmpospheric black and white pictures. Of course I will probably never get around to this but a man can/should dream. 

All of which brings me to four excellent monchrome films I have watched recently. I may be an old romantic but I think each of them is better for being shot in monochrome. I will turn first to David Lean's 1946 adaptation of Great Expectations - this is a top grade movie, previously reviewed here and I confirm my past prejudice to give it 85/100.

Lean was at it again in 1953 with the screen rendition of Hobson's Choice. Atmospheric monochrome magic. The quietly brilliant John Mills is once again the youthful hero. As for Hobson himself (a part for which I would break my unlamented stage retirement) this role falls into the hyper-capable hands of Charles Laughton. 86/100. 

Another reliably excellent actor is Henry Fonda and he has the conscience-stricken lead in 1957's Twelve Angry Men. This is a claustrophobic masterpiece that speaks gradually louder as to the importance of the rule of law. In an age where the President of the United States clearly has no conception of the rule of law, this is a film that cries out to be re-watched. Innocent and not-gulity are not the same thing. 88/100. 

I have talked of reliable imprimaturs - Lean, Laughton, Fonda. Today's last film comes courtesy of another such, or more accurately another two such - Powell and Pressburger. The Small Back Room. Although not nearly in the class of their gloriously colourful classics, A Matter of Life and Death, and Colonel Blimp, The Small Back Room is a taut monochrome dissection of trauma and courage. 79/100.

Monochrome. all that glisters is not gold.   

The Bankruptcy Of A Genius

The genius of whom I speak is Jacques Tati and his financial catastrophe was brought about by the financial demands of his magnificent comedic confection, Playtime.

This film invites you to laugh at the noble silliness of Tati's M. Hulot as he winds in and out of the widescreen modernity of Paris. The dialogue is a glorious mishmash of English and French but the spoken word operates merely as a backing track. I will not spoil any of the recurring gags by describing them because if you get the chance to see this film, I fervently urge you to do so. In the end modernity cannot quell the very human ability to have a good time. In our scarred present, this is a bold tonic. 90/100.   

The Tolkien Franchise

If J.R.R. Tolkien is looking down on us, I wonder if he is rueful about the abundance of riches that have been showered on the hugely significant but lesser literary figure of J.K. Rowling. This (admittedly not very novel) thought occurred the other day as I watched the Japanese Anime stylings of Lord of the Rings: the War of the Rohirrim. 

I have ben immune to the Anime bug but I have to admit that this bit of cartoonery was perfectly passable fun. Nuance and violence nicely mixed, which seems to me to be a fair description of Tolkien's lore. 69/100.
  

Noblesse Oblige And Other Dead Reckonings

Not that I think it causes you any worry but this blog is hard to write these days. I find myself mired in a contrary sludge of happiness and apathy. Happiness at my own good fortune and apathy about the state of local and global politics. We may be going to Hell in a handcart but at least Big Fat Pig has got a nice cart. 

I used to be an employer of a reasonable number of people. I hope I took my responsibilities seriously. Actually let's put false modesty aside, I know I did. Virtue, in this respect at least, is its own reward. Not a point that self-appointed class warriors ever appreciate. I do believe in noblesse oblige even if that makes me a patrician old fart. This is not a point that Donald Trump would understand, even if he could speak French.

His Vileness the Donald is on his second state visit to the UK. Realpolitk perhaps makes this necessary but I would prefer that the odious one not be here. We have, as a country, played host to plenty of worse dictators but we are entitled to expect better from our 'closest ally'. America should know better. Noblesse oblige.

Prince Harry and Meghan Markle - what a pair of tone deaf grifters. I won't bother wasting virtual ink on Prince Andrew and his horrendous ex-wife.

The rule of law. What happened to that as the underpinning of true sovereignty? 

Apathy overwhelms once again. I can't be arsed to moan any further. Take my advice - seek out healthy institutions of any size and concentrate your good offices on their survival. If we all refuse to be worn down by the mediocrities (this is being generous) who govern us and do our small bit, then hope exists.  

   

A Better Space Odyssey

I have been looking back at the various mentions I have made over the years of the alleged masterpiece 2001: A Space Odyssey. I addressed my difficulty with that film in an entry dated 11 October 2019 and gave it a rating of 6.5/10. More interesting than that is the fact that I trace references to it in most other reviews I have posted of science fiction movies. So whatever I have to say (which I accept is of minute significance) about 2001, I have to concede that its influence is far-reaching and that, even to a sceptic like me, it is the reference point for sci-fi.

All of which is a very round-about way of introducing a space movie that I think is better than 2001. Ad Astra (2019) is not without its longeurs but it holds its own as an odyssey played out in the vastness of outer space. It has Brad Pitt giving his best performance and it has the highly estimable Tommy Lee Jones in support playing the enigmatic father Pitt goes in search of. 79/100.