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.