Review of "The Land In Winter" by Andrew Miller

Poignant book about the life of two couples living in the countryside near Bristol, with both the wives pregnant. One of the men is a farmer who appears to have a Rachman-like figure as his father, the other a country doctor having an affair. It sounds a bit dull, but it's so brilliantly written, and the descriptions of the bleakness of both rural and urban life in what I think is the early 1950s is very vivid. 

I've liked everything Andrew Miller has written so far - I think it's all been historical novels so far, so this was a bit different, but still very good.

Review of All of Us Strangers

A beautiful, clever, touching film about love, death, loss, loneliness. Based on a book (the 1987 novel Strangers by Taichi Yamada), which is often a good sign. There was an earlier Japanese adaptation ( The Discarnates) which I would also like to see now.

The plot is about a lonely gay man living in a near-empty newly-built tower block in London, who is visiting his dead parents in his childhood home in a small town to the South of London. It's beautiful done, without much explanation of the mechanism but with plenty of mystery, and it's not entirely clear how it works for the dead parents either.

Watched on Channel 4 catch-up.

Review of "Lacunae and Laocoon: For The Triumph of Democracy over Oligarchy" by Molly Scott Cato

I'm not really sure what the point of this book is. Molly Scott Cato said that she was writing a book about fascism, but it isn't that - fascism gets a bit of a walk on part, but there isn't even much about the relationship between it and the super-rich. It's a bit about some of the mechanisms used by corporations to subvert national governments and so on, though it doesn't seem to have much new in it. If you've been reading say New Internationalist, or even The Guardian, most of this will be familiar. Is it useful because it's a compendium and a guide to the existing literature? Not really...it's not comprehensive or well referenced enough. Does it offer a new way of thinking about it? Not that I noticed.

And it's sort of odd that it's so much about the way that the "rules based international order" is rigged, even as that order seems to be coming to an end and being replaced by something even worse.

There's not much reflection on what democracy means, or why it's a good thing...there's some stuff about the rule of law, also taken to be self evidently a good thing, without much reflection.

Review of The Idea of You

Silly but enjoyable romcom about a woman in her 40s who gets into a relationship with a boyband singer. No dramatic tension, every bit of conflict resolved almost as soon as it appears. Watched on BBC iPlayer or something.

Review of "Clown Town" by Mick Herron

I enjoyed this enough, but it was entirely formulaic. MH just winds up his characters and lets them go. Judd is pompous and conniving, Lamb is snarky and physically revolting, Caroline Standish struggles with her drink problem...

The plot is a thinly veiled version of Stakeknife, come back to haunt the new Labour Prime Minister, who had some hand in it back in the day.

A small mystery is why the right wing press like Herron so much, when his stories are so critical and subversive of their cherished institutions.

Review of Crush

2020 High School teen gay romcom. Light and fluffy - somehow the fact that all the teen romances are lesbian makes the film sweeter and more innocent. Lots of talk about sex, but very little actual sex apart from some teen girl kissing, though the central character's mum does some great dirty talking.

Watched on Channel 4 online.

Review of They Came to a City

A very dated black and white fantasy film from 1944, adapted from a 1943 stage play, in which nine characters from then-contemporary England find themselves in modernist utopia. The nine are supposed to represent a cross-section of English class society - there's a shady businessman, a caricature aristocrat, a charwoman, a seaman, a waitress...and so on.

It's very stage-y - we won't actually see the utopia, just the faces of the characters talking about it from a weird castle overlooking the wonderful city. They go into it, and then return to the castle to talk about it. The upper class characters mainly hate it, and the working class ones mainly love it. From their descriptions it seems a very limited sort of utopia - clean houses and streets, gardens, and everyone happy in their jobs. 

The frame tale is a man and a woman, both in uniform, talking about what England is going to be like after the war, and a stranger (played by J B Priestley, who wrote the play and the film screenplay) comes to describe the story to them.

I couldn't help noticing the accents - which along with the clothes, were the class markers for the characters. The posh accents felt authentic; after all, there's plenty of actual footage of posh people talking from that period, and they more or less all sound like Queen Elizabeth. The working class accents felt wrong - a lot of substitution of "eh" sounds for "ah" sounds - did working class people actually speak like that in the 1940s, or is that just how posh-speaking actors thought they spoke?

Watched on YouTube via Chromecast.

Review of "Hag-Seed" by Margaret Attwood

I think that this might be a picaresque novel...it's about a pompous, self-satisfied and lazy theatre director that gets his deserved comeuppance early in the book, and then - after a miserable decline that's hard to feel too sorry for - plots and achieves revenge over his equally awful enemies. It was not very enjoyable spending so much time in the company of not-so-pleasant people, but I gradually warmed to the book because despite everything Attwood is a such a good storyteller. Much of the narrative takes place in a prison, because the central character becomes the director of a prison theatre program, which he uses for the revenge.

Review of "The Historical David: The Real Life of An Invented Hero" by Joel Baden

Easy to read, slightly repetitive book that aims to decode the Biblical narrative through the methods of text analysis...although the author knows about the archaeological evidence he doesn't go there much. Still, it's from a solid historical perspective, and doesn't do the daft "but what was David really like" stuff that some analysis of Biblical stories that some authors do.

Review of The Teachers' Lounge

Well crafted drama about an episode in a modern German secondary school, in which a young teacher gets caught up when someone (A colleague? A student?) is suspected of stealing from others. The film deals well with racism in the school and among the staff, and with the way that management processes can spiral into a nightmare with minimal bad intention.

Watched on BBC iPlayer.

Review of Corsage

Strange, slow film about the life of Elizabeth Empress of Austria-Hungary. The depiction of her life in the film appears really improbable, but a reading of her actual bio from Wikipedia is even weirder. The film doesn't seem to be very concerned to stick to the historical narrative, which seems odd in a biopic. For example [spoiler alert], it shows Elizabeth committing suicide by jumping into the sea, but the real Elizabeth died as a result of an unlikely assassination.  

It's just about possible that the film is an alternative account of the known facts (rather than a parallel account) because we are shown Elizabeth increasingly changing places with one of her ladies-in-waiting...so maybe she does commit suicide, and it's the lady-in-waiting who dies in the assassination many years later. Of course the Emperor Franz Josef would have had to been in on this, because although they don't spend that much time together they do occasionally have perfunctory sex, and he would surely have noticed.

Despite the slowness I enjoyed it, particularly the depictions of stultifying court life. Elizabeth doesn't seem to have much fun. I note in passing that although the rooms in the Imperial palaces are very grand, the corridors between them are shabby and cluttered with old furniture. Maybe that's how they were.

Review of "We, The Drowned" by Carsten Jensen

Big saga-type book about the seagoing inhabitants of the Danish town/island of Marstal over the period 1848 to 1945 - largely defined by a succession of wars against first Prussia and then Germany. It's also defined by the age of sailing merchant ships and their replacement by steamships; there are lots of vivid descriptions of how hard and injurious the life of the sailors were.

It took me a while to get into it, and I was a bit confused by shifting narrators, but I ended up enjoying it very much.

Review of "A History of The World in 47 Borders" by Jonn Elledge

Read this on holiday, and it was um sort of OK...some interesting geographical peculiarities, some of which I hadn't heard of. I think some of my favourites weren't in then - the enclave of Llivia, for example, a little bit of Spain inside the borders of France. Some others that felt like they could have been left out. A generally politically progressive sort of outlook, but a slightly "chap-ish" sense of humour that didn't land so well with me.