Review of "Disobedient" by Elizabeth Fremantle

A fictionalised biography of the early life of Artemisia Gentileschi, a real Italian baroque painter. A bit slow to get started, but I was gradually drawn in and quite enjoyed it. Lots of textural detail, fabrics and smells and birdsong.

I felt a bit annoyed by the violation of the convention that close third person narrative shouldn't switch between the inner lives and thoughts of multiple characters, but maybe that's a bit nit-picky.

Review of Bowie: The Final Act

Relatively nice and enjoyable Channel 4 documentary about Bowie's life and career, showing off his extraordinary talent, but also his remarkable fragility - how he wept when his rather dreary old school rock band venture "Tin Machine" was panned by critics. 

Review of "The Matchbox Girl" by Alice Jolly

Amazing, clever, beautifully crafted book that left me emotionally drained when I'd finished it. It's written from the perspective of a young girl (who becomes a woman during the course of the narrative) with autism in Vienna in the 1930s, through the Anschluss and the Nazi period. The girl is sent to the institute in which Hans Asperger works, and the book explores his contribution to the care of autistic patients and his engagement with the Nazi regime. Asperger didn't join the Nazi party, unlike many of his doctor colleagues, but he seems to have gone further than he might have done in sending some children off to be exterminated.

There's so much to say about the book - the clever structure, the narrative style, the characters real and invented, the texture of wartime Vienna - just get it and read it.

Review of "The System of The World" by Neal Stephenson

The third in the series, and now that I've finished it I'm a bit bereft. Just as fabulous as the other two volumes. I was sure that I'd read the whole trilogy 20 years ago, but this one brought back no memories, so maybe I bought it but never even started it. Anyway it's again brilliant, and it's a bit sad that it will never be made into a glorious TV series - but it won't because it's too big and broad, with too many plot lines and events.

Everything is brought to a conclusion and pretty much everything is finished and tied up, in a mainly happy way. Still plenty of anachronistic jokes, which I continued to enjoy.

I was aware that my historical knowledge of this period, after the Restoration and the "Glorious Revolution", is really sketchy - I didn't realise how much I didn't know about the Hanoverian succession.

Review of The Master

For some reason everyone seems to think that this is a magnificent film, but I'm not sure why. It's atmospheric, and the acting is good to watch, but it's also overlong and a bit boring. It's a not-very-well disguised biopic of L Ron Hubbard, and actually a real biopic would have been better. Apparently there's an HBO documentary, and other thinly disguised fictional depictions (The Profit, for one).

Review of Marty Supreme

Odd, long but captivating sports film. It's early 1950s New York, and young Marty Mauser works in his uncle's shoe shop while developing his career as a table tennis champion. Marty is a hustler and borderline small-time crook and fraud, with no regard for anyone else, including the young woman downstairs who is pregnant with his child and the many friends that give him much more loyalty than he deserves.

It looks like an older film, gloomy and washed out, though this might have something to do with the copy that I obtained, which has a watermark and some odd splashes of colour.

Marty is not a likeable character, but neither are most of the other people in the film. Still, I was completely engaged - I didn't look at my phone once.

Informal distribution, with some odd downsides. I couldn't find a version that would transfer to a USB stick, and then when I did it was in an odd unsupported format that needed a new codec, and so on.

Review of Prime Minister

Sympathetic and engaging portrait of Jacinda Ahearn, Prime Minister of New Zealand - who comes across as really nice and normal, even though she has had no career or work experience outside politics. Made possible in part by the footage taken by her rock-solid loyal partner, and by an audio diary that she kept.

For me the most unsettling part was the portrayal of the anti-vaxxers' demonstrations, which wore her down until she was ready to resign, despite a strong majority in parliament. We avoided this in the UK, even though there were big "freedom rallies" in London and elsewhere, in part because the government was half-way to their position, in particular sacrificing safeguards and lives in the name of "the economy". 

Watched via informal distribution.

Review of "The Confusion" by Neal Stephenson

I read this twenty years ago, loved it then and loved it on the re-reading. It's not possible to do a plot summary, even if I didn't care about not delivering spoilers. The plot is too big and rambling - not helped by the fact that it's really two slightly linked books, one set across the globe involving a group of ex-slaves in a complicated plot to steal Spanish gold, and one in central Europe involving some jobbing monarchs who eventually become the Hanoverian dynasty in England. 

It's just brilliant, read Quicksilver and then read this.