Review of "Mr Phillips" by John Lanchester

How I struggled through this. I like John Lanchester's writing in the LRB, but his fiction leaves me cold. This was particularly depressing. Mr Phillips is a man in his 50s, who has been made redundant from his accountancy job but hasn't told his wife or anyone else yet - and like the Japanese salarymen who might perhaps have inspired the book, he gets dressed for work and heads out for his usual train as if he was going to work. Then he wanders around London all day, thinking about his life, and thinking a lot about sex, and having some interesting and some dull experiences. 

He reflects on the pleasures and frustrations of modern life - this book was published in 2000, but it already feels like ancient history...this is a world with compact disc shops in railway stations. There are no smartphones - there may have been one mobile phone mentioned. There's no internet, no online anything. 

And Mr Phillips, who is eight years older than me, feels like a person from another era. I know he's supposed to be a big dull and emotionally sclerotic, but none of the people I know who are eight years older than me are like this.

Review of "Cahokia Jazz" by Francis Spufford

I really loved this book, but I haven't managed to write a review since finishing it more than two weeks ago - I wonder why not?

Let's started with what I liked. It's alternative history, which is a genre I enjoy - speculative fiction merged with history, what's not to like? And I like the scenario of this one, which is that the variant of smallpox that arrived in North America with the first Europeans was the non-lethal variety, so the Native American population was not devastated. And it ties really nicely into what I recall from The Dawn of Everything including how advanced Native American civilisations were, the existence of potential other routes of development, and Cahokia itself, a Native American urban civilisation.

Spufford has imagined how such a civilisation would have advanced into and alongside the modern, urban, industrial civilisation of the United States - the alt-history Cahokia is part of the US but still somewhat distinct politically and much more distinct culturally.  It's well imagined and beautifully described.

I also like the way that Spufford has avoided those long passages explaining the course of the alternative history - in the best tradition of alt-history there's an author's after-note, but no long explanatory passages. 

As in his book Golden Hill, Spufford - an English white bloke, as far as I know - has a great insight into the workings of race in America. The main character is of Native American descent but grew up in a white-run orphanage, so he both is and isn't connected to the Native American civilisation of Cahokia. And he's a Jazz musician, so his friends are mainly Black Americans, and he's partly connected to their world too.

The actual murder mystery plot, and the other characters - are great too. I was really sorry when it ended.

I'd like to say a bit more about the ending, which has some parallels with what happened at the end of The Lincoln Highway, but that would be a spoiler.

Review of His Three Daughters

Moving but not exactly enjoyable film about three women - two sisters and a half-sister - gathered in a New York apartment to be there for their father in his dying days. There's a few palliative care nurses who come in and out, and a few other characters, but mainly it's just the three women and their difficult relationships.

It feels like it could have been a stage play without much difficulty, even though the youngest of the woman sometimes goes outside the apartment to smoke weed.

Definitely worth watching - and I'd be grateful if someone could explain the ending to me.

Watched on Netflix.

Review of The Big Sleep

Watched this again last night - I've seen it before but I felt like watching it again. I've read the book, which was also confusing. I think I read somewhere that Chandler cobbled it together from bits that he had written, with the result that it's stylish and atmospheric but the plot doesn't really make sense. Also that the screenwriters on the film asked him to explain the plot, and he couldn't. On top of that I think that some things seem to have been cut from the book's narrative - wasn't the Geiger character involved in some sort of porn racket, and wasn't Carmen Rutledge being blackmailed because the photos of her were porn? I didn't get that from the film, though I did have a few little sleeps of my own during it.

Despite all this I did enjoy it. I note in passing that Lauren Bacall was not conventionally pretty, and that Humphrey Bogart would be scrawny by the standards of today's Hollywood. The men all wear great suits and hats, the women - even the minor characters - wear great outfits.

Watched on BBC iPlayer via Chromecast. 

Review of Elizabethtown

Another overlong and somewhat shapeless comedy. It felt like the plot was made up of bits left over from other films...a young man who is a shoe designer for a fictionalised version of Nike has a spectacular (and implausible) failure with one of his projects, decides to kill himself in an implausible and horrible way, but is interrupted by the news that his father has died. He must go back to his father's Kentucky small town hometown, and on the way he meets heartwarming people including the quirky but attractive air stewardess on his otherwise-empty flight, and they fall in love, and...get the idea?

Too long, not funny enough, kept feeling like it should have ended.

Watched on Netflix.

Review of Lee

Biopic about the war photographer Lee Miller. Ruth liked it, I didn't so much - it felt overlong, with terrible stilted dialogue and not very interesting storytelling. Shame, because Kate Winslet's acting is fine, and the cinematography is good too.

I was surprised, though, to find out that Miller covered the war, and took some of the first and most harrowing pictures of the Nazi concentration camps, while working for British Vogue. She's really shocked towards the end when she discovers that Vogue hasn't published her most searing pictures; I'm shocked that she ever thought that it might. 

Watched at the Vue cinema - haven't done that for a while.

Review of La Chimera

Strange Italian film, billed as a "comedy-drama" (that really ought to be a warning bell by now) but with no actual laughs. It's about archaeological looters - grave robbers who find Etruscan tombs, steal the grave goods and sell them to a fence, who sells them on to collectors. The central character is a tall, gangling, troubled English man who has just returned from a prison term and re-establishes contact with his gang of fellow-looters and with an older woman, living in a decaying grand house, who may be the mother of his former (and deceased) lover.  He seems to have some unexplained ability to find graves, either just by feeling them or with a dowsing rod.

There are some fantasy sequences - things that can't happen in a realistic narrative (for example, when the people on a train turn out to be the dead souls of the graves that he has robbed who want their votive offerings back).

There's a particular good, sinister moment when the gang board a grand and marvellous paddle steamer ship where the fence is making a slick sales presentation to some museum curators, including the presentation of documents of provenance which we know to be forged. 

It felt a bit overlong and sometimes confusing, but it was still good.

Watched at Lansdown Hall - a Stroud Film Club showing.

Review of Anna+

 Slow and not entirely interesting Dutch film about a young lesbian whose partner moves to Montreal, and she's supposed to follow in a few months, only they both agree to be open and polyamorous and it doesn't work out well as they both find new people to have sex with. 

Lots of sex in the film, none of which seemed erotic. The young woman identifies as queer but both her and her girlfriend (the word they use in the subtitles) seem very vanilla and un-queer, though there's a bit of drag dressing up with her bunch of lovely lesbian and gay friends.

Watched on Netflix. I'm glad it was there - positive role models for young LGBTQ people and all that - but it was a bit boring for me.

Review of "Another Country" by James Baldwin

I know I am a bit late to the party, but James Baldwin is an amazing writer. This one is set (mainly) in New York and follows the lives of several characters, white and Black, male and female, gay and straight. Close third person narrative, so it feels very immediate but the reader doesn't have a guarantee that it's going to turn out OK, as first person narrator tends to imply. Lots of pain and suffering, as much from gender and orientation as from race - Baldwin is really good at getting inside the heads of different kinds of people. 

Review of "Harlem Shuffle" by Colston Whitehead

This followed on from If Beale Street Could Talk...another book set mainly in Harlem, with a protagonist who has raised himself out of the criminal underclass and into the petit-bourgeois shop trading class (he's a dealer in furniture), but the temptation to re-engage with criminality as a fence continues to loom. It's a very compelling read with strong characters and plot, and another look at what it was like to be a Black person in a "less" racist northern US city.

Review of 3000 Years of Longing

Enjoyable fantasy romp with a bit of an Orientalist slant - sultans, harems, that sort of thing - but it's based on a short story by A S Byatt, and it stars Tilda Swinton, who is pretty much never in anything bad. Surprisingly Ruth enjoyed it too, even though she doesn't really do fantasy much - I think the plot was good enough, and it had a bit of emotional depth.

Review of Joyride

Another Olivia Colman showcase, this time she's Irish and about to give birth to a daughter that she plans to give away to her sister, only she runs into a young boy who's enmeshed in a complex relationship with his really bad dad, a thief and a cheat. Some great chases and escapes, lots of lovely local details. 

Review of Wicked Little Letters

 

A nice period piece of a film, with Olivia Colman as the recipient (and - spoiler alert, but not much of one - the writer) of obscene poison pen letters in Littlehampton. Lots of cameo roles for great British actors - Colman is just great.

Review of "The New Authoritarians Convergence on the Right" by David Renton

 

Declaration of interest - I know David Renton, and I think he's great. He's very astute politically, he avoids glib explanations and snappy prescriptions, and he writes very well in a way that is accessible and intelligent.

So no surprise that I liked this book very much. It makes several very important points; firstly that not every manifestation of the far right is fascist - fascism is a particular form of far right politics, with an emphasis on violence, control of the streets, and a "revolution" against the liberal state. So other versions of the far right, including the electorally successful versions in Europe, North America and Asia, have made their peace with elections and with a version of the liberal state. I don't think Renton says so explicitly, but the main differentiator isn't ideological or policy content. Fascists have been all over the place in terms of policies. They are clearly not free market ideologues, and often advocate a role for the state in managing the economy that would not be out of place in middle-of-the road Social Democracy. 

The second important point is that calling out the far right as fascists isn't only inaccurate, it's also decreasingly effective. There was a time, especially in the 1970s, that it was enough to demonstrate the historic links between the far right and the fascists of the inter-war and wartime periods. Since everyone thought that Nazis and fascists were bad, proving the connection was enough to place the far right outside the domain of acceptable politics. Sadly, that's no longer the case. The taint of Nazism is wearing thin and as a younger generation without personal memories of the antifascist generation don't care nearly so much. Nazism isn't as a toxic as it once was.

Which means that different tactics, and different arguments are called for in confronting the far right in its present manifestations. Responding with classic antifascist rhetoric and tactics is not going to work in the way that it once did.

I think Renton is also saying that addressing the root causes from which the far right draws its strength - in particular the failure of liberal capitalism to live up to its promises - is not only the most comprehensive response to the far right, but it's ultimately the only thing that will be effective.

Review of "Hot Time in the Old Town: The Great Heat Wave of 1896 and the Making of Theodore Roosevelt" by Edward P. Kohn

A slightly plodding account of the New York heatwave of 1896, and the impact that it had on the careers of two American politicians - Teddy Roosevelt and William Jennings Bryan.  Bryan is the more interesting, though the least successful - a failed almost-populist, almost-radical who's career came off the rails at a mass rally in Madison Square Gardens, during the heatwave. The book doesn't say this, but some people think that Bryan was the model for the cowardly lion in The Wizard of Oz. 

Despite this not being a brilliant book there's lots to think about - how our cities are going to cope with climate change, for one thing. And also about how the United States has always been separate economies forced into a single sovereign state, and the Populist moment was about the way that the agricultural west didn't really belong in the same monetary system as the industrial North East. 

Review of "Lily" by Rose Tremain

A Victorian melodrama. It's Rose Tremain, so it's very well written, with lots of beautiful description and a well observed interior life for the main character. Lots about the misery of orphans and foundlings in this time, and a not at all sympathetic portrait of the Coram orphanage. 

I read it during my recent bout of covid, and it was absolutely perfect for that - engaging without being too intellectually or emotionally demanding.

Review of All Quiet on the Western Front

Long, gruelling, realistic...I watched it in four tranches because it was too much all at once. My first thought was that this was actually like being there...without the smells, of course, but with lots of noise and mud and gore. But on reflection, it's not - the cinematic "God's Eye" view means that you see the enemy approaching as you would if you were, because the camera keeps cutting from one side to the other, and providing longer views so that the watcher can understand what's going on. Which means it's not like being there at all.

It does capture the randomness of death and the awful pathos of war, even though this was mainly a war in which combatants died and civilians didn't - perhaps it was the last such war.

I have a dim memory of the first film on the book, and this includes things that I don't remember being in that, as well as leaving out some of the poignant details from that - wasn't the protagonist a butterfly collector? Doesn't he die reaching for a butterfly?

Review of "Pigs in Heaven" by Barbara Kingsolver

A sequel to The Bean Trees, and a much better book - not really positioned as a sequel, but I realised a little way in. Readable without having read the previous book. I read it during my recent bout of covid, and it was just perfect - interesting and engaging enough without being too emotionally taxing (despite themes of racism, abandonment, child abuse and so on). I learned a bit about how racism against Native Americans has worked, and a bit about Cherokee culture. I had a little cry at the end.

Review of "Every Secret Thing: My Family, My Country" by Gillian Slovo

A well-written personal memoir of the Apartheid years and the end of white South Africa by one who was intimately connected with the struggle, this swing back and forward between the big-p political and the entirely personal.

Gillian Slovo is (or at least was, when she wrote the book) still angry with her parents for not loving her as much as they loved the struggle; something she acknowledges herself finding in the children of other figures from the movement, including Mandela's daughter. So there's sometimes a petulant, aggrieved tone to the book, and it doesn't make me want to know the author.

But there's lots to absorb, about what people in the opposition to Apartheid went through, especially those white people in leadership roles - and about the way it played out in their personal lives. 

And I'm aware, too, that it's a little bit of insight into the world in which Ruth grew up, even though her parents were not actively engaged in any kind of anti-Apartheid politics while in South Africa - though they did have personal relationships with many of the people that were. 

Every so often Slovo seems to remember that her parents were both Jewish, but it doesn't feature in a major way - maybe it didn't for them either. Some of the considerations of this seem implausible - could her grandmother really have forgotten her childhood Yiddish so thoroughly that she was no longer able to speak to her own mother?

Review of The Ballad of Buster Scruggs

I'd never heard of this film (even though it came out several years ago), until I came across it in covid-dazed mindless scrolling through reels on Facebook. I almost never do this, but I sought out the film and watched it (lots of time during covid, I can't do much else). Unlike many reviewers I think it's great - beautifully filmed, lots of great actors, and cleverly crafted if somewhat bleak stories, each one perfect in its own right as a critique of the American dream and fantasies about the Old West.

Well worth watching.

It's on Netflix but I foolishly watched it via informal channels, meaning I had to faff about with USB stick unecessarily.