“People say I have a period face” (Tom Hiddleston)

October 5, 2015June 6, 2018 / madamebibilophile / 22 Comments

Judge for yourselves, ladies and gents:

Tom_Hiddleston_Comic_Con_2016

I would say 1920s myself, although I bet he gives good late-18^th century too (dedicated to my friend M, who has never quite recovered from the fact that both Benedict Cumberbatch and Jamie Parker insist on being married to women who aren’t her).

This week I received my dissertation results. It was much sooner than I expected, as frankly, I’m still in recovery from the whole thing. I’d love to claim I’ve learnt loads about ritualistic bloodshed on the late Jacobean stage, but in reality what I’ve learnt is that you should never, ever, never under any circumstances attempt to undertake a full-time MA while also working full-time (even if your results are good 😉 ).

Now that I have some spare time the main thing I’ve been doing is… nothing at all. Bliss. I am vegging out to my bursting-at-the-seams digibox and of course, reading for pleasure. Hence this week I thought I’d look at books that have been adapted for the small screen (sadly neither feature Tom Hiddleston). I should say from the off that I won’t be looking at the behemoth of literary adaptations which currently dominates popular culture in almost all its forms:

Sorry ‘bout that.

The BBC normally saves its big literary adaptations for the autumn season, but there were two broadcast over the summer to whet the appetite of us bookish types, which I had to delay watching. Now I have handed in my millstone I’ve finally been able to watch them both (but as this is a book blog I’ll be concentrating on the paper versions).

Firstly, Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, by Susanna Clarke. This was adapted into an impressive (and pretty expensive-looking) seven-part series, featuring two fine actors who I’ll watch in anything, Eddie Marsan and Bertie Carvel:

It’s fair to say I am not the target audience for this novel. Magicians, meh. However, the fact that I made it through this close to 800 page tome is a ringing endorsement. Clarke has written a very readable alternative history of England during the Napoleonic wars, whereby Wellington employs magician Jonathan Strange to help him beat Napoleon:

“In the early summer of 1813 Strange again performed a sort of magic the like of which had not had not been done since the days of the Raven King: he moved a river. It happened like this. The war that summer was going well and everything Lord Wellington did was crowned with success. However it so happened that one particular morning in June the French found themselves in a more advantageous position than had been the case for some time. …His lordship was in really excellent spirits that summer and he greeted Strange almost affectionately. ‘Ah Merlin! There you are! Here is our problem! We are on one side of the river and the French are on the other side and it would suit me much better if the positions were reversed.”

Strange of course obliges. Back home, his scholarly mentor Mr Norrell disapproves, thinking English magic belongs in books, to be rarely practiced by himself first and foremost, and secondly by Strange “yet within Mr Norrell’s dry little heart there was [a] lively ambition to bring magic back to England”.

The two men are entirely different – dashing, ironic, friend-of-Byron Strange, and small, anti-social Norrell “the dullest man in Yorkshire”. Of course, they are entirely similar too, and of course they quarrel horribly. While there is war abroad, there are tensions at home, and not all of them between England’s foremost magicians. An evil faery, with the entirely excellent appellation of The Gentleman With Thistle-Down Hair is going round enchanting people to his evil ends:

“’Yet we ought to kill someone,’ said the gentleman, immediately reverting to his former subject. “I have been quite put out of temper this morning and someone ought to die for it. What do you say to the old magician? –Oh, but wait! That would oblige the younger one, which I do not want to do! What about Lady Pole’s husband? He is tall and arrogant and treats you like a servant!’

‘But I am a servant, sir.’

‘Or the King of England! Yes, that is an excellent plan! Let you and I go immediately to the King of England.’”

Will the Gentleman with Thistle-Down Hair be stopped? Will Strange and Norrell reconcile? Will the Raven King return to claim his place as Lord of English Magic? The only spoiler you’ll get from me is… England wins the Napoleonic Wars.

I’ve mentioned before that I love Marc Warren as a baddie, and so special mention must be made to his performance in the BBC adaptation as the Gentleman with Thistle-Down Hair – another great performance, another great outfit:

Image from here

Secondly, The Outcast by Sadie Jones, which was adapted into a two-part drama:

Damn, this was hard-going. Not because of Jones’ writing, I hasten to add, but because the injustice of the treatment towards a nine year-old boy who loses his mother is infuriating, and the hypocrisy that surrounds him is absolutely sickening. Lewis Aldridge grows up in 1950s Surrey, in a village built on things unsaid. When his sparkling, vivacious, alcoholic mother drowns with Lewis the only witness, he and his father spiral into separate pits of despair, unable to reach out to one another:

“he saw the moment between the not knowing and the knowing, as he woke, and he recognised it, because it was how he felt on waking too. He wanted to obliterate it. He wanted to take his son’s head in his hands and crush the feeling from it. He wanted to hold him hard and kiss him and make Lizzie come back to them through loving him badly enough. He wanted to hide his face and never think of it again.”

Jones is very good at this, capturing the messy, conflicting, contradictory emotions housed within one person, behind a still façade. Lewis becomes an expert at this outer calm, learning to bury all that he lacks the words to express:

“He didn’t feel sad anymore, it just went away and he felt hard as anything, hard as a diamond…

‘Lewis? Do come back in. Please.’

What could he do? He went.”

Lewis’ unnatural calm disturbs people; they find him uncomfortable and so they isolate him. He is unable to join in with the social niceties layered upon the secrets and lies of post-war British society and so this innocent, damaged boy is excluded, while a wife-and-child-beating sadist is welcomed as the powerhouse of village society. The Outcast is a novel that had me outraged at the injustice of it all, and at the cruelty of the refusal to acknowledge another’s pain “the world had exploded, but Sunday lunch would go ahead as usual.”

Lewis’ behaviour becomes violent as his desperation emerges in uncontrolled outbursts. The locals refuse to see their own complicity in what happens to him, and only Kit Carmichael, a fellow outsider, sees the village and Lewis for what they are. She loves him, but are they both too damaged to find their way to each other?

The Outsider is psychologically acute, well-paced, and unflinching in its portrayal of the damage human beings can do each other:

“It was an odd feeling, a looking-glass feeling, that he had, that all his life he had been on one side of the glass with everybody else on the other and now the glass had broken and the thick, broken pieces were at all of their feet.”

When I was cemented to my chair for 14 hours a day giving myself RSI through poor typing technique in a desperate attempt to meet the dissertation deadline, I would time my short breaks to the length of a Tim Minchin video. They broke the monotony, made me laugh, and stopped a short break spiralling into half a day. Here he is singing about not being cool which, now my MA is in, is the obvious topic choice for my doctorate as I have a lifetime of research behind me (contains strong language):

“You have a grand gift for silence, Watson. It makes you quite invaluable as a companion.” (Sherlock Holmes/Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)

December 9, 2013April 22, 2014 / madamebibilophile / 10 Comments

Yesterday I was vegging out in front of the TV, when I saw something that got me very excited:

Sherlock’s back! Sherlock’s back! Sherlock’s back!

OK, now I’ve composed myself, let’s have a discussion about books. Sherlock’s back!

I’ve gone the obvious route for my first choice, one of the original Sherlock Holmes stories, The Hound of the Baskervilles by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. I chose it because I think this was the first story that made me aware of Sherlock Holmes, watching an old black and white film version starring Basil Rathbone on TV (my mother told me the books were much better and the portrayal of Watson was rubbish – how right she was). The story is not long, but it crams a great deal in, and is a fast-paced, creepily gothic read. The story is narrated by Holmes’ loyal companion Dr Watson, who remains loyal despite being on the receiving end of such back-handed compliments from Holmes as: “It may be that you are not yourself luminous, but you are a conductor of light. Some people without possessing genius have a remarkable power of stimulating it. I confess, my dear fellow, that I am very much in your debt.” Charming. The two are employed by Dr Mortimer to investigate the death of Sir Charles Baskerville, and potential danger to his heir, Sir Henry Baskerville. Henry has inherited a huge pile in the middle of Dartmoor, and rumours of a supernatural, vicious hound that roams the moor abound. The eerie atmosphere is beautifully evoked, such as Watson’s first view of Baskerville Hall:

“We had left the fertile country behind and beneath us. We looked back on it now, the slanting rays of a low sun turning the streams to threads of gold and glowing on the red earth new turned by the plough and the broad tangle of the woodlands. The road in front of us grew bleaker and wilder over huge russet and olive slopes, sprinkled with giant boulders. Now and then we passed a moorland cottage, walled and roofed with stone, with no creeper to break its harsh outline. Suddenly we looked down into a cuplike depression, patched with stunted oaks and firs which had been twisted and bent by the fury of years of storm. Two high, narrow towers rose over the trees. The driver pointed with his whip.

“Baskerville Hall,” said he.

[…]

The avenue opened into a broad expanse of turf, and the house lay before us. In the fading light I could see that the centre was a heavy block of building from which a porch projected. The whole front was draped in ivy, with a patch clipped bare here and there where a window or a coat of arms broke through the dark veil. From this central block rose the twin towers, ancient, crenelated, and pierced with many loopholes. To right and left of the turrets were more modern wings of black granite. A dull light shone through heavy mullioned windows, and from the high chimneys which rose from the steep, high-angled roof there sprang a single black column of smoke.

“Welcome, Sir Henry! Welcome to Baskerville Hall!””

The story really is expertly crafted, and it’s understandable why Sherlock Holmes endures. Doyle succeeds in writing pacey, interesting, atmospheric tales that keep you hooked until the end. And of course, at the centre of it all is one of the most intriguing characters ever created: a brilliant mind for whom no detail is insignificant, and whose genius means he is stimulated in ways that the rest of us may not fully comprehend: “He burst into one of his rare fits of laughter as he turned away from the picture. I have not heard him laugh often, and it has always boded ill to somebody.”

I’ll stop right there before I give away any spoilers as to the mystery. On to my second choice, Whose Body? by Dorothy L Sayers (1923, my copy 2003, Hodder & Stoughton). Sayers is one of the authors identified with the Golden Age of Detective Fiction, and this novel is the first to feature Lord Peter Wimsey, an aristocratic amateur detective, who likes to “go off Sherlocking” and went on to feature in many more novels and short stories by Sayers.

I found this novel hugely enjoyable. It was well-paced (maybe flagging a little towards the end, but maybe I’m just used to Hollywood-style rapid denouements) it was witty, and didn’t take itself too seriously, with a few meta-comedy moments at the expense of detective fiction: “Sugg’s a beautiful, braying ass,” said Lord Peter. “he’s like a detective in a novel…”; “Its only in Sherlock Holmes and stories like that , that people think things out logically.”

As the meta moments suggest, Sayers is a clever novelist. But I never felt she was trying to prove how clever she was. The story, of a body found in a bathtub and a missing family friend (events Lord Peter believes are connected), remains believable and accessible. Sayers has a confident voice in her first novel, and an interesting turn of phrase: “His long, amiable face looked as if it had generated spontaneously from his top hat, as white maggots breed from Gorgonzola.”

I have one proviso to this recommendation: I found offensive the anti-Semitic remarks made by some characters in Whose Body? . The inter-war period was obviously a time that saw a growth in fascism throughout Europe with devastating consequences, and Sayers is probably just putting in her characters’ mouths the repugnant views that were expressed at the time. According the Wikipedia page on Sayers, she was surprised at accusations of anti-Semitism in Whose Body?, stating the only characters “treated in a favourable light were the Jews!” Certainly those who express anti-Jewish views are generally portrayed as old-fashioned and/or stupid, but it still makes for uncomfortable reading in this day and age.

I don’t want to end on a negative, so for all you fellow bibliophiles out there, here is a description of Lord Peter’s favourite room:

“Lord Peter’s library was one of the most delightful bachelor rooms in London. Its scheme was black and primrose; its walls were lined with rare editions, and its chairs and Chesterfield sofa suggested the embraces of the houris. In one corner stood a black baby-grand, a wood fire leaped on a wide old-fashioned hearth, and the Sevres vases on the chimney-piece were filled with ruddy and gold chrysanthemums.”

I for one could spend hours in that room.

Normally I finish with a picture of the books, but they have disappeared, nowhere to be found. ‘Tis truly a mystery: who could I call on, that is up to the task of solving this curious case…..?