Month: August 2023

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The power of Friedkin compels you! (Part 2)

 

© Hoya Productions / Warner Bros. Pictures

 

William Friedkin’s most influential movie arrived two years after The French Connection.  This was his horror masterpiece about a demonically-possessed child, The Exorcist (1973), which achieved two things the mainstream  film industry had previously thought impossible.  Firstly, it showed that horror movies could do big box-office business (something reinforced by Steven Spielberg’s Jaws two years later).  Secondly, it proved that horror movies could be as hard-hitting and adult in tone as anything coming from the New Hollywood Generation, who shook up American filmmaking in the 1970s and included Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, Peter Bogdanovich, Paul Schrader and John Milius.  Mind you, the idea of serious horror movies had diminished again by the 1980s.  That was when many horror filmmakers decided it was more fun to tell stories about horny teenagers being murdered in inventive ways by homicidal maniacs in hockey masks.

 

The Exorcist was released in cinemas around the time I first saw The Night They Raided Minsky’s on TV.  My family was living in Northern Ireland then and I remember a young guy called Lawrence Timlin, who worked for my dad, telling me about how he’d seen The Exorcist twice.  The first time was during his wanderings in London and the second time was after he’d returned home to Northern Ireland.  The version he’d seen in a Northern Irish cinema, he said indignantly, had had many things cut out of it, no doubt from fear of what Northen Ireland’s sizeable communities of religious nutcases (both Catholic and Protestant) would say if they were left in.  Mind you, that didn’t stop those nutcases picketing cinemas when the film opened in the province anyway.

 

A decade later, when I finally saw The Exorcist, it wasn’t in ideal circumstances.  I was at college and staying in a hall of residence.  The hall’s residents’ committee organised a showing of it one Sunday afternoon.  As a result, I saw it in a common room with about 40 other people, all of us squinting at a TV set, on which it was playing from a VCR.  Definitely not a big-screen experience.  Still, I was lucky that I saw it at all.  For, in a decision that highlights yet again the cultural idiocy of Maggie-Thatcher-era Britain, video sales of The Exorcist were banned by the British Board of Film Classification in 1988.  They were afraid of the effect it might have on ‘young people’ who saw it at home: “At the cinema it had been relatively easy to ensure that young people would be excluded, but video was another matter.”  Home video sales of The Exorcist remained illegal in the UK until 1999.  At least in 1998 I managed to catch it in a cinema, on a big screen at last, during a special release marking its 25th anniversary.

 

I have misgivings about The Exorcist’s philosophy.  I find facile its depiction of evil as an opportunistic, external force – when the idea that evil is something internal, that potentially resides inside every human being and can be activated by the right combination of circumstances (especially weakness of character), is more disturbing.  Even more facile is the idea that the Catholic Church is the line of defence holding evil at bay.  That seems laughable today, given that in the half-century since 1973 it’s become clear that the church’s cassocked ranks have harboured far more threats to young people than video sales of The Exorcist could ever have posed.

 

But those are issues I’d blame on the movie’s script and source novel by William Peter Blatty.  Its performances and Friedkin’s direction can’t be faulted.  He handles the famous set-pieces – rotating heads, projectile vomiting, the manifestation of the demon Pazuzu to Father Merrin (Max von Sydow) in Iraq – with aplomb.  And von Sydow’s arrival at the residence of Chris MacNeil (Ellen Burstyn) and possessed daughter Reagan (Linda Blair), when he stands silhouetted in mist, his outline delineated by a glowing streetlamp mixed with a shaft of light from an upstairs bedroom-window, is absolutely magical – perhaps the most seminal image of the horror genre.  The insertion of music from Mike Oldfield’s classic prog-rock album Tubular Bells (1973) during an early scene works brilliantly too.  And I say that as someone who normally hates progressive rock.

 

© Hoya Productions / Warner Bros. Pictures

 

Seven years later, Friedkin generated more controversy with his 1980 thriller Cruising.  This has Al Pacino playing a New York cop who goes undercover in the city’s gay S&M scene, in order to track down a serial killer who’s murdering gay men.  I didn’t see Cruising until the 1990s and I watched it at the insistence of an ex-girlfriend who was enthralled by the film.  Maybe she got turned on by seeing Al Pacino in a tableau of gay sex and S&M.  The film was condemned by New York’s gay community, who felt that by focusing on the city’s ‘leather bars’ it was linking all gay culture with violent sex.  In the film’s defence, Pacino claimed that it concentrated only on one sub-culture and could no more be accused of slandering the whole gay community than a film that dealt with the Mafia could be accused of slandering the whole Italian-American community.  Maybe so, but in 1980 mainstream America was a lot more aware of and at ease with its Italian-American component than it was with its gay component.  It might be able to distinguish between the specific and general in the former community, but could it do so in the latter?

 

Whatever – despite the issues about what it portrayed and how it portrayed it, I think Cruising is a pretty good thriller.  Though I obviously didn’t get the kick out of it that my ex-girlfriend did.

 

It was also in the 1990s that I saw a Friedkin movie that made me wonder if, creatively, he’d fired his last bolt.  This was the 1990 horror movie The Guardian, which has Jenny Seagrove playing an angelic English nanny who’s actually a dryad.  She abducts the children entrusted to her care and sacrifices them to the gnarly old tree that she’s an extension of.  Seagrove had form playing mythological creatures, having turned up in Bill Forsyth’s Local Hero (1983) as a mermaid who bewitches Peter Capaldi.

 

Horror movies about trees are generally not good – see From Hell It Came (1957), The Woman Eater (1958), Maneater of Hydra (1967) or the anthology movie Tales That Witness Madness (1973), which has an episode where Joan Collins is spurned by her husband because he’s become obsessed with a weirdly human-female-shaped tree trunk he’s found out in the woods.  (No jokes please about the tree trunk being a better actress.)  The Guardian unfortunately doesn’t buck the trend.  About the nicest comment about it was made by Time Out magazine, which chortlingly described it as: “A severely flawed but not unamusing venture from a director who should know better.”  The film was co-scripted by the estimable Welsh writer Stephen Volk.  It was Volk, apparently, who got Friedkin hooked on the tree angle – the film’s source novel, Dan Greenburg’s The Nanny (1987), has no such material in it.  However, once Volk had shown Friedkin the 1904 short story The Ash-Tree by M.R. James, the director was adamant.  His movie had to have a killer tree!

 

© Universal Pictures

 

But happily, Friedkin enjoyed a renaissance in the early 21st century.  This was largely thanks to an association with the playwright Tracy Letts.  First came the claustrophobic and entomophobic Bug (2006), based on Letts’ 1996 play of the same name and starring Ashley Judd and Michael Shannon.  Many people reacted to Bug by hailing it as an accomplished horror movie, which caused Friedkin to grumpily complain that it was no such thing.  For him it was ‘a black comedy love story.’  Well, I consider Bug to be both a pretty smart horror movie and an unsettling character study, with its two lead actors playing the messed-up protagonists with wonderful intensity.

 

Then in 2011 we got Killer Joe, an adaptation of Letts’ 1993 play, again of the same name.  This is about a family of Texan trailer trash hiring the titular hitman (Matthew McConaughey) to rub out their estranged wife / mother so they can get their hands on her life insurance policy.  A flamboyantly unhinged character, Joe agrees to the job, but only if he gets custody of the family’s youngest daughter, the simple-minded Dottie (Juno Temple), as a down-payment for it.  An unhealthy relationship soon develops between Dottie and the forty-something Joe.  “How are you gonna kill my mama?” she asks him at one point. “That’s not appropriate dinner conversation, Dottie,” he chides her.

 

From there, things become even darker and there’s a simultaneously horrific and hilarious finale that involves the family’s devious stepmother (Gina Gershon) being forced to do some unspeakable stuff with a chicken drumstick.  Killer Joe is an excellent slice of ‘Southern Gothic’ and benefits hugely from a barnstorming central performance by McConaughy.  When he warns, “If you insult me again, I will cut off your face and wear it over my own – do you understand?”, you believe him.

 

There are still Friedkin movies I haven’t seen but would like to.  I hear that 1985’s To Live and Die in L.A. with William Petersen and Willem Dafoe is very good, and I’d also like to catch up with his 1968 film version of Harold Pinter’s play The Birthday Party with Robert Shaw, Dandy Nichols and Patrick Magee.  The latter film was produced by Max J. Rosenberg and Milton Subotsky, whose company Amicus Productions was better known for making horror films.  I doubt if it’s a coincidence that images from Rosenberg and Subotsky’s first-ever horror venture, 1960’s City of the Dead, appear on a television screen during a scene in Killer Joe.

 

So… William Friedkin was a filmmaker who brought us harrowing tales of serial killers, deranged hitmen and psychotic cops.  He raced cars against elevated trains and coaxed explosives-laden trucks across flimsy rope bridges.  He consorted with monstrous woodland entities, with the devil, and with Norman Wisdom.  He even managed to make progressive rock sound cool – twice.  Truly a man of many achievements.

 

© Voltage Pictures / LD Entertainment

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The power of Friedkin compels you! (Part 1)

 

From wikipedia.org / © Guillem Medina

 

I was very young when a film made by William Friedkin, the great American director who died earlier this month, first unsettled me.  I was about eight or nine years old when I learnt that the BBC was going to show his 1968 movie The Night They Raided Minsky’s one evening.  The TV listings in the newspaper assured me this was a comedy film, starring the zany performer Norman Wisdom, who could best be described as Britain’s answer to the USA’s Jerry Lewis.  When I was eight or nine, I absolutely loved Norman Wisdom.  I adored the knockabout slapstick he specialised in and the gormless man-child persona he affected for his roles.  You couldn’t dissuade me from my belief that such efforts as The Bulldog Breed (1960), in which Norman joins the Royal Navy and ends up being launched into outer space in an experimental rocket, or The Early Bird (1965), in which Norman plays a humble milkman who takes on and outwits a ruthless dairy corporation that’s trying to muscle in on his milk-delivery patch, were the best movies ever.

 

Thus, I was rather perturbed when I sat down to watch The Night They Raided Minsky’s and discovered it wasn’t a typical Norman Wisdom vehicle.  Rather than a knockabout comedy, it was a nostalgic, bitter-sweet film about knockabout comedy, as it was enacted in American burlesque theatres in the 1920s.  It was also, I realised to my horror, a bit risqué.  It told the story of a naïve Amish girl (Britt Ekland) who runs away to the big city, tries to fulfil her dream of making a career onstage, and ultimately but accidentally invents the striptease routine. Every time the film featured a boob gag, I’d nervously look over my shoulder in case my parents had entered the room.

 

Needless to say, since then, my opinion of Norman Wisdom’s oeuvre has been revised, downwards.  I’ve also managed to see The Night They Raided Minsky’s again, at an age when I no longer found it baffling and was able to appreciate its tone and subject matter.  It’s not great, but it’s likeable and benefits from a marvellous cast: Ekland, Elliott Gould, Jason Robards, Forest Tucker, Harry Andrews, Denholm Elliott, Joseph Wiseman and Bert Lahr, who’d played the Cowardly Lion in The Wizard of Oz (1939).  In the film’s final images, Lahr is shown ruefully treading the boards of the now-deserted theatre, after the titular police raid, with the implication that as far as burlesque is concerned, this is the end of an era.  (It was also the end, alas, for Lahr, who died of cancer during production.)  And, credit where it’s due, Wisdom is pretty good in the movie too.

 

© Tandem Productions / United Artists

 

The Night They Raided Minsky’s was film number three on William Friedkin’s CV and was a credible third film for a director in his early thirties.  Mind you, based on it, you’d hardly predict the stunning commercial and critical success that awaited him in the next decade.

 

Half-a-dozen years later, I was also unsettled by the second Friedkin movie I saw, 1977’s Sorcerer, shown on TV while I was a typical teenager, i.e., I saw myself as hardened, cynical and incapable of being fazed by anything.  Sorcerer made an impression because it did faze me.

 

A remake of Henri-Georges Clouzot’s The Wages of Fear (1953), it tells the story of four dregs of humanity – a Mexican hitman (Francisco Rabal), a Palestinian terrorist (Hamidou Benmessaoud), a French businessman fleeing fraud charges (Bruno Cremer) and an Irish-American crook who has the Mafia after him (Roy Scheider) – hired to drive two ramshackle trucks carrying two loads of volatile explosives across a natural assault course of overgrown jungle paths, rocky mountain-trails and decrepit rope bridges.  The explosives, ancient sticks of dynamite so decayed they’ve started to leak their prime ingredient, nitroglycerin, are needed to extinguish a fire that’s consuming an oil well in a remote part of South America.

 

I was rattled by Sorcerer because I wasn’t prepared for how brutal, cynical and hard-as-nails it was.  From its unflinching images of accident victims – bloodied ones after the getaway car Schneider and his gang are using crashes in New Jersey, charred ones after the initial explosion at the oil well – to the squalor of the village from which the four men set out on their ultra-dangerous mission – mud, shacks, chickens, feral dogs, feral policemen, Big-Brother-type political posters bearing the features of the local military dictator, barefoot kids whose only function is to mindlessly chase after the jeeps that occasionally rumble through the place, sordid bars where the only thing missing is the author Malcolm Lowry sitting on a barstool, getting sozzled on tequila – to everything that nature flings against them during their nightmarish odyssey – torrential rain, sweltering heat, choking vegetation, raging torrents, treacherous quicksand and toppled trees – Sorcerer knocked me for six.  And ladled over that is the film’s relentless nihilism, which makes it plain there’s going to be no happy endings for anyone.  Teenaged kid, Sorcerer seemed to tell me, you still have some growing up to do!

 

© Universal Pictures / Paramount Pictures

 

The film’s master set-piece, of course, is the sequence where the quartet have to get their trucks across a falling-apart rope bridge, above a swollen river, during a mini-hurricane – which at one point sends a fallen tree scudding along the water and crashing into them.  Appropriately, this provides the vertiginous image that appears on Sorcerer’s poster.  The film’s stunt coordinator was the Bud Ekins, who’d doubled for Steve McQueen during the climactic motorbike chase in The Great Escape (1963), though I’ve read that the cast did many of the stunts themselves.  There’s also a pulsing, needling soundtrack by German prog-rock band Tangerine Dream, which Friedkin wisely refrains from overusing.

 

On its release, Sorcerer was a financial disaster – coming out at the same time as a wee film called Star Wars (1977) probably didn’t help – and received a critical drubbing.  Leading the charge was Britain’s notoriously prissy, reactionary whinging-film-critic-in-chief Leslie Halliwell, who lamented, “Why anyone should have wanted to spend twenty million dollars on a remake of The Wages of Fear, do it badly and give it a misleading title is anybody’s guess.  The result is dire.”  Happily, Sorcerer had now been re-evaluated and is recognised as one of the very best American action-thrillers of the 1970s.

 

Roy Scheider turned up again in the next William Friedkin movie I encountered, 1971’s The French Connection, the one that put him on the map and won him a Best Director Oscar.  Lauded for its grittiness, as exemplified by Gene Hackman (who bagged an Oscar too) in the lead role of rumpled and rowdy detective Eddie ‘Popeye’ Doyle, The French Connection manages to have its cake and eat it – for while it oozes with authentic, documentary-style 1970s New York grime and sleaze, it also serves up some classic, if hardly realistic, action set-pieces.  Most notable of these is the legendary chase between a car and an elevated train, which Friedkin filmed without proper permission.  The sequence also necessitated the head of the New York Transit Authority being bribed so that one of their trains could be ‘borrowed’.  Indeed, it sounds like Friedkin indulged in the same sort of ‘guerilla filmmaking’ that nine years later Lucio Fulci did when he shot the New York parts of his horror opus Zombie Flesh Eaters (1980) – he’d have his crew turn up in city locations, start filming and then run like hell when the police appeared.  (There. I’ve just mentioned William Friedkin in the same sentence as Lucio Fulci.  The famously cantankerous Friedkin would hate me for that.)

 

Incidentally, classic though The French Connection is, I think its sequel, John Frankenheimer’s imaginatively titled French Connection II (1975), is equally good.  This sees Doyle pursue Alain Charnier, the smooth French drug-mastermind of the original film (who was played by Fernando Rey, actually a Spaniard), back to Marseille.  This leads to culture clashes galore.  Predictably and hilariously, Doyle shows zero diplomacy while dealing with the locals, including the exasperated Marseille police force.  He’s surely the most boorish American to ever descend upon France – well, until 2018, when Donald Trump rocked up there for the 100th anniversary of the Armistice at the end of World War One.

 

© Philip D’Antoni Productions / 20th Century Fox

 

Stay tuned for the second instalment of this entry, when I talk about my experiences of William Friedkin’s The Exorcist (1973), Cruising (1980) and Killer Joe (2011)! 

 

Cue Mike Oldfield’s Tubular Bells…

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Hungry like the Alpha Wolf

 

 

I remember sometime in the 1990s reading an interview with the late, legendary radio DJ John Peel, who was an enthusiastic proponent of extreme heavy metal.  Peel talked about the oddness of going to see a band like the aptly-titled Extreme Noise Terror and realising that he was three times the average age of the punters in the auditorium.

 

That was exactly how I felt a week-and-a-half ago when I went to Singapore’s Aliwal Arts Centre to attend a gig by the Australian metalcore band Alpha Wolf.  Such was the youthfulness of those around me, and such was my own feeling of decrepitude, that I wondered if I should just send myself up, impersonate Steve Buscemi in the popular Internet meme (taken from a 2012 episode of the TV show 30 Rock) and declare, “How do you do, fellow kids?”

 

Metalcore, Wikipedia informs me, “is a fusion genre combining elements of extreme metal and hardcore punk… noted for its use of breakdowns, which are slow, intense passages conducive to moshing.”  A list of metalcore bands I’ve found on the Internet contains such names as Killswitch Engage and the Dillinger Escape Plan, bands whose albums have resided in my record collection for many years.  Wow, I thought, I’ve owned metalcore music without even knowing it was metalcore! 

 

Meanwhile, when I looked at Alpha Wolf’s Wikipedia entry, I discovered that they’d taken their name from the 2011 Liam Neeson thriller The Grey, which is about the survivors of a plane crash in an uninhabited part of Alaska being picked off one-by-one by a pack of hungry wolves.  At one point, Neeson’s character, a wolf expert, explains that the beasts are led by a fearsome ‘alpha wolf, which is apparently the Alien Queen of the lupine world.  However, as the band come from Tasmania, I wonder if their name was also partly inspired by their island’s most famous extinct animal, the Tasmanian wolf.

 

 

One nice thing about the Alpha Wolf gig was that support was provided by not one, nor two, but three local bands.  It fascinates me that a place as famously orderly and respectable as Singapore can produce so many bands specialising in the supposedly disorderly and disreputable genre of heavy metal.  Those support bands were Tariot, Tell Lie Vision and the self-described ‘progressive metalcore’ Aggressive Raisin Cat, whom John Peel would probably have awarded a session on his BBC Radio 1 show on the strength of their name alone.  All three gave their sets their best shot and won the crowd’s appreciation.  My only quibble was that Aggressive Raisin Cat didn’t have an image of a raisin, or indeed, a cat, projected onto the backdrop behind them while they played.  Instead, there was a weird-looking spinning crisp.

 

 

The venue proved a rather austere place.  It was just a space with a stage at the front, and a mixing console and a merchandising stall in the back corners.  There wasn’t a bar, which meant that liquid refreshment had to be procured from the nearest branch of 7-11, which took a while to find, and led me to unfortunately miss some of Tariot’s set.  In between performances, most of the crowd would seep out onto the street outside to chat, smoke and imbibe a little – despite Singapore’s reputation for strictness, drinking in public is permitted until 10.30 pm.  Then, as soon as they heard the next band’s musicians striking their first chords, they’d hurry back inside again.

 

I’ve seen some videos by Alpha Wolf on YouTube, where they performed belters of songs like Black Mamba and Akudama, though thanks to the limited acoustics in the box-like, concrete-y confines of the arts centre auditorium, some of the shape and structure of those songs got lost a bit.  Still, the intensity of the headliners’ show couldn’t be faulted.  From the amount of moshing and crowd-surfing going on, and the fact that by the end of the set there seemed to be more folk on the stage than on the floor below, it was clear that Alpha Wolf had given the punters their money’s worth.

 

Just before the proceedings finished, a cake-and-candles were brought onstage for the celebration of someone’s birthday – I couldn’t see very clearly from my vantage point at the back of the venue, but the birthday-boy might have been the singer with Aggressive Raisin Cat – which struck me as a sweet, final touch.  What a nice bunch of lads, I thought.  To put it another way, despite the aural bombast, Liam Neeson should have nothing to fear if this Alpha Wolf was at his door.

 

© Open Road Films

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No fool like an old fool

 

© Vintage Classics

 

The death of Martin Amis on May 19th this year brought forth a glut of media tributes that often included the claim he was the ‘greatest British novelist of his generation’.  I have to say that’s not something I agree with.  However, it did remind me that one generation before Martin Amis’s heyday, his father, Kingsley Amis, was also commonly feted as a major figure in British letters.

 

Neither was I greatly impressed by Amis Senior, although that’s no doubt an unfair opinion because, until recently, I’d read only one literary work by him.  (I have also read a couple of Kingsley Amis novels that were classified as ‘genre’ fiction, and therefore not worthy of serious consideration by Britain’s snobby literary establishment, but I’ll talk about those later.)  That book was his 1954 satire Lucky Jim, which I found awkwardly dated and, for a satire, not very funny.  Yes, all literature is of its time, but good literature doesn’t feel dated the way that Lucky Jim did.  And most books I’ve read by Anthony Burgess, William Golding and Graham Greene, contemporaries of Amis whom I do admire, don’t feel dated that way either.

 

That said, I was always keen to read Amis’s 1986 novel The Old Devils.  Partly this was because its basic scenario, about a bunch of boozy, cantankerous Welshmen and Welshwomen refusing to grow old gracefully and instead doing so disgracefully, sounded like one I could identify with.  Various people have accused me of being boozy and cantankerous and disgraceful in my old age too.  Admittedly, I’m not Welsh, but I’m from an Irish-Scottish background, which is surely the next best thing.  And in its day, The Old Devils received much praise.  It prompted Anthony Burgess, for example, to say of Amis: “There is one old devil who is writing better than he ever did.”  And in its year of publication, The Old Devils won the Booker Prize.  So it had to be good.  Right?

 

Well I’ve just read the book, and…  Wrong.

 

But first, here’s the plot, such as it is.  A small, tight-knit group of married couples live in the town of Dinedor in southwest Wales.  There’s the frail, beleaguered literary scholar Malcolm and his wife Gwen; the greatly-overweight retired engineer and one-time lecturer Peter and his wife Muriel; the seriously alcoholic and panic-attack-prone restauranteur Charlie and his wife Sophie; plus a few associates.  If I haven’t described the women in detail, there’s a reason for that, as we’ll see.  The men spend their time in a snug-room of the local pub, the Bible and Crown.  The room’s decorated with memorabilia from the Dinedor Squash Racquets Club, which they’d been members of in their long-ago primes.  The women devote themselves to a circuit of get-togethers at each other’s houses where cups of coffee rapidly give way to ‘one-and-a-half-litre bottles of Soave Superiore’ and the air soon fills with a fug of cigarette smoke.

 

The routineness and predictability of their existence is disrupted by the return of Alun and Rhiannon.  They are members of the gang who relocated decades before to London, where Alun has done very well as a TV presenter.  In particular, he’s become a ‘professional Welshman’, fronting shows about his home country that paint a mythologised and caricatured picture of it, and also establishing himself as an expert on an influential Welsh poet called Brydan.  (Brydan is clearly based on Dylan Thomas, whom Amis once dismissed as “an outstandingly unpleasant man who cheated and stole from his friends and peed on their carpets.”)

 

Back living in Dinedor, Alun and Rhiannon soon stir the emotional pot.  Firstly, Rhiannon has a history with Peter.  He ‘wronged’ her while he was a young lecturer and she a student, and he’s still tormented by guilt about it.  Also, the meek Malcolm has always secretly carried a torch for her and finds his old feelings bubbling up again.  But Alun’s impact is more immediately dramatic.  He’s a randy old goat and, before long, his insatiable carnal hunger has him cuckolding his supposed mates left, right and centre.

 

And that’s about it.  The book mostly held my interest for the first 200 or 250 pages – it’s nearly 400 pages long – but eventually I realised how meandering and predictable the plot was.  The likely climax would involve one of the male characters popping his clogs, either Malcolm with his general infirmity, Peter with his obesity, or Charlie with his alcoholism and panic attacks.  Or indeed Alun, who despite his obvious, continuing virility has been subject to brief but worrying ‘funny turns’.  My prediction proved correct, but I won’t say who snuffs it at the end.  Meanwhile, the female characters are sketched with a perfunctory sameness – world-weary, gossipy, bitchy, chain-smoking, wine-guzzling – and even late in the book I was having problems telling them apart and remembering which marriages they were in.

 

The one female character Amis draws distinctly is Rhiannon, since she’s got baggage with Peter and Malcolm, the former regretful about his past treatment of her, the latter still worshipping her.  The book’s most heartfelt part is where Malcolm persuades her to go for a drive with him, around some of their old hangouts during their youth, when he was close to her and hopeful of getting closer.  Needless to say, and sadly for Malcolm, Rhiannon doesn’t remember them with anything like the same clarity.

 

It’s here that we get a jolting reminder that these characters, for all their affairs, dissolution and bad behaviour, are actually old.  Rhiannon retreats into the ladies’ toilet of a restaurant, where she gets “down to work on her falsies,” i.e., picking tomato seeds from the meal she’s just had out of her dentures: “…she straightened to her full height, shook back her hair and did her best in the way of putting on an important, haughty expression…  the idea was to give herself a head start, an improved chance of facing down anyone who might presume to come barging in and find the sudden sight of an old girl with her teeth in her hand somehow remarkable, or embarrassing…”

 

Mind you, given the time, false teeth might not be a sign of elderliness.  I’ve recently finished reading another Booker prize-winner, Douglas Stuart’s Shuggie Bain, which was published in 2020 but set like The Old Devils in the 1980s.  That book’s a reminder of the astonishing fact that not so long ago, in Britain, many people believed it was desirable to get every tooth pulled out of their heads at as early an age as possible.

 

© From artinfiction.wordpress.com

 

Anyway, Amis portrays his male characters more vividly.  But it’s hard to like them, especially as they’re such a moaning and reactionary shower of old farts.  For one thing, they spend a lot of their time whinging about everything has changed for the worse.  Now admittedly, the belief that modern life is rubbish seems an inescapable trait of growing old.  Well, I should know…  But you don’t feel much sympathy for them when they start discussing politics and have “a lovely time seeing who could say the most outrageous thing about the national Labour Party, the local Labour Party, the Labour-controlled county council, the trade unions, the education system, the penal system, the Health Service, the BBC, black people and youth… They varied this with eulogies of Ronald Reagan, Enoch Powell, the South African government, the Israeli hawks and whatever his name was that ran Singapore.”

 

Elsewhere, we hear how Alun “dreamt that Mrs Thatcher had told him that without him her life would be a mere shell, an empty husk…”  That actually sounds like one of Kingsley Amis’s real-life wet dreams, as he once described the dreaded Maggie as “one of the best-looking women I had ever met… The fact that it is not a sensual or sexy beauty does not make it a less sexual beauty…”

 

In my view, British life did change and take a definite turn for the worse in the 1980s, with Thatcher’s Conservative government abandoning traditional industries and ushering in mass unemployment, squandering oil revenues from the North Sea, and basically marketizing and monetarising everything.  The latter policy included selling off publicly-owned infrastructure to the highest bidders, the legacy of which is the terrible transport system, sewage-filled rivers and exorbitant energy bills that bedevil Britain in 2023.  From Thatcher onwards, for a party that called themselves Conservatives, they weren’t very good at conserving anything, which makes Amis’s right-wing-Tory characters’ bellyaching about everything going to the dogs sound hollow.  Still, Thatcher won the Falklands War in 1982 and emasculated the unions, which I suppose was good enough for them.

 

That brings me to my other bone of contention with The Od Devils.  Its characters spend a lot of time prattling on about being Welsh, but they don’t feel very Welsh.  They don’t come across like any Welsh person I’ve ever met, either on a cultural level – for instance, there’s barely a mention of the country’s beloved sport of rugby – or on a political one.  Okay, they’re Tories, so you’d expect them to be dismissive of Wales’s main political traditions, exemplified by the likes of Labour’s Aneurin Bevan, Jim Callaghan and Neil Kinnock, the Liberals’ David Lloyd George, and Plaid Cymru’s Gwynfor Evans, and they carp about the ineptitude of local Labour politicians and describe the Welsh nationalists as ‘c*nts’.  But you’d expect the trauma of Wales’s 1980s industrial decline – following the 1984-85 Miners’ Strike, for instance, 25,000 Welsh miners lost their jobs in pit closures – to register at least a little on their radar.  It doesn’t, though.

 

I knew plenty of Scottish Tories back in the 1980s who, while they thought Thatcher was the bees’ knees and regarded themselves as loyal subjects of Her Majesty and the Union Jack, saw themselves too as Scottish to the core.  Maybe some of this was a pose – tartan, whisky, golf, Burns’s poetry – but deep down they seemed to have a genuine love for Scotland’s traditions and fiercely supported the country in its cultural and sporting endeavours.  I suspect these dual loyalties had often been forged by military experience during their youth, when they’d proudly served in Scottish regiments whilst also fighting for Britain.

 

But I didn’t get that feeling with Amis’s characters here.  It’s like they’ve been transplanted from the English Home Counties, with Welshness slathered over them like the trappings of some prestigious club-membership they can show off and banter about, but underneath means nothing to them – unless, as with Alun, it can be turned into money.  And there’s little or no talk in the book of World War II.  Given the book’s setting and the characters’ ages, shouldn’t this have been a big thing for them?  Wouldn’t the men have served in the Welsh regiments?

 

So, The Old Devils neither impressed me as a book nor convinced me as a representation of life in Wales nearly 40 years ago.  Indeed, when I look at what else was on the shortlist for the Booker Prize in 1986, I find it mind-melting that this beat both Kazuo Ishiguro’s An Artist of the Floating World and Margaret Atwood’s prescient The Handmaid’s Tale to the title.  And it won’t improve my opinion of Amis as a writer of mainstream literary fiction.  However, I’ll qualify that by saying that as a genre writer, I’ve enjoyed his output.  I highly rate both his James Bond pastiche Colonel Sun (1968) and his supernatural novel The Green Man (1968).  If only old Kingsley had written more spy and ghost stories, and crime, horror and science-fiction ones too…

 

Meanwhile, as the antics of Alun, Malcolm, Peter and co. increasingly set my teeth on edge, I found myself thinking of something my Dad liked to say: “There’s no fool like an old fool.”

 

© David Smith / From the Guardian

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More gibbering, and gibbeting, from Rab Foster

 

© Swords and Sorcery Magazine

 

Rab Foster, the pseudonym I use when I write fantasy fiction, has just had a second short story published in 2023.  As with the previous Foster story, The Pyre of Larros, which appeared in print five months ago, this one is featured in Swords and Sorcery Magazine and has as its main character the swordsman Drayak Shathsprey, who seems doomed to get into serious trouble wherever he goes.  In The Gibbeting of Azmyre, now available to read in issue 138 of Swords and Sorcery Magazine, that trouble involves being hired by a shady character to retrieve an insalubrious item – the corpse of an executed criminal, currently hanging on display in a city’s main street.

 

The idea for The Gibbeting of Azmyre came to me a while back when I started reading the 1951 novel My Cousin Rachel by one of my literary heroines, Daphne du Maurier.  This begins with an account of how the narrator, Philip, is brought by his cousin and guardian Ambrose to view the gibbeted body of a murderer.  “I can remember as a little lad seeing a fellow hang in chains where the four roads meet.  His face and body were blackened with tar for preservation.  He hung there for five weeks before they cut him down, and it was the fourth week that I saw him.”

 

Meanwhile, the windswept and snow-scoured city street where the action in The Gibbeting of Azmyre takes place – “its floor a band of flagstones and cobbles carpeted with snow, its walls two towering rows of facades and edifices, spires and turrets, five and six-storeyed townhouses” – was inspired by the Royal Mile in Edinburgh.  (Yes, it’s appropriate that I had the Scottish capital in mind while I wrote a story about bodysnatching, although strictly speaking Edinburgh’s two most famous bodysnatchers – Burke and Hare – didn’t actually snatch bodies.  They murdered people, and then flogged off their victims’ remains to Dr Robert Knox for vivisection during his anatomy lectures.)  The Royal Mile doesn’t experience many snowstorms in these globally-warmed times, but it’s still a challenge to walk along when there’s a stark east wind flaying in from the nearby North Sea.

 

For the next month, The Gibbeting of Azmyre can be read here, while the main page for issue 138 of Swords and Sorcery Magazine is accessible here.