Author: MrM0untfield

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The literary Bond revisited: Moonraker

 

© Penguin Books

 

As a ten or eleven-year-old kid I read a lot of Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels.  Indeed, I read most of them before I ever saw any of the films.  However, it was only a few years ago, after Penguin Books brought out new editions of the novels, using the same covers that’d graced them in the 1950s and early 1960s and having contemporary writers like Val McDermid write introductions to them, that I got round to reading the novels I hadn’t come across in my boyhood – Moonraker (1955), The Spy Who Loved Me (1962), On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (1963) and Octopussy and the Living Daylights (1966).   I also reread a few of the novels I’d read at a young age which, for one reason or other, had gone over my head or not left much of an impression – I still vividly remembered Live and Let Die (1954) or You Only Live Twice (1964) from those far-off days, but almost nothing of Diamonds are Forever (1956) or The Man with the Golden Gun (1965).

 

And in the case of From Russia With Love (1957)…  Well, as a kid, I started reading it, but unfortunately at the time I was staying at my grandmother’s house in rural Northern Ireland.  My grandmother noticed I had my nose stuck in a book, insisted on reading the blurb on its back cover and confiscated it from me, saying she didn’t think it was suitable reading matter for someone my age.  To rub salt into the wound, she then started reading it herself.  “I’m really enjoying it,” she told me a few days later.

 

Anyway, here is the first in a series of posts in which I describe my reactions to the Fleming / Bond novels I’ve read or re-read in the 21st century.  Starting with Moonraker.

 

It’s difficult to approach Moonraker the novel without having your brain fogged by memories of Moonraker the 1979 movie, which for good or bad – well, bad, actually – was a milestone in the James Bond cinematic franchise.  The Bond movies had become increasingly absurd over the years and by 1979 both the filmmakers and cinema audiences were firmly aware of their silliness. But with Moonraker, those filmmakers – Cubby Broccoli and his team – seemed to abandon all restraint.  It was as if they decided, “The audiences know that we know the movies are silly…  And we know that they know…  So, let’s have a ball!”  The result was that Moonraker, which has James Bond (Roger Moore) blasting off in a space shuttle and taking on an orbiting space station full of villains, also blasted off into whole new realms of galaxy-sized daftness.

 

Apart from the far-fetched science-fictional plot (which might have had something to do with the success of a certain movie called Star Wars two years earlier), the stupidity includes the hulking, steel-toothed villain Jaws (Richard Keil), who’s not only invulnerable to mishaps such as falling out a plane and hitting the ground without a parachute or having a cable-car crash down on top of him, but who’s also given a cringe-inducing, comedic love interest.  But even the business with Jaws pales into insignificance compared to the sequence where Bond escapes from some baddies in Venice using a gondola that transforms into a speedboat and then into a hovercraft, whose appearance in St Mark’s Square causes a pigeon – yes, a pigeon – to do a double-take.  I remember the movie critic John Brosnan writing that at that moment he concluded “the Bond series had gone about as far down the tube it could possibly go without reaching China.”

 

© Eon Films

 

But… Trying to erase all thoughts of the movie, I started reading the book from 24 years earlier.  Unlike the film version, whose plot ricochets between the USA, Italy, South America and outer space, the novel’s action takes place entirely in England, where immensely rich industrialist, stockbroker and rocket-designer Sir Hugo Drax has built a base, with a launch site, on the south coast.  From this he intends to test-fly a new missile called the Moonraker, potentially a valuable new means of defence against the Soviet Union.  Bond first crosses paths with Drax at Blades, an exclusive and opulent London gentleman’s club, where he discovers he’s been cheating at cards.  This suggests he’s less saintly than the adoring British media has made him out to be.  Later, Bond is sent to investigate the death of a security officer at Drax’s base, where he finds further, and much more serious, evidence that Drax is a bad ’un.  In fact, Drax is an embittered former Nazi, now employed by the USSR, who plans to fit a nuclear warhead into the Moonraker and send it ploughing into downtown London during its test flight.

 

During his mission, Bond joins forces with a policewoman called Gala Brand, who’s working undercover at the base.  After Drax’s goons make a couple of unsuccessful attempts to eliminate them, they manage to thwart the scheme by sending the Moonraker off course.  Rather than striking London, it niftily lands on top of a submarine transporting Drax and his minions back to the Soviet Union.  The novel ends on a rather un-Bondian note, however.  Gala Brand reveals to 007 that she already has a fiancé and isn’t about to swoon into his arms.  So, instead, Moonraker’s final line is: “He touched her for the last time and they turned away from each other and walked off into their different lives.”

 

In Moonraker the film, Gala Brand is replaced by an American heroine called Holly Goodhead, played by Lois Chiles.  (Goodhead… Get it?  Good… head…?)  In fact, according to jamesbond.fandom.com, poor Gala is “the only lead female character of the Fleming canon not to have appeared as a character in a James Bond film”, which is puzzling given the quip-friendly nature of her name.  I could just imagine Roger Moore hoisting a crinkly eyebrow at her and intoning, “Well, this is going to be a Gala affair…” or “I know where I’d like to Brand you…”

 

© Eon Films

 

Reading Moonraker, what struck my 21st century self was the shadow that World War II casts over the plot.  It has a heavy bearing on the characters – not just on the villainous ex-Nazi Drax, who draws on German V2 technology for his missile project and intends to destroy London as revenge for his country’s defeat in 1945, but on minor ones like the lift operator in the secret-service headquarters who lost an arm during the conflict.  And of course, there are references to how Bond served in the war himself and has scars on his back to prove it.  I didn’t notice this so much when I read other Bond novels in the 1970s probably because, then, the war didn’t seem so far back in time.  I knew middle-aged people who had vivid memories of it.  And it was still being enacted on television in countless documentaries, comedies and dramas like The World At War (1973-74), Dad’s Army (1968-77), It Ain’t Half Hot Mum (1974-81), Secret Army (1977-79) and Colditz (1972-74), and the stories in practically every boys’ comic on sale in the newsagents at the time – Victor, Battle, Warlord – dealt with nothing else.  Indeed, there were probably some kids my age who believed we were still fighting the Germans.

 

And no doubt the war, or more specifically the war’s aftermath, played a part in the Bond novels’ huge success in the 1950s.  Those six years of conflict had broken Britain’s economy and Fleming’s readers inhabited a drab, grey world of rationing and austerity.  I recall a remark J.G. Ballard made in his memoir Miracles of Life (2008), about leaving Shanghai and arriving in Britain for the first time in 1946.  Taking his first steps on the soil of his home country, Ballard wondered why the British claimed to have won the war.  From the worn-out faces and rundown landscapes around him, it very much looked like they’d lost it.  Another pertinent quote is one made by Keith Richards, who said that growing up in early 1950s Britain was like living in black and white.  Only when rock ‘n’ roll arrived from America did life suddenly switch to being in colour.

 

But reading Moonraker, I also realised how far Bond is removed from the dreary reality of post-war Britain.  Fleming portrays him as a shameless consumer, one with a seemingly inexhaustible shopping budget.  He wears the most expensive labels, smokes the costliest cigars, drinks the finest wines and spirits, helps himself to the fanciest foods.  Accordingly, Bond’s first encounter with Drax in Moonraker is in the club Blades, whose service, food-and-drink and furnishings were things that most of Fleming’s 1950s readers could only dream about.  Though Fleming was accused of marketing watered-down pornography in his books, it surely wasn’t pornography of a sexual or violent nature that titillated his readers so much at the time.  It was consumer porn, intended to give a perverse, if futile, thrill to underfed and down-at-heels readers who were still carrying ration books.

 

Mind you, the fact that Moonraker’s plot is confined to 1950s England didn’t go down well with those readers who’d started reading the Bond books – Moonraker was the third in the series – for the pleasure of being transported in their imaginations to exotic locales, which in real life they lacked the financial means to visit themselves.  My trusty copy of Henry Chancellor’s guide to the novels, James Bond: The Man and his World (2005) tells me that “Fleming received a number of letters from disappointed readers complaining that Kent, even on the most glorious English summer’s day, did not compare with the tropical heat of the Caribbean.  ‘We want taking out of ourselves,’ declared one old couple, who read Bond novels to each other aloud, ‘not sitting on the beach in Dover.’”  Fleming took note of the complaints.  None of his later novels restricted Bond to English soil.

 

© Hammer Films

 

I have to say that nowadays Fleming’s descriptions of Drax’s base and its technology sound decidedly low-fi.  The references to ‘gyros’, ‘radio homing beacons’, ‘ventilation tunnels’ and, indeed, ‘rockets’ had me thinking of some old black-and-white British sci-fi movie.  They particularly made me think of the Hammer film Quatermass 2 (1957), which features both rockets and a big secret base where the villains – aliens – hang out.  For their depiction of the base, the filmmakers used the sprawling and suitably eerie oil refinery at Thurrock in Essex for location shooting, and I imagined Bond and Gala battling Drax and his minions against a similar backdrop.

 

On the other hand, one element of Moonraker’s plot that feels more relevant than ever is its notion that a super-rich tycoon could become so enthused about, and involved in, developing futuristic rocket technology.  I can think of one billionaire… no, two billionaires… no, three billionaires in 2023 whose fascination with space-going vehicles is like that of little boys with toy train-sets.

 

Finally, even as a ten or eleven-year-old, one thing I did pick up from Fleming’s novels was a sense of Bond’s melancholia – a melancholia that wasn’t hinted at in the movies until the tenures of Timothy Dalton and, later, Daniel Craig in the lead role.  You get this in Moonraker at the very beginning, with Bond calculating how many more missions he has to go on before he can retire from the secret service and what the odds are for surviving that number of missions.  Retirement for Bond, I was shocked to discover, comes at the age of 45.  Yikes, I thought.  If I’d been an agent in Fleming’s version of MI6, I’d be way beyond pensionable age now.

 

So, readers of post-war Britain, forget the thrills and spills, and forget the fine living and exotic locations, and forget the fancy cars and beautiful women.  Even Commander Bond has reasons to gripe about his lot.

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Favourite Scots words, M-O

 

From wikipedia.org / Scottish National Portrait Gallery

 

Burns Night falls this evening, with – by my calculations – 264 years having now passed since the birth of Scotland’s greatest poet, Robert Burns.  For many decades, January 25th witnessed one of the greatest ironies in Scottish culture.  All over the country, schoolchildren would be made to memorise, then get up and recite Burns’ poems in front of their classmates and teachers.  Those poems, of course, were written in the Scots language and thus were loaded with Scots vocabulary and grammar.  However, any other day of the year, if a schoolkid had dared to speak Scots in the classroom, they’d have received a teacherly reprimand: “No, don’t speak like that.  Speak proper English…”

 

Actually, a famous scene in William McIlvanney’s 1975 novel Docherty, where the hero’s son gets battered by a teacher at school for daring to utter the Scots word sheuch (meaning ‘gutter’ or ‘ditch’), seems sadly credible.  At one time, speaking the language of Burns on a day that wasn’t Burns’ birthday was probably enough to get you belted in certain Scottish schools.

 

Anyway, here’s another slew of Scots words that I like – this time, starting with the letters ‘M’, ‘N’ and ‘O’.

 

Makar (n) – a poet or bard.  In 2004, the Scottish Parliament established the post of ‘Scots Makar’, i.e., a national bard or poet laureate.  Since then, the post has been occupied by Edwin Morgan, Liz Lochhead, Jackie Kay and, currently, Kathleen Jamie.

 

Malky (n/v) – a Glaswegian term meaning ‘a murder’ or ‘to murder’.  Research tells me that malky was originally a nickname for a razor used as a weapon, and to malky someone was to slash them with such a razor.  That said, the catchphrase of popular culture’s most famous depiction of Glaswegian crime and crime-fighting, “There’s been a murrr-der!” in the TV cop show Taggart (1983-2010), wouldn’t had the same impact if it’d been, “There’s been a malky!”

 

© STV Studios

 

Manse (n) – a manse is the house provided for a Church of Scotland minister, so basically it’s similar to a ‘rectory’ or ‘parsonage’.  Someone who grew up in a manse, because their father (or mother) was a Church of Scotland minister, is known as a son or daughter of the manse.  The Scottish Labour Party has, for some reason, given us several children of the manse, including former Prime Minister Gordon Brown, former Scottish Labour Party leader Wendy Alexander, and Wendy’s wee brother Douglas, a former cabinet minister.  Political children of the manse inevitably cite their backgrounds as evidence of their strong ‘moral compasses’, though I have to say in my time I’ve met a few inhabitants of the manse (children and parents) whose moral compasses have gone a bit wonky, usually after a few glasses of whisky.

 

Mawkit (adj) – extremely dirty.

 

Merle (n) – a blackbird.  I understand that merle is also the French word for ‘blackbird’, so presumably it’s another example of the linguistic legacy of the Auld Alliance that once existed between Scotland and France.

 

Messages (n) – shopping of the everyday variety, i.e., buying a few groceries rather than buying in bulk at Tesco or Sainsbury.  Hence the common expression: “I’m daein’ ma messages!”

 

Midden (n) – a dunghill.  A word often employed by Scottish parents while they complain about the condition of their teenage kids’ bedrooms.  Also, at one point, the celebrated British sci-fi comic 2000 AD featured a character who was a Scottish bounty hunter with a gruesomely mutated visage.  His name was Middenface MacNulty.

 

© Rebellion Developments

 

Mince (n) – nonsense. Hence such exclamations as “Och, ye’re talkin’ mince!” or “Yer heid’s fu ay mince!” or “See thon new Avatar movie? It’s mince!”

 

Ming (v) – to smell badly, with the present participle mingin’ used as adjective to mean ‘stinking’.  As a result, when I was a kid and watched the old Flash Gordon serials (1936-40) on TV, I could help wondering if the villainous Ming the Merciless was so named because of his fearsome body odour.  For a while, ming passed into popular usage all over Britain with a tweak in meaning, so that the word ‘minger’ became a common slang-term for describing someone who was ‘severely deficient in the looks department’.  But I don’t hear it used much nowadays.

 

Mowdie (n) – a mole.

 

Muckle (adj) – very big.  This adjective was immortalised in the much-loved children’s poem Crocodile by J.K. Annand, which begins: “When doukin’ in the River Nile / I met a muckle crocodile. / He flicked his tail, he blinked his ee, / Syne bared his ugsome teeth at me.”

 

Incidentally, here’s some pictures of a muckle crocodile I once met, at the side of the stairs going up to Shwedagon Pagoda in Yangon, Myanmar.

 

 

Neb (n) – a nose, beak or projecting point.  Once upon a time, ladies of a certain age had to put up with uncomplimentary remarks about nebs whenever they played their Barry Manilow records on the household stereo.

 

Ned (n) – a young hooligan.  Depending on which story you believe, the word ned was derived from the term ‘never-do-well’ or was an acronym for ‘Non-Educated Delinquent’.  For a time in the early 2000s, it was ubiquitous in Scottish conversation, used as a label for any undesirable-looking youth with a penchant for wearing shell-suits, bling and Burberry-patterned caps and for swigging from bottles of Buckfast Tonic Wine.  Its popularity was no doubt increased by the ‘neds’ sketches in the famous Scottish TV comedy show of the era, Chewin’ the Fat (1999-2005).  Indeed, ned became the north-of-the-border equivalent of the word ‘chav’, used in England to describe ‘an anti-social lower-class youth dressed in sportswear’.  Just as with ‘chav’, there were fears that ned was being used to demonise all young, working-class people. If I remember correctly, the Scottish Socialist Party MSP Rosie Kane tried to have the word banned from the Scottish parliament in 2003.

 

But before the controversy, I remember hearing the word ned as long ago as the early 1980s.  Folk from Glasgow I knew would use it to describe anyone who was small, mouthy and annoying.  In that way, it wasn’t much different from the abusive Scots term nyaff, which urbandictionary.com defines as “a very irritating person.  When they come into the room, you want to leave.”

 

© Southern Television

 

Neep (n) – a turnip.  That’s why in the 1970s kids’ TV show Wurzel Gummidge (1979-81), Billy Connolly played a turnip-headed Scottish scarecrow called ‘Bogle MacNeep’.  Turnips and potatoes together on a plate are, of course, known as neeps an’ tatties.  Meanwhile, my American partner assures me that whenever I talk about neeps an’ tatties, it sounds to her like I’m describing something extremely lewd and filthy.  Goodness!  (Or better still, jings!)

 

Neuk (n) – a corner, including one – i.e., a bend – in the coastline.  The most famous geographical example is East Neuk in Fife.

 

From maps.google.com

 

Nip (n) – a short, sharp measure of alcoholic spirits, often whisky, though I’ve heard people talk about ‘nips ay gin.’  I’d always assumed that, when describing a measure of whisky and the spiky, tingling effect it had when you downed it, nip was synonymous with jag.  But looking online, I’ve seen claims that it comes from the word ‘nibble’, as if a nip is just a nibble at the cake that is the full whisky bottle.  Also, I’ve seen it attributed to the archaic word ‘nipperkin’, which was ‘a unit of measurement of volume, equal to one-half of a quarter-gill, one-eighth of a gill, or one thirty-second of an English pint’.

 

Nippie sweetie (n) – an irritable, sharp-tongued person.  This is usually applied to the female of the species.  Disgruntled Scottish Conservatives, Liberal Democrats and Labourites frequently fling the term nippie sweetie at Scotland’s First Minister and leader of the Scottish National Party, Nicola Sturgeon.

 

Numpty (n) – a stupid person.  To me, though, a numpty is more than that – it’s a preposterous, pompous person who is also stupid.  In In the Loop (2009), the movie spin-off from the satirical TV show The Thick of It (2005-12), the preposterous, pompous politician played by Tom Hollander becomes a laughing stock when the wall of his constituency office endangers public safety by toppling over.  Jamie MacDonald, the ferocious Motherwell-born spin doctor played by Paul Higgins, taunts him about ‘Wallgate’ by calling him ‘Humpty Numpty’.  (To quote MacDonald in full: “If it isn’t Humpty Numpty, sitting on top of a collapsing wall like some clueless egg c*nt.”)

 

© BBC Films / UK Film Council / Optimum Releasing

 

Offski (adj) – ‘away’, ‘leaving’, ‘going’, as in the common Glaswegian phrase, “I’m offski!”

 

Orraman (n) – in agricultural communities, an orraman was an odd-jobbing farmhand who’d muck out sheds, dig holes, put up fences, mend drystane dykes, lug bales of hay around, drive tractors and basically do whatever needed doing at the time. Now, with farming heavily mechanised, and with one farmer on a tractor (towing the appropriate machine) capable of doing what it took half-a-dozen people to do a few decades ago, the days of the orraman are probably past.

 

Oxster (n) – an armpit.  Dundonian poet Matthew Fitt deployed this word when he wrote the Scots-language translation of the 2013 Asterix-the-Gaul book, Asterix and the Picts.  In the original French text, Asterix’s hulking sidekick Obelisk made a joke about ‘oysters’.  Fitt converted it into a joke about oxsters / armpits to make it more Scottish-friendly.  As you do.

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Look, a sky-walker

 

 

Among female deities, surely few are more formidable than Simhavaktra, a gilded bronze representation of whom I recently encountered in Singapore’s Asian Civilisations Museum.

 

The name Simhavaktra means ‘lion-faced’ and this leonine-faced she-deity, so the information panel told me, “strides over seas of blood which represent the world caught in an endless cycle of birth, death and rebirth.”  Important in Vajrayana Buddhism – the form of Tantric Buddhism that developed in India and elsewhere, most notably in Tibet – she’s a protector of Buddhists “in the higher realms”.  And she’s a dakini, which in Tibetan means a ‘sky-walker’, “who guides followers along the right path to enlightenment.”

 

All very well and good, but it’s Simhavatra’s garments that make the biggest impression.  She wears a cloak of flayed human skin, “symbolising the peeling away of surface appearances to reveal ultimate reality.”  Look carefully at her statue in the Asian Civilisations Museum and you’ll see that the arms of that expanse of skin are knotted around her throat, with their hands hanging on either side like gruesome tassels.  Check out her back and you’ll see the head of the poor bugger who donated this skin dangling from her nape, and at least one of his feet adorning the cloak’s bottom corner.

 

 

That skin cloak was presumably removed from its former owner by the tool Simhavaktra wields in her right hand, “a curved flaying knife with a vajira (thunderbolt) handle.”

 

Incidentally, I thought the Asian Civilisations Museum was one of the most attractive and interesting museums I’ve visited in a long while.  Expect to hear more about it in future posts on this blog.

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Not the best book from an 18-year-old Shelley

 

© Heperus Books

 

The genesis of Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus (1818) is well-known.  It was written by Mary Shelley in 1816 while she and her husband, Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, were staying at the Villa Diodati by Lake Geneva as guests of Percy’s fellow Romantic poet Lord Byron.  Mary was 18 years old at the time and Frankenstein sprang out of a resolution by the group to each write a ‘ghost story’.  This was largely because the wet and dreary weather that summer prevented them from doing much outdoors.  Mary duly concocted Frankenstein, which of course is one of the seminal novels of the horror genre.  Also, while it certainly wasn’t the world’s first horror story, there’s a good case to be made that it was the first work of science fiction. Victor Frankenstein, after all, assembles his creature out of pieces of dead bodies and brings it to life using technology, not magic.

 

Actually, a joke I’ve seen on social media runs along these lines: Mary Shelley went off and invented science fiction so that she didn’t have to endure listening to Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley talking shite all summer.

 

I think Frankenstein is an amazing book, though a logically flawed one.  The creature is totally inarticulate when he comes into the world, but soon picks up the ‘lingo’ by spying on a room where a foreign woman is receiving language lessons and secretly learning alongside her.  Before long he’s able to read and understand a copy of John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667) and spends five whole chapters talking non-stop at his understandably flummoxed creator.  As someone who’s spent a good bit of his career teaching the English language to people, that’s a result I could only dream of.

 

Later, Victor Frankenstein retreats to a remote island in the Orkneys where he manages to find the body parts for, and assemble, a female mate for the creature without being noticed by the island’s inhabitants. He then ends up adrift in a boat that takes just one night to float all the way from the Orkneys to the coast of Ireland, and there the creature frames him for the murder of his best friend, Henry Clerval, whose body is discovered on the same coastline.  We last heard tell of Clerval in the central Scottish city of Perth, so how did the creature get his body to Ireland and know where to dump it?  After being freed, Frankenstein is collected by his elderly father, who makes a journey from Geneva to Ireland even though earlier we’d been told he was too infirm to travel between Geneva and Ingolstadt in Bavaria.

 

Yes, the fact that Mary Shelley was only 18 at the time does show through occasionally in Frankenstein’s plotting.  You get the impression she’s impatient to get on with the story, and move from one event to the next, and like any impulsive teenager isn’t too bothered about the logistics of how exactly she manages this.

 

But hey…  I’ve recently read Percy Bysshe Shelley’s short novel Zastrozzi (1811), which he had published at the age of 18 (though he wrote it a year earlier).  I have to say that compared with the scribblings of her teenaged husband, the teenaged Mary Shelley that’s suggested by Frankenstein is a model of good sense, decorum, level-headedness and maturity.

 

I’ve nothing against a good gothic potboiler and Zastrozzi begins in good-gothic-potboiler fashion. The mysterious but obviously villainous Zastrozzi of the title, and his two henchmen Bernardo and Ugo, abduct the book’s hero, Verezzi, from an inn near Munich and drive him off in a coach – or ‘chariot’ as the young Shelley insists on calling it.  They transport him while he’s asleep and the implication is that he’s been drugged, though this isn’t made clear – you’re left wondering of Verezzi is just an abnormally heavy sleeper.

 

Verezzi wakes up to find the three rogues imprisoning him inside a cavern – “Verezzi beheld the interior of this cavern as a place where he was never again about to emerge – as his grave.” – and Zastrozzi gets to inform him: “Resistance is futile.”  Yes, that’s the catchphrase of the Borg, from Star Trek: The Next Generation (1987-94).  Subsequently, a violent thunder-and-lightning storm tears asunder the rock above the cavern and exposes it to the elements.  This doesn’t provide Verezzi with an opportunity to escape, as you might expect, but leaves him with a ‘burning fever’ and ‘delirious with a despairing illness’.  Verezzi is going to suffer a lot of despairing illnesses during this book.

 

Deciding it’d be a mistake to keep the ailing Verezzi in the cavern, Zastrozzi, Bernardo and Ugo convey him instead to a cottage ‘on an immense heath, lonely, desolate, and remote from other human habitation.’  Verezzi recovers and, this time, does manage to escape, though with his three persecutors giving chase.  He makes it to the Bavarian city of Passau, where he meets and is offered refuge by an old woman called Claudine, who’d suffered the death of her son just the previous week.  The work done by her son had provided Claudine with a little income and she’s quick to invite Verezzi to take the son’s place in return for board and lodgings in her humble cottage,

 

From British Literature Wiki

 

While Verezzi finds a temporary hiding place with Claudine, Zastrozzi, Bernardo and Ugo, still hunting him, become lost in a forest.  In a baffling plot-twist, they stumble across ‘a large and magnificent building whose battlements rose above the lofty trees’, seemingly by accident.  This, it transpires, is the suitably gothic abode of Matilda, the noblewoman who’s masterminded the scheme to abduct and imprison Verezzi.  Matilda, you see, is madly in love with Verezzi, but Verezzi is unfortunately madly in love with, and betrothed to, someone else – a lady called Julia, who’s currently resident in Italy.  Matilda will consider committing any crime to thwart the relationship between Verezzi and Julia.

 

Meanwhile, it’s hinted, and in the book’s final pages confirmed, that Zastrozzi is not simply Matilda’s loyal minion.  He has his own reasons for wanting Verezzi to suffer.

 

And here, the plot seems to stop – or disappear up its own arse – for a long time.  Verezzi crosses paths with Matilda, whom he likes if doesn’t actually love, and about whose nefarious scheme he knows nothing.  She persuades him to leave Claudine’s cottage and stay at her chateau in the forest for a while.  There he falls critically ill, again – Matilda telling him a malicious lie about Julia being dead has something to do with it.  And the book’s most interesting character, Zastrozzi himself, fades into the background, leaving the reader to wade through pages of melodramatic blather where Verezzi and Matilda indulge in many ‘ecstasies of melancholia’, ‘floods of tears’, ‘gentle sighs’ and, yes, ‘heaving’ of ‘bosoms’.  There’s also much wandering done in the local forest, with the word ‘cataract’ cropping up as frequently as the word ‘chariot’ does elsewhere.  Now that he believes Julia to be deceased, will Verezzi get over his grief, succumb to temptation, and do the business with that duplicitous minx Matilda?  Honestly, I couldn’t have cared less.

 

At least things pick up later.  The action relocates to Venice, Zastrozzi becomes prominent again, and the book’s two most annoying characters are unexpectedly killed off 20 pages before the end.  Matilda and Zastrozzi end up on trial for their lives, in front of a horde of torture-loving Inquisitors.  Matilda  crumbles and finds religion: “God of mercy!  God of heaven… my sins are many and horrible, but I repent.”  However, the atheistic and – surprise! – Byronic Zastrozzi is made of tougher stuff and goes to his doom unrepentantly and defiantly.

 

I’d be more generous towards the book – which was, after all, the work of a 17-year-old – if the plot was less flabby.  It needed to centre less on the tormented, wimpy and seriously illness-prone Verezzi and more on Zastrozzi, who has some dynamism and agency.  Indeed, the book’s most memorable scene has Matilda out in the forest, sitting on a granite boulder, while a fearsome storm rages around her.  Zastrozzi is suddenly revealed to her by a flash of lightning: “His gigantic figure was again involved in pitchy darkness as the momentary lightning receded.  A peal of crashing thunder again madly rattled over the zenith, and a scintillating flash announced Zastrozzi’s approach, as he stood before Matilda.”  It’s uncannily reminiscent of the scene in Frankenstein where Victor encounters his creation during a tempest in the Alps.  Mind you, it’s a shame that Zastrozzi’s most notable feature here – his gigantic stature – isn’t actually mentioned by the author, or remarked on by the other characters, when he appears in the novel’s early pages.  This gives the impression that somewhere along the way he had a sudden and impressive growth-spurt.

 

The foreword to my edition of Zastrozzi was penned by Germaine Greer, who’s unexpectedly indulgent of Shelley’s excesses.  She views the helpless, fever-stricken Verezzi, at the mercy of the conniving, dominating but not undesirable Matilda, as symbolic of the fixation the very young Shelley had for his mother: “…Shelley’s mother, who was more in sympathy with him than his father, was from all accounts a very beautiful woman…  As the youngest of five children, Shelley’s infant passion for his mother probably went largely unrequited; his best chance of getting her to himself was when he was in the throes of one of his childhood illnesses which were, like Verezzi’s, ‘of a nervous or spasmodic nature’.”

 

However, while I struggled through Zastrozzi’s purpler patches, I found myself less in sympathy with Germaine Greer and more in sympathy with Rowan Atkinson’s Edmund Blackadder, who in the 1987 TV series Blackadder the Third said witheringly of the Romantic poets: “…there’s nothing intellectual about wandering around Italy in a big shirt, trying to get laid.”

 

© BBC

Posted on

Jim Mountfield walks among the shadows

 

© Schlock! Webzine

 

Jim Mountfield, the pseudonym under which I write horror fiction, has just had his first short story published in 2023.  The story is entitled Temple Street and it appears in this month’s edition – Volume 17, Issue 6 – of Schlock! Webzine.

 

Temple Street is set in the northern Sri Lankan town of Jaffna – a town so north in the island and so close to India, in fact, that it often feels more Indian in culture and temperament – and it’s particularly inspired by Kovil Road, the street where I usually stayed during the many occasions between 2016 and 2020 when I was sent to Jaffna as part of my job.  I found Kovil Road fascinating for the same reason that the story’s main character finds the fictional Temple Street fascinating: “Though it was narrow and its traffic consisted mainly of tuk-tuks, motorbikes and bicycles, it’d taken him past properties that seemed to represent every point on every spectrum of town life, from ancient to modern, poor to rich, wild to civilised.”

 

 

One night, though, I had an eerie experience walking back along Kovil Road after spending a few hours in my favourite local watering hole, the Colombo Restaurant – no, it wasn’t a restaurant and no, it wasn’t in Colombo either.  A strong wind was blowing, shaking the tops of the trees overhead, especially the palm trees, and I couldn’t help noticing how bestial-looking the shadows of the palm-fronds looked on the road beside me.  They seemed to twist and writhe on the asphalt like giant, black, shaggy beasts…  And that gave me the idea for Temple Street.

 

I’m wary of horror stories written by Western writers and featuring Western characters that use ‘exotic’ – i.e., non-Western – locales as their settings.  Often, intentional or not, the implication is that the locale is mysterious, dangerous and less ‘civilised’ because it’s culturally different from the West.  The laziest of these stories appropriate something from the local culture, from its mythology, legends or folklore, and use it as a cheap way to rustle up a monster and / or some horror.  Since I didn’t wish to do that with Jaffna, Temple Street stresses that the bad stuff comes from a combination of conditions that could arise anywhere in the world, Western countries included.  Unfortunately for the story’s protagonist, those conditions just happen to arise one night while he’s walking along the street of the title.

 

For the next month, Temple Street can be read here, while the main page for Schlock! Webzine is accessible here.

Posted on

Mad-lands

 

From wikipedia.com / © gov.uk

 

The last time I gazed into the abyss of British politics and wrote about what I saw there, it was September 2022 and Liz Truss had just been crowned leader of the Conservative Party and Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, taking over from that unrepentant, lawbreaking blond blob Boris Johnson.  That was a mere four months ago.  What’s happened since then seems a cavalcade of chaos and insanity.  To contemplate it again, and attempt to make sense of it all, feels like a risk to my own sanity.  As Fredrich Nietzsche warned, “…when you gaze into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.”

 

But oh well.  Here goes.

 

So, Prime Minister Liz Truss.  What could go wrong?  Everything, basically, at top speed.  On September 23rd, she and her chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng unveiled a plan to cut tax on the largest scale for 50 years and pay for it all by increasing government borrowing.  This spooked the world’s markets in the abrupt and dramatic manner that uttering the name ‘Dracula’ would spook an inn-ful of 19th century Carpathian peasants.  The pound plummeted, banks and building societies yanked 40% of their mortgage products off the market, the Bank of England started buying UK government bonds to re-establish calm and save pension funds, and 30 billion pounds were added to the British Treasury’s fiscal hole, which effectively doubled it.

 

Acting on a comment in the Economist that Truss’s grip on power was likely to be as long as ‘the shelf-life of a lettuce’, the Daily Star – a tabloid newspaper not normally known for its political acumen – set up a live stream where a picture of Liz Truss sat beside a limp, green and gradually decaying leaf-vegetable and viewers were asked, “Which wet lettuce will last longer?”  On October 20th, by which time Truss’s live-stream opponent had evolved to acquire googly eyes and a wig, she threw in the towel and resigned as PM and the lettuce won.  It was a fittingly farcical denouement to a premiership of industrial-scale incompetence and self-delusion and of embarrassing brevity.  Managing just 44 days in office, she easily beat the previous record set by George Canning in 1827 (and Canning at least had the excuse of dying after 119 days as PM).

 

Still, Truss’s disastrous tenure provided much hilarity as the country’s many right-wing newspapers had to contort themselves in the style of a circus rubber-man.  Almost in the blink of an eye, they went from praising Truss, for being as loopily right-wing in her politics as they were, to lambasting her.  AT LAST!  A TRUE TORY BUDGET! trumpeted the Daily Mail headline on September 24th.  HOW MUCH MORE CAN SHE (AND THE REST OF US) TAKE? despaired the Daily Mail headline on October 15th.  LIZ PUTS HER FOOT ON THE GAS gushed The Sun’s Harry Cole one moment.  The next moment, he was writing: HOW LIZ LOST IT: INSIDE STORY OF LIZ TRUSS’ FIRST 40 DAYS IN POWER THAT ENDED IN BIGGEST POLITICAL MELTDOWN IN YEARS.  The Daily Telegraph’s Tim Stanley swerved from crowing LIZ TRUSS HAS RESURRECTED THE IDEA OF CONSERVATISM, AND THE LEFT WILL HATE HER FOR IT to lamenting TRUSS OFFERED US RISK AND AMBITION, BUT IS NOW LEFT FLOGGING AN UTTERLY DEAD HORSE.

 

It was also gratifying to see the policies advocated for years by those dodgy, mysteriously-funded ultra-right thinktanks and pressure groups congregated in or around No 55, Tufton Street get their moment in the sun, via their adherents Truss and Kwarteng, and immediately be shown to be utter bollocks.  After this shitshow, it would nice to think that the likes of the Institute for Economic Affairs, the Centre for Policy Studies, the TaxPayers’ Alliance, etc., would, out of shame, shut up about unfettering the rich, about deregulating everything, about letting the environment, workers’ rights and workers’ quality of life get ground to a pulp in the rush for profits.  But probably they won’t.

 

From wikipedia.com / © Tim Hammond, PM’s Office

 

By an uncanny coincidence, Truss’s departure occurred at the same time as another blond female departed from a vital role in British society – for Jodie Whittaker ended her tenure as the title character of the BBC’s long-running and much-loved science fiction series Doctor Who (1963-present).  There was almost another uncanny coincidence here for in a shock twist Whitaker regenerated not into a new Doctor, but back into a predecessor, the hunky and wildly popular 10th Doctor, David Tennant.  Whereas it looked for a while like Truss might regenerate into a predecessor too – the hunky and wildly popular in his own mind, though un-hunky and wildly unpopular to everyone else, 55th Prime Minister, Boris Johnson.

 

Since his resignation as PM in July, Johnson had been soaking up the sun and flashing his bronzed abs during seemingly non-stop holidays in Slovenia, Greece and the Dominican Republic.  Very occasionally, he stirred to attend to matters pertaining to his 84,000 pound-a-year job (plus perks) as a Member of Parliament.  Well, twice – he made a statement in the House of Commons about Ukraine and made another statement about the death of the Queen.  Great work if you can get it.  Following Truss’s demise, Johnson started sounding out support for him having another run at getting elected PM.  And for a surreal few days in October, it looked like he might be back in No 10, Downing Street just months after he’d left it amid a merry shambles of sleaze, lawbreaking and mass ministerial resignations.  However, he then announced – presumably realising that the human memory isn’t as short as he thought it was – that he wouldn’t run again after all, which left the field clear for his former chancellor Rishi Sunak.

 

Sunak became Prime Minister on October 25th.  This was after a rushed leadership contest designed to restrict the decision to Conservative parliamentarians, and keep it away from the party’s membership who last time, apparently stricken with dementia, had elected Truss and seemed capable this time of electing someone really stupid, like Jacob Rees-Mogg, or Rolf Harris, or Thomas the Tank Engine, or Vladimir Putin.  Despite his Indian heritage, Sunak is hardly a symbol of egalitarianism and fairness.  He seems more symbolic of Britain in the 19th century rather than the 21st.  He’s minted.  He and his wife Akshata Murty – believed, due to her non-domiciled status, to have avoided paying up to 20 million pounds in British tax – are worth a supposed fortune of 730 million pounds.  And during the previous leadership race, when he unsuccessfully ran against Truss, a 2011 video surfaced wherein the young Rishi bragged about having friends from all walks of life: “…friends who are aristocrats… friends who are upper-class… friends who are, you know, working class…”

 

Really, Rishi?  Working class?

 

“Well, not working class.”

 

From wikipedia.com / © Simon Walker, HM Treasury

 

In fact, Sunak was soon performing feats of contortion worthy of those right-wing newspaper  commentators who’d first applauded, then reviled Liz Truss. He became expert in the art of the political U-turn.  He announced he wasn’t going to attend the COP27 climate summit in Egypt in November, apparently feeling he had better things to do than join other world leaders in their attempts to figure out a way of preventing the planet burning.  Soon after – screech!  Sunak announced he would attend it after all.  (This change of heart came after Boris Johnson had announced he was going to pop along to COP27, presumably hoping there’d be someone there who hadn’t heard he’d stopped being British Prime Minister.)  Mandatory housing targets?  Screech!  No mandatory housing targets – Home Counties Tory MPs didn’t fancy suddenly being in earshot of construction work in their leafy back gardens.  A ban on onshore windfarms?  Screech!  “Yes,” Rishi decreed, “let there be onshore windfarms.”  Frakking, the proposed Schools Bill, fines if you missed a GP appointment?  Screech, screech, screech!

 

However, no U-turns yet from Sunak’s Home Secretary Sue-Ellen Braverman, who apparently likes to call herself ‘Suella’ because she hates being called ‘Sue-Ellen’ – her folks named her after Sue Ellen Ewing, the hard-boozing wife of Stetson-wearing villain J.R. Ewing in TV soap opera Dallas (1978-91).  Sue-Ellen is still pushing ahead with plans to stick newly-arrived asylum seekers on planes and fly them out to Rwanda for ‘processing’, in defiance of the European Convention on Human Rights (whose founders in 1948 included that pathetic, woke, lefty snowflake Winston Churchill).  At the Tory Party conference in early October, she told an audience: “I would love to have a front page of the Telegraph with a plane taking off to Rwanda, that’s my dream, it’s my obsession.”  Her dream?  She might have the name Sue-Ellen, but at heart she’s pure J.R.

 

To round off the year with a final dose of misery, the cost-of-living crisis that’s deeply troubling households the length and breadth of Britain, and that Sunak’s government seems unable and / or unwilling to do anything about, prompted everyone and their dog to go on strike or threaten to go on strike: rail workers, postal workers, teachers, driving examiners, highway workers, Border Force staff, G4S workers and, while the National Health Service is allowed to fall apart and hospitals start to resemble war zones, nurses and ambulance staff.

 

From wikipedia.org / © Steve Eason

 

Incidentally, I’m sure there are even some right-wingers out there who’ve felt the urge to join a trade union after hearing the admirably straightforward, no-nonsense tones of Rail, Maritime and Transport Union general secretary Mick Lynch.  After years of being subjected to the same old waffling, prevaricating, patronising, meaningless bollocks spouted by countless politicians and media pundits, Lynch’s ability to speak Human has been a breath of fresh air.

 

To Good Morning Britain’s Richard Madeley: “Richard, you do come up with the most remarkable twaddle sometimes.”  To Sky News’ Kay Burley: “Picketing is standing outside the workplace to try and encourage people who want to go to work, not to go to work.  What else do you think it involves?”  To knuckle-dragging Tory MP Jonathan Gullis: “I think Jonathan should apologise for talking nonsense… (He’s a) backbench MP who’s just learnt it off a script.”  To professional bawbag Piers Morgan, after Morgan had pointed out that his Facebook page featured a picture of the Hood, the villain in TV puppet show Thunderbirds (1965-66): “Is that the level journalism’s at these days?”

 

Talking of journalism again, don’t expect the UK’s predominantly right-wing press to do much just now to hold Sunak’s government to account.  When they aren’t castigating strikers – see the Daily Mail’s headline about ambulance crews: HOW WILL THEY LIVE WITH THEMSELVES IF PEOPLE DIE TODAY? – they’re happily employing smoke and mirrors to distract readers from the big issues of the moment and hide the fact that, under the Tories, the country has turned into a basket case.  Mainly, of course, they’re obsessing over the Royal Family – the latter-day British equivalent of Karl Marx’s ‘opiate of the masses’ – and promoting the current spat between Prince Harry and his spouse Meghan Markle and the rest of the so-called ‘Firm’.

 

Honestly, who cares?  Yes, it was hideous of Jeremy Clarkson to fantasise, in his column in the Sun, about having Markle paraded naked through every town in the land while people jeer and pelt her with shit.  But I don’t think the current shenanigans in the Royal Family, and the reactions to it in the media by beer-bellied, boob-chested, saggy-jowled manbabies like Clarkson, are of much importance to families panicking as inflation runs rampant, energy bills sky-rocket, and health and transport services disintegrate around them.

 

Still, after 2022 saw the UK become an absolute mad-lands…  Surely things are so bad now that at least they can’t get any worse?

 

The sound you hear is 2023 saying, “Hold my beer…”

 

From unsplash.com / © Peter Leong

Posted on

My 2022 writing round-up

 

© The Horror Zine

 

If years were cars, then the one that’s just concluded, 2022, would definitely not be a sleek, shiny Aston Martin DB6 driven by Sean Connery in Goldfinger (1964).  No, 2022 would more likely be an ugly, black-smoke-spewing, rolling-coal diesel pick-up truck driven by some Trump-loving, climate-change-denying, QAnon-believing, anti-vaxxer moron in Texas.

 

Thanks to wars, economic crises, environmental disasters and ongoing pestilence, I can’t imagine anyone claiming that 2022 was a vintage year.  Well, maybe except for the Right Honourable Baroness Michelle Mone OBE, who at this moment is possibly raising a glass of bubbly and toasting the sight of Britain receding in the rear-view mirror of her luxury yacht, cruising at full speed towards some far-off, sun-kissed tax haven where she can enjoy the 29 million pounds that’s allegedly turned up in her and her children’s bank accounts.  This windfall may have something to do with Michelle cannily using her position and influence to lobby the British government a while back, during the pandemic, and persuade them to hand over 200 million pounds of taxpayers’ money to the mysterious company PPE Medpro in return for it supplying the NHS with personal, protective equipment – equipment that, it transpired, “’did not comply with the specification in the contract’ and could not be used”.

 

Anyway, on a personal level, 2022 was a hectic one for me.  It involved moving from Sri Lanka – not the result of the political and economic turmoil that erupted there earlier in the year, since I’d been planning to leave for some time before that – and coming to Singapore to start a new job.  The stress of the move may have affected me in a few ways.  For example, two things I normally love doing are reading books and watching films, yet in 2022 I’ve rarely had the concentration or been in the mood to do either.  However, one area of my life that seems to have survived unscathed is my writing.  I got a reasonable number of short stories published during the year, under the pseudonyms Jim Mountfield (used for my horror fiction) and Rab Foster (used for my fantasy fiction).

 

Here’s a round-up of those stories, who’s published them, and where you can find them.

 

© Schlock! Webzine

 

As Jim Mountfield:

  • In March 2022, my story Never Tell Tales out of School, which drew on unhappy memories of playground bullying during the rough-and-tumble 1970s, and was inspired by the work of the masterly Liverpudlian horror writer Ramsey Campbell, was published in Volume 16, Issue 26 of Schlock! Webzine. The issue can currently be purchased as a paperback or Kindle edition here.
  • Mermaid Fair – a story that involved both mermaids and, yes, a fair – was originally published in the now-defunct webzine Death Head Grin back in 2010. In March 2022, it was reprinted in the anthology Fearful Fun, from Thurston Howl Publications, which can be purchased here.
  • March was also when I had the first of several stories published in 2022 in the magazine The Sirens Call. Liver, set on a farm and featuring a dysfunctional father-son relationship, plus much eating of red meat, appeared in Issue 57 of The Sirens Call, which can be downloaded here.
  • And in July, it was the following issue of The Sirens Call that provided a home for my next story to appear in 2022. The magazine’s summer 2022 edition featured stories with a holiday theme. Thus, my story Selfless was about a holidaying couple in Thailand who come into possession of a strange smartphone that requires its owner to take lots of selfies.  Endless selfies… The issue can be downloaded here.

 

© Thurston Howl Publications

 

  • My haunted-house story Coming Home originally appeared in the webzine The Horror Zine back in 2014. In September 2022, I was delighted when it was selected for the commemorative anthology The Best of the Horror Zine: The Middle Years, which showcased the webzine’s strongest stories published between 2013 and 2020.  The collection can be purchased on Kindle or as a paperback here.
  • In October, I made it into the pages of another anthology. Published by Cloaked Press LLC, Nightmare Fuel 2022: Objects of Horror featured stories where “what lurks in plain sight… is the true horror” and where the scares emanate from “such seemingly mundane items as an antique desk, a television, or a cute little stuffed elephant…” My story was about a set of haunted wind chimes and, unsurprisingly, was called The Chimes.  Nightmare Fuel 2022: Objects of Horror can be obtained in Kindle or paperback versions here.
  • October was also the month of Halloween, and I managed to get a story into Issue 59, the Halloween edition, of The Sirens Call. This was entitled Guising and took a nostalgic look at the custom of guising – the Scottish version of trick-or-treating – as kids practised it in the 1970s.  Being a Jim Mountfield story, there was of course a gruesome ending.  A copy of the Halloween edition can be downloaded here.
  • Just before Christmas, my story Upstairs, inspired by the crumbling old French-Colonial-era apartment building that I lived in during my years in Tunisia, appeared in the December 2022 edition of ParABnormal Magazine, which can be purchased here.
  • And at the end of the year, my story The Faire Chlaidh – which translates from Scottish Gaelic as ‘the graveyard watch’ and is about the old belief that one of the souls of the folk buried in a graveyard has to remain there and guard the place – appeared in Issue 60 of The Sirens Call. It can be obtained here.

 

© The Sirens Call

 

As Rab Foster:

  • In January 2022, my fantasy story Crows of the Mynchmoor appeared in the ezine Swords and Sorcery Magazine. Not only about crows, but also about witches, sheep, scarecrows and, yes, turnips (beat that, George R.R. Martin), the story can now be read in the ezine’s archive section, here.
  • And it was in Swords and Sorcery Magazine that my second Rab Foster story of the year appeared, in August. The Library of Vadargarn was about forbidden books, religious zealots and demons covered in bronze scales and, again, is available for reading in the ezine’s archives, here.
  • Drayak Shathsprey, the hero of Crows of the Mynchmoor, made a second appearance in 2022. This was in the story The Tower and the Stars, published in the ezine Aphelion in October.  The Tower and the Stars also featured another Rab Foster character, the witch Gudroon, who’d originally appeared in the anthology Swords & Sorceries: Tales of Heroic Fantasy, Volume 3, published in November 2021.  The story is now available to read in Aphelion’s archive, here.

 

And that’s everything.  A very Happy New Year to you all.

 

Let’s hope that – if years were cars – 2023 is more like that Aston Martin DB5 and less like a brazenly-polluting, smoke-belching pick-up truck that Andrew Tate would approve of.  (Tate… Ha ha.)  Oh, and let’s hope too that Michelle Mone’s luxury yacht hits an iceberg.

 

© Aphelion

Posted on

Jim Mountfield does the graveyard shift

 

© The Sirens Call

 

My short story The Faire Chlaidh, written under the pseudonym Jim Mountfield, has just appeared in the winter 2022 edition of the dark fiction and poetry ezine The Sirens Call.

 

The story is inspired by an old Scottish belief that, to quote Wikipedia, “the spirit of the person most recently buried in a churchyard had to protect it until the next funeral provided a new guardian to replace them.  This churchyard vigil was known as the faire chlaidh or ‘graveyard watch’.”  A more detailed account of this belief – with, if you’re not familiar with Scottish Gaelic, a chance to hear the correct pronunciation of faire chlaidh – can be found here.

 

226 pages long, bursting with some 175 stories, poems and features, and absolutely free of charge, the winter 2022 issue of The Sirens Call can be downloaded here.

Posted on

The alternative Christmas movie list

 

© Pan-Canadian Film Distributors

 

The cinema at Singapore’s ArtScience Museum is currently showing a season of Christmas-themed films so a few days ago my partner and I visited it to catch a showing of John McTiernan’s action classic Die Hard (1987).  My partner hadn’t seen it before and I’d only seen it on a small screen back in the prehistoric days of Betamax video cassettes.

 

I know every festive season an argument erupts on social media about whether Die Hard is or isn’t a Christmas movie, but seeing it again in 2022 I have to say it seems very Christmassy, much more than I remembered.  It’s got Christmas trees, Christmas decorations, Christmas presents, Christmas carols and Christmas Santa hats – one gets planted cheekily on the corpse of a dead terrorist which Bruce Willis’s John McClane sends down in a lift to taunt the remaining bad guys.  There’s also a limousine stereo playing Run DMC’s Christmas in Hollis (1987) – ”Don’t you have any Christmas music?” McClane grumbles from the back seat.  And Die Hard has Alan Rickman as the villainous and sublimely withering Hans Gruber, who’s a sort of anti-Santa Claus.  Gruber’s intonation is priceless as he reads the message McClane has written in blood on the dead terrorist’s chest: “Now I have a machine gun.  Ho… ho… ho.”

 

From amazon.com / © 20th Century Fox

 

However, I tend not to be aficionado of Christmas movies, for two reasons.  Firstly, the way that Christmas is presented in these movies has never corresponded to Christmas as I know it.  For example, as a kid, when I heard Bing Crosby crooning White Christmas in the 1954 film of the same name and then looked out of my window in Scotland at the late-December weather, what I saw wasn’t Bing’s white, fluffy snow-scape.   What I saw was usually a charcoal-grey sky, leaking charcoal-grey rain down onto a charcoal-grey terrain.

 

Secondly, Christmas movies are, nearly without exception, rubbish.  Most of them eschew anything resembling quality and dial the schmaltz and saccharine up to 11 and assume that’ll satisfy audiences instead – which unfortunately, in many cases, it does.  The biggest offender in my opinion is Richard Curtis’s Love, Actually (2003), which I prefer to think of as Shite, Actually.  That thing wouldn’t have got anywhere near being a good film even if they’d rewritten the Alan Rickman character and allowed him to start killing people.

 

Still, there’s a small handful of what are officially deemed ‘Christmas movies’ that I like.  Die Hard is one and others include The Snowman (1982), Gremlins (1986), The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993), Rare Exports (2010) and The Muppet Christmas Carol (1992) – any film that has Gonzo the Great playing Charles Dickens is fine by me.

 

There’s also a number of movies that aren’t officially counted as Christmas movies, even though they take place during the festive season, that I like too.  No doubt they aren’t included in the accepted Christmas canon because they’re dark in tone and don’t conform to the Richard Curtis Law of Christmas-Movie Pap and Sentimentality.  Anyway, it’s in honour of those non-conforming films that I offer the following – my list of favourite alternative Christmas movies.

 

© Embassy International Pictures / Universal Pictures

 

Brazil (1985)

Terry Gilliam’s take on George Orwell’s 1984 (1949) has so much going on thematically and visually that it’s easy to forget it’s set at Christmas-time.  But while we try to get our heads around the workings of the dystopian society depicted in Brazil – where labyrinthine bureaucratic systems and labyrinthine plumbing systems go wrong with equal regularity, one with deadly results and the other with disgustingly gloopy ones – we’re assailed by Yuletide trappings: Christmas parties, presents, trees, music.  There’s a family reading Dickens’ A Christmas Carol (1843) – just before a terrifying squad of secret-police goons come crashing into their home, wrongly sent by a bureaucratic mistake involving a fly getting stuck inside a typewriter.  There are Christmas-decorated department stores that become hellholes – even more hellish than normal at this time of year – when terrorist bombs explode.

 

On a more symbolic level, the fate that befalls Robert DeNiro’s Harry Tuttle character – surreally engulfed in a mass of paper – suggests the horror of frantic, last-minute Christmas present-wrapping, when you begin to fear the unruly, recalcitrant paper is going to swallow you up.  And, late on, when Brazil’s everyman hero Sam (Jonathan Pryce) is imprisoned and facing torture, he gets a visit from Helpmann (Peter Vaughan), a senior official in the Ministry of Information, who ironically shows up wearing a Santa Claus outfit.  This underlines the fact that, like many an authoritarian, Helpmann believes he’s being benevolent towards his subjects, though in reality he’s anything but.

 

© Cinema Entertainment Enterprises

 

Rabid (1977)

As you might expect, Christmas with Canadian director David Cronenberg is not exactly cosy.  Set during the festive season in and around Montreal, Cronenberg’s Rabid tells the tale of a woman (Marilyn Chambers) developing a weird, parasitic skin-puncturing / blood-draining orifice under her armpit following some experimental surgery.  She soon becomes a plague-spreader – her new body part infecting people who turn into ravening, blood-craving monsters.  One negative thing I always felt about Christmas was the sense of confinement – being stuck indoors because the weather was foul and because there was nothing to do outside anyway due to everything being closed.  Rabid conveys a similar feeling by showing Montreal under martial law, its wintry streets silent save for the trucks prowling around removing corpses from the sidewalks.  Though a more obvious Christmassy moment is when carnage erupts in a shopping mall and the cops unwittingly gun down the store Santa Claus.

 

The Silent Partner (1978)

You have to hand it to those Canadians – back in the 1970s, at least, they knew how to stage a dark Christmas movie.  Daryl Duke’s The Silent Partner (1978) is an excellent thriller, often amusing but with a few moments of nasty violence to keep the audience on edge.  Its villain is the psychotic but intelligent criminal Harry Reikle (Christopher Plummer).  Reikle becomes a formidable opponent for – and, as the film progresses, the title’s sinister ‘silent partner’ to – the film’s hero, Miles Cullen (Elliot Gould), a mild-mannered teller working in the Toronto bank that Reikle decides to rob.  As it’s Christmas time, and the shopping mall where the bank’s located is overflowing with festive cheer, Reikle carries out the crime disguised as a mall Santa Claus.  However, he meets his match in Miles.  After Reikle botches the robbery, Miles uses it as an opportunity to fill his own pockets with the supposedly ‘stolen’ money.  Reikle is predictably disgruntled by this and a game of cat-and-mouse ensues between them.

 

The Silent Partner later moves its action to a different time of year, but not before we see Miles at that traditional festive fixture, the staff Christmas party, where he has to listen to his weary, cynical workmates speculating longingly about what they’d do with the stolen money if they had it.  His colleagues include a very young John Candy, sporting an alarming 1970s side-parted hairdo.

 

© Hammer Films / British Lion Films

 

Cash on Demand (1961)

While we’re on the subject of movies about bank workers finding themselves in unhappy alliances with bank robbers, let’s mention the superlative Hammer Films B-movie Cash on Demand, directed by Quentin Lawrence, with Peter Cushing – better known for appearing in the studio’s horror films – as a snotty, uptight bank manager called Fordyce, who’s forced to help a criminal, Hepburn (Andre Morell), intent on robbing his bank.  Unlike The Silent Partner, Cash on Demand doesn’t show any violence but a lot of nastiness is implied, with Hepburn matter-of-factly informing Fordyce that he’s kidnapped his family and is going to start torturing them with electrical shocks if he doesn’t cooperate.

 

And, like The Silent Partner, the attempted robbery in Cash on Demand takes place during Christmas, with a Salvation Army band playing carols outside Fordyce’s bank.  Indeed, there’s a Scrooge / Christmas Carol subtext to the plot.  Fordyce begins the film as an insufferable prick, contemptuous of his workers, who are more interested in their upcoming Christmas do than the day’s toil at their desks.  However, by the ordeal’s end – and after his staff have come to his rescue – Fordyce is a much more appreciative soul, not just of his family but of the people who work for him.

 

© Amicus Productions / Metromedia Producers Corporation

 

Tales from the Crypt (1972)

Cushing also appears in the cast of the British horror anthology movie Tales from the Crypt, along with such notables as Sir Ralph Richardson, Ian Hendry and Patrick Magee.  Its first episode, All through the House, has the future Alexis Colby and all-round super-diva Joan Collins murdering her wealthy husband on Christmas Eve.  Just before she can make the murder – bashing his head in with a poker while he was reading a newspaper, smoking a cigar and wearing a Santa hat – look like an accident – falling down the cellar stairs – fate intervenes in the form of an escaped homicidal maniac who’s prowling outside and is dressed as Santa Claus.  We spend the story waiting to hear why he’s dressed as Santa Claus, but we never do – he just is.  In the climactic scene, Ms Collins gets her just desserts by being strangled by the maniac.  Actually, it looks like he’s just giving her a shoulder massage, but it’s still good, grisly, Yuletide fun.

 

© Rizzoli Film / Seda Spettacoll / Cineriz

 

Deep Red (1976)

Dario Argento’s ultra-stylish giallo movie Deep Red (Italian title Profondo Rosso) has David Hemmings investigating a string of gruesome murders around Turin.  It’s only tenuously a Christmas movie – the opening scene involves a child witnessing a murder next to a Christmas tree – but generally, in its dark way, the film feels Christmasy.  It’s due in part to the richness of Argento’s visuals and in part to the Christmas-like music by Argento’s frequent collaborators, German progressive-rock band Goblin, which alternates between a baroque organ-driven theme and a plaintive child’s refrain.  Meanwhile, the cackling clockwork puppet that makes a brief but unforgettable appearance is the sort of Christmas present you’d give to a child you really don’t like.

 

The Proposition (2005)

What does this Nick Cave-scripted, John Hillcoat-directed Australian western have to do with Christmas?  Well, the movie’s finale is a masterpiece of festive-season irony.  It has a beleaguered police captain and his wife, played by Ray Winstone and Emily Watson, prepare for their Christmas dinner – turkey, sprouts, pudding et al – with civilised English decorum in the midst of the festering, dusty, fly-ridden hellhole that was the 1880s Australian Outback.  There’s also a gang of vengeful, blood-crazed bushrangers on their way intending to kill Winstone and rape Watson, even while Winstone and Watson arrange the Christmas cutlery and crackers on their dining table.

 

Australians I know have described the weirdness of trying to celebrate a European-style Christmas against the backdrop of Australia’s sweltering December climate, and Cave’s script taps into that weirdness.  The Proposition is, incidentally, one of the mankiest films I’ve seen, with the grime-encrusted, matted-haired characters on view paying absolutely no attention to their personal hygiene.  The best thing Santa Claus could do for this lot is leave a few bottles of shampoo and conditioner in their stockings.

 

© UK Film Council / Sony Pictures Releasing

 

The Proposition would make a great Australian double-bill with my favourite Christmas movie of all time, which is…  Drum-roll…

 

Wake in Fright (1973)

One of the films that helped kick-start what is now known as Australia’s cinematic New Wave, Ted Kotcheff’s Wake in Fright is a reworking of William Golding’s Lord of the Flies (1954) – with a schoolteacher called John Grant (Gary Bond), not some schoolchildren, stranded in an isolated, primitive environment where the onion-skins of civilisation are gradually peeled off him and he descends into savagery.  The twist is that Grant isn’t stuck on a desert island but in a hellish Australian Outback town called Bundanyabba, where he’s foolishly gambled away the money he was using to travel home to Sydney.  And the brutish behaviour of Bundanyabba’s locals that infects him and drags him down isn’t, it’s implied, any different from that in any other Australian Outback town.

 

Famous for its scenes of squalor, drunkenness, brawling, vandalism, vomit, sweat-stains, flies, animal-slaughter and Donald Pleasence going bananas, Wake in Fright still qualifies as a Christmas movie.  Grant is trying to get back to Sydney for the Christmas vacation and events in Bundanyabba take place against a festive background of Christmas trees, decorations and carols.  Meanwhile, a scene near the end where a stained and begrimed Grant wakes up on a floor, haunted by memories from the night before of drinking about a hundred pints, gunning down about two dozen kangaroos, wrecking a pub, and shagging Donald Pleasance, will strike a chord with anyone who’s woken up in a similar state, with similarly traumatic memories, the morning after the work Christmas party.

 

© NLT Productions / Group W Films / United Artists

 

Merry Christmas!

Posted on

Look backwards and wince

 

© White Rabbit

 

Sing Backwards and Weep, the autobiography of singer, songwriter, musician and poet Mark Lanegan, was published in 2020, two years before Lanegan’s untimely death.  It’s not a book to read if you want to know about the creative processes that went into Lanegan’s impressive body of work.  This included being vocalist with the grunge band the Screaming Trees for 16 years, contributing to alternative / stoner rock band Queens of the Stone Age during their glory years of the early noughties, being one half of the Gutter Twins with the Afghan Whigs’ Greg Dulli, and producing a dozen solo albums – of which, in my opinion, Whiskey for the Holy Ghost (1994), Bubblegum (2004) and Blues Funeral (2012) are particularly excellent.  Lanegan also seemed to be the world’s most prolific collaborator, working with an array of musicians and bands that included Moby, the Breeders, Melissa Auf der Maur, the Eagles of Death Metal, Tinariwen, Hey Colossus, Cult of Luna, the Manic Street Preachers and Belle and Sebastian’s Isobel Campbell.

 

No, you get little insight into that in Sing Backwards and Weep.  What you get is a lot, at times a non-stop barrage, of despair and degradation that’s often of a drug-fuelled nature. This is mingled with much bile directed at other people, including many working in the music industry, and much loathing directed at himself.  But while there were passages of Sing Backwards and Weep that I read wincing, the equivalent of how I’d watch a gruelling horror film through my fingers, I did end up feeling this was one of the best rock-music bios I’d ever come across.

 

In terms of grimness, the book hits the ground running. Lanegan introduces himself as being “from a long line of coal miners, loggers, bootleggers, South Dakotan dirt farmers, criminals, convicts and hillbillies of the roughest, most ignorant sort”, and says of his hometown Ellensburg in Washington state: “I hated this dead-end redneck town, hated the ignorant right-wing, white-trash hay farmers and cattlemen talking constantly about the weather, hated the constant battering wind that blew the putrid smell of cow shit everywhere.”  He detested his mother, a feeling that she reciprocated.  While he was much fonder of his father, the man had an alcohol problem and was distant, ineffectual and incapable of controlling his son.

 

The young Lanegan predictably became a delinquent.  At the age of eighteen he narrowly avoided spending a year-and-a-half in prison, the rap-sheet he’d accrued by then including “vandalism, car prowling, multiple counts of illegal dumping of garbage, trespassing, 26 tickets for underage drinking, shoplifting alcohol, possession of marijuana, bicycle theft, tool theft, theft of car parts, theft of motorcycle parts, urinating in public, theft of beer keg and taps, insurance fraud, theft of car stereos, public drunkenness, breaking and entering, possession of stolen property, and… a disorderly conduct charge.”

 

In 1984 Lanegan joined local band the Screaming Trees. This was hardly a moment of epiphany, where he forgot the misery of existence and instead discovered the transcendental joys of creativity and art.  Far from it.  A long time passed before Lanegan became happy with the Trees’ music.  Until then, he felt, “Our records were a shitty mishmash of half-baked ideas and catchy tunes derailed by the stupidest of lyrics.”  Also, his relationship with the band’s guitarist / songwriter Lee Conner was adversarial to say the least.  “Lee was completely inept socially and expected the world to come to him, something that was never going to happen.”  An incident on tour where Conner received a severe electric shock from a broken light-bulb on the frame of a dressing-room mirror is both darkly hilarious and indicative of the scorn Lanegan felt for him: “He flopped like a fish on a line and I saw blue light coming out of the wall as he electrocuted himself on the broken filament…  I howled with maniacal glee.”

 

From wikipedia.org / Copyright unknown

 

Yet the Trees were, as the adage goes, ‘in the right place at the right time’.  Elsewhere in Washington state, in its capital Seattle, the world-conquering musical movement that’d become known as ‘grunge’ was gathering momentum and the Trees would find themselves one of its leading bands – though grunge was a label Lanegan despised.  He got a glimpse of what was on the way when an up-and-coming band called Nirvana performed in his hometown: “Perhaps one of the best bands I’d ever seen, in the f**king Ellensburg Public Library no less.”  This was the start of a close friendship with the gifted and charismatic but troubled Kurt Cobain.  When Nirvana later became the biggest rock band on the planet, Lanegan observes how Cobain “was disgusted by the pedestal he’d been set atop and the ass-kissing sycophants he encountered at every turn.”  After Cobain’s suicide in 1994, he writes: “I was lost in the darkest, most depressing regret and self-loathing I’d ever experienced.”

 

After relocating to Seattle, Lanegan also bonded with Layne Staley, the singer of fellow grunge outfit Alice in Chains: “one of the most naturally hilarious, magical, mischievous, and intelligent people I’d ever met.”  Staley would die in 2002, another victim of the apparent ‘curse of grunge-band singers’ that’d struck down Cobain and would later claim Scott Weiland of the Stone Temple Pilots in 2015, Chris Cornell of Soundgarden in 2017 and Lanegan himself in 2022.

 

Thus, things get pretty awful during the course of Sing Backwards and Weep, for Lanegan’s friends and associates and for Lanegan himself, but it’s a remarkably funny book too.  Funny in a macabre way, obviously.  Many of Lanegan’s most amusing anecdotes involve famous people.  There’s James Garner, star of television’s The Rockford Files (1974-80), who’s a guest on an episode of Jay Leno’s The Tonight Show in 1993 where the Screaming Trees give a disastrous live performance.  Afterwards, when Lanegan is persuaded to sit down with Leno and his guests, Garner grasps his hand and says, “How you doing, young fella?  I’m Jim.  That wasn’t bad, young fella.  It coulda been a lot worse!”

 

There’s the film star Matt Dillon, victim of an arson attack by Lanegan: “…while drinking together post-gig in a NYC bar, I stuck my lit cigarette into the pocket of Matt Dillon’s suit jacket when his back was turned and set it on fire as I walked away.”  The reason for this?  Dillon had appeared in the 1992 movie Singles, Hollywood’s attempt to cash in on the grunge phenomenon, which Lanegan considered “a lame and sap-filled farce of a movie… To me, it may as well have been the Spice Girls film.”

 

© Warner Bros

 

There’s a funny anecdote about Nick Cave, who’s in Seattle and arrives at Lanegan’s door to make a drugs transaction – by this point Lanegan was selling drugs from his apartment, to everyone from ‘street people, mostly Eritrean and Ethiopian migrants’ to ‘traveling rock bands’, and spending the profits on heroin.  He’d attracted the ire of his neighbours and was ‘especially despised by a young goth couple whose door was directly opposite mine.’  After the sale, “the couple just happened to be unlocking their door and entering their apartment. As we stepped out, they caught a glimpse of Cave standing there in his three-piece suit, his iconic jet-black pompadour perfectly in place, and almost broke their necks doing a double take.”

 

However, the laugh-out-loud highlight of the book is the chapter where Lanegan recounts what happened in September 1996 when the Screaming Trees took part in a North American tour as support to then Britpop superstars Oasis.  It would be an understatement to say that Lanegan and the Oasis singer and notorious gobshite Liam Gallagher didn’t hit it off.  At the tour’s start, Gallagher accosted Lanegan with a mocking cry of “Howling Branches!”, which prompted the response, “F**k off, you stupid f**king idiot” – ‘spoken as if to a bothersome mosquito.’  Predictably, Gallagher took this badly.  Lanegan’s disdain for the lippy Mancunian increased when he heard that Gallagher had insulted one of his idols, Neil Young.  “It was one thing to be a prick to me, but how dare that son of a bitch be rude to Neil?”

 

Lanegan fills the chapter with hilarious anti-Gallagher invective: “He had probably been a low-life c**ksucker his entire life.  Maybe he’d been a bedwetter, shit his pants at school, or been cut from the football squad as a youngster and never gotten over it.  I couldn’t believe someone hadn’t beaten, knifed, or shot him to death by now, such was the reckless, witless, and despotic nature of his insufferable façade.”  After Gallagher seemingly promised that there’d be a physical reckoning between the two of them in Miami, the final gig of the tour, Lanegan got so wound-up in his hatred that, one day in a taxi, he poured his heart out about it to the driver.  The taxi driver had him swap a ten-dollar bill for a roll of quarters and advised him: “Keep these in your fist and the next time you see him, break his f**king jaw.”

 

Alas, the Miami showdown never happened, for Oasis curtailed the tour and flew back to England early.  While it’s more likely that internal tensions within Oasis at the time were responsible for this, Lanegan believed it was because of Gallagher’s fear of the drubbing he was going to get: “That phony motherf**ker had pissed his pants and gone home to mama before I had a chance to blow this whole thing up myself.”

 

But the laughs in Sing Backwards and Weep come amid much darkness. Lanegan’s self-loathing is a recurring motif.  When he was with Cobain, he felt he was an “actively negative presence in the life of this beautiful and talented man, who instead of showing him any positive guidance, consistently chose to take the low road so that I could continue to stay high…”  Reflecting on his knack for sabotaging any opportunities to find success and happiness, he muses, “…I was an expert on trading gold for garbage.”

 

© Sub Pop

 

This isn’t just melodramatic, self-obsessed whining.  Events described throughout the book give ample justification for Lanegan’s low opinion of himself.  Particularly bleak are the final pages, which see him reduced to homelessness – sleeping ‘under a dingy blue tarp I had pulled out of a dumpster’ – and dependent on selling drugs and robbing shops to survive.  This comes to an end only through interventions by Cobain’s widow Courtney Love and Guns ‘N’ Roses bassist Duff McKagan, which get Lanegan into a Californian drug-treatment programme and then into accommodation and employment.

 

However, it’s a chapter before that, entitled Ice Cold European Funhouse and detailing part of a Screaming Trees tour in the late 1990s that incorporated Sheffield, Bristol, Essen, Amsterdam and London, that really illustrates the depths Lanegan had sunk to.  By this point, he was so blighted by his addictions that his bandmates “had begun to refer to me behind my back as ‘Mr Burns’, the old, bitter, bent-over, and creepy boss in The Simpsons cartoon television programme.”  The descriptions of his increasing desperate attempts to procure heroin across England, Germany and Holland, with his body wracked by withdrawal symptoms and his behaviour becoming more and more unhinged, are nightmarish.

 

Fate seems to conspire against him.  His efforts are continually thwarted by him not having any money to buy the drugs, by him not having tickets for the night-buses or fares for the taxis he needs to get to and from the dealers, by criminals selling him fake heroin, by other criminals mugging and robbing him…  It’s like watching Wile E. Coyote constantly failing to catch the Roadrunner, with Lanegan as the Coyote and the drugs as the Roadrunner.  All this takes place against the intense, miserable cold of a north European winter.

 

At one point, trying to make it to a dealer’s place on a street in King’s Cross, he “began to projectile vomit so hard that it took me to my knees, then flat out on the ground.  Despite the fact that I’d not eaten any food in two days, up came copious quantities of pure-black liquid.”  At another point, in Amsterdam, penniless but determined to obtain funds to score, he goes after the man responsible for selling the tour’s merchandising and demands that he gives him money.  Terrified, the ‘merch guy’ hides in his hotel room.  “I began trying to actually kick the door in, trying my damnedest to gain entry to actually murder this recalcitrant son of a bitch.”  Back in London, when someone tries to mug and rob him a second time, he beats the shit out of his would-be attacker: “…all the repressed anger, pain, and extreme anxiety I’d held on to throughout this entire, trying ordeal… came pouring out.”  In the midst of these horrors, the Screaming Trees have to perform on the venerable TV music show Later with Jools Holland (1992-present).  You can imagine the now utterly raddled Lanegan in the presence of the famously chirpy Holland, “…enduring the half-baked witticisms of the scripted banter between host and guests.”

 

The Ice Cold European Funhouse chapter could almost be a self-contained short story about the damage that drugs can do to a person.  It’d be a great short story too, something that wouldn’t be out of place in, say, the Irvine Welsh collection The Acid House (1994).  Incidentally, on my copy of Sing Backwards and Weep, Welsh contributes the blurb on the front cover.

 

The book ends in 2002.  This calls to mind the Chinese saying, “May you live in interesting times,” which initially sounds like a blessing but is actually a curse.  Lanegan’s life until then was fascinating to read about, but often hellish for Lanegan himself.  After 2002, presumably, he found stability, success and fulfilment, which was great for him but would probably make much less interesting reading material.  However, by the time you reach the end of Sing Backwards and Weep, you won’t begrudge the old bugger for having earned the right to live a more boring life afterwards.

 

From wikipedia.org / © Steven Friederich