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The literary Bond revisited: Colonel Sun

 

© Vintage Publishing

 

Here’s the latest in a series of posts wherein I look at the original James Bond novels and short-story collections from the 1950s and 1960s.  This time, however, I’m looking at a Bond novel that wasn’t written by Ian Fleming.  It’s 1968’s Colonel Sun, by Kingsley Amis.  Why?  Well, I slagged off Amis’s The Old Devils (1986) on this blog a few months ago, and I feel a bit guilty about giving poor old Kingsley a (verbal) kicking then.  So here’s my take on Colonel Sun, which I believe is much better.

 

In some ways, the 21st century has been a difficult time for James Bond.  On the film front, the new century began with one of the worst Bond movies ever, 2002’s Die Another Day, an ignoble end to Pierce Brosnan’s tenure in the role.  And, though the franchise was steadied with the recruitment of Daniel Craig and a more serious, mature and sensitive approach to the character, trouble never felt far away.  See, for example, the long periods between productions – six years from Spectre (2015) to No Time to Die (2021) – and Craig’s well-publicised reluctance to play Bond again after Spectre.  And the fact that, in the most recent movie, the filmmakers took the unprecedented step of – MASSIVE SPOILER AHEAD! – killing him off at the end.

 

Plus, there’s been much talk in recent years about Bond’s ‘obsolescence’.  The thinking goes that as a privileged, white, stuck-up, sexist macho-man rooted in the early decades of the Cold War, Bond has become embarrassingly anachronistic in our more socially-aware era today.  Laurie Penny, for instance, said as much in a New Statesman article in 2015.  There’s a parallel argument that in the high-tech modern world Bond is obsolescent too.  This was even referred to in Spectre, when Bond is faced with a new, tech-obsessed superior called C (Andrew Scott).  C vows to “bring British intelligence out of the dark ages, into the light” and argues that “an agent in the field”, like 007, can’t “last long against all those drones and satellites.”

 

And yet, no matter how unfashionable Bond might be nowadays, you can’t deny that well-regarded modern writers are still keen to follow in Ian Fleming’s footsteps and have a go at writing new Bond novels.  These include Sebastian Foulkes (with 2008’s Devil May Care), Jeffery Deaver (with 2011’s Carte Blanche), William Boyd (with 2013’s Solo) and Anthony Horowitz (with 2015’s Trigger Mortis and 2018’s Forever and a Day).  Long before Foulkes, Deaver, Boyd and Horowitz got in on the act, though, another writer attempted to construct a novel around Fleming’s legendary superspy.

 

In 1968, just four years after Fleming’s death, Kingsley Amis wrote a Bond adventure called Colonel Sun and published it under the pseudonym Robert Markham.  By then, Amis was a big noise in British letters thanks to works like 1954’s Lucky Jim and 1960’s Take a Girl Like You.  I should say my 2015 Vintage Classics edition of Colonel Sun makes no mention of Robert Markham on its cover and advertises it unapologetically as a Kingsley Amis novel.  Anyway, before I offer my thoughts on Colonel Sun, here’s another spoilers warning.  There are lots of them ahead…

 

© Ian Fleming Publications

 

The novel is set a little while after the events of Fleming’s Bond swansong, The Man with the Golden Gun (1965), which Amis is rumoured to have polished up when Fleming died before he could revise it himself.  It begins with an audacious attempt by some unidentified villains to kidnap both Bond and his secret-service boss M.  They’re only half-successful.  M is abducted and whisked out of England, but Bond manages to elude his would-be abductors and is tasked with tracking M down.  He soon homes in on an island in the Aegean Sea.  There, M is being held by a Chinese officer, ‘Colonel Sun Liang-tan of the Special Activities Committee, People’s Liberation Army’.

 

The Colonel has a dastardly plan.  The Soviet Union is hosting a secret international conference in the area and Sun plans to destroy it and the delegates in a mortar attack, the blame for which will then be pinned on Britain.  Sun intends to make it look like one of the last mortars blew up accidentally, before firing, and leave Bond and M’s dead, but still identifiable, bodies in the wreckage.  Thus, China will benefit from the discrediting not only of the USSR for sloppy security, but also of the UK for warmongering.

 

To rescue M and thwart Sun’s scheme, Bond joins forces with a woman called Ariadne Alexandrou, a Greek communist who’s been working for the Soviets; and a Greek World War II veteran called Niko Litsas who, after fighting Nazis, fought communists during the 1946-49 Greek Civil War.  Amis discreetly skates over Britain’s sorry role in this episode of Greek history.  In 1944 the British government decided to back the anti-communist faction in Greece against the left-leaning one, even though the former faction contained many Nazi sympathisers and collaborators and the latter contained many partisans who’d fought for the Allies.  Despite their ideological differences, the trio bond – ouch – and are soon prowling the Aegean Sea in a vessel called The Altair whilst figuring a way of taking the fight to Sun and his many henchmen.

 

Amis’s plot is generic and a few things don’t make sense.  For example, why does Sun want to plant the elderly and normally deskbound M at the scene of the crime?  This is the literary M we’re talking about, not the feistier and more empowered cinematic version played by the likes of Judi Dench and Ralph Fiennes.  Wouldn’t it look more believable if the body of another, physically-able British agent was found there next to Bond’s?  It’s hard to see this as anything more than a perfunctory excuse for the novel’s main gimmick, the kidnapping of M.

 

But Colonel Sun is still good entertainment and feels more credible as a Bond novel than the other non-Fleming Bonds I’ve read.  For one thing, unlike the rather bland villains in most of the 21st century Bond-novels I mentioned above, Colonel Sun makes a memorable baddie.

 

© Methuen

 

Yes, he belongs to a long tradition of Oriental supervillains found in pulpy colonial adventure fiction – Sax Rohmer’s Fu Manchu books being the most notorious examples.  He’s not even the first bad guy in the Bond canon to follow this dubious blueprint, an honour that belongs to the titular character of Fleming’s Dr No (1957).  But Sun is splendidly eccentric.  He’s irritatingly polite and addresses friends and foes alike by their first names.  He also sees himself as an Anglophile: “Sun did not share his colleagues’ often-expressed contempt… for everything British.  He was fond of many aspects of their culture and considered it regrettable in some ways that that culture had such a short time left.”

 

Then there’s his penchant for torture.  Near the novel’s end, just before he lays into Bond with an array of kitchen utensils (‘knives, skewers, broom-straws’), he explains: “True sadism has nothing whatever to do with sex.  The intimacy I was referring to is moral and spiritual, the union of two souls in a rather mystical way.”  Later still, he surprises us when he confesses to Bond that “I didn’t feel like a god when I was torturing you back there.  I felt sick and guilty and ashamed.”

 

Admittedly, I could have done without the linguistic quirk that Amis gives him.  Thanks to his “quick ear and passionate desire to learn” English and a “total ignorance of the British dialect pattern”, he’s ended up with a bizarre accent combining the “tones of Manchester, Glasgow, Liverpool, Belfast, Newcastle, Cardiff and several sorts of London…”  As a result, every time Colonel Sun opens his mouth in the book, I imagine his voice sounding like an Artificial Intelligence one created from a dataset involving Liam Gallagher, Billy Connolly, Ringo Starr, Van Morrison, Jimmy Nail, Charlotte Church and Ray Winstone.

 

Colonel Sun also feels like a proper Bond novel because Kingsley Amis’s authorial voice doesn’t sound that different from Ian Fleming’s.  Putting it more crudely, it feels closer to the originals than the modern pastiches do because Amis was as much of a curmudgeonly snob as Fleming was.  By the 1960s, Bond’s rarefied world of Bentleys, dinner jackets and private members’ clubs were on their way out; and Amis bellyaches about it as you’d imagine Fleming would.  When Bond drives through some English farmland, he writes: “Places like this would last longest as memorials of what England had once been.  As if to contradict this idea, there appeared ahead of him a B.E.A. Trident newly taken off from London Airport, full of tourists bringing their fish-and-chip culture to the Spanish resorts, to Portugal’s lovely Algarve province, and now… as far as Morocco.”

 

Also activating Amis’s Licence to Grump is the prospect of the great, fish-and-chip-loving unwashed discovering the Greek islands.  Describing a waterfront, he observes: “At the near end were whitewashed cottages with blue or tan shutters and doors, then a grocery, a ship’s supplier, harbour offices, a tavérna with a faded green awning.  No neon, no cars, no souvenir shops.  Not yet.”

 

Still, some aspects of Colonel Sun are surprisingly liberal, considering Amis’s cranky right-wing politics.  Adriane, the book’s heroine, is resourceful and able to look after herself and Bond comes across as less of a sexist boor than one might expect.  Meanwhile, some Soviet characters are depicted sympathetically: for example, Gordienko, Moscow’s man in Athens, who believes Bond’s warnings that something fishy is afoot and will have bad consequences for both their countries; and Yermolov, the pragmatic, vodka-loving dignitary who at the end expresses the USSR’s gratitude to Bond for foiling Sun’s plan.  Indeed, Yermolov feels like a prototype for the tough but avuncular General Gogol, the KGB head played by Walter Gottel, who appeared in every Bond movie from The Spy Who Loved Me (1977) to The Living Daylights (1987).  In Colonel Sun, Yermolov even offers Bond the Order of the Red Banner; just as Gogol awards Roger Moore (‘Comrade Bond’) the Order of Lenin at the end of 1985’s A View to a Kill.

 

© Eon Productions

 

But before we assume that old Kingsley has gone all hippy-dippy and peace-and-love, we should bear in mind that the Soviets are the good guys here only comparatively – because the bad guys are the Chinese.  The novel even postulates that the West and the Soviet Union are on the brink of working together because of the increasing threat posed by China.  Richard Nixon’s jaunt to China in 1972 must have knocked that notion on the head.  Happily, by the time of the 1997 Bond movie Tomorrow Never Dies, which has Pierce Brosnan joining forces with Michelle Yeoh to take on Rupert Murdoch, sorry, an evil, fictional media mogul played by Jonathan Pryce, the Bond-verse had decided that the Chinese could be good guys too.

 

While Colonel Sun has never been filmed, it’s interesting how a few of its ideas have turned up in the Bond movies.  The kidnapping of M was a key plot element in 1999’s Tomorrow Never Dies, while a villain called Colonel Tan-Sun Moon features in Die Another Day.  And if Colonel Sun’s musings during the book’s climactic torture scene sound familiar – “Torture is easy, on a superficial level.  A man can watch himself being disembowelled and derive great horror from the experience, but it’s still going on at a distance…  a man lives inside his head.  That’s where the seed of his soul is…  So James, I’m going to penetrate to where you are.  To the inside of your head….” – it’s because they were used as dialogue in Spectre, during the scene where Christoph Waltz violates Daniel Craig’s skull using a torture device that looks like a dentist’s drill on a robotic tentacle.

 

In Spectre, Waltz’s character is revealed as being none other than Ernst Stavro Blofeld.  Having James Bond’s great arch-enemy borrow his best lines?  Colonel Sun would have been flattered.

 

© Eon Productions

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Hey, hey, we’re the munchies

 

© Duckworth Books

 

Another Halloween-inspired post…

 

Zombie movies used to be my favourite sub-genre of horror cinema.  Okay, at first, it’s difficult to see the charms of a school of movies about reanimated corpses shambling around and trying to munch on the living.  But what I liked about zombies was that they could be a brilliant metaphor for any group that was large in number but, according to the powers-that-be, mindless: consumers, blue-collar workers, the homeless, etc.  This gave filmmakers endless opportunities for social comment and allowed zombie movies to have brains figuratively as well as literally.

 

Thus, George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (1968) is a parable about a United States rattled by racial tensions and the Vietnam War.  His 1979 sequel Dawn of the Dead takes potshots at a consumerist America where shopping malls had become part of both the landscape and the social fabric.  Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later (2002) reflects a Britain where anger was an increasingly common social phenomenon, terms like ‘road rage’ and ‘air rage’ having entered the popular vernacular.  Its sequel, Juan Carlos Fresnadillo’s 28 Weeks Later (2007) is an allegory about the post-war occupation of Iraq.  And Edgar Wright’s Shaun of the Dead (2004) takes the piss out of a twenty-something slacker generation who can’t tell if someone’s a zombie or just stoned, drunk or hungover.

 

But I said I used to be fond of zombie movies, because in the last few years I feel there’s been too damned many of them, offering the same old apocalyptic visions and same old shambling tropes.  Zombies have become ubiquitous, not just in the cinema but in TV series, books, graphic novels and computer games.  With popular TV shows like The Walking Dead (2010-present), derived from a graphic novel, and The Last of Us (2023), derived from a computer game, filling our screens with zombie carnage week after week after week, surely it’s impossible now to do anything fresh with the concept?

 

Despite my zombie-fatigue, however, I recently read Max Brooks’ bestselling 2006 novel World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War.  This is probably the number-two urtext in the zombie pantheon.  (Obviously, the number-one urtext is George A. Romero’s original trilogy of Living Dead movies, Night, Dawn and 1986’s Day of the Dead, which created the template: the flesh-eating, the infection being spread by bites, the need to shoot them in the head, the humans reacting to the crisis soon becoming more monstrous than the zombies themselves.)  Brooks updated the sub-genre for the 21st century and imagined a zombie plague happening on a global scale, with different countries responding in different ways.

 

From wikipedia.org / © Rhododendrites

 

World War Z is a mock non-fictional tome modelled on Studs Terkel’s The Good War: An Oral History of World War Two (1984).  It’s purportedly a compilation of interviews by a United Nations expert who, sometime after a worldwide zombie crisis ended, worked on a UN Postwar Commission Report.  He collected oral testimonies from survivors but, ultimately, the commission’s chairperson decided not to include the testimonies in the report, reasoning: “It was all too intimate…  Too many opinions, too many feelings.  That’s not what this report is about.  We need clear facts and figures, unclouded by the human factor.”  So instead, the UN expert publishes the survivors’ stories in book-form.

 

One’s first impression of World War Z is that Brooks – who in real life is the son of venerable funnyman and comic filmmaker Mel Brooks – has not only set his sights high but done his homework.  The book believably presents the voices not just of ordinary people, but of politicians, scientists, doctors, soldiers, mercenaries, pilots, etc.  It nicely captures their particular sets of jargon, slang and cadences as they describe their  experiences of the conflict with the undead.  The political protocols, science, technology, medicine, weaponry and equipment referred to sound convincingly well-researched.  Brooks is also authoritative when his UN official interviews people from more specialist walks of life, such as deep-sea divers (these zombies can move underwater) and astronauts (there’s a section about the crew of the International Space Station who, after things kick off, find themselves in orbit for longer than planned and do all they can to help humanity below).

 

The jargon occasionally gets a bit dense.  For instance, a diver grumps: “Kids today… f*ckin’ A.  I sound like my pops, but it’s true, the kids today, the new ADS divers in the Mark 3s and 4s, they have this ZeVDek – Zero Visibility Detection Kit – with colour-imaging sonar and low-light optics…  We couldn’t see, we couldn’t hear – we couldn’t even feel if a G was trying to grab us from behind.”  But then, people in any profession use plenty of jargon when they talk with passion about their work.  And you have to be passionate about your work when it involves relentless waves of zombies coming at you.

 

From pixabay.com / © Syaibatul Hamadi

 

A few entries stray into stereotypes and caricature, though.  An account by one Kondo Tatsumi, a teenaged computer geek so addicted to hacking into systems and obtaining information that he stays at his bedroom computer long after his parents have vanished, and the zombies have started eating his neighbours, without any awareness of the peril he’s in, ladles on the stereotype of the Japanese otaku too thickly.  To rub it in, Kondo is described as being at the time ‘a skinny acne-faced teenager with dull red eyes and bleached blond highlights streaking his unkempt hair.’

 

Another Japanese-set instalment is rather cheesy too.  It concerns an elderly blind man called ‘Sensei’ Tomonaga Ijiro.  Though old and blind, his sense of hearing and smell are acute and he’s also skilled at using a samurai sword – well, it’s really a sharp-bladed shovel that he used during his pre-World-War-Z days working as a gardener.  He manages to survive for years in the forested mountains of Hokkaido, slaying any zombie that ventures near him.  Here, Brooks is clearly riffing on the legendary blind swordman Zatoichi, a fixture of Japanese cinema and fiction.  But the story’s unlikeliness is out-of-place in a tome that generally aims for documentary realism.  Even if Sensei Tomonaga’s non-visual senses and swordsmanship enable him to fight off zombies for several years, I don’t see how an old blind bloke could stay alive in Hokkaido, in the open, for so long.  I’ve lived in Hokkaido and know how brutal its winters are.

 

Worst of all is the testimony of David Allen Forbes, a stereotypical Richard Curtis / Hugh Grant-style silly-ass Englishman whom Brooks’ dad could have featured in one of his films – Robin Hood: Men in Tights (1993), say, or Dracula: Dead and Loving It (1995).  An expert on castles, he begins by explaining how modern-day humans used the medieval structures as refuge against the zombie hordes.  Then he gets onto his own experiences of World War Z, which he spent holed up in Windsor Castle, just outside London.  There’s some utter guff where Forbes gets teary recalling Queen Elizabeth II.  She refused to join the rest of the Royal Family when they were evacuated to Ireland – yes, it shows how desperate things were that the Royal Family, for their safety, had to be sent to Ireland.  Instead, she stayed with the garrison in Windsor to ‘be an example to the rest of us, the strongest, and bravest, and absolute best of us.’  Of castles and Her Majesty, Forbes concludes: “One defended our bodies, the other, our souls.”  That bit turned my stomach more than the most graphic gore I’ve seen in a zombie movie.

 

Still, the good parts of World War Z more than outweigh the duff ones.  Most effective for me is a section where an American woman, Jesika Hendricks, recalls her experiences as a girl early in the crisis.  Following government advice to move north – by then it’d been noticed that zombies freeze up in cold weather – her urban, white-collar family load up a van and head for Canada.  They join some fellow refugees who’ve set up camp beside a lake.  Initially, everything is cheery, with communal bonhomie, singing around the campfire, and the nearby forest and lake-waters providing fuel and food.  Then, as the trees get cut down, and the fish get dynamited to non-existence, and the days grow shorter and colder, the mood sours.  “The camp became a mess, nobody picking up their trash anymore.  A couple of times I stepped in human shit.  Nobody was even bothering to bury it.”  By mid-winter, things have become truly nasty.  It’s a grim and believable account of what frightened and unprepared people can end up doing in an emergency.  And the zombies aren’t even around.  They figure in the punchline, though: “It took a lot of time, but eventually the sun did come out, the weather began to warm, and the snow finally began to melt.. spring was finally here, and so were the living dead.”

 

Meanwhile, Brooks devises a neat explanation for the zombies’ origins and how they spread everywhere.  The zombie-creating virus first appeared in China – possibly somehow spawned in the areas flooded by the Three Gorges dam project – and went on to infect the country’s supply of organs that’d been forcibly-harvested in its prisons.  Some of these organs were exported around the world and they released the virus into the bodies of their recipients.  Incidentally, in real life, China announced in 2014 that it would no longer use prisoners as forced organ-donors.

 

© Skydance Productions / Paramount Pictures

 

This premise didn’t make it into the big-budget, but disappointing movie version that Hollywood made of World War Z in 2013.  No doubt the studio, Paramount Pictures, was mindful of the growing importance of Chinese audiences for international movie profits and didn’t want to include anything that might annoy the Chinese government.

 

Finally, I noticed how the book makes references, mostly indirectly, to personages like Nelson Mandela, Fidel Castro and the aforementioned Queen Elizabeth II.  This gives it an oddly historical feel now.  Its story evidently began in the mid-noughties and concluded sometime in the 2010s.  And while Brooks pours scorn on inept and corrupt politicians, and other assholes in positions of power and influence (like a crooked pharma tycoon who lulls the West into a false sense of security with an ‘anti-rabies’ vaccination), he obviously believes the era still has enough people with the leadership skills, knowhow and courage to win the day for humanity.

 

But the mind boggles at the thought of such a scenario occurring in 2023.  For years now, we’ve been subjected to the callousness, venality and stupidity of leaders like Putin, Bolsonaro, Modi, Netanyahu, Johnson and, of course, Trump.  Also, we’ve seen how so many of them botched the handling of the Covid-19 epidemic.  If a zombie apocalypse started under the watch of the far-right-wing populist authoritarians who currently run too many countries in the world, they’d probably use it as an excuse to invade neighbouring countries, burn the Amazon, bash the Muslims, avoid corruption charges, hold raucous parties, inject themselves with bleach or, indeed, abandon the ‘blue states’ to the zombies.

 

And on the fake-news front, millions of ‘zombie sceptics’ would agree with Alex Jones, who’d dismiss news footage of zombie carnage as the work of ‘crisis actors’.  Millions of supposed ‘freethinkers’ would applaud the tweets of Right Said Fred and Neil Oliver, who’d dismiss the thing as a hoax engineered by a shadowy global cabal wanting to foist a ‘world government’ on us all.  Actually, I could imagine Oliver defying zombie-emergency lockdown by announcing on GB News: “If your freedom means I might get bitten by a zombie then so be it.  If my freedom means you might get bitten by a zombie, then so be it.”

 

Max Brooks’ 2006 World War Z chronicles a horror-show, but in hindsight, there’s ultimately something positive and uplifting about it.  A 2023 World War Z would be a horror-show full-stop.

 

From invaluable.com / © Motik One

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A Russell-ing in the dark

 

© Penguin Classics

 

Another post for Halloween…

 

Even if the American horror, science-fiction and mystery writer Ray Russell hadn’t done any writing, it’s likely he still would have had an impact on one of his preferred genres.

 

In the 1950s, after serving in the wartime US Air Force, studying at the Chicago Conservatory of Music and working for the United States Treasury, he  became fiction editor for Hugh Hefner’s Playboy magazine.  Playboy was an odd combination of smutty pictures of hot ladies and seriously well-written stories and articles.  The magazine’s detractors have dismissed this as a cynical ploy on Hefner’s part, propagating the idea that you could simultaneously be an unsavoury male lech and a connoisseur of the literary and intellectual.  Hence, by perusing the latest fiction by Philip Roth or an interview with Jean-Paul Sartre, its readers didn’t have to feel bad about jerking off to a picture of the Playmate of the Month a few pages earlier.

 

Whatever.  During the 1950s, Russell must have kept many horror and fantasy writers, such as Robert Bloch, Richard Matheson, Ray Bradbury and Charles Beaumont, afloat by regularly buying their short works and printing them in Playboy‘s glossy – if sometimes ejaculation-splattered – pages.  By the late 1950s and early 1960s, those guys had moved onto television and were writing scripts for shows like The Twilight Zone (1959-64) and the Boris Karloff-hosted Thriller (1960-62).  (In Robert Bloch’s case, his 1959 novel Psycho also became something of a hit when it was adapted for the cinema screen by a chap called Alfred Hitchcock).  These shows imprinted themselves on the DNA of the kids watching them, who occasionally grew up to be popular filmmakers, like Steven Spielberg, or popular novelists, like Stephen King.

 

In effect, indirectly, Russell helped cultivate an unsettling, mid-20th-century American gothic.  This was one in which the world suddenly and inexplicably turned dark and weird for the citizens of post-war, suburban America – for office-bound men in grey-flannel suits, dutiful housewives in nipped-in-at-the-waist housedresses, wholesome kids playing behind white picket fences.  And it’s one whose influence is still felt today.

 

But it’s Ray Russell the writer, rather than the editor, whom I want to discuss here.  I’ve just read a collection of his short stories, first published in 1985 and now reprinted as a ‘Penguin Classic’, entitled Haunted Castles.  Yes, I bet nobody working for Penguin Books back in 1985 imagined their prestigious publishing company would one day consider a book called Haunted Castles a ‘classic’.  Its seven stories show Russell’s love for a different type of gothic fiction – the full-blooded, 19th-century variety exemplified by such books as Charles Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer (1821), Sheridan Le Fanu’s In a Glass Darkly (1872) and, of course, Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897).

 

Russell’s tales here take place in a world of wild, sparsely-populated mountains and forests, fearsome thunder-and-lightning storms, nightmarish coach-rides and remote settlements inhabited by superstitious villagers.  And, as the collection’s title suggests, castles.  Each one is a “vast edifice of stone” exuding “an austerity, cold and repellent, a hint of ancient mysteries long buried, an effluvium of medieval dankness and decay.”  In fact, four of these stories feature castles and they’re all equipped with torture chambers: “There stood the infernal rack, and branding irons and thumbscrews, and that grim table called in French peine forte et dure, whereon helpless wretches were constrain’d to lie under intolerable iron weights until the breath of life was press’d from them.”

 

Occupying the first two-thirds of the book are three novellas that are frequently regarded as a trilogy, though they don’t have anything in common apart from their gothic settings and trimmings and the fact that they have single-word, polysyllabic titles beginning with ‘s’: Sardonicus, Sagittarius and Sanguinarius.

 

© Columbia Pictures

 

Kicking off the proceedings is Sardonicus, Russell’s best-remembered story.  It’s told in the first-person by a 19th-century London physician called Sir Robert Cargrave, who specialises in treating muscular disorders.  The title character summons him to – surprise! – his castle in ‘a remote and mountainous region of Bohemia’.  Sardonicus suffered a nasty mishap in his youth.  Following his father’s funeral, he discovered that prior to his death the old man had purchased a winning lottery ticket.  Inconveniently, the ticket was pocketed in his burial clothes.  The avaricious Sardonicus dug up his father to retrieve it, and claim the attendant fortune, but paid a hideous price. Seeing a terrifying death’s-head grin on his parent’s decaying face, he was so traumatised that his facial muscles froze and fixed his mouth in an identical, grotesque rictus. Now resembling a 19th-century version of the Joker in Batman, he tasks Cargrave with finding a cure for his affliction.

 

Channelling Dracula with its setting and Gaston Leroux’s The Phantom of the Opera (1909) with its disfigured central character, Sardonicus benefits from both an irresistible set-up and Russell’s knowingly-florid prose-style.  Also, he manages to sustain the reader’s sympathy for Sardonicus despite it becoming clear early on that he’s an evil shit who probably got what he deserved.  Sardonicus’s unfortunate wife is someone Cargrave once loved from afar, and the smiley-faced cad soon makes clear to the physician that unspeakable things will be done to her if he fails in his mission.

 

Meanwhile, Sagittarius and Sanginarius channel other macabre literary and historical characters.  With Sagittarius, it’s the dual personage described in Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), though the setting isn’t Victorian London but decadent fin-de-siecle Paris – well, Paris in 1909, to be exact.  Russell has a lot of fun evoking the city’s simultaneously sophisticated and sleazy theatrical world at the time, though when the Jekyll-and-Hyde trope surfaces, it’s not difficult to guess how the story will end.

 

Sanguinarius focuses on Elizabeth Bathory, the notorious 16th / 17th-century Hungarian countess who allegedly bathed in the blood of hundreds of murdered girls and women, believing it was a beauty treatment that’d hold the ravages of old age at bay.  Interestingly, Russell’s take on the legend depicts Bathory as, initially at least, an innocent victim.  The goodness gets gradually squeezed out of her, and she becomes corrupted, by an evil entourage around her.  Russell also downplays the idea that she bathed in blood to stay young.  Rather, the slaughter is mostly fuelled by sheer badness, by the thrill of being ‘steep’d… in reeking devilish rites, and vilest pleasures… sharing both dark lust and blame.”

 

Of the other stories, Comet Wine is the most substantial.  Set in a community of composers and musicians in 19th-century St Petersburg, this one draws on the Faust legend and reflects the love Russell – a student at the Chicago Conservatory of Music – had for classical music.  The remaining three pieces, The Runaway Lovers, The Vendetta and The Cage, are comparatively brief affairs and are best described as gothic fairy stories.  But each comes with a nasty barb in its tail.

 

Reading these stories, there’s a sense of Russell having his cake and eating it.  He describes horrible, bloody, perverted goings-on in stylised prose and with obvious relish, but at the same time doesn’t go into detail and rub our noses in the gore.  Elizabeth Bathory merely laments, for example, about “the manner by which these hapless prisoners were put to death: not with the swift, blunt mercy that is dealt even to dumb cattle, but by prolong’d and calculated tortures, which I have not stomach to set down here, so degraded and inhuman were they.”  A fine line is trod between the erudite and the sordid – a line that, come to think of it, Hugh Hefner would have approved of.

 

© Santa Clara Productions / American International Pictures

 

Incidentally, Russell also wrote for the movies but, sadly, no one properly managed to capture his flamboyant gothic visions onscreen.  He scripted a film version of Sardonicus in 1961, with the title slightly adjusted to Mr Sardonicus.  The film terrified me when I saw it on late-night TV at the age of ten.  However, as it was directed by William Castle, a filmmaker more fondly remembered for the outrageous gimmicks with which he publicised his movies – plastic skeletons flying above cinema audiences’ heads in The House on Haunted Hill (1959), special ‘Illusion-o’ viewing glasses to allow audiences to see the ghosts of the title in 13 Ghosts (1960), a 45-second ‘fright-break’ near the end of Homicidal (1961) so that cinema-goers who couldn’t handle the horror could flee the auditorium (and get a refund on the way out) – rather than for the quality of the movies themselves, I imagine it wouldn’t stand up well today.

 

Around the same time, Russell penned scripts for two directors who’d recently made their names pioneering a newer, bolder, more vivid form of gothic-horror cinema – Terence Fisher, who’d helmed Hammer Films’ revivals of Dracula and Frankenstein, and Roger Corman, who’d launched a series of adaptations of Edgar Allan Poe stories for American International Pictures.  The results, alas, represented neither director at their best.  Russell wrote The Horror of It All (1964) for Fisher while he was moonlighting from Hammer and working for the low-budget Lippert Films.  A horror-comedy about an oddball family getting murdered one-by-one in a dilapidated mansion, it was evidently designed to cash in on a remake, released the year before, of the 1932 classic The Old Dark House.  (Confusingly, 1963’s Old Dark House remake had been produced by Hammer and directed by William Castle.)  Again, I found The Horror of It All scary enough, and funny enough, when I saw it as a ten-year-old, but I hate to think what it would seem like now, 48 years on.

 

Russell scripted an Edgar Allan Poe adaptation for Roger Corman, 1962’s The Premature Burial.  It has its moments but lacks the flair of Corman’s best Poe movies like The Pit and the Pendulum (1961) or Masque of the Red Death (1964).  This is partly due to it not having the energising presence of Corman’s usual Poe-movie star, Vincent Price.  And it’s hamstrung by a lame ending.

 

I prefer a non-gothic film Russell wrote for Corman, the sci-fi chiller X: The Man with the X-Ray Eyes (1963).  This is about a scientist, played by Ray Milland, who experiments on his own eyes and ends up seeing beyond the visual spectrum that’s perceptible to humans.  Nothing good comes of this, of course.  Milland’s increasingly penetrative vision goes from letting him see though clothing – hence a party scene where, to his bemusement, the dancing revellers appear to be cavorting in the nude – to letting him see the distant edges of the universe, where horrible things lurk.  How one reacts to the film today depends on how one reacts to the special effects that Corman, a famously thrifty filmmaker, deploys to represent Milland’s visions.  They vary from psychedelic patterns and filters to (when he’s peering into human bodies) flashes of what are obviously photos and diagrams taken from human-anatomy manuals.  The effects are either desperately ingenious or just plain desperate, depending on your attitude.  Still, the film cultivates an effective mood of cosmic horror and the ending is nightmarish in its logic.

 

Ray Russell died in 1999, before there’d been a truly impressive cinematic version of his work.  Actually, there still hasn’t.  But returning to Haunted Castles…  I notice that the forward to my edition of it has been written by none other than the Oscar-winning Mexican director Guillermo Del Toro, who specialises in making horror and fantasy films.

 

So…  How about it Guillermo?

 

From penguinrandomhouse.com / © Charles Martin Bush

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Du Maurier, du merrier (Part 2)

 

© Penguin

 

One nice thing that’s happened to me during the past couple of years has been my discovery of how good a writer Daphne du Maurier was.  I’d long been aware of her reputation, but until recently the only thing I’d read by her was her famous short story The Birds (1952).

 

However, I have lately rectified this by working my way through her best-known novels Jamaica Inn (1936), Rebecca (1938) and My Cousin Rachel (1951), as well as her short-story collection Don’t Look Now and Other Stories (1971).   Regarding the collection, I didn’t think its title story was quite as good as the famous film it inspired, also called Don’t Look Now, in 1973 – but I thought some of the other stories in it, like A Border Line Case and The Way of the Cross, were crackers.

 

Now I’ve just completed another book of du Maurier’s short fiction called The Blue Lenses and Other Stories, which was originally published in 1959 as The Breaking Point.  I’m happy to report that the tales in it are every bit as satisfying.

 

Much of the Don’t Look Now collection had a common theme, that of English people travelling abroad and having problems – by turns humorous, serious and horrible – as they leave their comfort zones and encounter the new and the strange.  This theme reappears in a couple of stories in the The Blue Lenses one.  Ganymede even uses the basic scenario of Don’t Look Now itself, i.e., an English visitor coming unstuck in Venice.  The tale, though, isn’t a macabre one but a painful comedy of errors.  An older gay Englishman lusts after a teenage Venetian waiter and gets his comeuppance from the lad’s shady relatives, who happily lead him on whilst milking him of his money.  Ganymede has a few uncomfortable moments where you wonder if it’s being anti-gay or, alternatively, anti-Italian.  But du Maurier – herself believed to have had a lesbian relationship with Gertrude Lawrence – gets away with it, balancing our sympathy for the pathetically naïve Englishman with our satisfaction at him getting his just deserts from the Italians.  For all his pitifulness, he is still a predator.

 

The Chamois has an English couple travelling to some far-flung Greek mountains because the man, obsessed with hunting the goat-antelopes of the title, has been tipped off about the sighting of a notable and shootable specimen there.  To get to the peaks that are its territory, they entrust themselves to the care of a goatherd-cum-mountain-guide with a primordial appearance.  The woman, narrating the story, describes him as “wrapped in his hooded burnous, leaning upon his crook…” with “the strangest eyes…  Golden brown in colour…”  There follows a series of psychological revelations about the couple.  The man hunts to make up for inadequacies in his psyche and the woman, shall we say, is simultaneously turned off and turned on by his hobby.  And a weird, almost mythical narrative unfolds wherein they find it harder and harder to distinguish between the beast they’re seeking and man-beast who’s escorting them.

 

Similar weirdness occurs in the stories The Pool and The Lordly Ones – the former about a pubescent girl staying at her grandparents’ country house and experiencing strange dreams involving a pond in the woods beyond the garden, the latter about a misunderstood mute child who runs off with some unidentified ‘beings’ who come in the night while he and his family are holidaying on a remote moor.  Both contain dashes of W.B. Yeats-style mysticism and Arthur Machen-style folk horror and are among the best stories in the book, even if in The Lordly Ones I saw the ending coming a mile away.

 

The remaining stories are admirably varied.  The Menace is a comedy with a slight science-fictional element, about a movie heartthrob called Barry Jeans who sets hearts aflutter by communicating as few words and expressing as little emotion as possible onscreen.  Offscreen he’s not much more vocal or expressive and listlessly leaves all decisions to his bossy wife and his sizeable entourage of hangers-on.  Then some new technology ushers in ‘the feelies’, which promise to be as game-changing for the film industry as the arrival of ‘the talkies’.  In the feelies, film stars are wired to a machine that transmits their sexual energy – what Austen Powers would call their ‘mojo’ – to the audiences watching them in the cinemas.  Barry’s entourage are horrified when preliminary tests suggest that the inscrutable star’s mojo is almost non-existent.  So, they embark on a drastic campaign to pep that mojo up.  The Menace sees du Maurier taking the mickey out of Hollywood and I suspect it might have been inspired by some unedifying experiences with the place – for example, she was sued for breach of copyright after Rebecca was made into a film in 1939.

 

The Alibi is the collection’s most twisted tale, about a well-to-do and respectable man who one day seemingly flips: “He was aware of a sense of power within.  He was in control.  He was the master-hand that set the puppets jiggling.”  He walks away from the routines, conventions and obligations of his upper-middle-class existence, invents a new identity for himself and secretly rents a room in a seedy part of London.  Initially, he plans to commit murder – but his Nietzschean madness subsides somewhat and instead he starts living a parallel life as an aspiring artist, using the room as his studio.  But his project gets knocked for six when the story reaches an unexpected and nasty conclusion.

 

Different again is The Archduchess, an exercise in magical realism.  It describes the final days of a ruling dynasty in a Ruritanian microstate called Ronda, somewhere in southern Europe, which has discovered the secret of immortality.  It’s difficult to know where du Maurier’s sympathies lie here.  Is she writing in favour of the dynasty and, by extension, of aristocracies and the status quo everywhere?  Or is she satirising it?  One thing I will say – her account of a devious revolutionary named Markoi, who edits the main newspaper and uses it to seed the minds of the population with doubts, suspicions and eventual paranoia, so as to engineer the downfall of the ruling order, strikes a chord today.  Markoi seems all too familiar in a modern world of fake news, where Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News helped propel Donald Trump into the American presidency and, in Britain, the Barclay Brothers’ Daily Telegraph did something similar with Boris Johnson.

 

Finally there’s the title story, The Blue Lenses, which I found terrifying.  Its set-up is a familiar one, about a woman in a hospital recovering from an eye operation who discovers that things suddenly aren’t as they’re supposed to be.  But unlike the hero in John Wyndham’s Day of the Triffids (1951), who removes the bandages from his eyes and finds that the world really has gone to hell, the nightmare experienced by the heroine of The Blue Lenses is ambiguous.  The surreal, if not grotesque things she sees have a subjective quality and you wonder about her sanity.  What makes the story more effective is her decision to pretend to the hospital staff around her that nothing is amiss, while she tries to figure out what’s happening.  Her desperate efforts to stay composed heighten the horror of the situation.

 

As a collection, The Blue Lenses and Other Stories ticks off the checklist of things I want to find in a collection of short fiction: clear, lucid prose, plenty of incident, a variety of tones and genres, the writer’s willingness to use their imagination whether the story is grounded in reality or not, and a commitment at all times to telling an entertaining yarn.  It’s another package of du Maurier marvelousness.

 

From famousauthors.org

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Du Maurier, du merrier (Part 1)

 

© Penguin Books

 

As Halloween is approaching, here’s a reposting of something I once wrote about the novella that inspired one of the greatest horror movies of all time – Daphne du Maurier’s 1971 tale Don’t Look Now, turned into the Nicolas Roeg movie of the same name two years later.  And there’s mention of some other disquieting stories by her too.

 

I have a tiny sliver of a connection with Daphne du Maurier, the popular 20th century English writer responsible for novels like Jamaica Inn (1936) and Rebecca (1938) and short stories like The Birds (1952) and Don’t Look Now (1971).  When I was at college in the 1980s, I knew her great-nephew very slightly.  Actually, I was better acquainted with her great-nephew’s flatmate and a few times, because of him, I visited their apartment.  Its walls were slathered with pictures of George Michael and Andrew Ridgely from the then-massive pop duo Wham, cut out of popular teen magazines of the time like Smash Hits and No 1.  I assume the young du Maurier and his flatmate had stuck up these pictures in an attempt to appear ironic.  Unfortunately, it meant that thereafter when I saw his great-aunt’s name on the cover of a book, I couldn’t help but hear, by way of association, the irritatingly bouncy strains of such Wham pop-dance numbers as Club Tropicana (1983) or Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go (1984).

 

For a long time the only thing by Daphne du Maurier I’d read was The Birds (1952), a story that because of its remote Cornish setting feels even more claustrophobic and desperate than the North America-set film version directed by Alfred Hitchcock in 1963.  However, a while back, I got a chance to familiarise myself with more of her fiction when my partner gave me a copy of du Maurier’s 1971 collection Don’t Look Now and Other Stories as a present.

 

A novella about a grieving English couple who’re taking a break in Venice when they’re approached by two strange women – one of whom claims to be a medium – and told that their dead daughter’s spirit is trying to warn them against danger, Don’t Look Now has been filmed too.  Nicolas Roeg directed a movie version in 1973 and it’s now regarded as a classic, both as a horror film and as an example of Roeg’s work in the 1970s and 1980s, which combined fragmented and elliptical narratives, haunting and recurrent images and scenes of violent and sexual intensity to unforgettable effect.  Having seen the film several times over the years, I was keen to read the piece of fiction that’d inspired it.

 

My first impression when I started reading Don’t Look Now was that film and story felt like they belonged to different eras.  The couple, John and Laura, seem more modern, liberated and chic in the film, though that may be because they were played by 1970s icons Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie.  On the page, John and Laura have an old-fashioned English starchiness and they try to get over their loss with stiff upper lips and a strained Keep Calm and Carry On cheerfulness.  Also, the literary John and Laura are in Venice as tourists, so they seem less confident and more vulnerable.  Their cinematic equivalents are there for work reasons – John is helping to restore a Venetian church – and thus know their way around better.

 

Then there’s the presentation of the story.  Du Maurier’s novella is a briefer and more economical account of the events I was familiar with from the film.  As it stands, it could easily have been made into a 45-minute TV play.  (The film clocks in at 110 minutes.)  It begins in Venice with John and Laura encountering the medium.  The death of their daughter, by meningitis, is mentioned retrospectively.  And the suggestion that the dead girl’s spirit is urging them to leave the city before something terrible happens feels like a simple device to kick-start the main story – wherein John doesn’t leave Venice, through a series of mishaps, misunderstandings and further supernatural shenanigans; and then, when he tries to intervene in what he thinks is the mistreatment of a child, something terrible does happen.

 

© Casey Productions / Eldorado Films / British Lion Films

 

The movie opens with a harrowing sequence showing the death of John and Laura’s daughter – not by meningitis but by drowning in a pond in the English countryside.  Roeg and his scriptwriters Allan Scott and Chris Bryant create a sense of a cosmic, all-encompassing evil at work.  Even as the girl dies, everything that’s still to happen in Venice seems to be prefigured.  We see John studying pictures of the Venetian church where he’ll be working and discovering a mysterious figure wearing a red coat in one of the slides.  When he spills water onto the figure, its redness spreads across the slide like a bloodstain.  John’s daughter is also wearing a red coat when she drowns and, later, so too is the child-figure John sees scarpering alongside the night-time Venetian waterways.

 

Indeed, in the film, John clearly makes a connection between the two characters thanks to the coat.  Is the red-clad figure by the canals the ghost of his daughter?  But this association doesn’t appear in the original novella.

 

Daphne du Maurier’s Don’t Look Now is efficiently gripping.  But I think Nicolas Roeg’s brooding cinematic version, spinning a web of portents, visions and uncanny coincidences in which John’s doom seems pre-ordained from the start, is better – a work of art.  That’s despite the fact that, by changing the girl’s death from meningitis to drowning, the film can be accused of illogicality.  As the website British Horror Films observes pithily: “If tragedy has struck and drowned your daughter, why go to a place with an excess of water?”

 

Actually, with Don’t Look Now and Other Stories, I preferred a couple of those ‘other stories’ to the title one.  And interestingly, nearly all of them share a similar theme, in that they deal with English people going abroad and coming unstuck as they leave their cultural comfort zones.

 

Not After Midnight is about an amateur artist taking a holiday in Crete to do some landscape painting.  In a manner reminiscent of the hero of John Fowles’s novel The Magus (1965), he encounters a strange man and becomes embroiled in some equally-strange activities touching upon ancient Greek myths.  However, while Fowles’s novel is an airy and exuberant affair where a Prospero-like figure orchestrates spectacular and elaborate ‘masques’, Not After Midnight is altogether grungier.  The man putting the events in motion is a drunken, debauched brute and, accordingly, the myths invoked concern “Silenos, earth-born satyr, half-horse, half-man, who, unable to distinguish truth from falsehood, reared Dionysus, god of intoxication, as a girl in a Cretan cave, then became his drunken tutor and companion.”  Du Maurier doesn’t say explicitly what bacchanalian depravities her hero finally succumbs to; but as he’s a teacher at a posh English boys’ school, we can guess.

 

From wikipedia.org / © The Chichester Partnership

 

In A Border Line Case, a young woman who works as a theatre actress tries to honour the dying wish of her father.  She goes in search of her father’s long-lost best friend, to tell him that her father had wanted to “shake the old boy by the hand once more and wish him luck.”  She finds the missing friend in the Republic of Ireland, living as a recluse on an island, mysteriously lording it over a cohort of local men, and engaged in activities that are probably illegal and possibly weird.  Unlike the hapless protagonists in the other stories, the heroine here is a resourceful type.  She uses her skills as an actress to improvise, hide her identity and talk her way out of tight spots.  However, when at one point she suspects she’s stumbled across a secret society of homosexuals (“They were all homos…  It was the end.  She couldn’t bear it…”), you feel surprised that a theatre actress should be so wary and intolerant of gay men.  Still, A Border Line Case is well-paced and balanced nicely between an adventure story and a mystery one.  It builds up impressively to a nasty, if slightly predictable ending.

 

The book’s most humorous story is The Way of the Cross, about a group of disparate English tourists making their way to and then around Jerusalem.  The characters and plot seem slightly contrived at times.  It’s unlikely that a progressive left-wing lady who’s worried about the plight of the Palestinians should be married to a hard-nosed right-wing businessman.  Also, a climax where two characters are stricken by unconnected illnesses and a third one suffers a serious accident stretches credibility.  Nonetheless it’s an enjoyably satirical account of English folk abroad.

 

The final story, The Breakthrough, is the exception to the rule.  Its engineer hero doesn’t leave England for another country, although he is posted to the desolate flatlands and beaches of East Anglia.  There, an ambitious experiment is underway in a scientific / military laboratory, ostensibly involving computers, but really about capturing a psychic energy that surrounds people when they’re alive and escapes when they die.  The Breakthrough’s blending of the scientific and the supernatural calls to mind the famously frightening TV play The Stone Tape (1973), written by Nigel Kneale.  Bravely, du Maurier opts for a non-sensational ending that prioritises character over action or horror.  Admittedly, some readers might find that ending a bit of a let-down.

 

Overall, I greatly enjoyed reading Don’t Look Now and Other Stories, because of the author’s precise and no-nonsense prose, her ability to pack a lot of incident into her narratives without letting them get too convoluted, and her determination at all times to tell a rattling good yarn.

 

Indeed, on the strength of this, I’m now starting to think of Daphne du Maurier as being in the mould of Stephen King – and not so much in connection with George Michael and Andrew Ridgely.  Yes, better the author of The Running Man (1982) than the authors of I’m your Man (1986).

 

© Casey Productions / Eldorado Films / British Lion Films

 

Expect more on Daphne du Maurier very soon…

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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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Bad hombres

 

© Pan Macmillan 

 

June 13th saw the death of Cormac McCarthy, reckoned by many to be the greatest American novelist of his generation.  (However, he certainly wasn’t the last great American novelist, as some excitable types have suggested.  Don DeLillo is still with us, and Donna Tartt surely has much petrol left in her tank, and no doubt more notables will emerge in the future.)  Anyway, as a tribute, here’s a piece I wrote a few years ago after reading McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men (2005), and when I felt an urge to compare it with the Oscar-winning film version of the same name, directed by Joel and Ethan Coen, which had been released two years after its publication. 

 

A word of warning…  Just as there were in my entry a few days ago about the literary and cinematic versions of Jurassic Park – many spoilers lie ahead about No Country for Old Men in its book and film forms!  

 

I greatly admire Cormac McCarthy’s novels Blood Meridian (1985) and The Road (2006).  However, I hadn’t felt any overwhelming desire to read another of his most famous works, 2005’s No Country for Old Men, because I’d already seen the 2007 movie adaptation of it by Ethan and Joel Coen and I’d heard that the film followed the book closely.

 

Thus, thanks to the Coen Brothers, I already knew No Country for Old Men’s plot and characters.  I’d also found the film vaguely dissatisfying.  As I rather pretentiously explained to a friend at the time, “It’s like a Frankenstein’s monster where Jean-Paul Sartre’s head is stitched onto Clint Eastwood’s body.”  What I meant was that for most of its running time the film was a lean, ruthless thriller, a gripping piece of modern western noir.  But then near the end, its remorseless storyline just stops.  After that, there’s a protracted scene where Tommy Lee Jones’s Sheriff Bell character visits an elderly relative and announces his intention to retire because, basically, the world is a terrible place and he can’t handle it any longer.  And so the film seems to peter out amid lamentations of existentialist angst.

 

© Miramax Films / Paramount Vantage

 

I’d assumed that, since it was supposedly a faithful adaptation of the book, the book would have a similarly dissatisfying ending.  Which admittedly was a bit unfair towards Cormac McCarthy.

 

A while ago I spotted a second-hand copy of No Country for Old Men, the book, on sale in a charity shop.  And with that jolt of horror you get occasionally when you’re growing older and realise how quickly time seems to be passing, it occurred to me how it’d been a dozen years since I’d seen the movie.  I’d also forgotten a lot of what’d happened in it.  This seemed a good opportunity to buy the literary version of No Country for Old Men and acquaint myself with it.

 

My main impression after reading No Country for Old Men was that, yes, for the most part, the Coen Brothers were remarkably faithful to the original when they made their movie.  As the story unfolds – a hunter and Vietnam vet called Llewellyn Moss stumbles across the bloody, corpse-strewn aftermath of a drug-deal-gone-wrong on the remote Texas / Mexico border, lifts a satchel full of money and makes a run for it, only to be pursued by a gang of vengeful narcos, as well as by a certain Anton Chigurh, a hitman so relentless, merciless and fearsome he makes the Terminator look like Bambi – I found near-identical scenes from the movie returning to my memory after many years.

 

One difference between the book and the film I noticed early on was when Moss, having scarpered with the money, nobly but foolishly decides to return to the scene of the massacre because he’d left behind one survivor, a badly-injured gangster who was begging for water.  When he comes back with some water for that survivor, the survivor is surviving no longer; and one of the cartels involved has sent along some new hoodlums to find out what’s happened to their drugs and money.  There follows a nail-biting chase across the desert, climaxing with Moss flinging himself into a river to escape the hoodlums.  In the film, the Coen Brothers ratchet the suspense up further by introducing a big attack dog that doesn’t appear in the book.  Even the river doesn’t deter the brute in its pursuit of Moss because it’s a powerful swimmer.  In fact, the dog is a crafty metaphorical foreshadowing of Anton Chigurh, who is soon pursuing Moss too.  If there’s one thing you want following you even less than a big attack dog, it’s him.

 

The book also has more of Sheriff Bell, the ageing lawman trying to find and save Moss whilst also keeping tabs on Carla Jean, Moss’s young wife.  At regular intervals, there are short chapters showing Bell’s stream of consciousness while he ruminates on existence and the general state of things.  “My daddy always told me to just do the best you know how and tell the truth…” he says at one point.  “And if you done somethin wrong just stand up and say you done it and say you’re sorry and get on with it.”  This makes him a likeable and sympathetic character, but not too much so.  Later, as we hear more of his musings, we discover some of his views are pretty reactionary and probably if he was still around in 2016 – the story is set in the 1980s – he’d have voted for Donald Trump.  These interludes also prepare us for the gloomy philosophical ending, in a way we weren’t prepared for it whilst watching the film.

 

For much of the book and film, the plot is an increasingly desperate and nasty cat-and-mouse game between Moss and Chigurh, while various foot-soldiers arrive from the cartels and get blown away in the crossfire.  McCarthy describes it all in his admirably economical and deceptively simple-looking prose, though lovers of punctuation will cringe at his brutal disregard for inverted commas.

 

From wikipedia.org / © David Styles

 

It helps too that McCarthy really seems to know the macho, rural and violent world he’s writing about: its cartel machinations, its police procedures, its vehicles, its guns: “The rifle had a Canjar trigger set to nine ounces and he pulled the rifle and the boot towards him with great care and sighted again and jacked the crosshairs slightly up the back of the animal standing most broadly to him…  Even with the heavy barrel and the muzzlebrake the rifle bucked up off the rest.  When he pulled the animals back into the scope he could see them all standing as before.  It took the 150-grain bullet the better part of a second to get there but it took the sound twice that.”  I’m unfamiliar with McCarthy’s background – he was very reclusive – and have no idea if he was really the man’s man, the rugged Hemmingway type, that he comes across as here.  But the fact that he does certainly doesn’t harm the telling of the story.

 

I felt apprehensive as I approached the novel’s end.  Would the main storyline finish as abruptly and unsatisfyingly as it did in the film?  In the latter, Bell arrives at a motel for a rendezvous with Moss, only to discover that Moss has just been killed (offscreen) by some cartel hoodlums.  After that, the film has only the scene where Bell decides to call it quits, plus one where Chigurh pays a visit to the now-widowed Carla Jean and it’s implied that he executes her.  (In the book, it’s spelt out more clearly.)  No doubt the Coen Brothers were happy to make a statement about the fickleness of fate and the randomness of life and death, and by this late moment in the film, Moss had surely used up all of his nine lives.  But having spent the most of two hours rooting for him, I wanted something more than a brief, flippant reference to him getting killed.  Call me old-fashioned, but I’d have liked a little more closure with the character.

 

In the book, Moss dies with an equal sense of arbitrariness – Bell shows up at the motel and finds out that his man has just been assassinated.  However, there’s more.  The Coen Brothers made a major break with this section of the book because they left out a character, a female teenage runaway.  McCarthy has Moss pick the girl up while she’s hitchhiking and while he’s making the fateful journey to the motel.  To be honest, the girl isn’t much of a character, being a teenage brat who thinks she knows it all.  But at least her naivete provides context for Moss, who by now is feeling as old, jaded and world-weary as Bell.  Later, at the motel, she offers to sleep with Moss, but wanting to stay faithful to Carla Jean he turns her down.

 

When Moss finally gets there, yes, the gangsters have intervened and Moss is dead, as was the case in the film.  However, the book has a deputy tell Bell what happened from the eyewitness reports: “…the Mexican started it.  Says he drug the woman out of her room and the other man (Moss) came out with a gun but when he seen the Mexican had a gun pointed at the woman’s head he laid his own piece down.  And whenever he done that the Mexican shoved the woman away and shot her and then turned and shot him….  Shot em with a goddamned machinegun.  Accordin to this witness the old boy fell down the steps and then he picked up his gun again and shot the Mexican.  Which I dont see how he done it.  He was shot all to pieces.”  So at least Moss dies making a noble (if futile) self-sacrifice and goes down with guns blazing, taking out one last bad guy.  That’s more like the closure I was looking for.

 

I know people who’ve objected to both the book and film of No Country for Old Men because of another disappearing plotline, the one involving Anton Chigurh, who in the film was memorably played by Javier Bardem.  Both end with him still on the loose, presumably being unspeakably evil and continuing to kill people.  But I don’t mind that loose thread so much.  I find it appropriate that McCarthy wraps up the story with Bell lamenting about the darkness of the world; while Chigurh still lurks in that darkness as a symbolic bogeyman.

 

© Miramax Films / Paramount Vantage

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Jurassic snark

 

© Universal Pictures / Amblin Entertainment

 

As yet another grim reminder that time stops for no man or woman, and that I’m gradually de-evolving into a doddery, senile old git, I’ve just read in a newspaper that it is now, exactly, thirty years since the release of Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park (1993), the epic monster movie about dinosaurs being cloned from ancient bits of DNA to be put on display in a lavish theme park.  It was based on a novel, published three years earlier, by Michael Crichton, and of course it led to a franchise of sequels and reboots that, despite being increasingly lame, generated billions of box-office dollars.

 

Wow!  Thirty years?  Was the original Jurassic Park movie really that long ago?

 

Anyway, readers, brace yourselves for a big shock.  I thought the 1993 movie was pretty lame itself.  Although a lot of people nowadays view the original Jurassic Park as a classic – here’s a hot-off-the-presses feature at the BBC website’s ‘Culture’ section praising it for how it ‘made scary movies accessible for young children’; and here’s another feature at the Guardian praising it for its prescient warnings about ‘self-styled geniuses’ who exploit new technology for their aggrandisement without thinking through the potential consequences – I found it a big let-down.

 

This was because I made the mistake of reading Crichton’s Jurassic Park-the-book before I went to see Spielberg’s Jurassic–Park-the-movie, and I felt miffed when what’d I’d visualised in my head during the book failed to materialise on the cinema screen.  And before you read further, here’s a spoiler alert.  This entry will give away a lot about the plots of both the book and the film.

 

Three decades ago, I certainly had high hopes for the film.  Firstly, with Spielberg at the helm and a ton of Hollywood money behind it, Jurassic Park looked like being a very rare beast, a dinosaur movie with proper dinosaurs in it.  I’ve always loved the idea of dinosaur movies, but apart from those ones where the prehistoric beasties were powered by stop-motion animation – like the silent-movie version of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World (1925) and the original King Kong (1933), whose dinosaurs were animated by Willis O’Brien, and The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1953), One Million Years BC (1966) and The Valley of Gwangi (1969), whose special effects were the work of the late, great Ray Harryhausen – dinosaur movies before 1993 had contained dinosaurs that looked, frankly, rubbish.

 

© Universal Pictures / Amblin Entertainment

 

I’m thinking of ones where the dinosaurs were plainly stuntmen lumbering about in rubbery dinosaur suits, like The Land Unknown (1957).  Or magnified glove puppets, like The Land that Time Forgot (1974).  Or unfortunate modern-day lizards who’d also been magnified and had had fake spikes, horns and fins glued onto them to make them look big and fierce.  The worst offender in that last category is surely Irwin Allen’s terrible 1960 remake of The Lost World, during which Claude Rains exclaimed at the sight of one supposed sauropod: “It’s a mighty brontosaurus!”  While I was watching the film on TV, at the age of ten, I yelled back: “No, it’s not!  It’s just a stupid iguana!”

 

The big-budget Jurassic Park was going to employ all the latest advances in animatronics and computer-generated imagery to get its dinosaurs right, so I wouldn’t have to worry about having my intelligence insulted by the spectacle of men in monster suits and overblown puppets and lizards.

 

Secondly, there was a buzz about Jurassic Park because it was rumoured that, for the first time in yonks, Spielberg was going to do something dark.  He’d spent the past dozen years making movies with unbearably-high schmaltz levels: movies about cute aliens phoning home (1982’s ET), and ghostly pilots moping about their still-alive girlfriends (1989’s Always), and Robin Williams turning out to be Peter Pan (1991’s Hook).  Once upon a time, though, he’d directed punchy, at times nightmarish films like Duel (1972) and Jaws (1975).  Prior to Jurassic Park’s release, I was told by more than one film magazine to expect Spielberg to be back to his old schmaltz-free best.  Supposedly, Jurassic Park was going to be like Jaws on dry land.

 

As for Michael Crichton’s original novel – well, it would never be mistaken for great literature but, reading it, I did think that with cutting-edge special effects and a skilful director it could make a hell of a movie.  Many of its scenes seemed intensely cinematic.  Actually, this wasn’t a surprise because Crichton himself had made films.  Most notably, he’d wrote and directed 1973’s Westworld, which is about a futuristic theme park that allows its visitors to enact their most homicidal fantasies in mock-ups of the American Wild West, medieval Europe and Roman-era Pompeii.  These are populated by scores of human-like robots whom it’s okay to shoot or hack or stab to death because they can’t actually die.  Of course, a glitch in the system eventually compels the robots to start fighting back and then it’s the holiday-makers who get slaughtered.  Westworld, in fact, is a prototype for Jurassic Park, with the same theme-park setting but with robots instead of dinosaurs as the exhibits-that-turn-nasty.

 

From wikipedia.org / © Jon Chase, Harvard News Office

 

I knew Crichton’s novel would get trimmed as it was turned into a film, but I was dismayed at how much of it was trimmed.  While Jaws shed a few gratuitous sub-plots that’d made its source novel, the 1974 bestseller by Peter Benchley, seem flabby, and it was a lean, muscular movie as a result, Spielberg’s Jurassic Park was pared to the bone.  In its final reel the park’s pack of deadly velociraptors have escaped from their compound, the surviving humans are running around trying to avoid being eaten by them, and that’s about it.  The velociraptors rampage through the book’s final chapters too, but there are other matters adding to the suspense.  It becomes clear that some velociraptors have managed to board the supply-ship that services the island where the park is located, and there’s a real danger that they’ll reach the American mainland and become an ultra-lethal invasive species.  The humans are also on a desperate quest to count the hatched eggs in the velociraptors’ nests, so that they can calculate just how many of the scaly killers are on the loose.

 

Also simplified are the fates of the characters.  The main characters, palaeontologists Alan Grant and Ellie Sattler, chaos theorist Ian Malcolm and the billionaire mastermind behind the park, John Hammond, don’t all make it to the end of the book.  Malcolm expires from injuries sustained from a dinosaur attack while Hammond dies after he hears the roar of a tyrannosaurus rex, panics and falls down a hillside.  (Ironically, the roar comes from the park’s PA system – Hammond’s two young grandchildren have been mucking around in a control room with some dinosaur recordings.)  Meanwhile, certain secondary characters, like the park’s lawyer Gennaro and its game warden Muldoon, survive the dino-carnage.  Gennaro is even allowed to show a degree of courage, which is unusual for a fictional corporate lawyer.

 

In the movie, though, Grant, Sattler, Malcolm and Hammond are played by big-name stars – Sam Neill, Laura Dern, Jeff Goldblum and veteran British actor / director Sir Richard Attenborough – who clearly had it in their contracts that none of them would suffer the indignity of being eaten by a dinosaur.  So, they all survive.  But because this is a monster movie, which demands that monsters eat people at regular intervals, the supporting characters are gradually bumped off, including Gennaro and Muldoon.  This makes the plot very predictable.  Interestingly, one supporting character who got killed in the book but made it out of the movie alive is the geneticist Henry Wu.  Played by B.D. Wong, he’s ironically become the character with the most appearances in the Jurassic Park franchise – Wu’s now turned up in four of the movies.

 

Meanwhile, the casting of Attenborough symptomizes one of the film’s worst features.  The cuddly, twinkly Attenborough, who one year later would play Santa Claus in a remake of Miracle on 34th Street, is way nicer than the John Hammond of the book, who’s a callous, conniving and delusional arsehole.  He should have been played by Christopher Lee or Donald Pleasence.

 

© Universal Pictures / Amblin Entertainment

 

Spielberg couldn’t bring himself to be nasty to Hammond, whom he probably regarded as a kindred spirit.  Hammond at his dinosaur theme park, like Spielberg in Hollywood, is merely trying to wow the masses by giving them spectacles they haven’t seen before.  How could he be bad?  Thus, we get a maudlin scene where Hammond explains his motives to Dern’s character by reminiscing about his first venture in the entertainment business – a flea circus.  (Attenborough also gives Hammond the worst Scottish accent in movie history, so he tells Dern how he brought his wee flea circus “doon sooth frae Scotland” to London.)  Look how big the fleas are in his circus now, Spielberg seems to tell us.  What a visionary!

 

The softening of Hammond’s character infects the rest of the film.  Though some of the velociraptor and tyrannosaurus-rex scenes are scary, it’s all a bit too feel-good.  Spielberg wants us to be awed by the dinosaurs, not shit ourselves at them.  John Williams’ musical score adds to the problem – his Jurassic Park theme, according to Billboard magazine, oozes with ‘astonishment, joy and wonder’; but since this is supposedly a sci-fi horror movie, shouldn’t it be oozing with some old-fashioned fear too?

 

But my biggest frustration about the film was that while Spielberg portrays Hammond as being like Walt Disney, the park isn’t like Disneyland – and it ought to be.  In the novel Crichton wonderfully juxtaposes the primeval and the high-tech.  There might be hordes of monstrous reptiles from earth’s distant past stumping around the wilds of Hammond’s island, but at the same time the place bristles with state-of-the-art sensors and cameras and is honeycombed with service tunnels crammed full of power-cables.  At its centre is Hammond’s console-packed control room where he squats like a space-age spider in a technological web.  The joy of the book is watching all this technology slowly, gradually start to malfunction and break down – until finally it’s useless.  And meanwhile, the prehistoric stars of the show are clawing at the scenery, hungry to get at the humans who’ve been pulling the levers behind it.

 

You don’t really get this impression in the film.  Attenborough’s control room looks a bit dingy, like he’s set it up in his garden shed.  And the dinosaurs just seem to be out in big fields with big fences around them – nothing in the background but foliage, nothing underneath but soil.  This Jurassic Park is more like Jurassic Farm.

 

No, while I sat through Jurassic Park in a cinema 22 years ago, I didn’t feel like I was watching a classic.  The main thing I felt was a huge sense of disappointment – crushing me as effectively as if one of the behemoths onscreen had suddenly stepped out into the auditorium and trod on me.  For the authentic Jurassic Park thrill-ride, check out Crichton’s book.

 

© Alfred A. Knopf

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Remembering Iain Banks

 

From wikipedia.com / © Tim Duncan

 

Ten years ago today, on June 9th, 2013, the Scottish novelist Iain Banks passed away at the age of 59, struck down by a gall-bladder cancer that’d only been diagnosed two months earlier.  Here’s a slightly updated version of the tribute to him I wrote at the time. 

 

Iain Banks became a big thing for me, and for many people like me, when he found success, fame and a certain notoriety with the publication of his first novel, The Wasp Factory, in 1984.  This was because he seemed to tick a lot of important boxes.

 

Like me and the crowd I hung out with, he came from a Scottish background, so we were familiar with many of the places he wrote about.  Like us, his politics were left-of-centre, with a leaning towards the cause of Scottish independence because independence seemed the best way to avoid being saddled with right-wing Tory governments whom few people in Scotland ever voted for.  And like us, he was obviously into literature, but he was also into some strange, off-beat writers whom stuffy literary critics would dismiss as being too ‘genre’ for serious consideration – Mervyn Peake, Brian Aldiss, M. John Harrison, and so on.

 

You could argue that Alasdair Gray had blazed the same trail a few years earlier with his 1980 novel Lanark, but there was one important difference.  Gray had been a young man in the 1950s.  Banks, like us, was clearly of the 1980s.  Like it or not – and we did not – Banks and us, his readers, were Maggie Thatcher’s children.

 

The Wasp Factory made an immediate stir with its blackly funny plot about Frank Cauldhame, a maimed delinquent living in a remote part of Scotland, who amuses himself with the shamanistic killings of insects, seagulls, rabbits and young children.  In quick succession Banks followed it with Walking on Glass (1985), which showed the influence of Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast books (1946-59); The Bridge (1986), a paean to both the Forth Rail Bridge and Gray’s Lanark, with a healthy dose of the J.G. Ballard short story Concentration City (1957) mixed in; and in 1987 Consider Phlebas, the first of many epic outer-space novels about an interstellar anarcho-utopian society called the Culture.  The Culture novels were attributed to Iain M. Banks, a move by his publisher to help fans of ‘serious’ mainstream fiction and fans of science fiction identify what was what in his output.  At the time, the speculative fiction magazine Interzone remarked that it was delighted to see Banks at last ‘come out of the closet’ as a sci-fi writer.

 

In August 1987 Banks was scheduled to appear on a discussion panel at the Edinburgh Book Festival.  Around the same time I’d agreed to edit the latest edition of a small literary magazine called Alma Mater, published by some fellow-students at the University of Aberdeen’s English Literature Department.  Dr Isobel Murray, who’d been my tutor at Aberdeen for the past year, was chairing the Book Festival panel and I used my connection with her to persuade Banks’s agent to let me interview him after the panel, for Alma Mater.  I later offered Dr Murray a grovelling apology for brazenly using her name as my calling card.

 

© Abacus Books

 

The panel, which I attended, produced a few sparks.  In addition to Banks and Murray, it featured the Glaswegian writer Frederic Lindsay, whose 1983 novel Brond had recently been made into a TV series, directed by Michael Caton-Jones and starring a very young John Hannah.  (By a sad coincidence, Lindsay also died in 2013, just ten days before Banks did.)  And it was rounded off by another Glaswegian, Ronald Frame, author of the just-published novel Sandmouth People.  If it’s unfair to say that the tweedy Frame was a young fogey at the time, he certainly gave the impression of being one.  When somebody in the audience asked the authors about their views on self-censorship, he said pompously: “I would never include anything I might regret in five years’ time.”

 

Banks immediately spluttered, “But those are the best bits!”

 

Afterwards I met up with Banks and a few of his friends and conducted the interview in a pub in Edinburgh’s Rose Street – either the Kenilworth or the Auld Hundred, if I remember correctly – with Banks speaking into the mic of the clunky tape recorder I’d bought with me, transferring his voice onto a crackly cassette tape that, like almost everything else I possess, now resides inside a cardboard box somewhere in my Dad’s attic.

 

I asked him about the hostile reception that The Wasp Factory had received in some quarters.  (The Irish Times had described it as ‘a work of unparalleled depravity’.)  Banks had been surprised by this.  He’d expected some flak from animal rights groups, but not from the critics.  He’d learned that one reviewer who’d blasted the book as ‘the literary equivalent of a video nasty’ also worked in the Conservative Party office in London, which pleased him no end.  Offending that guy had been an honour.

 

I also asked him about his fondness for peppering his novels with references to the popular culture of the time.  In The Bridge, for example, just before the car accident that sets the surreal plot in motion, the hero slots a copy of the Pogues album Rum, Sodomy and the Lash (1985) into his car stereo.  Wouldn’t that make the books look rather dated a few years later?  “Yeah,” he agreed, “it’ll date them.  But what the hell?”  He believed that characters living in a particular time and particular place would be influenced by the current popular culture, so he didn’t see why he should shirk from mentioning the music, books, films and TV programmes of the moment.

 

I quoted Brian Aldiss at him – Aldiss had famously said that all good science fiction hovers at the edge of being something different from science fiction.  Banks agreed with that, sort of, but he also disagreed.  Enthusiastically, he told me how Consider Phlebas came with all the trimmings of the traditional Isaac Asimov / Robert Heinlein ‘space opera’: giant spaceships, laser cannons, inter-planetary battles.

 

© Little, Brown

 

Did he, I asked finally, worry about being pigeon-holed, with one half of the world viewing him as a ‘Scottish’ author and the other half viewing him as a ‘sci-fi’ one?  Not at all, he said.  He was quite at ease with being regarded as Scottish.  And being seen as a sci-fi author didn’t bother him either, since science fiction was an ‘old love’ for him.

 

From Rose Street, we moved to Greyfriars Bobby’s Bar in Candlemaker Row, just behind the statue of the famous Edinburgh terrier who’d spent 14 years in the adjacent graveyard guarding the grave of his dead master.  Poor wee Bobby, I remember musing, wouldn’t have lasted long if he’d been a character in The Wasp Factory.  By then a good number of pints had been drunk and the conversation had descended somewhat from the lofty heights of literary discussion.  I recall talking to Banks about Arthur Montford, the lugubrious Scottish TV football commentator famous for his eccentrically patterned sports jackets and for his catchphrases that included “What a stramash!” and (uttered all too often) “Disaster for Scotland!”  At some point too we discussed the 1966 Hammer horror film Dracula Prince of Darkness, which had featured the Scottish actor (from Shotts in North Lanarkshire) Andrew Keir.

 

The next issue of Alma Mater, containing my interview with Iain Banks, was published later that year.  A series of cock-ups by the typesetter meant that it looked pretty ropey, though thankfully the pages featuring Banks were okay.  The following year, I heard that Banks would be making an appearance at Edinburgh’s Science Fiction Bookshop in West Crosscauseway (now long vanished) and I went along to give him a copy of the magazine.  To my surprise, he remembered me and enthused about the mini-pub crawl we’d done that day: “That was a good afternoon!”

 

After that I read several more Banks novels: Espedair Street (1987), Canal Dreams (1989), The Crow Road (1992), Complicity (1993).  The Crow Road, his stab at writing a sprawling family saga, is the book that everyone talks about, although I have to say that it’s not one of my favourites.  Sure, it has one of the best opening lines in modern literature (“It was the day my grandmother exploded”), but as with most other sprawling sagas about eccentric families, I find it too contrived for its own good.

 

© Little, Brown

 

On the other hand, I think Espedair Street, which is about a hapless rock musician who’s found fame, fortune and much unhappiness and is now trying to live anonymously in a rough part of Glasgow, is marvellous.  I also think it’s the warmest and most relatable Iain Banks book that I’ve read.  Among my all-time favourite novels about rock ‘n’ roll, it’s up there with Harlan Ellison’s Spider Kiss (1961) and John Niven’s Kill Your Friends (2008).

 

And I like Complicity, which welds a serial-killer plot onto Banks’ intense distaste for the corruption and inequalities of the recently-ended Thatcher era.  Much of it is set in Edinburgh, where scuzzy journalist-hero Cameron Colley boozes in a series of pubs ranging from the upmarket Café Royal on West Register Street to the desperate, late-opening Casbah in the Cowgate.  By then I’d lived in Edinburgh and I knew Colley’s haunts well.  I’d even had an experience similar to one he has in the Café Royal, when he stands in front of the bar’s gantry (which doesn’t contain a mirror although it looks as though it does), can’t see his reflection and in a drunken panic believes himself to be a vampire.

 

After Complicity, however, I stopped reading Iain Banks, probably because by then there were just too many young Scottish writers competing for my attention: Irvine Welsh, Alan Warner, James Robertson.  Banks’s success in the 1980s, of course, had helped pave the way for all these slightly younger Turks.  It wasn’t until after his death that I read more of his stuff: the collection State of the Art (1991), whose stories lean towards science fiction, so the name ‘Iain Banks’ on the cover contains that all-important initial-letter ‘M’ to warn readers of serious mainstream literature to keep clear; The Steep Approach to Garbadale (2007); Stonemouth (2012); The Quarry, published posthumously in 2013; and Banks’s one book of non-fiction, Raw Spirit (2003), which details his experiences while he works on the rather enviable assignment of visiting, and sampling the products of, as many of Scotland’s whisky distilleries as he can.

 

Among these later novels, The Steep Approach to Garbadale, another sprawling family saga, perhaps sticks most in my mind.  That’s largely because of the following quote, wherein the narrator muses on the connection between being right-wing and not having an imagination, and which could be the manifesto for Banks’s own politics: “We got talking about how some people were selfish and some weren’t, and the difference between right-wing people and left-wing people.  You said it all came down to imagination.  Conservative people don’t usually have very much, so they find it hard to imagine what life is like for people who aren’t just like them.  They can only empathise with people just like they are: the same sex, the same age, the same class, the same golf club or nation or race or whatever.  Liberals can pretty much empathise with anybody else, no matter how different they are.  It’s all to do with imagination, empathy and imagination are almost the same thing, and it’s why artists, creative people, are almost all liberals, left-leaning.”

 

Meanwhile, I found Raw Spirit so informative that, as I read it, I tried to record what it said about the distilleries Banks visited, the whiskies he drank, and his opinions on their flavours, in a series of mind-maps.

 

 

Banks was so prolific that, looking at his bibliography, I see there are still nearly 20 books of his that I haven’t read yet.  That includes the entire series of Culture novels.  So, I still have much catching up to do with the great man’s oeuvre.

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When novelists and films collide

 

From Wikipedia / © Antonio Monda

 

May 19th saw the death of Martin Amis, reckoned by some to be the greatest British novelist of his generation.  I have to say that’s not an opinion I shared, although I liked his 1984 novel Money and some of the stories in his 1987 collection Einstein’s Monsters.  Anyway, one thing I noticed about the lengthy obituaries of Amis I read after his passing – none of them mentioned the fact that he wrote the script for 1980’s science-fiction movie Saturn 3.  This features a saucy robot, programmed with the libido of Harvey Keitel, pursuing Farah Fawcett around a base on one of Saturn’s moons.  Why the omission?  No doubt Amis’s obituarists declined to mention it out of respect.  Saturn 3 was an embarrassment and Amis surely left it off his CV.

 

However, Amis and Saturn 3 do highlight how, over the decades, well-respected authors have been involved with the film industry – a world less interested in creative endeavour and excellence and more interested in giving the public what it wants, putting bums on seats and making a fast buck – and the results have frequently not been pretty.

 

Here are a few of my favourite examples of novelists and filmmakers colliding and the movies birthed by those collisions being, let’s say, memorable for the wrong reasons.

 

© Amicus Productions

 

John Brunner and The Terrornauts (1967)

The science-fiction author John Brunner was highly regarded in his day and won both the Hugo and the British Science Fiction Association (BSFA) Awards for his 1968 novel Stand on Zanzibar.  Also, his 1979 novel The Jagged Orbit netted another BSFA award and his pessimistic and prescient 1972 novel, The Sheep Look Up, about extreme pollution and environmental disaster, was much admired too.  Though he’s not so well-remembered now, the BBC website did devote a feature to him in its Culture section a few years back.

 

Perplexingly, the only film script Brunner ever wrote was for the ultra-low-budget British sci-fi movie The Terrornauts (1967), which is about some astronomers contacting the remnants of an alien civilisation stowed away on an asteroid, being abducted and taken to that asteroid, and eventually having to fight off an invasion fleet that’s heading towards earth.  Brunner’s script was based on a book called The Wailing Asteroid (1960) by another sci-fi writer, Murray Leinster.  I saw The Terrornauts on late-night TV when I was 11 and even at that young age thought it was dreadful, with its poverty-row special effects, its cardboard sets, and the thuddingly incongruous presence of comedy actors Charles Hawtrey and Patricia Hayes, inserted into the proceedings for alleged ‘comic relief’.  Still, The Terrornauts was so terrible that it burned itself into my memory and I’ve never been able to forget the bloody thing since.  For the filmmakers, I guess that was some sort of achievement.

 

Chief among those filmmakers was producer Milton Subotsky, who ran Amicus Productions with Max J. Rosenberg during the 1960s and 1970s and was better known for making horror movies.  I read an interview with Brunner once and he confessed to writing The Terrornauts as a favour to Subotsky, who was a friend of his.  Subotsky and Rosenberg, incidentally, had form in getting literary folk to pen their screenplays. They drew at various times on Robert Bloch, Margaret Drabble, Harold Pinter and Clive James, the latter for a film that never got off the drawing board.  And for their 1974 lost world / dinosaur epic The Land That Time Forgot, they hired another esteemed science-fiction writer, Michael Moorcock.  The low-budget dinosaurs in The Land That Time Forgot are rubbery and a bit laughable by today’s standards, but Moorcock was gracious enough to describe the film as ‘a workmanlike piece of crap.’

 

And speaking of dinosaurs…

 

© Hammer Films

 

J.G. Ballard and When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth (1969)

Ballard is one of my all-time favourite writers.  While a few filmmakers have come close to successfully translating his disturbing, dystopian and hallucinogenic literary visions into celluloid, such as David Cronenberg did with Crash (1996) and Ben Wheatley with High–Rise (2015), the pulpy When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth was, weirdly, the only film that Ballard himself scripted.  This was a sequel by Hammer Films – like Subotsky and Rosenberg’s Amicus, a British company best known for making horror movies – to its 1965 epic One Million Years BC, featuring Raquel Welch as a fur-bikini-clad cavewoman and with splendid stop-motion-animation dinosaurs courtesy of special-effects genius Ray Harryhausen.

 

While One Million Years BC is a movie to watch and enjoy with your brain set at low gear, When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth is one where you need to switch your brain off altogether.  Aside from the obvious scientific absurdity of human beings and dinosaurs being shown to exist at the same time, when they’d really missed each other by 65 million years, the film ends with a natural cataclysm so violent that part of the earth breaks off and creates the moon.  But somehow, its main characters survive the carnage.  The dinosaurs this time were animated by Jim Danforth and, though not up to Harryhausen’s standard, they’re good fun.

 

How, you wonder, did Ballard get emmeshed in such hokum?  In his 2008 autobiography Miracles of Life, he gives an amusing account of meeting Hammer producers Aida Young and Tony Hinds when they were trying to brainstorm ideas for the film.  The meeting had not gone well, but then Ballard rather desperately suggested that the big cataclysm at the end contain not a tidal wave crashing in, but one surging out from the shoreline.  This would reveal “’…All those strange creatures and plants…’ I ended with a brief course in surrealist biology…  There was silence as Hinds and Aida stared at each other.  I assumed I was about to be shown the door…  ‘When the wave goes out…’  Hinds stood up, clearly rejuvenated, standing behind his huge desk like Captain Ahab sighting the white whale.  ‘Brilliant.  Jim, who’s your agent?’”

 

© Rothernorth Films / Redemption Films  

 

Fay Weldon and Killer’s Moon (1978)

Here’s the most mind-boggling collaboration on this list.  On one hand, we have the feminist author Fay Weldon, who in works like The Life and Loves of a She-Devil (1983) strove to “write about and give a voice to women who are often overlooked or not featured in the media.”  On the other, we have Alan Birkinshaw’s bonkers, grubby, low-budget horror effort Killer’s Moon, which seems the last thing Weldon would get involved with.  Yet, uncredited, she rewrote the film’s dialogue.

 

Killer’s Moon has a quartet of escaped lunatics (wearing bowler hats like the Droogs in Stanley Kubrick’s controversial 1971 classic A Clockwork Orange) stalking the Lake District and terrorising some teenaged girls on a school trip whose coach has broken down.  The loonies’ psychiatric treatment has included being dosed with LSD and now, mistakenly, they believe themselves to be dreaming.  This makes them think they’re free to indulge without any repercussions in their darkest fantasies, which consist of rape, murder and animal mutilation.  But don’t worry, animal-lovers.  The dog that loses a limb early on, and spends the rest of the film hobbling about on three legs, was three-legged in real life.  According to Killer’s Moon’s Wikipedia entry, she “was originally a pub dog who had lost a leg as the result of a shotgun wound sustained during an armed robbery.  She was later awarded the doggy Victoria Cross award for bravery.”

 

Weldon’s involvement was for a familial reason.  Director Birkinshaw was none other than her brother.  She grumbled that by working on Killer’s Moon, she’d turned it into a ‘cult film’, but that’s exaggerating things a bit.  Seen in 2023, Killer’s Moon is no cult film.  It’s still daft, badly-made tat, and the bits of it that once seemed shocking just seem funny today.

 

© ITC Entertainment

 

Martin Amis and Saturn 3 (1980)

And now the movie that inspired this entry, the dire Saturn 3.  Amis’s script was based on a story by John Barry – not the composer most famous for his work on the James Bond films, but John Barry the set designer on Star Wars (1977), who died of meningitis the year before Saturn 3 was released.  Horror writer Stephen Gallagher was assigned the job of writing Saturn 3’s tie-in novelisation and once said of it: “The script was terrible.  I thought it was bad then but in retrospect, and with experience, I can see how truly inept it was.”  Gallagher added that this may not have been Amis’s fault and the script could have fallen victim to the film industry’s penchant for endless re-writing.  He heard later that “every script-doctor in town had taken an uncredited swing at it, so it’s impossible to say if it was stillborn or had been gangbanged to death.”

 

Supposedly, Amis based some of his novel Money on his experiences with Saturn 3.  It’s even said that one of Money’s characters, the ageing movie star Lorne Guyland, who’s convinced of his enduring youth and virility and isn’t afraid to disrobe and flaunt his body in an effort to prove it, was inspired by Saturn 3’s star Kirk Douglas.  Years later, Amis remarked: “When actors get old they get obsessed with wanting to be nude…  And Kirk wanted to be naked.”

 

© Zoetrope Studios / Golan-Globus

 

Norman Mailer and Tough Guys Don’t Dance (1987)

Three years after the publication of his crime-noir pastiche Tough Guys Don’t Dance, Norman Mailer got the chance to turn the book into a film starring Ryan O’Neal, Isabella Rossellini, Lawrence Tierney and Wings Hauser.  The venerable American novelist was both co-scripter and director.  I wrote extensively about Tough Guys Don’t Dance-the-movie a couple of months ago, so I won’t repeat here too much of what I said.  It was, I wrote, “a delirious slice of so-bad-it’s-good campness”,  where the cast visibly struggle “as they try to get their tongues, and their minds, around Mailer’s dialogue, which is largely fixated on performing the sex-deed with adequate levels of manliness.  At one point Rossellini tells O’Neal that she and her husband, Hauser, ‘make out five times a night.  That’s why I call him Mr Five.’  Though this is contradicted when Rossellini and Hauser have an argument.  ‘I made you come 16 times – in a night.’  ‘And none of them was any good!’”

 

And of course, there’s the scene where hero Ryan O’Neal “finds out about his wife’s infidelity and reacts with a jaw-dropping display of bad acting – ‘Oh man!   Oh God!  Oh man!  Oh God!’ – which, over the years, has become so infamous it’s now an Internet meme.”

 

© Scott Free Productions / 20th Century Fox

 

Cormac McCarthy and The Counselor (2013)

Also not having much success with sexy dialogue was legendary American author Cormac McCarthy, who wrote the script for the Ridley Scott-directed movie The Counselor.  At one point in The Counselor, we get an auto-erotic scene – that’s ‘auto’ as in ‘involving automobiles’ – where Cameron Diaz makes out with Javier Bardem’s sports car.  While grinding against the windscreen on her way to a climax, and flashing a certain part of her anatomy at Bardem on the other side of the glass, he likens the sight to “one of those catfish things, one of the bottom-feeders you see go up the side of the fish tank.”

 

Most critics panned The Counselor, presumably because they’d hoped that it would combine the intensity of McCarthy’s celebrated ultra-violent Western novel Blood Meridan (1985) with the intensity of Scott’s darkly-perverse space-horror movie Alien (1980).  What they got, though, was a bewildering crime thriller about drug cartels that, to quote Mark Kermode in the Observer, “gets an A-list cast to recite B-movie dialogue with C-minus results.”

 

Michel Houellebecq and the KIRAC arthouse porn movie (2023)

Many writers have turned up in films as actors, usually in supporting or cameo roles – Maya Angelou, William S. Burroughs, Stephen King, Salman Rushdie and, indeed, Norman Mailer and Martin Amis (who as a blond 13-year-old starred in 1965’s A High Wind in Jamaica).  I doubt, though, if any of these have generated as much noise as French author Michel Houellebecq’s recent, er, performance in a film production from radical Dutch art collective KIRAC (Keeping It Real Art Critics).  I haven’t managed to find the title of the film — which sounds like it belongs to the ‘arthouse porn’ category — in the news reports about it.

 

Houellebecq, it transpires, agreed to be filmed having sex in the movie and signed a waiver saying that the only restriction on his participation was that his face and his ‘block and tackle’ didn’t appear together in the same shot.  KIRAC didn’t even extend an invitation to him originally.  It was Qianyun Lysis, Houellebecq’s better half, who suggested they use her husband – and no, it’s not her, but another woman who appears in bed with Houellebecq in the film.  Now anyone who’s read his sex-filled and provocative novels, such as Atomised (1998) and Platform (2001), would assume this sort of thing is right up Houellebecq’s street.  However, he lost his enthusiasm for the project after a few days of filming (and after the deed had been captured on camera).  He then denounced the production and has since been trying, and failing, to stop KIRAC releasing the film in France and Netherlands.

 

If I was crass and prurient, I would roll my eyes at this and give a little cry of “Oh là là!”  But I’m not.  So, I won’t.

 

© From Wikipedia / © Fronteiras do Pensamento