'Adventure stories'

Now that I think about it, two of my favourite series as a child contained the word 'Adventure' in their titles. One was by Willard Price, whilst the other was by Enid Blyton. And I loved Robin Hood, whether it was written by Richard Carpenter or Roger Lancelyn Green. And The Three Musketeers, although that was perhaps more Dogtanian. I've still never actually read Dumas. And a little later on Strider was the coolest character I'd ever met in fiction, the character I most wanted to be when I grew up. Before he was superseded by Elric of course.

And at the age of 32 I find I still read superhero comics. In fact, I've read more superheroes in my twenties than I ever did growing up. My self righteous teenage self would never have wanted to read such things for a start. Although my interest does tend to fluctuate somewhat, and I'd like to hope I'm discerning in my taste. I do wonder sometimes.

...all were in pursuit of the dream nurtured by every Spaniard: to live without doing a stroke of work, to pay no taxes and to swagger about with a sword at their belt and a cross embroidered on their doublet

Arturo Perez-Reverte, The Man in the Yellow Doublet, p.57

Inigo Balboa may be dismissive of his countrymen here in the latest Captain Alatriste, but I also wonder if he doesn't also capture something of what an adventure story promises: freedom from responsibility and normal social cares and pressures. Of course, the hero of any adventure story, no matter how morally compromised they might be, also holds to a code of honour. This code of honour is often absurdly stern, and brings the hero into conflict with much of the world which falls beneath such high standards.

But it is a vision of freedom. Even when the hero is part of some kind of formal hierarchy, such as Hornblower or Sharpe, they also assert a freedom and independence from the hierarchies of which they are a part. They are the repositories of moral rectitude and correct behaviour in their respective narratives.

And before this becomes rather too macho and sweatily masculine, I must point out that the biggest fans of Hornblower and Sharpe that I've met have been female. Also, now that I think about it, I wonder if this vision of absolute freedom isn't part of what Libertarianism appears to promise its adherents, which perhaps only goes to show that some ideals shouldn't be inflicted on too much of the real world.

But frankly, I don't really want to peer too closely at the ideology of adventure stories. When done well, and Captain Alatriste is certainly done well (given my earlier love for the Strider the choice of actor for Alatriste in the 2006 film is almost too perfect), then it's just a very pleasurable narrative form for me. Perez-Reverte creates a dirty and gritty early seventeenth-century Spain in which to set his adventures. Alongside this we get lectures on Spanish history and classical literature. That these don't seem out of place works because they're all told from the retrospective point of view of an older battle scarred and weary Inigo. What might otherwise seem like an author dumping his research on his readers works here because it makes perfect sense that our narrator would want to tell us about the vanished world which meant so much to him.

Yes, Inigo does excuse, even celebrate the imperialism and misogyny that the culture he eulogises also contained, but his narratives also celebrate loyalty, friendship and the need to perform right actions no matter how difficult their performance might be. There is a virtue here, for all that it might be easy to dismiss it as childish in a different context.

But surely, the real reason for reading a novel such as this is just for the sheer pleasure of it's telling.

Diego Alatriste was in a devil of a hurry. A new play was about to be performed at the Corral de la Cruz, and there he was on the Cuesta de la Vega, duelling with some fellow whose name he didn't even know.

ibid.

Honestly, how could you read such opening sentences and not desperately want to know what happens next?

Music in 'Rio Bravo'

It's been difficult to write anything for this for the last few weeks for a variety of reasons. Whilst suffering from flu a few weeks back I re watched Howard Hawks' wonderful film Rio Bravo. It's at least the third of fourth time I've seen it by this point. The film which convinced me John Wayne could act, with Angie Dickinson ever ready to puncture his character's self image and granite masculinity. Hawks is one of the reasons why I feel justified in being so sweepingly generalising in dismissing the majority of modern commercial cinema. He made such wonderful films within the popular genres of classical Hollywood cinema. And as David Thomson has pointed out, it's never the one you think you're watching. So, Rio Bravo, which is obviously a western (everyone wears a cowboy hat!) is actually a character comedy. There's very little plot, and much of the film consists of little more than the characters reflecting upon what little plot there is. It's beautifully managed, but what I was most attracted to this time were other things. The interplay between the sets and the real photographed reality in shots of the dusty empty street. And the music. By which I mean the diegtic music, intrinsic to the narrative, not the score.

In an early scene the villain (whose name I forget), pays the band at one of the local taverns to play a Mexican tune continuously in order to unsettle the film's heroes. It plays throughout in the background of a number of scenes, adding a subtle undercurrent of menace to the scenes under which it plays. The title of the tune, translated from the Spanish, is 'Cut Throat'. The implication is clear: violence and depravity is displaced onto the foreign other of Mexico, even though the the narrative seems to involve no Mexican characters. The location of the town is not identified in the film, but the real street scenes would appear to locate it somewhere in the South towards the border. Mexico is simultaneously present and absent. Weirdly it seems to anticipate the films of Leone and Peckinpah of at least a decade hence.

Then, at about the 1 hour, 40 minute mark, there's a wonderfully relaxed scene where the four heroes sit around singing a couple of songs. It serves no narrative purpose (unless it's to put to use the musical talents of Dean Martin and Ricky Nelson), serving only to illustrate a scene of manly companionship. Again, this is underlined by the choice of song, one of which is 'Cindy', a song I've only recently really discovered for myself through Robert Plant's wonderful Band of Joy album. The chorus says it all really:

Get along Cindy, Cindy,

I'll marry you some time

It's a confident image of impregnable masculinity, embodied here in this group of companionable lawmen.

Of course, it isn't impregnable. Dean Martin's character is a recovering alcoholic, as a consequence of his failed relationship with a disreputable women. We never see this lady, one of the ways in which the film silences female voices, and a major element of the film is Dean Martin's rebuilding his masculinity, symbolised by his initial inability to successfully role a cigarette, and which he is finally able to complete in one of the final scenes. But despite his experiences, he remains resolutely convinced about the positive nature of a romantic life and goads Wayne's character into his final confrontation with Angie Dickinson. I still don't quite get that final scene, in which she appears to talk herself into a relationship with him, almost as if she's trying to convince herself as much as him. The endings of Hawks' films often seem to come a little out of nowhere, taking the characters by surprise as much as the audience. Throughout the film Angie Dickinson has appeared to have the measure of Wayne's character, John T. Chance. His masculinity is never quite as secure or comfortable as it would appear in that delightful scene of companionable song.

This Week's Comics

Well, I didn't manage to make it into a regular feature, but I don't think I wanted to anyway. This is actually last week's comic, but I only picked it up on Thursday with this weeks comics.

Criminal: The Last of the Innocent #1

Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips' series of interlocking crime stories is one of my favourite comics currently being published as a serialised narrative. In practically every interview with him that I've read Ed Brubaker appears to like to point out one of his favourite themes, the relationships between between parents and children, dysfunctional familes. In the afterword printed in the back of this issue he tells us that this particular story came to him following his own father's death. Appropriately enough perhaps, it's the death of the protagonist's father which prompts Riley Richards' return to the small town of his youth from the nameless noir city where all of Criminal's narratives take place.

Brubaker is self conscious enough about his favourite themes, and Criminal is equally self conscious in the way it situates itself within the crime genre, with the slightly too obvious title, the 'pulp fiction'-like covers of Sean Phillips, and the articles spotlighting particular works of crime and noir fiction which appear in the back of each issue. The title of this story is equally self conscious in it's allusion to Fredric Wertham's Seduction of the Innocent. It also alerts us to one the story's themes of nostalgia (which Brubaker also helpfully points out for us in his afterword).

What interests me most is the way in which Brubaker and Phillips chose to visually depict the nostalgia which afflicts Riley as he returns to the small town of his youth. Various flashbacks puncture the issue's story, drawn in a style which appears to be lifted from Archie comics. As capable an artist as Sean Phillips is, he doesn't quite manage to appropriate the wholesome aesthetic that even someone like myself who has never read an issue of Archie would associate with that line's comics. This isn't entirely inappropriate since the youthful events that Riley pines for are far from the innocent escapades found in Archie. And it underlines just how innocent was the teenage sex and drug taking that we see, effectively contrasted with the more sordid contemporary reality found in the city depicted on the first tier of page two.

It also gives a tactile quality to Riley's nostalgia. By giving the images of the past an aesthetic which is so distinct from the present it becomes a self conscious appropriation of that nostalgia, which is further ditanced for the audience on the very first panel of the story's first page with a caption which locates the story's present not in our present but in 1982. It's also interesting because it's a device Ed Brubaker has used before. Published by Vertigo between 2000 and 2001, Deadenders is an odd series whose various elements didn't quite gel, only lasting for 16 issues. Consequently the last 4 become rather rushed after the leisurely pace of the preceding issues in a rush to give the series' overarching story a reasonably fitting conclusion. Brubaker's stated aim for the series was to try and create a series which would work in a similar way to Jamie Hernandez's work where there might be several main characters, but the story could be free to drop in on and follow other characters within the same world. It followed the adventures of a group of mod bikers within a post apocalyptic future America, slowly revealing the reasons for the mysterious cataclysm which has afflicted their world.

The last issue, in which the cataclysm unravels and something like our reality is restored, makes similar use of Archies aesthetic as the realistic teenagers we've followed over the previous 15 issues are transfigured into new characters with a new contemporary past. This may be a little unclear as I don't currently have access to the comic in question since most of my comics are in storage and I can only go on memory. The final pages find one of the characters driving one night and discovering some record he only vaguely remembers along with a vinyl player (even in 2001, a vinyl record player was an object which explicitly referenced the past). As he plays one of the records something of the past is mysteriously evoked, a past which is both the narrative we've seen in the previous 15 issues and an unseen past of the newly created character. The past is figured as an untouchable, even unknowable absence, referenced only by cultural fragments such as a vinyl record.

Which of course, it always is. That's why nostalgia can be so painful. I've only read a portion of Ed Brubaker's comics, but what I have read seems to have an ambiguous relationship with the past. One of his earliest pieces, the short 'An Accidental Death' which was serialised in Dark Horse Presents features a character looking back on the tragic events which occurred in his childhood. It's clear that this tragic occurrence has in some way scarred his present day narrating self, and the telling of his story is in no way cathartic. In different ways, his earlier Vertigo comics, Prez: Smells Like Teen President and Scene of the Crime both demonstrate an ambiguous relationship with the cultural legacy of the 1960s.* The relationship between generations may be an acknowledged preferred theme, but the various stories which have so far been published under the Criminal banner seem to be more marked by the depiction of characters unwilling or unable to escape their differently troubled pasts. This might be nothing more than a noir staple, and to a degree that's exactly what it is, but another theme that comes through prominently in many of Ed Brubaker's interviews is a somewhat complicated relationship with his own past. As a teenager he was something of a thief and drug addict who narrowly escaped prison. It was this he says which straightened him out. It's clearly left it's mark on him.

I don't generally favour biographical readings. They can be briefly illuminating, but rarely get at what's so fascinating about a particular work. It does interest me that there is a recurrent pattern hear. Brubaker is also fully aware of how seductive nostalgia can be, and the appropriation of Archie's aesthetic seems bound up with this seduction. It makes the past both tactile and distant. In the final pages of Criminal: The Last of the Innocent #1 Riley Richards falls asleep on the couch in his childhood home after reading a bunch of his old comics. His dream self floats through the idealised vision of his past, before he wakes to the realisation that the solution to his present day problems is to murder his wife. It might be a noir staple of the morally compromised protagonist wanting to kill the wife he no longer loves, and no doubt there will be complications in future issues. It's never that easy. We're being warned here.

*Interesting that these comics were published at the company built on the success of Alan Moore and which has published so many comics by Grant Morrison, both of whom have a much more celebratory view of the 60s and its cultural inheritance.

English Magic Realism

There were several things I mentioned in passing in this earlier post which I intended to come back to when I had the chance. Of course, life got in the way, or else I've ended up blogging about other things as they've come to my attention or crossed my mind. I still haven't gotten to posting about most of the things I thought I wanted to post about when I decided to start this blog! Hopefully, that's stuff for future posts.

I loved Tim Pears' In the Place of Fallen Leaves. After years of reading English fiction about cities (well, London), I'm starting to find I want to read more rural or provincial fiction. I haven't read anything by Tim Pears before, although I remember watching the BBC adaptation of his second novel In a Land of Plenty. My memory of the adaptation is that it was sold as a follow up to the successful Our Friends from the North from a year or two previously. There were deffinite similarities. Both series were episodic sagas tracing the lives of various characters over the preceding 40 years against a backdrop of Britain's changing economic and political fortunes. The sort of challenging television on a large scale which the BBC no longer seems interested in producing. In contrast to the more politicised Our Friends from the North however, In a Land of Plenty is a much more personal story about the interpersonal relationships within a somewhat dysfunctional family.

If I remember correctly, In a Land of Plenty never achieved the same sort of critical success and popularity as the earlier show, becoming rather lost in the schedules. I haven't seen it since it was first transmitted, but my memory is of an enchanted depiction of post war English history and life. Even so, I wasn't expecting the magic realism of In the Place of Fallen Leaves which from its opening pages comes on like full blown Garcia Marquez transplanted to Devon in the midst of the 1985 heat wave.

I've no interest in trying to define magic realism here. I have some sympathy with Terry Pratchett's view that it's "like a polite way of saying you write fantasy", although I don't quite agree with him. I love (almost!) everything Sir Terry has writen, but some of his pronouncements about his craft do bespeak something of a chip on his shoulder about the way he feels his chosen genre is treated by 'respectable' literary critics. I don't quite have the time or the critical tools at my current disposal to work out a definition for myself let alone anyone else, but I do think it's both possible and useful to define it as a distinct category of the fantastic.

If I say it's rare in that earlier post, it's because in an English literary context, I feel it is a mode which not many writers have tended to use, although I'd certainly be willing to find myself corrected on that score. We've certainly produced a great deal of fantasy. Its always tended to be seen as an exotic 'other' in a English context, springing from Latin America or Europe. Salman Rushdie for example, may have been resident in London when he wrote all of his most significant fiction, but I wouldn't confine his work to an English context. I think there's a broad agreement that his work operates in a post-colonial context, although obviously (and appropriately) his work draws upon a multitude of traditions. And as I say in passing in my earlier post, I would now place his work very strongly within the context of Bombay.

So, this is just a brief list of books to try and define for myself a tradition of English Magic Realism. Perhaps this contradicts my blog's name, but I define it as English because that's the landscape and the identity which I'm most interested in exploring on this blog.

Kate Atkinson, Human Croquet, and the stories in Not the End of the World.

Angela Carter, The Magic Toyshop, Nights at the Circus, Wise Children, some of her short stories and the film A Company of Wolves.

John Fowles, The Magus which may be mostly set on a Greek island, but still feels very English to me.

Paul Magrs, Marked for Life, Does It Show?, Could It Be Magic?

Michael Moorcock, Mother London, King of the City.

Tim Pears, In a Place of Fallen Leaves.

Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger, A Canterbury Tale.

Salman Rushdie, the London scenes in The Satanic Verses.

Marina Warner, Indigo

Jeanette Winterson, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, Sexing the Cherry.

Yes, a small list, but hopefully there's more to be discovered. I shall add more to this list at a later date should I think of or else come across anything else which seems to fit. I can already think of a couple of titles I should probably put on this list, but I haven't read them as yet. It's meant to be a personal list anyway, and of course, some or all of these titles could be clasified in different ways. I'm sure this 'tradition' I'm briefly sketching overlaps with others, but that's surely part of the pleasure to be had here.

Theatre Review

The Merchant of Venice
Royal Shakespeare Theatre, dir. Rupert Goold

(Seen on 26th May, 2011)

Every time I go to the theatre I wonder why I don't go more often. There's something about the live experience of theatre that film can't even begin to approximate. Granted, I live in York, where perhaps we don't have the best provision for theatre (although we do currently have the best Pantomime in the country at Christmas), but even if that is true Leeds isn't very far away. I've no excuse, basically.

So I've never heard of Rupert Goold, although he's apparently making something of a name for himself as an exciting new director. I took the option to see it when I was at the Shakespeare Institute's Annual Graduate Conference last week mostly because Patrick Stewart was playing Shylock. I've heard of him at least! In the event, good as he was, the real stand out performance for me was Susannah Fielding who played Portia. Most of the cast were good in fact, although the accents sometimes wavered. Richard Riddell, who played Bassanio, was particularly guilty of this, with an accent that veered between one side of the Atlantic and the other and back again. What's most hard to avoid talking about of course, is the setting they chose to place the play in: Las Vegas.

Mr Goold is a conceptualist apparently, or so I heard him described by someone else at the conference. Certainly there was a very clear concept at work. The three caskets scene was imaginatively reworked as a trashy game show, vaguely reminiscent of Deal or No Deal. Within the reality of the play however it seemed at times to have a reality with backstage staff appearing at one point whilst at others seeming to exist as little more than as a metaphor, slipping between both an imaginative and a real space. Which gets to the heart of the concept. This wasn't set in America, it was set in Americana, our dream of the place and it's culture: Las Vegas, Elvis, Goodfellas, Patrick Stewart's performance channeling Dustin Hoffman and Paccino, Wild at Heart, Film Noir, Guantanamo, Spanish immigrant (slave) labour, a probably a dozen others I'm either forgetting or missed.

One of the problems with imposing such a clear concept on the play is that it can end up as something of a game: how will they make such and such an aspect work in their chosen setting. It can still be an extraordinarily powerful way to reinterpret a play. I can still remember images from Macbeth on the Estate, which was shown on TV when I was teenager, a very powerful reinterpretation. But I wonder of it doesn't also risk flattening the play when you impose such a powerful and loaded overaching concept.

They also broadened the plays racism. Portia and her maid Nerissa act towards Jessica with patronising anti-semitism.When Morocco first appears, bananas are thrown onto the stage, something I think I would have found more shocking if I hadn't known it was going to happen. Seeing it as part of a conference, we also got to meet the actor who played the Duke of Morocco and the shows Assistant Director who gave a brief talk and q+a as a plenary. They were very cagey about giving too much away about the setting, which might have accounted for the slight air of smugness that came across when someone asked the obvious question of how has it been received by the audience. Of course they've had letters accusing them of 'destroying' the play. Obviously this is nonsense. You can't appreciate every production of a play, and it's especially nonsense in the case of a dramatist and a play which has been performed so many times before and will be performed again.

Still, I find myself wondering just how daring this production is actually being. The Merchant of Venice is a play whose meaning has been utterly changed by history. We can't see it the same way it's original audience must have done, or even any audience watching it before the Second World War, when anti-semitism was either a perfectly normal social attitude to have or at least tolerated. Shakespeare's play isn't about racism. It's actually racist because that's how we now interpret the depiction of Shylock. So I wonder if making it so much about 'racism' doesn't actually flatten out the plays meaning?

There was something almost deliberately awkward, even admirable in this production's utter refusal to give its audience any satisfaction. Whilst there were a great many sight gags, we were always laughing at them and not with the characters because everyone was largely hateful, even cartoonish.. Both the scene following Bassanio's successful guessing of the correct casket and the final one where Portia and Nerrisa tease their repective husbands about giving away their rings are played in a way which denies any joy in these events, suffuced with a melancholy which emphasises the distance between the characters. Which doesn't quite work in the case of the latter scene where it felt a little forced.

Of course, ultimately it has to work for today's audience. Fixing it so clearly to America through its imagery feeds into a lot of people instintive anti Americanism (when the bananas actually come from the behavior of British football fans). I can't deny the effectiveness of the various theatrical devices and props deployed. It works, and Susannah Fielding was, as I've already said, excellent. Ultimately, the fact that it's impossible to have any sympathy for anyone in the play is surely a valid interpretation.

One final thing: Shylock hides his Jewishness from the characters who surround him, removing his yarmulke before he goes out. It's only once he loses Jessica and seeks to carry out his barbaric debt that adopts a more obviously 'Jewish' manner of dress in the trial scene. The one moment of sympathy he gets comes not with the obvious 'If you prick us, do we not bleed?' speech which feels thrown away here, but immediately afterwards when he is left alone on stage and dances a few steps to some mournful Klezmer music. In locating sympathy for Shylock not in the common humanity expressed in his famous speech but instead in the wordless acknowledgement of his Jewishness does this production not further alienate him from the surrounding Christian characters?

"Norton, no question, was there in the garden when the incident occured."

Found in my university library this afternoon whilst I was looking for something else. According to the library catalogue this is a copy of the Commentaries on the history, constitutions, & chartered franchises of the city of London, written by one George Norton, and published in 1869. I imagine it's only if you have enjoyed the works of Iain Sinclair that you would find it amusing that there really was a Norton who was a historian of London, although I suppose it's always possible that this isn't a coincidence at all.