Booked Out

The Little Stranger

Saturday June 20, 2009

But the thing in her hand was not quite silent, after all. As she raised the cup to her ear she could hear, coming from it, a faint, moist susurration – as if wet silk, or something fine like that, were being slowly and haltingly drawn through the tube. The sound, she realised with a shock, was that of a laboured breath, which kept catching and bubbling as if in a narrow, constricted throat. In an instant she was transported back, twenty-eight years, to her first child’s sickbed. She whispered her daughter’s name – ‘Susan?’ – and the breathing quickened and grew more liquid. A voice began to emerge from the bubbling mess of sound: a child’s voice, she took it to be, high and pitiful, attempting, as if with tremendous effort, to form words.

The Little Stranger was my introduction to Sarah Waters, and I have come away very impressed. Her latest novel is a brilliantly written study of the shifting changes in the English post-war class system. It is beautifully paced, full of subtle observations and quite simply a pleasure to read. It is also one of the most effective, chilling and original ghost stories I have read for some time. I finished The Little Stranger a few days ago but, still thinking it through, I have been unable to start a new book.

cover of The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters

Hundreds Hall is a crumbling mansion and we find it in disrepair just after the war. The Ayers family, mother son and daughter, are struggling to keep alive the dusty rooms and prevent their home sinking more and more into decay. The middle aged Doctor Faraday narrates the story, which begins when he is called to attend to one of the few servants the Ayers can cling onto. Their maid, feigning sickness, claims to Faraday that the house is haunted. Whilst he dismisses this belief, Faraday is slowly drawn into the Ayers world and the family are indeed revealed to be haunted, although Waters is clever enough not to reveal the true cause of their resulting anguish and tragedy.

And being a very intelligent and clever novel makes The Little Stranger such an achievement. Waters creates an intriguing narrator in Faraday, a middle aged man who at first appears to be dull, lifeless and set in his ways who begins to slowly reveal a deep resentment for his working class origins and a fascination with the Ayers family that grows more uneasy with every page. The book has received few criticisms but one of them is its lack of likeable characters. The Ayers family are indeed odd; the eccentric and nervous brother who eventually loses his mind, the plain and frumpy sister who Faraday slowly begins to fall for. Faraday himself is almost a misfit, a tense and unimaginiative loner, but I found them all fascinating. And fascination, and obsession, is something that makes this novel tick.

The Thirteenth Tale has been cited as a comparison to this novel and I can see why; The Little Stranger is certainly as good. I also thought of Ann Radcliffe’s novels, which constantly taunt the reader with seemingly supernatural events then only to wring out the fantastic and reveal the rational reasoning behind them. The Little Stranger taunts in similar ways, with many spooky scenes that Faraday urges the reader to dismiss as thinking the work of ghosts. They are still chilling though; the sudden fire in the house, creeping irrational madness, strange childlike writing on the walls, mysteriously locked doors, footsteps forever out of sight. It’s all so well crafted you begin to secretly hope that there is a ghost at work, although Waters ultimately delivers something far more subtle and imaginitive.

The Little Stranger kept me gripped right to the end of its 500 pages. The ending, which I was expecting to reveal a twist, was far from the conclusion I was expecting. But on reflection I think that Sarah Waters delivered a masterly ending, and one that had me rereading it several times, along with the novel’s opening and several other key scenes. This is an ambiguous book, where the reader cannot firmly conclude on the role of the supernatural or if there really was one at all, but for this reason I found the almost uncomfortable outcome all the more unsettling. And it’s one I’m still deciding about. I cannot recommend this novel highly enough.

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Wacky Races

Wednesday June 17, 2009

A bleak and wintry landscape, where truck drivers tear along country lanes at breakneck speed. Britain in 1957; roadside cafes and bed-sitting rooms. An impressive cast featuring Stanley Baker, Patrick McGoohan, Sean Connery, Herbert Lom, David McCallum, Gordon Jackson, William Hartnell and Sid James. You’ve guessed it: Hell Drivers, one of my all time favourite British movies.

Where to start? One of the best things about this film is the cast, and one can easily forget how essential Sid James and Herbert Lom were as supporting actors in the 1950s. Oddly, the least remembered actor from the roll call above is probably the star of the film: Stanley Baker. It’s a shame he’s been forgotten as he always gave strong performances, here impressive as an ex-con who is recruited into a no-nonsense trucking firm.

Cy Endfield’s film has aged surprisingly well. The casting helps, but the writer-director has made a quality film all round, from the excellent script to the well orchestrated truck races. And races they are; once Baker is taken on by the surly boss (Hartnell, giving one of his excellent pre Doctor Who character roles) he realises that he must risk his life every day by driving like a madman to make the required number of deliveries. This is further complicated by his decision to take on the resident maniac (Patrick McGoohan).

Sean Connery, Sid James, Stanley Baker and Patrick McGoohan in Hell Drivers

For maniacal film roles McGoohan is very good in Hell Drivers, and if he appears a touch over the top the film needs to be forgiven from lurching into melodram from time to time. What the drivers are actually doing in this film is fairly vague; leaving their depot and driving miles across the country as fast as they can, filling up their trucks with grit and then driving back again. Over and over again. “Red” (McGoohan) has decided to be the best at this particular game, pulling such stunts as overtaking on the left, ramming the other trucks that get in his way and tearing across a dangerous quarry that acts as a short cut. There’s no room for Health and Safety in Hell Drivers. The drivers are expected to maintain their own vehicles and seat belts are unheard of (and life threatening as Baker takes his inaugural journey in a truck minus decent brakes). It’s all rather exciting.

So Baker, the softly spoken and quietly tough Welshman, commences battle with the raving Irishman (McGoohan), and eventually almost everyone as he uncovers that Hartnell is running a corrupt outfit. This is the crux of the film, and it works extremely well. Heroes and villains are clearly defined, and the struggle between the good and the bad could easily be transplanted to a different genre, for example a Western. And somewhere, someone has no doubt compared Hell Drivers to specific Westerns, although I personally find the British setting perfect. This film just predates the change in British cinema that was about to take place, and Baker personifies the type of lead that was about to be usurped by the likes of Alan Bates, Tom Courtenay and Albert Finney. Less of an antihero, less ambiguous, just your straightforward British lead. But Hell Drivers manages to convey very well what life in Britain was like more than half a century ago and before anyone had coined the term “kitchen sink”.

Cy Endfield’s most successful film was the better known Zulu that came a few years later. Whilst it also starred Stanley Baker, probably best remembered is the young Michael Caine. Alas, Zulu is now considered a Caine film through and through, although at the time he was relatively unknown and Baker was still the draw.
Typical of Endfield’s films is the lack of good female actors. In Hell Drivers Marjorie Rhodes is fun as a landlady, but Peggy Cummins is quite irritating as the love interest who comes between Baker and Herbert Lom (here playing an Italian from his huge repertoire of stock roles). Cummins just grates, and tends to be responsible for introducing the most melodramatic moments.

But who can beat a film starring the future James Bond, Doctor Who and The Prisoner?

Footnotes:

This is the earliest film I’ve seen that features the trademark laugh of Sid James.
A hospital room door has Number One written on it. Patrick McGoohan drives the Number One truck. He calles himself Number One until Baker steals his truck, becoming The new Number One.
Both McGoohan and Baker turned down the role of James Bond, which of course went to Connery. There is no evidence that the part was ever offered to Sid James.

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Gig

Tuesday June 2, 2009

When I was aged 14 I asked for David Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust album for one of my Christmas presents. It was already quite a few years old at the time, but a friend and I had decided to form a band and were plundering classic records for ideas (I forget what he was getting that Christmas, possibly a Who album). My mother had hidden Ziggy Stardust somewhere in the house and one December lunchtime, the place empty, I decided to try and find it. Although she hid it well it didn’t take me long to find the album, concealed amongst her jazz LPs. This was somewhere I never ventured, hating jazz and the music I was often forced to put up with as a background noise. But there, sandwiched between the Ella Fitzgerald, was Bowie.

Like Simon Armitage, I’ve tried to get a grip on jazz and try to like it over the years but have always failed. Also like him, I’ve always much preferred the music I was told I’d grow out of. But I never did grow out of the likes of The Smiths, and I probably never will. In his musical memoir Gig, Armitage also has an enduring Bowie memory, where his father shows a not untypical reaction to the androgyny of Ziggy:

As I walked through the living room with Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars under my arm, he pointed at it with the mouth-end of his pipe. ‘What’s that then?’ And he’d obviously heard of the man and his music, because when I told him, he said, ‘David Bowie? He’s a homosexual.’

My mother probably had a similar attitude, although ten years after Ziggy Stardust was first released she had at least mellowed enough to buy me the album.

cover of Gig by Simon Armitage

Gig documents Armitage’s enduring obsession with a number of bands that include The Smiths, The Fall, The Cocteau Twins, The Blue Nile and The Wedding Present. Most of them are still going strong today, and he writes about seeing many of them perform live in recent years. He also meets a few of his icons, not always with satisfying results. As a responsible adult and parent, Armitage is like me still excited by the music that inspired him as a youth. He writes very amusingly about the cantankerous Mark E. Smith of The Fall, muses on the brilliance of Liz Frazer of The Cocteau Twins and ruminates rather movingly on a Morrissey concert. Again, it is his father who turns enjoying the music of Moz into a guilty pleasure:

‘So who is it you’ve been to see?’
He knows.
‘Morrissey.’
‘Who’s he then?’
He knows.
‘He was in the Smiths.’
‘And what did they ever do?’
He genuinely doesn’t know the answer to this question, though he does know how much I liked them, and therefore that I’ll protest too much and in all probability collapse under cross-examination. I can’t believe I’m debating indie guitar music with my dad, but I’ve swallowed the bait and I am.

Although a successful and acclaimed poet (he’s on the GCSE syllabus) Simon Armitage laments the fact that he never made it as a musician. His dream is to be or be like David Gedge, the kitchen sink songsmith fronting the thrashy guitared Wedding Present, everyone’s second favourite band as he puts it. I can understand why as well; being an ordinary guy in many ways an ordinary band Gedge is oddly appealing. He’s also an artist who’s kept at it now for two decades with an enduring fanbase and a strange kind of enviable respect. I agree with Armitage. I’d sooner be David Gedge than Bono any day.

But like mine the Armitage electric guitar stayed mostly unstrummed, or unthrashed, eventually being packed off to a buyer on eBay. The dream sort of comes true towards the end of Gig, however, when he forms a musical duo called The Scaremongers although, strangely, I would have preferred it is Simon had remained the musical bystander. He’s best as the commentator and the dreamer.

In addition to the musical ones, Gig follows some of the poetic, describing his role as a literary performer. Armitage also writes about the lengths he goes to to find inspiration. A trip on a mail train to help shape his excellent poem The Last Post, a visit to Surtsey and work inside prisons to produce his series of films for Channel 4. He’s a likeable man with a witty and self-deprecating sense of humour. Most of all, even in a mostly prose book such as this, a strikingly imaginative voice.

As well as collections of poems, Simon Armitage has also written two novels Little Green Man and The White Stuff. Whilst I enjoyed the first the second was a little disappointing, and the essay-structured yet informal Gig is the kind of book he writes best. In many ways it is similar to his All Points North, which is reissued as a companion to this and is also worth catching.

As a footnote, my mother decided to get rid of her vinyl collection a few years ago. She’d completed the transition to CD and was about to move house, so the heavy collection of LPs had to go. I was invited to take my pick from them before they were hurded off to a car boot sale. Alas I found no Bowie there, not even my missing Cocteau Twins albums hiding between the Stan Getz. After flicking through I took away a couple of Frank Sinatra records. But the reality still is: I don’t like jazz.

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Fear is the Key

Saturday May 23, 2009

there was a war on: you could tell that too from the untidy gaps between the Bloomsbury houses – a flat fireplace half-way up a wall, like the painted fireplace in a cheap dolls’ house, and lots of mirrors and green wall-papers, and from round a corner of the sunny afternoon the sound of glass being swept up, like the lazy noise of the sea on a shingle beach.

This extract from the opening of Graham Greene’s The Ministry of Fear sets the mood for the novel perfectly; the imagery of the dolls’ house prepares for the surreal atmosphere of the book, as does the use of mirrors and eerily familiar interiors for the nightmare world of Arthur Rowe. The numbed familiarity of the London Blitz is also brought to the fore; writing in 1943, Greene brilliantly sketches the backdrop of a capital at war – strong enough for a modern reader to taste the sound, smell and fear of the bombings.

cover of The Ministry of Fear by Graham Greene

The Ministry of Fear is one of Greene’s oddest books, and reads at times like his usual prose has been soaked in Kafka and Conrad. The brilliant opening chapter finds Rowe at a sorry wartime fête, where he correctly guesses the weight of a cake on the advice of a fortune teller. Here’s starts Greene’s own nightmarish take on the wrong man story, with Rowe pursued by dark forces across a London under threat of the air raid. It’s a brilliant tale, illuminated by the panic and uncertainly of 40s London. As usual, Greene can say a lot in few words; whilst the novel is brief it is also dense and layered, proving again that he is not always the easy author we take him to be.

Unfortunately this novel doesn’t live up to its early promise. Perhaps I was more interested in the background of the Blitz rather than the plot, which attempts to unravel the weird set pieces, which include a murder at a séance, an encounter with a seedy bookseller and a spell in a sinister hospital, to explain itself more logically. This somehow takes the fun out of things, but The Ministry of Fear is worth a read for an example of good literature that just doesn’t age.

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Coraline

Sunday May 17, 2009

It’s official. The beauty of Neil Gaiman’s imagination has at last been realised in Coraline. The film is visually stunning, witty and most of all strangely moving; I haven’t enjoyed a film for children this much in a long time.

What worried me was that the young audience I was part of were not so appreciative. This isn’t a film for the very young, and maybe not even for the impatient adult (as I left the cinema I overheard a child asking her mother what long winded meant). Although only 100 minutes in length Coraline did appear as quite long (I think animated films are just more exhausting), and the ten year old film critic that accompanied me appeared oddly deflated. Perhaps it was the element of scare in the movie. Perhaps I had built it up too much. Perhaps Neil Gaiman is a matter of acquired taste.

still from Coraline

But I loved it. Coraline is visually breathtaking, perhaps the best animated film I have ever seen. It isn’t just the level of technology; I found the effects weren’t just there to be showy and always complimented the story perfectly. Because Coraline is essentially a fairy tale, there’s a fairy tale logic to everything that happens. It’s very tight, and for all my scrutiny I could find no holes in the plot. Director Henry Selick (responsible for the vaguely similar James and the Giant Peach) does a very accomplished job. Probably both in 2D and 3D – the 3D version of the film we saw today doesn’t, I suspect, add too much. It’s just a great experience without the extra bells and whistles.

Those familiar with Gaiman’s work will already know the story of Coraline. A girl who briefly escapes her dull new home, where her parents spend most of their waking hours with their backs turned, to visit a half dreamlike alternative world where her mum and dad appear exciting and, most importantly, interested in her. Appear is the key world here, as the people in this “other” world have buttons for eyes. Something isn’t quite right because, quite rightly, buttons for eyes are the stuff of nightmares.

So unfolds the brilliant fairy tale. The animation realises it superbly, from button shadows covering the moon, to performing mice, a very wise cat and an eerie tunnel between the two worlds (pictured) that brought back the worst memories of Hellraiser from the corners of my memory. Best of all is how Coraline slowly realises that horror is around her and that she must act. Dakota Fanning (from Charlotte’s Web) is fantastic in the role, totally believable throughout. As I’ve said, it’s also moving; especially the scene when Coraline loses her real mum and dad and creates her own pair of button parents to prop beside her in the empty double bed.

The rest of the cast are also wonderful. Teri Hatcher is very impressive as both of Coraline’s mothers, Ian McShane plays an eccentric neighbour and Dawn French and Jennifer Saunders turn up as two rather odd sisters to provide some humour. Unlike many animated films, however, Coraline never knowingly assumes it can go over young heads, although the trade off I suspect is the very young, who just aren’t ready yet for this sort of sophistication. Unwittingly, this film may be just too advanced for much of its intended audience.

My pals on Twitter will already know that I’ve given this a nine out of ten. I’m sticking with that, but I feel that there was so much in this film that I need to see it again. It’s so lovingly made, and that’s a rarity these days in children’s cinema. This is quality, real quality. So hats off to this film, and even a bow; the best film I’ve seen this year.

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