The Unit – Ninni Holmqvist

It’s the near future and society is divided into those who are necessary and needed, and those who are dispensable. Any woman over the age of 50 – or any man over the age of 60 – who is single and childless, and who doesn’t work in certain industries that are considered essential to the economy, is considered to be dispensable. These people lose their liberty and are housed in a Bank Unit for Biological Material. They live out the rest of their lives in relative comfort, but they are used as guinea pigs in medical experiments, and they ultimately have to donate their body organs - right up to the final donation of their heart or lungs so that a necessary and needed person may live.

No, this isn’t a new policy proposal from the Conservative party, but it’s the premise of Swedish writer Ninni Holmqvist’s novel, The Unit.

The story is told from the point of view of Dorrit Weger, a 50-year-old, not-too-successful writer, who has been living alone in her dilapidated house with her dog, Jock. She’s one of the unneeded, a dispensable person, and the novel opens with her being collected from her home and driven to The Unit – which is to be her new home.

The Second Reserve Bank Unit for Biological Material is a huge complex in which she has her own apartment. Her needs are well catered for: there are shops, restaurants, a gym, theatre, cinema, library, art gallery. However, the residents of the unit live under constant surveillance, with cameras monitoring their every move – as a suicide prevention measure. She makes new friends, and while mourning the loss of her old life, she gradually adapts to her new one.

She meets and befriends 64-year-old Johannes, and their initial flirtations eventually grow into something more substantial – they fall in love with each other.

The question for Dorrit is: does she settle for life in The Unit, knowing that the inevitable final donation will not be too far away for either herself or Johannes, or does she try to escape?

The Unit is an interesting, thought-provoking tale, written with a tenderness and lightness of touch by Ninni Holmqvist. She avoids making it too heavy-handed and hectoring, and instead opts for a more subtle approach.

I can imagine this story in the hands of a less mature writer – The Unit’s staff portrayed as cold and arrogant, with maybe a few genuine sadists amongst them; the ‘dispensables’ living lives of torment and horror as they’re subjected to daily doses of torture from their tormentor/s. But Holmqvist delivers a novel that isn’t like that at all – and it’s all the more believable and affecting for it.

The staff are portrayed as being generally decent people who are doing their job in as humane and compassionate way as possible. The Unit’s inhabitants are seen living lives of material comfort; the emotional pain they feel is usually about missing someone from the outside world, or the loss of a friend from within the unit – someone who has made their final donation. Never do we see them railing against the injustice of a system which placed them in such a position in the first place. There are no rebels in the unit, no concerted effort to escape. Instead there is a quiet acquiescence, an acceptance of their fate.

It is this aspect of the novel that makes it so chilling and makes it work as a potent allegorical tale.   The initial proposal for ‘dispensable’ people to be housed in Bank Units of Biological Material came from a minor political party, but it gained weight and traction, and was adopted by larger, more mainstream parties, until it became law; and more than that – it just became the way things are. Public discourse has been gradually and perniciously poisoned by this distinction between necessary and unnecessary people, until everyone accepts it as being true. No character in the novel truly steps outside this belief and examines it for the obscenity that it is.

The novel isn’t perfect: some parts of it felt a little perfunctorily described, and many of the characters – apart from Dorrit – failed to truly come alive for me. But I’m nitpicking, and these things didn’t really bother me. It’s an engaging novel, the premise is intriguing, Dorrit is always an interesting and sympathetic narrator – and her plight is genuinely moving. The pain she feels at missing her old life – and in particular her pet dog – is beautifully captured and positively heartrending at times.

Ninni Holmqvist has delivered a chilling picture of a near-future dystopia that feels all too plausible. It’s an intelligent and gripping read, and its underlying themes have some resonance with what’s currently happening in UK politics. It’s a novel that I expect will linger in my memory for quite some time.

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by davidbarb on February 17, 2012  •  Permalink
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Posted by davidbarb on February 17, 2012

http://thelockedroom.com/2012/02/17/the-unit-ninni-holmqvist/

Jamrach’s Menagerie – Carol Birch

“I was born twice.  First in a wooden room that jutted out over the black water of the Thames, and then again eight years later in the Highway, when the tiger took me in his mouth and everything truly began.“

It’s eighteenth century London and eight-year-old Jaffy Brown is roaming the streets of the East End when he encounters an escaped Bengali tiger. Rather than fleeing in terror, he approaches the animal, curious, and strokes it on the nose. But the tiger flexes its jaws, grabs hold of him in its mouth, and carries him away. Thankfully, the tiger’s owner, Mr Jamrach, is on hand to leap on the tiger’s back and force it to release its grip on Jaffy, and the boy escapes unharmed.

Impressed by Jaffy’s bravery, and detecting in him a natural affinity with animals, Jamrach gives Jaffy work helping out in his yard – Jamrach is a supplier of exotic and rare animals from all over the world to private clients, circuses, zoos and the like.

Jaffy befriends another boy who is also working for Jamrach, Tim Linver, and falls in love with his sister, Ishbel. The opening part of the novel is set in London’s East End and charts the early days of their friendship and of their time working for Jamrach.

The novel then jumps forward seven years, and the now fifteen-year-old Jaffy, along with his friend Tim, goes to sea on a whaling ship with explorer Dan Rymer. Their aim is to capture a ‘dragon’ for one of Jamrach’s clients – the ‘dragon’ being a mysterious creature that is rumoured to inhabit an island of the Dutch East Indies. The novel then goes on to tell the story of what happens on this expedition.

Jamrach’s Menagerie is a mesmerising novel, full of the strange and the exotic and the wonderful. Birch’s writing is a thing of beauty. It’s a novel that evokes all of the senses – it captures the sights and sounds and stench of working in the menagerie and the rigours of  life at sea in glorious, vivid, multicoloured, multisensory detail. It’s full of life and colour, drama, tension and excitement. But be warned that in the latter stages when events take a dark turn, it does become a gruelling, arduous read, which may not be to everyone’s taste.

It’s a novel of emotional and psychological depth. The friendship between Jaffy and Tim is beautifully captured, subtle and nuanced. There’s a bond between them, a solid friendship, and like everything else in this wonderful novel it feels three-dimensional and real. Tim is at times as much an irritant to Jaffy as he is a friend. At times an outright bully, or an enemy. There’s undeniably a cruel streak to his character, but it’s the sort of cruelty that is perhaps common in childhood, but which all too often goes unacknowledged in idealised rose-tinted images of children that often crop up in fiction.

For me this novel delivered on all counts. I absolutely loved it. I loved its vibrancy and energy, Birch’s sparkling prose, its ability to transport me to another time and place with vivid, almost hallucinogenic detail. I read many books that I’ve all but forgotten within weeks or months of finishing them, but parts of this novel are indelibly etched on my memory, and it’s a book that I will never forget. I think that Jamrach’s Menagerie is a masterful, essential, mind-boggling, dizzying, kaleidoscopic, technicoloured, awe-inspiring piece of work. I can’t recommend it highly enough.

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by davidbarb on February 15, 2012  •  Permalink
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Posted by davidbarb on February 15, 2012

http://thelockedroom.com/2012/02/15/jamrachs-menagerie-carol-birch-2/

Skyrim

(I’m playing the xbox 360 version)

Skyrim. All the critics love it, the games press went crazy for it. I’ve just taken a look on metacritic.com and the average critic score for this game – on the xbox 360 – is 96/100. 96 out of a hundred. Damn near perfect. And that’s based on 88 games critics’ reviews. And of those 88, 31 have given the game a perfect 100 score – which is to say that it couldn’t be improved upon in any way.  The majority of the remaining 57 reviews score the game at over 95/100, and only three critics have scored the game below 90/100 – the lowest score being a solitary and anomalous 75/100.

So that’s universal acclaim from the critics. The average metacritic user review score for the game is not quite so glowing, but it’s still currently rating at a very impressive 8.5/10 based on 1756 user ratings.

So everyone loves Skyrim – or at least most people seem to love it. For many it is video gaming perfection. Great. But for me, my experience of the game has been that it is anything but perfect, and the aim of this post isn’t really to review the game – because there are plenty of reviews already out there – it’s more to explore the time (100+ hours) I’ve spent with the game and to give vent to some of the frustrations I’ve experienced along the way.

First off, let me say this: I like Skyrim. I’ve enjoyed the time I’ve spent with it enough for me to keep going, and after a long process of coming to terms with what the game is and what it isn’t, I’m probably enjoying it more now than I have done at any point since I started playing it over two months ago.  But it saddens me to say that for a long time I was underwhelmed and disappointed by it. And despite the glowing critical acclaim that has been showered upon this game, I do feel that there are things wrong with it, things that Bethesda could have done better.

The first problem I had with Skyrim had nothing to do with the game and everything to do with me, and it’s this: unrealistically high expectations.  I loved Bethesda’s last two games, Oblivion and Fallout 3, and between the multiple playthroughs of  both games they’ve probably consumed hundreds of hours of my life – which, as far as I’m concerned, was time well spent. Despite the numerous bugs, glitches and flaws, both games totally captured my imagination, immersed me in their world, and successfully worked their magic on me. Before I had even set eyes on Skyrim I expected it to be a masterpiece. And that’s dangerous, and foolish. I wasn’t just expecting it to be a good game, or even a very good game, I was expecting it to be Bethesda’s best game, the pinnacle of their achievements. Realistically, how could it live up to these inflated expectations? It couldn’t. I was setting myself up for disappointment.

Also, before I started Skyrim I was playing the magnificent Dark Souls, From Software’s majestic follow-up to Demon’s Souls. It’s stunning, ingeniously designed and fiendishly difficult. It is brilliant in the ways that Skyrim isn’t brilliant – most notably in its combat, but also in its overall game design and how the different component parts of the game work together to create a satisfying whole. I think I started playing Skyrim with a ‘Dark Souls’ mindset and my head wasn’t quite in the right place for what’s a completely different type of game. But overall I do think that the excellence of Dark Souls served to accentuate and magnify some of the flaws in Skyrim.

But, putting aside my inflated expectations and the brilliance of Dark Souls, I do think there are things wrong with Skyrim. Here are some of the problems I have with it:

Difficulty. It’s not that it’s too difficult, or not difficult enough, my problem is the unevenness of the difficulty. And when I say it is uneven, I mean it is really uneven. The difficulty is up and down and all over the place with seemingly no logic, no cohesion, no consistency. One moment you’ll be breezing past enemies who offer no challenge at all, the next you’ll be confronted by one who’ll rip you apart in a matter of seconds. You’ll battle through a horde of bandits and defeat them as easily as if they were made of paper, but then you’ll come to the bandit leader and he might as well be made of granite for how difficult it is to defeat him. Sure, you’d expect the leader to be a tougher opponent than his minions, but his stats are so super-charged that the gulf between a regular bandit and the bandit leader becomes ridiculous – and jarring. It broke my immersion the game. It reminded me that I was just playing a video game, and took me out of the game world because it stopped being believable.  For a game whose raison d’etre is creating a sense of immersion in a fantasy world, this just seemed wrong.

These jarring leaps in difficulty are present throughout the game, but are more noticeable in the early stages when you have a lower level character. Rather than a smooth difficulty curve, the difficulty curve in this game has all the smoothness of a car being driven along a busy high street by a drunk, half-blind octogenarian, constantly veering off the road and crashing into shops and passers by. The issue of difficulty also connects to my next point:

Dragons. Dragons attacks feature heavily in the game and form the spine of the story. At first they look spectacular, as the dragon swoops and glides through the air, breathing fire or frost and laying waste to all before it.  But when you’ve fought half a dozen of these things the dragon battles become just a little bit tedious. No, scratch that – they become very tedious. Each one follows the same pattern: the dragon flies around for a bit, you wait for it to land… You wait some more… You wait some more… Then it lands! You attack it while you can! Then after twenty seconds or so the dragon flies off again and swoops and circles around overhead. You wait for it to land… You wait some more…. More waiting…. It’s landed! Take that you big scaly fire-breathing bastard! Then it flies off again and you wait some more and this cycle repeats until you finally kill the damn thing.  As a gameplay experience, it’s hardly the most compelling or involving – and over the course of the game you have to fight dozens of these battles. I grew to dread hearing the rumble of a dragon in the distance, simply because I was bored stupid of having to fight the damn things.

Another thing about the dragon attacks: although some dragons are tougher than others, on the whole these are not challenging battles. They are for the most part very easy. You have small windows of opportunity in which to attack it, the rest of the time it is flying around, offering no threat, affording you plenty of time to use healing spells or potions to keep your health topped up. Given that the main storyline involves the dire threat that these dragons pose to the people of Skyrim, the ease with which you can despatch them just feels wrong.  Again, I found it jarring, and it broke my immersion in the game. When a bandit leader or a sabre cat poses a significantly more deadly threat to you than a huge fire-breathing dragon then something is wrong with the balance of difficulty in the game.

There’s too much. Yes, there’s too much. Of everything. This might seem like a strange criticism – surely more is better, right? Well, in this case I honestly don’t think it is.

Bethesda’s previous Elder Scroll game, Oblivion, was a huge game with a massive amount going on: a lengthy main storyline, several substantial major quest lines, and dozens and dozens and dozens of smaller individual quests. It was a huge, expansive game, and the beauty of it lay in how you combined these different storylines to create a narrative that felt unique to your character.

In their next game, Fallout 3, Bethesda made a conscious decision to trim out all of the fat – it was still a big game with plenty to do, but it was a leaner, tighter experience. There were fewer quests and the focus was on quality rather than quantity.

In Skyrim the pendulum has swung as far as it can in the opposite direction: Bethesda has thrown everything and the kitchen sink at this game, and it is positively overflowing with stuff; with quests, things to do, items to collect. On paper this might sound like a good thing, and it is good in the sense that it gives you plenty to do and it’ll keep you occupied for a long, long time. The downside is that there’s so much going on that I felt detached and disconnected from most of it. There are lots of quests but I didn’t find many of them all that memorable. At times, trying to reduce the number of active quests I had felt like work rather than pleasure.

Likewise with equipment: there’s so much of it that a) most of it went unused and ignored, and b) it became a real slog at times trawling through my inventory trying to locate a particular item. For example, in the item management screen, potions are listed alphabetically, which would be fine but each potion comes in a variety of different strengths, so when listed alphabetically all your health potions, for example, are spread out all over the place. Likewise with every other kind of potion. Identifying what you do and don’t have and making sensible and judicious use of items becomes very difficult when your inventory management screen is made up of seemingly interminable lists of stuff and more stuff and even more stuff in a gazillion different strengths and forms.

During the time I’ve spent playing Skyrim I have spent far, far too long with the game paused as I navigate my way through the item management screen. Over time I’ve trained myself to do this less, as it was completely breaking the flow of the game, but I can’t help but think that the way the game is set up makes it inevitable that you will spend far too much time trawling through menu screens rather than actually playing the game.

Pathfinding. This is a minor gripe, but it’s a gripe nonetheless: due to the mountainous, rocky terrain, it  can sometimes be difficult finding your way to your quest objective. For every active quest there will be a marker on your map showing you where you need to go. Great. The problem is that it’s often not obvious how on earth you get there. There’s been numerous times when I’ve been walking towards my objective only to have a wall of impassable rock loom up ahead of me. I’ve then circled around trying to approach it from another direction, sometimes with success, sometimes with mounting frustration and impatience as I find myself halfway up the wrong mountain wondering how the hell I got there. Sometimes I’ve just given up and accepted that the quest will just have to wait until I can be arsed to battle the terrain and figure out how the hell to get to where I need to be.

Bugs and glitches and broken quests. The issues I’ve written about so far were things that I didn’t expect to find with Skyrim, however, being familiar with Bethesda’s games I did expect Skyrim to contain bugs and glitches. For the most part I can forgive a game as big as this its bugs, but when the game effectively breaks on you, it can be very frustrating. I’ve had a major questline (the Companions quests) break on me and be impossible to complete, and I currently have an active miscellaneous quest that is impossible to finish because I need to talk to a character who is standing in a place where it is impossible for me to approach her. Great. Plus, I’ve encountered numerous other bugs that may not have broken the game but which have provided many moments of absurdity. For example, one character seems to have replicated himself, so there’s now two of him. Both versions of him are standing outside Whiterun, one of the game’s many towns, with one version of him half embedded in the ground. It has no impact on the game other than it looks ridiculous.

Other negatives are that the combat does feel very primitive by the standards of modern video games, and that many of the dialogue scenes feel wooden and artificial, with it sometimes being difficult to figure out who’s talking.

All of this makes it sound like I am really, really down on Skyrim. I’m not. Like I said at the beginning, I do like Skyrim, and I’ve grown to enjoy it more over time. I just find it hard to reconcile my experience of the game with the universally glowing reviews I’ve read. Yes, it’s magnificent in some respects, but it’s desperately flawed in others, and overall I do feel that Bethesda got carried away and threw everything they could at this game, sacrificing quality and a balanced gameplay experience for more - more of everything.

But to end on a positive note: the game environment, the land of Skyrim itself, is a stunning creation. It’s a huge fantasy game world that has a hint of a ‘fairytale’ feel to it. It offers breathtaking views, moments of quiet tranquility, and wherever you venture there are hidden secrets and adventures to uncover. It is a glorious, beautiful creation and it can be a positive joy to explore. My frustrations with the game can be boiled down solely to the fact that they have broken my immersion in this stunning game world. Everything I’ve written about here has somehow taken me out of the experience of being in the game, broken its spell. At times I felt like I was battling the game, fighting to try to enjoy it – and it’s because I wanted to enjoy the game so badly that its flaws became so much more frustrating.

Skyrim is a magnificent, glorious, immense, flawed, chaotic, jumbled, uneven, richly-detailed and lovingly-created beast of a game. For my money, it’s not Bethesda’s best game – that would be Fallout 3 – and it hasn’t held me under its spell in the way that Oblivion did,  but despite all of the flaws and frustrations I’ve written about here, it has still at times captivated and delighted me. And it will probably continue to do so for a long time.

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by davidbarb on January 26, 2012  •  Permalink
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Posted by davidbarb on January 26, 2012

http://thelockedroom.com/2012/01/26/skyrim/

The Sisters Brothers – Patrick deWitt

Patrick deWitt’s The Sisters Brothers is an odd, quirky and compelling novel. Set in the American west in 1851, the brothers Eli and Charlie Sisters are hired guns working for a shadowy figure known as Commodore. They are given instructions to kill a gold prospector called Herman Kermit Warm, and the novel tells the story of their journey in search of this Warm character, and the people, adventures and mishaps they run into along the way, until, about halfway into the novel, they finally catch up with their man.

The novel is narrated by the younger brother, Eli, and the prose style is taut, lucid and minimalist; deWitt offers only the barest minimum of descriptive detail about the novel’s characters and locations. Whether you like this style or not is matter of taste, but for me it worked really well, and the novel transported me to a particular time and place with vivid cinematic detail.  Rarely do I feel as firmly planted in a novel’s world as I did when I was reading The Sisters Brothers, and deWitt achieves this by using just a few deft descriptive strokes and allowing the reader’s imagination to take over and fill in the rest.

It’s a darkly comic novel, but it’s also much more than that. The characters the Brothers meet on their journey are an eccentric and oddball bunch, and each vignette is satisfying in its own right. There are moments of tenderness, vulnerability and friendship –  and then occasional explosions of violence. There are also scenes of terrific tension, where the stakes are life-or-death and you genuinely don’t know how the situation will play out. It’s a novel of surprises, of the unexpected, of the labyrinthine ways we can navigate our way through life. And it is also occasionally a novel of breathtaking beauty.

Eli is always an engaging – and surprisingly sympathetic – narrator.  His moral compass my be skewed when judged by modern standards, but, despite his profession as a killer, he is a character of depth and has his own code of honour. Eli is the reluctant killer; Charlie is the one who relishes their profession and is the driving force behind what they do. This ever-changing fraternal relationship is the backbone of the novel, the canvas on which everything else is painted. The brothers bicker, disagree, harbour resentments, occasionally ignore each other and go their separate ways, but ultimately the fraternal glue that binds them together allows them to ride out their disagreements and ultimately reach a point of understanding with each other.

The Sisters Brother is a portrait of a pre-civilised world in which death, disease and destitution are constant threats. A lawless world in which a stranger is as likely to shoot you as shake your hand. I found reading this book an intensely enjoyable experience, and when I reached the end of its lean 320 pages – although what I’d read felt satisfying and complete – I’d have been happy had there been 300 more pages to read.  I think it’s a great book, and one that will linger long in my memory.

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by davidbarb on November 7, 2011  •  Permalink
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Posted by davidbarb on November 7, 2011

http://thelockedroom.com/2011/11/07/the-sisters-brothers-patrick-dewitt/

We Need To Talk About Kevin – Lionel Shriver

I didn’t know much about Lionel Shriver’s critically acclaimed 2003 novel until recently. I’d heard of it, knew that it had won the Orange Prize for Fiction several years ago, and that it was a much-loved book for many people, but beyond that I didn’t even know the detail of what it was about. Now that a film adaptation has been made, and it has been featured all over the TV and press recently, my interest was piqued – primarily due to the fact that the film is directed by Lynne Ramsey, whom I like very much. Before seeing the film I wanted to read the book. I wanted to visit the source material before watching the adaptation, which is why I came to read this book now.

I finished reading it last night; I’m writing this without having had much time to digest it. These are my general impressions of the book  in the immediate aftermath of having read it, and it’s possible that in time my opinions about it might change. But for now, in a nutshell, my opinion of it is this: it’s a book that I admire, but I didn’t enjoy it at all.  Maybe enjoyment isn’t the point – it’s such an unremittingly grim, horrible, nasty book, it’s impossible to enjoy it. But even so, I have problems with it that go beyond what an unpleasant read it is.

The book is set a year after almost-16-year-old Kevin Katchadourian has used a crossbow to massacre several of his fellow high-school students, a teacher, and a cafeteria worker. Told through a series of letters written by Kevin’s mother, Eva, to her absent husband, Franklin, Eva tells the story of Kevin’s childhood and the impact that his arrival had on their marriage. She also writes of her present-day-life, as the mother of a notorious killer, the condemnation or compassion of strangers, and her weekly trips to visit her son in prison.

Although I admired the quality and precision of Shriver’s writing, the book threw up all sorts of questions for me – and I wasn’t sure if this was a good or a bad thing. Good because it was making me think, or Bad because I was finding it lacking in some way. One problem was that I never believed in Kevin as genuine, realistic, flesh-and-blood, someone-like-this-could-really-exist character. Yes, I believed in his crime; it was the 16 years of his life that preceded it that I had trouble with.  From the moment he is born he is portrayed as a rage-filled, cold, sullen, sneering, monstrous horror of a child. Not until he is ten-years-old, and ill, do we witness a single moment of weakness or child-like vulnerability. He is relentlessly portrayed as being cruel, sadistic and highly manipulative.  I found this lack of light and shade troubling. I didn’t believe that a young child could maintain such an unshakable persona without it at least occasionally cracking and a glimmer of some semblance of child-like vulnerability shining through.

However, what I had to bear in mind while reading it was that these letters are being written by Eva after her son has committed mass murder, and she is re-examining his childhood in the light of that tragedy. So it’s hardly surprising that she’s focusing on the worst aspects of his personality and the moments of sadistic cruelty that peppered his childhood.  The question that I kept coming back to while reading it was: How reliable a narrator is Eva? The cold, bald facts of what she writes are never in doubt – she’s not a liar; in fact, she’s unflinchingly honest –  it’s more her interpretation and perception of events that one is never entirely certain of trusting.

Eva is the globe-trotting creator of a hugely successful series of budget travel guides, the wonderfully titled On a Wing and a Prayer. She remains an enigmatic and impenetrable character throughout. Erudite and intellectual, her voice remains cool and unemotional in her letters to Franklin.  In her struggles with motherhood and her inability to bond with her son, Eva does come across as a well-drawn – yet not entirely sympathetic – character. Franklin, however, never really did it for me. He’s a Reagan-loving republican who has a Happy Days 1950s vision of a perfect family life that renders him seemingly incapable of seeing any flaws in his son’s behaviour. He comes across as a bit of a drip. Had the novel been set over the course of a few months then I might have found this more credible, but it covers sixteen years, and I didn’t find his character entirely believable. I was left wondering what the hell Eva saw in him.

And here comes the crux of why I find this a difficult book to like: Eva talks of her love for Franklin, but one never feels it. It is a cerebral book of ideas rather than a visceral book of raw emotion. This permeates every aspect of the story. The book made me think but it didn’t make me feel. Yes, I was left feeling shaken by the end of it – and it is rare for a book to do that to me – but I felt like I’d been toyed with in a not entirely pleasant way; it had a feel of artifice about it that I could never shake off.

Still, I’m glad that I read this novel, although I almost certainly will never read it again. It has power, I’ll give it that, but the ability to pack-a-punch alone does not necessarily a good novel make. It seemed to me to be a book of ideas and scenarios contrived to spark debate – and in that is is very successful; but where it lacked for me was in emotional veracity. I’ve never read any of Shriver’s other work, so I don’t know if this emotionally detached quality is unique to this book – as a carefully constructed component of Eva’s personality – or if it’s typical of all of her writing. Maybe, in the future, I’ll come to read other works by Shriver that give me a renewed respect for this book – because they give me a context in which to view it.

So, I admired this book – Shriver is undoubtedly a skilful and talented writer, and I admired the brave, unflinching way she confronted the subject – but I didn’t enjoy it. In fact, I hated it.

I’m not sure I want to see the film now.

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by davidbarb on October 31, 2011  •  Permalink
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Posted by davidbarb on October 31, 2011

http://thelockedroom.com/2011/10/31/we-need-to-talk-about-kevin-lionel-shriver/

The Wedding Banquet – Ang Lee

It was with a mild feeling of apprehension that I recently sat down to watch Ang Lee’s 1993 film ‘The Wedding Banquet’. The reason for the apprehension was that it was a film that I’d seen at the cinema on it’s release, and which I’d absolutely loved. I loved it so much, in fact, that I returned to the cinema to see it again; and then I returned to watch it a third time! It was a film that I found both very moving and very funny; it got under my skin and affected me in a way that few films do, and it instantly became one of my favourites, and Ang Lee a director to look out for.

That was back in 1993, when I saw it at Manchester’s Cornerhouse; and until last week I’d never seen it again since. It’s been a film that I’ve looked out for over the years, but I was never able to track down a copy. And the longer I went without seeing it, the more I built it up in my mind. Above all the other films that I saw in my youth, this was the one that I wanted to see again, this was the one that I remembered as being a forgotten classic, a neglected masterpiece. It took on an almost mythological significance for me; which is why I was a little nervous about finally being able to see it again – after all that time, after building it up to something so big in my mind, with it being so replete with wonderful memories, could watching it now be anything other than a crushing disappointment? How could the reality of the film possibly live up to what my memory had transformed, and possibly elevated, it into over the intervening eighteen years? Basically, would the reality of the film viewed now in 2011 live up to the memory I had of it, or was I heading for a major disappointment by watching it again?

It’s happened before, this feeling of anticipation followed by disappointment. There have been several films that I have revisited in recent years that knocked my socks off when I first saw them in the 90s, but which, viewed though older eyes, failed to impress me in the same way today. I just hoped that The Wedding Banquet wouldn’t be one of them.

So, what’s the film about?

The plot is reasonably straightforward, although I’ll probably make hard work of describing it! Wei-Tung is a Taiwanese immigrant living in New York, and involved in a seemingly very happy, long-term relationship with his partner, Simon.

Simon

Wei-Tung

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

However, back in Taiwan, Wei-Tung’s parents, who have no idea about their son’s sexuality, are constantly applying pressure on him to marry, have children and continue the family name. His mother enrols him in a dating agency and picks out potential partners for him.

Wei-Wei

 

 

Meanwhile, one of Wei-Tung’s tenants, Wei-Wei, a struggling artist from mainland China, is desperately in need of a green card.

 

 

 

 

Together they hatch the plan – it is actually Simon’s idea – for Wei-Tung and Wei-Wei to marry, thus getting his parents off his back, and getting her a green card.

What could possibly go wrong?

The happy couple

Well, rather a lot as it happens. Wei-Tung’s parents are naturally delighted that their son is getting married, so much so that they insist on flying to America to attend the wedding; and the wedding celebrations, which were initially planned as something low-key, under their guidance turn into a huge wedding  banquet with hundreds of guests invited.

The wedding banquet

It's a busy day

With Wei-Tung, Simon, Wei-Wei and Wei-Tung’s parents, Mr and Mrs Gao,  all living together in the same house, and with the parents staying in America for longer than they had initially planned, relationships start to get strained and emotions fraught as the three main protagonists struggle to keep up their respective roles, and cracks start to develop. What started out as a light comedy develops into something altogether more moving and heart-rending.

So, that’s what the film is about; and viewing it again, eighteen years after I first saw it, how did it hold up? The answer to that is: very well indeed. I loved it just as much now as I did back when I first saw it in 1993. The anxiety I felt before watching it was unnecessary: The Wedding Banquet is every bit as good a film as I remembered it being. It is an absolutely wonderful film.

There are many, many things that make this film great. There’s a lightness of touch in Ang Lee’s writing and direction that draws you in; it’s an accessible and, certainly in the early stages, a very funny film. You’ll be sure to laugh when, early in the film, Wei-Tung relents to pressure from his mother to join a dating agency, and he and Simon have some fun filling out the forms. They try to list impossible requirements for a potential partner. She must be an opera singer. Six feet tall. And have a Phd. No, make that two Phds. Despite this, the agency does find a suitable match – although she only has one Phd, which they hope won’t be a problem.

What makes this film great, though, is how well-drawn the characters are. Ang Lee is brilliant at getting under the skin of his characters and conveying the emotional truths of their inner lives; and he does this in such a light, subtle way – a few words spoken here, a fleeting reaction shot there. The cumulative effect is that as the film progresses the characters develop in a very satisfying way, and your heart starts to bleed for these people – all of them. Each of the major characters is portayed as a real flesh and blood human being, each going through their own emotional journey. Wei-Tung is struggling with the fact that he is lying to his parents about his sexuality and his sham marriage. Simon is struggling to cope with the unexpected strains that his well-meaning plan has put on his relationship with Wei-Tung. Then there are the parents, Mr and Mrs Gao, whose arrival on the scene sparks the clash-of-cultures, east-meets-west theme at the heart of the film. You witness their intense delight at their son’s marriage, but you know it’s all a sham, and you feel for them too.

And then there’s Wei-Wei. When I first saw the film all those years ago, it was her story that was somehow most resonant for me. The emotional kicker to this entire story is that she genuinely feels for Wei-Tung, but she knows that he is gay and that she can’t have him; yet she is forced to live out the charade of being his wife. There are moments in the film when you see her pain, isolation and loneliness – moments that I find heartbreaking. And on top of all this, there’s the guilt she feels at deceiving Wei-Tung’s parents – she is embraced into the bosom of the family and treated like a daughter by them.

As the film progresses each of the characters is locked in their own bubble of pain, which probably makes it sound like a heavy, depressing experience – but it really isn’t. It is an emotional, very moving film, but rather than being a turgid, depressing experience, Ang Lee’s lightness of touch, and the film’s richness of character, makes it feel like a cathartic and ultimately life-affirming experience. I think it is a truly beautiful, heartfelt film.

Ok, you could argue that there’s a little woodenness to some of the dialogue, but hell, I love this film so much I’d forgive it anything. And it is interesting to see what dates a film: for the most part, the film has aged very well, but there is one scene early in the film where Simon gives Wei-Tung a present – a mobile phone. Given that this film was released in 1993, so probably filmed in 1992, you can imagine what the mobile phone looks like: a huge cumbersome black thing with a rubber aerial sticking out of the top of it. It looks silly. Of course, that’s not a failing of the film, it’s just how technology has advanced over the years.

For my money, Ang Lee has never made a better film than The Wedding Banquet. There’s a fair chance that you’ve never seen it, because as far as I’m aware it’s never had a video or DVD release in the UK, which is a crying shame. This film deserves to be far better known than it currently is, and if you get a chance to see it then do! It is genuinely a film that will make you both laugh and cry – no matter how hardened you think you are, I defy you to have dry eyes at the end of it! Yet despite being put through the emotional wringer, you will come away from it feeling uplifted and enriched by the experience.  I love it, and for all its low-budget indie feel, and some arguably clunky dialogue, it remains, just as it was back in 1993, one of my favourite films.

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by davidbarb on October 10, 2011  •  Permalink
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Posted by davidbarb on October 10, 2011

http://thelockedroom.com/2011/10/10/the-wedding-banquet-ang-lee/

Amy Winehouse

Amy Winehouse is dead…. What the fuck? It’s a million different kinds of wrong, desperately sad. She was brilliant, a genuine talent.  What a shame.

 

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by davidbarb on July 23, 2011  •  Permalink
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Posted by davidbarb on July 23, 2011

http://thelockedroom.com/2011/07/23/amy-winehouse/

Born Free – Laura Hird

I’ve read a lot of very good novels this year but one of the absolute very best is Born Free by Laura Hird. Published in 1999, and shortlisted for the Orange Prize and the Whitbread First Novel Award, Hird’s novel is a mesmerizing portrait of a family in meltdown.

It’s set in Edinburgh and tells the story of an extremely dysfunctional working-class family, seemingly at war with itself. It’s an honest and brave book, it’s extremely funny, yet it’s also shot through with a tenderness and a poignancy that can be heart-wrenching at times.

The story is told from the point of view of the four members of the family, the point of view shifting with each chapter. The characterisation is rock solid throughout: each character feels fully formed, vivid, real;  Hird captures the inner voice of each character remarkably well.

Joni is fifteen years old, a compulsive  shoplifter who is obsessed with losing her virginity before her sixteenth birthday. Jake is thirteen and is bullied at school, but he’s suffering in silence; he wouldn’t dream of telling anyone about it. Their father, Vic, works as a bus driver. He’s a timid man, well-meaning, but he has no idea how to deal with or respond to the teen angst of his children, or the mid-life crisis of his wife, Angie.  She works in a bookies, has a problem with alcohol, is prone to wild, unpredictable mood swings, and is convinced her seedy boss is flirting with her.

Over the course of the story each of the characters goes on a journey of sorts, and Hird weaves together the four voices to construct a rich and compelling narrative.

I loved this book. I loved its honesty, its emotional rawness. I loved the vibrancy and energy of Hird’s writing; although the subject matter is quite dark, the book is never a heavy or depressing read due to the sparkly nature of Hird’s prose and the humour that had me laughing out loud on almost every page. And in amidst the chaos of the family life, the alcoholism and infidelity and violence and teen-angst and loneliness and pent-up frustration, Hird will suddenly deliver a moment of the most breathtaking tenderness, done with a supremely delicate touch, that adds real emotional depth to her characters: these people will make you laugh, you might occasionally be appalled or shocked by some of their actions, but your heart will bleed for them.

Born Free is a humane and compassionate book, superbly written – and Hird has a great ear for dialogue, too. It’s extremely funny and also very moving. I think it’s an absolute gem of a novel, and I’m just pleased I’ve discovered it. It’s a slice of urban life that is explosively good, and an absolute pleasure to read.

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by davidbarb on July 23, 2011  •  Permalink
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Posted by davidbarb on July 23, 2011

http://thelockedroom.com/2011/07/23/born-free-laura-hird/

A Kiss Before Dying – Ira Levin

Browsing through the Amazon kindle summer sale, I chanced upon this 1953 novel by Ira Levin. I’d never read anything by him before, but it looked like the sort of novel that I would enjoy, and at only 99p I thought I’d give it a go. Wow! Really – wow! This book is a classic, and to anyone who enjoys crime-thrillers or suspense novels I would wholeheartedly recommend it.

The novel is split into three parts, and the first part is told from the point of view of a young male college student, a returning war hero. Tall, handsome and outwardly charming, he is a man with a plan, and his plan is to marry a wealthy girl and escape from the poverty of his upbringing.

The girl unlucky enough to be his girlfriend is Dorothy Kingslip, daughter of Leo Kingslip, a powerful and fabulously wealthy copper tycoon. Needy and insecure, Dorothy falls hook line and sinker for her boyfriend’s calculated mimicry of affection and tenderness. She fully believes in his love for her.

However, she falls pregnant, and to her strict, moralistic father a child conceived before marriage would be grounds to disinherit her. The boyfriend – seeing his plan falling apart and his future wealth disappearing – talks her into taking some pills to terminate the pregnancy, but when they fail to work he devises a more drastic plan. A plan to kill her.

Levin then pulls a masterstroke in the second part of the novel: he switches the point of view to a young girl on the college campus, Ellen. She comes into contact with several tall, handsome young men, blond and blue-eyed, but which one of them is our killer from the first part of the novel? We don’t know. Although we have seen inside his mind and witnessed his calculating scheming, we don’t know his name. It is clear that Ellen is in danger, but the suspense lies in not knowing from which blond, blue-eyed direction this danger will come.  The reveal, when it comes, is masterfully done.

‘Levin is the Swiss watchmaker of the suspense novel,’ said Stephen King, and on the evidence of this novel alone I can see why he said it.  A Kiss Before Dying is a meticulously well-crafted book. It is one of the most gripping and suspenseful novels I have ever read – it’s as taut as a piano wire, and my eyes were glued to every word of Levin’s tight, economical, masterful prose.  It’s also quite chilling: the killer is one of the most calculating, cold-hearted, narcissistic psychopaths I’ve ever encountered in print.

A Kiss Before Dying is a remarkable book. It’ll grip you, chill you, horrify you and give you the heebie-jeebies, but for all your discomfort you won’t be able to pry your attention away from it. It’s a commercial thriller that also happens to have great literary merit. I thoroughly enjoyed every moment of it.

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by davidbarb on July 11, 2011  •  Permalink
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Posted by davidbarb on July 11, 2011

http://thelockedroom.com/2011/07/11/a-kiss-before-dying-ira-levin/

Whatever You Love – Louise Doughty

In Whatever You Love, Louise Doughty tells the story of what must be every parent’s worst nightmare  - the death of a child. It’s a lyrical and painful book, but the subject matter is sensitively, confidently handled, and ultimately it is a compelling and gripping novel.

The novel opens with the death of nine-year-old Betty. Her mother, Laura, is at home with her youngest child, waiting for Betty to return home from her after-school club. She is growing increasingly anxious because Betty is late. One of Laura’s friends is out driving the streets looking for Betty, tracing the route by which she would have walked home from school. The doorbell rings and Laura fully expects it to be her friend returning her shamefaced daughter back home. But it isn’t her friend, it’s two uniformed police officers, bearers of the most devastating of news.  There has been an accident. Betty has been hit by a car. Within a few pages Laura is at the hospital, identifying her daughter’s body.

It’s a powerful opening, convincingly written: Louise Doughty takes you directly into the heart of Laura’s frozen, uncomprehending horror.

After this punchy opening the novel then jumps back and forth in time, with Betty’s death being the axis around which the novel revolves. For Laura, there is her life before, and her life after.

The early stages of the novel tell the story of Laura’s developing relationship with David, the man who would go on to become her husband. Refreshingly free of cliché, this part of the novel is written with a feverish intensity, capturing the almost obsessive nature of the early days of their whirlwind relationship.

The marriage does not work out well, though, and after the birth of their second child the relationship starts to dissolve into acrimony. At the time of Betty’s death Laura and David are separated, and he is living with his new partner.

About half of the novel is dedicated to the build up and disintegration of the marriage, and the other half to Laura’s life following the loss of her daughter, and how she copes – or doesn’t cope – with the overwhelming grief of her loss.

I liked very much how this book was written – it was always very readable and engaging. The characters felt three-dimensional and interesting, and Louise Doughty captures the emotional truths of each component of the novel very well: the febrile intensity and mutual desire of the early days of Laura and David’s relationship, the bitterness and acrimony of the dissolution of the marriage, and most overwhelmingly the devastating grief of the loss of a child.

There are also a couple of thriller-esque subplots, and it is in these elements where the novel is less successful for me. One involves threatening letters that Laura starts to receive around the time of the breakup of her marriage. The other involves the feelings of revenge with which Laura becomes consumed following the death of her daughter.  She tracks down the man who was driving the car that killed Betty, and she becomes obsessed with hurting him in the way that he has hurt her.

Both of these subplots, the threatening letters and the plot for revenge, didn’t ring as true for me as the rest of the book – at times they bordered on being ridiculous – and I wasn’t entirely sure that the novel needed either of them. I was left with the feeling that they were included to make the book a more commercially viable proposition.

However, I still enjoyed the book very much, it gripped me from the first page to the last and I found it very difficult to put down.

The painful and harrowing subject matter will mean this book is not for everyone, but for those with the stomach for it this is a worthwhile read; a smart, moving, intelligent and fearless novel that will continue to resonate long after you have turned the final page.

If you own a kindle: at the time of writing, this book is currently included in the Amazon summer sale and is available for 99p. Snap it up!

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by davidbarb on July 9, 2011  •  Permalink
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Posted by davidbarb on July 9, 2011

http://thelockedroom.com/2011/07/09/whatever-you-love-louise-doughty/

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