reading and watching
Sep. 6th, 2012 11:59 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kindkit1) I rented Deserter because it looked slashy and because Tom Hardy is a reputable actor (and because I didn't know at the time that it was a cash-in re-release of something from early in Hardy's career). I got as far as the text crawl a few minutes in which informed the audience that Algerians and French settlers had lived in peace and harmony until "Arab nationalists" started causing trouble. Then I switched off.
2) Having watched everything I can readily find with Christopher Neame in it (well, everything I can readily find that's not awful American TV where he's in a minor role), I've now started watching everything with Paul Chapman in it. Chapman is an actor I had in great affection, without knowing anything about his career, when As Time Goes By was airing in the US; when I saw Colditz, in which he plays George Brent, it took me ages to figure out what I'd seen him in before. I'm rewatching his episodes of ATGB (which, scoff as you will, was actually a very good show. With JUDI DENCH. And GEOFFREY PALMER). I've also watched most of Fairly Secret Army, also starring Geoffrey Palmer--it's a funny/creepy show about a right-wing but utterly useless paramilitary group in the early 1980s. Chapman, alas, is woefully underused.
3) I seem to have gotten over some of my recent inability to read fiction. First I managed to finish--on the second try, the first try having been stymied by my "can't read fiction right now" block--Jonathan Barnes's The Domino Men, which is essentially a fantasy novel (Queen Victoria makes a hideous bargain with dark forces to keep Britain powerful, while a secret society fights the House of Windsor and its evil overlords for the next 100+ years) that somehow got itself marketed as literary fiction in trade paperback. It's a well-written page-turner, if nothing terribly original, which is always the pitfall of "respectable" books encroaching on sff territory. There is one plot twist towards the end that had me wondering WTF Barnes was thinking, because it plunges the book into weak topical satire at a time when there's not enough book left to recover from that. Also, no queer characters, and one deeply homoerotic scene that is explicitly identified as a fall into evil. Oh, and Barnes's vision of contemporary London is completely whitewashed, a problem that I'm ashamed to say I didn't recognize until I read the next item on my list.
4) I stumbled upon a secondhand copy of Ben Aaronovitch's Whispers Underground, the third of his Rivers of London series, and decided to see what all the fuss was about. I liked it tremendously, although it does suffer a bit from series-itis, in that there's an overhanging series plot that doesn't get resolved (and that, because I haven't read the earlier books yet, I didn't entirely understand the significance of), and the ending is oddly rushed, as though Aaronovitch were told to take out forty pages and he took them all from the last four chapters. But the magical stuff is creatively done, there's a glorious sense of place, and I was delighted that within the first thirty pages Aaronovitch presented several characters of color (including the protagonist), a lesbian character, and a Muslim woman police officer wearing hijab. My only complaint on that front is that I'd have liked to see more queer characters in more prominent roles (though I am convinced that Nightingale is in love with Peter Grant, and I shall continue to believe this for as long as the books let me). I've ordered the previous two novels and I'm looking forward to reading them.
5) At long last, I found an unexpurgated copy of Eric Williams's The Tunnel, a lightly fictionalized memoir (he mostly just changes the names) of Williams's time as a POW before the escape recounted in The Wooden Horse. One of the most intriguing things about reading both the full and "edited for younger readers" versions of both books is what Williams chose to redact. The Tunnel loses some things one would expect, such as one character's recounting of his accidental visit to a Montreal brothel (which even in the original is cut off right after the character's realization that he is in fact in a brothel and not a tea house) and a comparison of tunnelling to post-coital peacefulness. But also taken away are a brief discussion of the main character, Peter's, wife having been killed in an air raid and the account of a friend of Peter's from RAF training who, after an accident he felt responsible for as navigator, refused to fly anymore and was dismissed as "lacking moral fibre." Queer content is also suppressed, such as this scene where the German security officer turns up unexpectedly in the barrack block.
Interestingly, just a few paragraphs after the reveal that John will travel dressed as a woman and he and Peter will (pretend to?) kiss if necessary as a disguise, Peter dreams he's lying on the Downs near the ciffs of Dover.
Yes, I see what you did there, Eric Williams. Clearly not everyone did or this book would never have been published, but . . . damn. Either you're trying very hard to tell us you were in love with your friend, or else you yourself only realized it subconsciously and the book is saying more than you ever knew.
2) Having watched everything I can readily find with Christopher Neame in it (well, everything I can readily find that's not awful American TV where he's in a minor role), I've now started watching everything with Paul Chapman in it. Chapman is an actor I had in great affection, without knowing anything about his career, when As Time Goes By was airing in the US; when I saw Colditz, in which he plays George Brent, it took me ages to figure out what I'd seen him in before. I'm rewatching his episodes of ATGB (which, scoff as you will, was actually a very good show. With JUDI DENCH. And GEOFFREY PALMER). I've also watched most of Fairly Secret Army, also starring Geoffrey Palmer--it's a funny/creepy show about a right-wing but utterly useless paramilitary group in the early 1980s. Chapman, alas, is woefully underused.
3) I seem to have gotten over some of my recent inability to read fiction. First I managed to finish--on the second try, the first try having been stymied by my "can't read fiction right now" block--Jonathan Barnes's The Domino Men, which is essentially a fantasy novel (Queen Victoria makes a hideous bargain with dark forces to keep Britain powerful, while a secret society fights the House of Windsor and its evil overlords for the next 100+ years) that somehow got itself marketed as literary fiction in trade paperback. It's a well-written page-turner, if nothing terribly original, which is always the pitfall of "respectable" books encroaching on sff territory. There is one plot twist towards the end that had me wondering WTF Barnes was thinking, because it plunges the book into weak topical satire at a time when there's not enough book left to recover from that. Also, no queer characters, and one deeply homoerotic scene that is explicitly identified as a fall into evil. Oh, and Barnes's vision of contemporary London is completely whitewashed, a problem that I'm ashamed to say I didn't recognize until I read the next item on my list.
4) I stumbled upon a secondhand copy of Ben Aaronovitch's Whispers Underground, the third of his Rivers of London series, and decided to see what all the fuss was about. I liked it tremendously, although it does suffer a bit from series-itis, in that there's an overhanging series plot that doesn't get resolved (and that, because I haven't read the earlier books yet, I didn't entirely understand the significance of), and the ending is oddly rushed, as though Aaronovitch were told to take out forty pages and he took them all from the last four chapters. But the magical stuff is creatively done, there's a glorious sense of place, and I was delighted that within the first thirty pages Aaronovitch presented several characters of color (including the protagonist), a lesbian character, and a Muslim woman police officer wearing hijab. My only complaint on that front is that I'd have liked to see more queer characters in more prominent roles (though I am convinced that Nightingale is in love with Peter Grant, and I shall continue to believe this for as long as the books let me). I've ordered the previous two novels and I'm looking forward to reading them.
5) At long last, I found an unexpurgated copy of Eric Williams's The Tunnel, a lightly fictionalized memoir (he mostly just changes the names) of Williams's time as a POW before the escape recounted in The Wooden Horse. One of the most intriguing things about reading both the full and "edited for younger readers" versions of both books is what Williams chose to redact. The Tunnel loses some things one would expect, such as one character's recounting of his accidental visit to a Montreal brothel (which even in the original is cut off right after the character's realization that he is in fact in a brothel and not a tea house) and a comparison of tunnelling to post-coital peacefulness. But also taken away are a brief discussion of the main character, Peter's, wife having been killed in an air raid and the account of a friend of Peter's from RAF training who, after an accident he felt responsible for as navigator, refused to fly anymore and was dismissed as "lacking moral fibre." Queer content is also suppressed, such as this scene where the German security officer turns up unexpectedly in the barrack block.
[Mueller] was looking at the two pin-up girls pasted above Saunders' bunk. "That one is pleasing," he said. "This one--I do not like her so well. A little thin perhaps?"Later, we learn the reason John has been growing his hair: it's part of his intended disguise after escaping with Peter.
Saunders was hurt. "Oh, I don't know. I'd rather be with her than with a policeman."
There was interest in Mueller's eyes. He looked at Saunders in disbelief. "So? In England is it not forbidden to go with policemen?"
Their laughter washed around his ears. He reddened, turned on his heels and marched out of the block.
"Hit him where it hurts the most, I expect," John said.
"Wonder he doesn't make a pass at you," Saunders said, "judging by the length of your hair."
"I'm going as an Italian," Peter said, "John's going as my daughter."There are also a couple of moments where Peter describes John's looks that I don't remember from the "young readers" version, notably this passage where Peter, lying in the top bunk and considering the level of quiet and self-containment necessary for so many men to live peacefully together in close quarters, imagines John: "If he looked down now he would see him, pliant and graceful, his long black hair and fringe of fluffy beard . . . " And even in the expurgated version there are plentiful references, as in The Wooden Horse, to John's "slim brown hands" and other attractive features.
"Stow it!"
"Honestly. We've thought the whole thing out. We'll walk at night, and if anyone sees us we just go into a clinch in a hedge or up against a wall--and no one would dream of disturbing us. The most natural thing in the world."
"Unnatural," Hugo said. "It's incest."
Interestingly, just a few paragraphs after the reveal that John will travel dressed as a woman and he and Peter will (pretend to?) kiss if necessary as a disguise, Peter dreams he's lying on the Downs near the ciffs of Dover.
At his side the girl (It was never [Peter's late wife] Pat. Why did he never dream of Pat?), cool in a summer frock, leaned on bare brown arms and faced the sun. Under her frock her legs were long and smooth and brown. He could not see them but he knew it.That's not a girl, that's John in a dress. The description exactly matches the language Williams uses, time and again, to describe John (those long brown limbs), and I think that the placement of the dream immediately after the stuff about John travelling as Peter's daughter/girlfriend (with its weird reinscription and transgressing of taboos, where incest takes the place of homosexuality) has got to be significant. Peter looks into her eyes and wakes up in confusion (the text hints that he has an orgasm in his sleep) to find himself in the barracks again.
Yes, I see what you did there, Eric Williams. Clearly not everyone did or this book would never have been published, but . . . damn. Either you're trying very hard to tell us you were in love with your friend, or else you yourself only realized it subconsciously and the book is saying more than you ever knew.
