fun things

[kindkit]

A couple of things I'm enjoying at the moment:

1) Luther, a new BBC cop show with an absolutely stellar cast: Idris Elba in the title role of DCI John Luther, a "loose cannon" officer who's starting to look even more screwed up than that description suggests; Saskia Reeves as his boss, DSU Rose Teller; Steven Mackintosh as his colleague and friend DCI Ian Reed; Indira Varma as his estranged wife Zoe; and PAUL MCGANN as Zoe's new boyfriend. (McGann hasn't been given much to do in the first two episodes, but I suspect more is coming or they wouldn't have cast such a big-name actor in the role.)

The plots and dialogue aren't all that special so far, but the performances are as good as you'd expect. I especially like Reeves's weary, solid competence as Teller and Mackintosh's unusual (for the role, not so much for Mackintosh) vulnerability and gentleness as Reed. You probably won't be surprised to hear that I'm slashing Luther/Reed like crazy.

2) John Le Carré. Someone recommended Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy to me, and I decided to give it a look despite years of ignoring Le Carré, which I did because I assumed that spy novel = macho right-wing bullshit of the John Clancy sort. To my surprise, I liked Tinker, Tailor a lot. Its deep, hard-bitten realism about the unglamorous and amoral world of espionage keeps it from being right-wing (or left-wing, for that matter), and Le Carré makes vivid characters out of people who often spend their whole lives trying to go unnoticed. The prose is good, too. And there's a particular kind of male/male homoeroticism in Tinker Tailor (and in The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, which I started today) that I've never encountered in fiction before--extremely fraught, often bitter and laced with mistrust and betrayal, based on shared experiences that, because they're secret, mean that Le Carré's spies understand one another in a far deeper way than they will ever be understood by the women in their lives. This makes the atmosphere of the books compelling to me, even though I don't care all that much about the espionage plots.

Comments

[lilacsigil]

May I ask you a few questions about Luther? I'd like to watch it, but I've had problems with British cop shows in the last few years.

1. How hand-held is the camera work? I can't physically watch more than a few seconds of swoopy, loopy, wobbly film.

2. How violent is it? I know American shows are more graphically violent, but the very realistic, nasty violence of something like "Spooks" is a bit much for me.

Thank you!

[kindkit]

1) It isn't.

2) I didn't find it very violent, although I've only seen a few episodes of Spooks, and that was years ago, so I can't do a direct comparison. But so far I've found it far less ickily violent than, say, Prime Suspect or Wire in the Blood. There's one disturbing scene at the beginning of the first episode (but it's primarily disturbing in a psychological/emotional sense), and a little bit of gore; the second episode has less of both. The show seems to want to focus on Luther as a character rather than on crime-titillation.

[lilacsigil]

Thank you! And hooray for a show that doesn't wobble things around. Spooks is more violent than Prime Suspect, but on the same spectrum of horribly realistic, if that makes sense.

[st_aurafina]

You're so right - Le Carré is fraught. I've only just realised that - I read them when I was much, much younger. It really bugged me, because I knew something else was going on but I didn't know what it was and it never said in the text. Poor little me, with no words for what I could see.

[kindkit]

I think there's an argument to be made about the queerness of espionage in Le Carré (especially the secrecy aspect), but I need to read more.