The pop-up library in Selfridges

The seriously stylish department store, Selfridges, has opened their very own pop-up library until the 1^st March. The 15,000-book library set up in the UltraLounge space in the basement area of Selfridges Oxford Street store was curated by publishers Faber, Penguin, Tashen and Thames & Hudson. It aims to promote the beauty and power of the written word, and to reinforce the importance of libraries at a time when many libraries are being threatened by cuts and closures. Shopholics can enjoy handwriting analysis sessions, storytelling workshops, Penguin Classics book clubs, audio books, reading material on iPads and a game of Scrabble on the interactive screens. And plenty of celebrities are joining in the celebration, such as Sophie Dahl and Thandie Newton sharing their most treasured reads with the public.

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The installation on the Southbank Centre’s Queen Elizabeth Hall

David Kohn Architects and the conceptual artist and sculptor, Fiona Banner, have designed a rather odd one bedroom installation in the shape of a boat perched on the roof of Southbank Centre’s Queen Elizabeth Hall. The unusual idea is the winning entry for the design competition organised by Living Architecture and Artangel, beating submissions from 500 artists and architects around the globe.

Joseph Conrad’s steamboat Roi des Belges, which travelled on the Congo in the late nineteenth century, and Conrad’s disturbing novella Heart of Darkness were the inspirations behind the quirky hotel room. ‘Passengers’ can enjoy a panoramic view of London from the Big Ben to St Paul’s Cathedral from the lower and upper decks of this peculiar piece of architecture. Visitors are also encouraged to record their experiences in the logbook at the bridge of the boat. An octagonal library of specially chosen tomes and a Soanian cabinet with drawings of the Thames and Congo rivers are other weird but wonderful features of this strange vessel.

David Kohn Architects are no strangers to the arts, or indeed awards. The practice has achieved a number of accolades, such as the D&AD Yellow Pencil Award in 2009 for their work on the temporary restaurant at the Royal Academy of Arts. Fiona Banner’s portfolio includes Harrier and Jaguar, two real fighter jets, which were placed in the neoclassical Duveen Galleries at Tate Britain from the summer of 2010 to last January. Banner’s art work explored the tensions between these war machines as both of objects of incredible beauty and devastating violence.

As well as intriguing visitors, the boat will also serve as an inspiring space for creative individuals as writers, artists and musicians have been invited by Artangel to exercise their imaginations in the boat, creating new writing, images and music to be shared with the public. Special guests include the author of Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, Jeanette Winterson, and video and installation artist, Jeremy Deller.

Kimberley Chen 

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Charles Dickens: The Inimitable

Next year will be the bicentenary of the birth of Charles Dickens, the largely self-taught writer, who harboured the genius to create Oliver Twist, David Copperfield and Great Expectations to name a few. In 2012, there will be exhibitions all across the world to celebrate this humorous and heavy weight chronicler of ugly social truths, city life and the poverty of the Victorian class system. But the French have snuck in early, with Charles Dickens: The Inimitable at Hardelot Castle in The Pas-de- Calais region of France.

Love is in the air, when James Wicks (the photographer) and I got talking to the curators of the show, an hour north of Calais. In fact, as soon as the Eurostar shot through to the other side of the Channel Tunnel, the grim London skies were suddenly blue; the sun visible. Marina, from Open2Europe greets us at the station in a Madeline-style hat and sunglasses, and we are then being driven to a plush restaurant in a sleepy French town by Pierric – one of the curators, who has spent the last two years researching and producing this show. I sit in the front seat, straining to hear his broken English as he tells me why the French feel that a good third of Britain’s most famous writer belongs to the Opal Coast.

“Condette was his spiritual home. He came here to escape, and he came here to meet with his lover… and I will take you to their ‘love nest’ later.” Pierric lowers his glasses to emphasise this point. “But with Dickens, one has to remember that he was not a novelist. Not a great thinker. He started as a reporter and his job was to write – and he never stopped!” Over lunch Pierric, talking of his own background in journalism, reiterates this. “He had deadlines each week as his writing was published as a series of work. There is a style he had to adhere to – always leaving the reader wanting more. There was no time for intellectualising, like the French. His ‘ole life was an emergency!”

At the castle, in the depths of large woodland, I can see that it’s with these cliff-hangers in mind that the exhibition has taken shape. Information is unveiled, piece by piece, with drama, intimacy and pride that the writer found sanctuary in this region. The curators have obtained many of Dickens’ working manuscripts – “treasures”, says Pierric, which show how he moulded his narratives to suit his fans, who often approached him on the street with new ideas.

The writer may not have intellectualised his subjects but he empathised with them. Always on the move and meeting new people, he created over 1600 different characters. From the young boy slaving in a factory to pay his family out of the jailhouse, to a writer who, at the time of his death, had more fame and clout than most politicians, Dickens’ compassion towards the poor and needy never waned. Likely because on reflection it was always “a matter of some surprise to me, that I could have been so easily thrown away at such a young age”. This quote is painted on the wall in the opening alcove of the exhibition, one that Pierric created, and is my favourite. Below are the bars taken from the now demolished Mashalsea prison in Southwark where his family were detained while he, as a 12 year old boy, worked for their release. When we understand this, we can understand the world Pierric and the other curators have worked tirelessly for us to see. And we creep back into a Dickensian time, into the life of a man whose commentary upon it was relentless and unforgiving. Seeing this ancient, rusted section of the prison is like falling straight into the pages of his narrative. But there is something not quite Dickensian about the show. Known as a chronicler, reporter, author, comic writer, Dickens was never depicted as a romantic.

Opposite the jail bars is the dressing table Pierric imagines Dickens would have inspected his reflection in, between a mannequin, dressed in the suit he wore when presented to Queen Victoria. There is also a letter documenting the remains of his estate when he died. Such conflicting stories of hardship, struggle and major success, that he (as proposed by the lay-out of this room) must have known each time he looked at himself in the mirror.

“One creates their own destiny.” Pierric says mysteriously as he leads me into the next room, where the words: “I have no relief but in action. I am incapable of rest”, are printed upon the wall above many portraits of a severe, Victorian man who came here for just that: “for peace, to walk in the countryside and escape his fans, his public life and his work,” my guide continues.

The next room is a mock-up of Dickens’ dining room, populated with portraits of his wife and nine children, and then to a dark, narrow corridor. “And he came for love, of course!” Pierric twinkles. Away from the austere images of Dickens’ family, alone in the corridor, red velvet curtains frame a single, yellow-lit portrait of a young woman.

Through Dickens’ work he created a type of moral universe, where the good were rewarded and the bad horribly punished. He stood for the highest of Victorian virtues, and his marriage was compared to that of Queen Victoria and Albert’s. But he broke away from it. And in the following 13 years of secret relationships, he left a mysterious web of forged identities and coded messages, enough for many to piece together and conclude that the young actress in this portrait, and he, had a passionate affair. Empathiser and generous to individuals, it is no wonder that this Ellen Ternan, gripping to the fringe of gentile society, would have appealed to Dickens – a fatal combination of desperate, artistic and beautiful, but there was never the same intrigue in a celebrity’s love life as there is today.

His ‘love nest’ is unfortunately closed when we visit it, but the grave yard opposite is open – laying to rest the landlord credited (by whom I wonder?) in keeping this love affair not-so-secret. Aside from the fact that Dickens sought sanctuary in Northern France, it is his mythic and possibly fictitiously romantic nature that has captivated the French imagination. That maybe there is a love triangle here, between Dickens and France, and the French with the hidden romantic in Dickens, or maybe the not so hidden romantic, in a modern day academic.

Juliette Golding

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Photograph taken by Paige Sinkler

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Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman as Holmes and Watson

There are several different ways of making an adaptation. You could go down the 1980s Brideshead Revisited route, which is to take the entire text of the book, get Jeremy Irons to recite it and then overlay a really involved soundtrack, so it becomes essentially a radio play with costumes. Or you could take the basic concept of a novel (such as: Man solves crimes. Man talks to animals. Man falls hopelessly in love with woman) and make something that is essentially invented by you but still happens to share a title with the original work. This is the explanation for Eddie Murphy’s Doctor Doolittle film (which we do not talk about) and also the Guy Richie Sherlock Holmes films, the plots of which I suspect were the product of people shouting random words, like ‘GYPSIES! SHOOTING! WEAPONS! DISGUISE! HUMOUR! NUDITY! DOG!’ and then turning them into scenes.

But as well as these, there’s the rare adaptation that considers the essential concept behind a book, takes that and puts a twist on it, so that what comes out is interesting and new but still recognisably from the same source. (This is, incidentally, very similar to what happens in good fanfiction). This is extremely difficult to do well, and it’s a rare project that manages it – and among that elite group is the BBC’s Sherlock.

While Guy Richie’s films seek to answer the question “What would happen if Sherlock Holmes was a person who punched people in the face a lot?” The BBC wonders, far more intelligently, how the Holmes Arthur Conan Doyle actually made up would react to being alive in the twenty-first century. The answer, of course, is that he would be a technical wizard, solving crimes with iPhone and Google and publishing his monographs on his website, while Watson blogged about it.

Sherlock is a brilliant translation, not just between book and screen but between 1892 and 2012, and one of its best features is that it manages to use the technology that we see around us every day in an incredibly clever and beautifully organic way. Instead of pretending, as many shows do, that the internet doesn’t exist, leading to embarrassing scenes where characters stand there clutching their smartphones and screaming “OH GOD! THE WORLD IS DOOMED BECAUSE WE CAN’T REMEMBER THAT VITAL PIECE OF INFORMATION AND WE HAVE NO WAY OF FINDING IT OUT!”, if Sherlock doesn’t know something he checks it out (bringing the words up on our screens, too, in a fantastic use of visual space).

Part of the message of the Holmes stories is that it’s not just the information that’s important, but the deductions that you make from it – Watson always has exactly the same view of the case but because he lacks Sherlock’s superior brain activity, he can’t understand what he’s really seeing. It’s an added bonus, by the way, that the Watson of Sherlock is not the brain-dead blithering idiot of many adaptations, but something much closer to the sensible, upstanding and fundamentally good ex-soldier of the stories.

Creators Stephen Moffatt and Mark Gatiss have shown that they can both respect their source material and have a lot of fun updating it. Sherlock is filled with delightfully smart and tongue-in-cheek references to its source material. In the season two opener, Watson writes up ‘The Adventure of the Speckled Blonde’, there are thumbs in the fridge (presumably belonging to engineers) and a hilarious reinvention of the origins of the Sherlock-in-a-deerstalker image.

The stories in question, A Scandal in Bohemia and The Hound of the Baskervilles, have been adapted  in ways that simply make sense. Putting all extremely knotty accusations of potential anti-Irene Adler sexism aside, an ‘adventuress’ in 1892 probably would be equivalent to a dominatrix in 2012 (fascinating, sexually suggestive, slightly outside the audience’s comfort zone). Conan Doyle’s pan-European intrigue would, of course, become international terrorism, just as the idea of a giant dog these days inevitably brings with it the suggestion of genetic engineering. It seems very likely to me that Conan Doyle, if he was alive today, would have written extensively about mutant glowing mice and jellyfish with orangutan arms. Genetic engineering has the same basic mixture of outlandish horror and creepy possibility that you find in a lot of Conan Doyle’s real stories – The Adventure of the Creeping Man, for example, or The Sussex Vampire. There’s clearly been a lot of thought put into why the Holmes stories work the way they do, and that care shows through in every episode of Sherlock.

For me, the difference between the two current versions of the Baker Street detective– and the difference between a perfectly adequate adaptation and a really stellar one – can be summed up in equivalent scenes that take place in the first Guy Richie film and Sherlock season one. Both come from the episode in one of the Conan Doyle stories where Holmes makes a deduction about a client’s entire life and character just from a look at his watch. The Richie film does a fairly good recreation of the moment, although it substitutes Watson for the hapless client, but the BBC version updates it into something far more clever. Watches these days just don’t matter to us in the same way – the equivalent, in terms of price and social value, would be an iPhone – so it’s Watson’s iPhone that Sherlock reads, deducing that the person plugging it in to charge scratched its surface with the shaky hands of an alcoholic. There’s a name engraved on the back, ‘Harry’, who Sherlock decides must be Watson’s estranged alcoholic brother. He’s right, except that the ‘Harry’ in question isn’t Watson’s brother but his (lesbian) sister. It’s a lovely bit of shorthand for the both the differences and the essential similarities between 1892 and 2012, and that mirror-image-with-a-twist runs all the way through Sherlock. “I thought you weren’t my housekeeper,” Sherlock says to Mrs Hudson in The Hounds of Baskerville. “I’m not,” she replies frostily, which is technically true – in 2012, she’s his landlady – but the joke-within-a-joke is that we know both that in the original she was his housekeeper, and that really, she still is.

I’m usually a cynic where remakes and adaptations are concerned. It’s so rare to find one that even comes close to being as good as the original – and if it is, it tends to mean that the source material is not up to much. That’s why, to me, Sherlock comes as such a delight. Of course, I’m not saying it’s better than the Conan Doyle stories it comes from. In many ways, it’s very different, which is a lot of what charms me about it. It’s just the right balance of new and old, innovation and thoughtful reference, and it’s made something that’s familiar but very unique.

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Still arousing people’s curiosity today, Dans le noir (French for in the dark) is a truly unique dining and sensory experience. Food blogger,  Elsa Messi went to see if it could wow your senses more than a night-in reading Perfume.

Dining in the dark

This uniqueness lies within the concept, eating and drinking in total darkness and having a complete transfer of trust with your blind waiter. It established its first successful franchise in 2004 in Paris growing from strength to strength, leading it to develop internationally in London, Barcelona and a soon-to-open new setting in New York.

Upon entering the restaurant situated in Clerkenwell, you are greeted by the friendly bar staff who debrief you on what it is to expect of your evening. Their main policy to get the most out of the experience is to store your belongings in a designated locker and strictly have no cameras or mobile phones in your possession. If you do not choose to have a drink at the lit bar area beforehand, then the introduction of your ‘guide’ for the duration of your meal is the next step.

Ordering your meal is simple enough, you choose from 4 concise menus which include the blue menu for fish and seafood lovers, green menu for vegetarians, a red menu for carnivores and a white menu which is the chef’s surprise and can consist of a mixture of all three. They ask you if there is anything you cannot eat due to dietary requirements rather than what it is you would like to eat. The waiter advises all dining parties to follow him/her through to the heavily curtained, pitch black dining room in a single file, placing your hand on the shoulder of the person in front, resembling a training or trust exercise.

You are sat down at your table and how you get the attention of your ‘guide’ is by calling out their name if he/shedoes not happen to be at close proximities at any time. This experience is not for the faint hearted but you do seem to get well adapted fairly quickly to pouring your drinks, feeling where everything is located and the friendly voices surrounding you are somewhat a comfort, also your guide is with you every step of the way. Your sense of smell, touch, hearing and taste become sensitised. Although vulnerability and helplessness is a big part of this concept, you are left with a new found confidence as you get more and more used to your surroundings.

It is a culinary guessing game and some guides advocate to ditch the cutlery and eat with your hands. Unfortunately, the food is below average and does not match the quality of the concept and the great service. Although they want you to refamiliarise yourself with the familiar, it is very difficult to recognise what you are putting in your mouth, maybe with the exception of the desert.

When your meal is finished, you are escorted back to the lit bar area where the concotion of your meal is revealed. They claim that it is French cuisine but it is more a mixture of modern European where exotic meats are heavily focused on.

Yes, this is a revolutionary and unique experience. The concept is very well thought and it is a sort of role reversal between you and your blind guide where they are the ones in control whilst you are left with a wide feeling of vulnerability and you have no choice but to place your complete trust in their hands.

Costing at £41 for two courses or £49 for three per head excluding drinks. If it is the experience you are after then by all means give it a try as nothing like this has been done before in the UK. If, however, it is the food you want to focus on, it really is not worth the time or money as the food is disappointing and you could probably create a similar experience at home with food, guests and a blindfold. But Dans Le Noir does get an A for effort.

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Gillian Anderson as Miss Havisham

Families are like boxes of chocolates. They turn up around Christmas, full of joyful truffles and pralines, and then six days and five boxes later you’re furiously sick of them and all that’s left are the ones with bright green insides and suspicious nuts.

Unfortunately, most Christmas TV seems reluctant to acknowledge this. The time of year when people feel the sourest about human nature is the time when we get warmth, love and familial togetherness shoved down our throats, all of which leaves (much like that 36th chocolate) a nasty taste in the mouth. It’s true that people should be selfless, and noble, and kind – except that it turns out to be quite difficult to manage on a day to day basis, to say nothing of major holidays. So it’s quite pleasant to find a Christmas special that concerned itself with families being not just slightly unpleasant to each other but so out-and-out vile that it makes you feel positively saintly by comparison. I’m talking, of course, about the BBC’s new adaptation of Great Expectations.

After a festive diet of Doctor Who, Downton Abbey and The Borrowers, Great Expectations was a black-hearted, cynical delight, a portrait of a world in which most people seem to make decisions by wondering ‘Will this destroy or seriously harm the happiness of another human being?’ with the implication that, if not, they are NOT TRYING HARD ENOUGH.

It’s ironic that the Dickens who wrote insane, flammable Miss Havisham, and horse- and wife-beater Bentley Drummle, is the same man who gave us a lot of what we now think of as the gooeyest, most sentimental ingredients of Christmas (turkey, snow, forgiveness, happiness in the eyes of small children) – ironic, but not entirely surprising. Dickens had a soft heart (the explanation for characters like Jo the crossing-sweeper) but a thoroughly nasty imagination (the explanation for Jo the crossing-sweeper’s fate), and it’s the nasty imagination that’s definitely uppermost in Great Expectations, a heartwarming story about bad things happening to not particularly good people.

Maybe it’s Christmas getting to me, but this adaptation of Great Expectations seemed to be more than ever about the uniquely knotty problems that come from families. The good ones don’t stick around while the bad ones refuse to leave; the ones you don’t have, you want, the ones you do have, you don’t appreciate; and just when you think you’re safe, hitherto unknown or forgotten-about relations turn up in droves to gleefully ruin your life.

The opening scene of Great Expectations (set on gorgeously atmospheric marshland – the Beeb, as always, has done great things with mist and fog) sees the orphaned Pip tending the graves of his (extremely dead) parents. But just as you think that he’s alone in the world, someone that looks suspiciously like a replacement father figure rears up in front of him, dripping mud, and Pip’s already dreadful life goes downhill from there. Unsuitable parents, indeed, keep literally coming back to haunt Pip. You think I’m exaggerating? Magwitch bursts up out of the ground, chains clanking like the nastiest sort of ghoul, and Miss Havisham spends all her time floating around her house ethereally in a long white dress. They’re Pip’s very own Ghosts of Parents Past.

Nor am I exaggerating about their unsuitability. In what may be one of literature’s most impressive examples of terrible parenting, Miss Havisham brings up her daughter Estella specifically to ruin other people’s lives, and in her free moments meddles so successfully with Pip’s that he ignores his only really good family member, his humble but loving brother-in-law Joe, in order to be spectacularly unhappy and spectacularly in debt in London. There’s a happy ending, of course – there always is – but it’s a doubtful and mixed one, even for Dickens. The real point of the story comes from all of Pip’s bad decisions, all the things (and there are many) that he gets wrong on the way to realising that Joe is not such a bad chap after all, even if he is a bit hairy and muddy and prone to dropping his aitches.

As always, the BBC has done a wonderful job of presenting its material. Dickens’s characters ought to have faces as weird and wriggly as their names, and this Great Expectations has an ensemble cast that looks like they were originally discovered in the pages of a particularly nutty cartoonist’s sketchbook. Everyone’s clothes stick out from their bodies like beetle carapaces or possibly armour, their hair is wild and there’s a definite aura of grime that hovers around their bodies to remind us – as if we needed to be – what a nasty world we’re in. It’s all exemplified by Miss Havisham, who we see literally rotting away as the plot progresses. Her hair-line recedes, her skin flakes, her dress tears and she gets unnerving crusty bits around her mouth. Gillian Anderson, by the way, deserves a special commendation for her portrayal, which she manages to make both creepily sympathetic and mad as a bag of furiously struggling rodents. It’s all very much in the spirit of the original, and wonderful (although that might not entirely be the right word) to watch.

Twisty, dark and full of the rottenest, meanest kind of Dickensian humour, the new Great Expectations was the perfect anti-Christmas treat. It was also a nice little reminder to us all to cherish the fact that our own families, for all their strange and infuriating flaws, are (probably) not actually trying to con us, crush our dreams or kill us. For which small mercies, as Dickens might say if he was feeling in the mood, God bless them, every one.

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