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The Play’s the Thing

webmaster — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 15:43:02 +0000

Katherine Kelly & Steve Pemberton in 'She Stoops to Conquer'

There’s an important fact that you don’t really get told in English lessons: plays aren’t actually meant to be read. Go to school or university and you could come away imagining that plays are strangely bare, odd-shaped novels, with no description and scene changes instead of chapter titles. The truth is, of course, that plays (being plays) are meant to be acted, and reading them only lets you understand half of what’s really going on. It’s like trying to watch a film from the next room while you’re busy with something else.

Plays, after all, are about communication, and communication is made up of a lot more than just speech. It’s about the nuances you put into words, the movements you make, the tone of your voice. You can say the words “He’s very handsome,” and show by the way you say them that you really do think so, or that you think that he thinks so, or that you secretly think he’s a hideous toad in a suit.

This is something that living in London has really brought home to me. I keep going to see plays that I think I know well, and every time I come away astonished at how much better they are in action than I even imagined they could be when I was reading them. She Stoops to Conquer is a case in point. Written in the eighteenth century by Oliver Goldsmith, it’s the story of upper class twit Marlowe, a man who’s spent all his life being educated and has consequently never learnt how to deal with women of his own class. A saucy rake around bar maids and the like, he becomes a dribbling idiot when put near any girl who’s fully dressed and able to write her own name. Eventually, his father loses patience and sends him off to be married to upper class lady (and extremely clever girl) Kate Hardcastle. Of course, Marlowe can’t even look at her, but Kate likes the look of him so much that she decides to seduce him by dressing up as a maid. Events, of course, proceed amusingly from there, and end up with lots of marriage and general revelry.

Even on the page, She Stoops to Conquer is completely delightful. It’s difficult not to be won over by a heroine who exclaims, when told of a prospective lover’s good looks and fortune, “He’s mine! I’ll have him!” Gleefully anti-authority and with a deliciously hard-headed attitude towards romance – when another character exclaims, “Perish the baubles! Your person is all I desire!” he’s told off by his fiancée for being too impractical – She Stoops to Conquer champions desire founded on what’s in someone’s head as much as what’s in their heart. Love in this play is about compatibility, mental as well as physical, an attitude that chimes so well with what we believe today that I’m forced to conclude that either people in the eighteenth century were much more advanced than we give them credit for or that we’ve hardly moved on at all.

But that’s just the text. The play is what you do with that text, and the ever-brilliant National Theatre have used Goldsmith’s words to create a new production that’s charmingly naughty, visually spectacular and so uproariously jolly that I left the theatre in a haze of goodwill towards mankind.

As I’ve said, I studied the play at university, and so I thought I understood the irony of lines like Marlowe’s “As for Miss Hardcastle, she’s too grave and sentimental for me.” But when I finally saw him saying it, blissfully ignorant, while the Miss Hardcastle in question came sidling up behind him lifting up her skirt and aiming her cleavage at his head, I realised that I’d been missing how incredibly, dirtily funny the situation really was. This production definitely makes the most of She Stoops to Conquer’s physical humour. Marlowe, when he finally notices Kate in her peasant dress, leaps up and neighs like a horse; characters slap and pinch each other and drag each other in and out of rooms; and Kate’s country bumpkin mother has an awe-inspiring accent that travels up and down the register from Glasgow to Torquay.

Sophie Thompson (who plays Mrs Hardcastle) really does have a show-stealingly great turn. From her curtseys (which always end up as undignified crouches) to her hair-piece (which is constantly falling out) she’s outrageously pitch-perfect. Not that the cast she overshadows aren’t excellent as well. Kate (Katherine Kelly) is beautifully pert, Marlowe and his friend Hastings (Harry Haddon-Paton and John Hefferman respectively) are beautifully foolish, and Mr Hardcastle (Steve Pemberton) has a beautiful time shouting at everybody.

It’s all backed up by gorgeous costumes and a stunning set (the Olivier Theatre’s rotating stage is put to good use, and we even get tree trunks lowered down onto the stage in the garden scene), and an incredibly enthusiastic ensemble who gallop around banging on pots and pans and singing.

She Stoops to Conquer is a wonderful text that’s had wonderful things done to it, and the result is a play that’s genuinely funny and warm-hearted. And most importantly, it’s a pleasure to watch.

Robin StevensSimilar Posts:

This Sporting Life

webmaster — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 09:54:37 +0000

'The Art of Fielding' by Chad Harbach

In the last few weeks, there have been a lot of column inches in the review sections of the weekend papers regarding the new US bestseller The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach. I haven’t read it yet but I know it’s been mentioned as the next “Great American Novel” and has received generally excellent reviews from the press. I’m sure it’ll be a multi-faceted book with the usual helpings of love and life-changing experiences but what I find interesting is that the background to the novel is baseball. Now, I’ve nothing really against baseball – I certainly don’t understand the finer points of what looks like an upmarket rounders, even though it’s always on screen in almost every American bar. My point is more general. Given how much sport seems to dominate our lives these days, it strikes me that there are relatively few novels in which sport features to any great extent.

I’m not saying that there aren’t any. In fact, in recent years, one or two novels with sport as the background have been very successful. Netherland by Joseph O’Neill was a novel mainly about the strangeness of New York but showed cricket in possibly the last city in the world where you’d expect to find it. The Damned Utd by David Peace featured a fictionalised Brian Clough struggling to maintain his high standards of football management when thrown the challenge of looking after Leeds United. I know this book divided opinion, written only two years after Clough’s death, but I thoroughly enjoyed both the book and the subsequent film, starring Michael Sheen.

Looking further back, there have been novels or stories about rugby league (This Sporting Life by David Storey), golf (The Clicking of Cuthbert by PG Wodehouse) and pool (The Hustler by Walter Tevis). If you like your crime novel with a horse-racing setting (and you’ve read every Dick Francis book), you can’t beat the Saratoga series (Saratoga Longshot, Saratoga Swimmer etc.) by the American writer Stephen Dobyns, featuring the private detective Charlie Bradshaw. Moreover, if The Art of Fielding has given you the urge to read even more about baseball, you could try Ring around the Bases by Ring Lardner or any collection of his short stories, such as Round Up or Selected Stories. Lardner was a sports journalist in the American mid-west and wrote his stories between 1915 and his early death in 1933, at the age of 48. Although not so easy to find today, his books capture the prohibition-era and the American obsession with sports that not many other countries play. So, I’m certainly not saying the shelf of sporting novels is empty or of a low standard, just that compared to the number of novels featuring love and romance, for example, we see very few with sport at the centre.

Some of the best books about sport are, of course, the straightforward biographies or autobiographies, once you cut your way through the large number of ghost-written “why I’m so great” books. Try It’s Not about the Bike by Lance Armstrong on cycling (and his battle with cancer) or the excellent King of the World by David Remnick about the rise of Muhammad Ali. Both books shed light on two sports that don’t always get as much exposure as others. As for football, where lack of exposure certainly isn’t a problem, I’ve found the most enjoyable books have taken a more offbeat view of the sport. Fever Pitch by Nick Hornby is a good example of this, focussing on a die-hard fan’s obsession with Arsenal, though to be honest, compared to those of us who support a League One team, he can consider himself lucky. Another book in this vein is A Season with Verona by Tim Parks, a gripping story, part-travelogue, part-social history, where the author journeys around Italy with the often terrifying fans of Hellas Verona during one of their rare forays in the top division of Italian football. I couldn’t put the book down, desperate to discover the outcome of their battles, sometimes in every sense for the fans, with the might of Milan and Juventus.

It’s possible, then, that the relative dearth of sport-based novels is because of the difficulty of capturing the sheer thrill and excitement of actual sporting events, whether in watching or participating. So, with that in mind, I suppose it’s about time for my daily jog around the local park.

Briony Wickes

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Good Bad Books

webmaster — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 09:00:23 +0000

Last week, I wrote about Culture, something that has an almost unique ability to make most of the population very nervous, as though it were a test they were bound to fail. It’s an understandable position but a very unfortunate one – people should be able to read, or look at, whatever they want, regardless of who they are. But if there’s a mistaken belief that there are certain kinds of art that can only really belong to people who speak like the Queen and have souls shaped like David Cameron, there’s an equally silly and almost as prevalent idea out there that there are certain sorts of book that are not for ‘real readers’.

This, as a position, drives me completely crazy. It’s also something that I come up against repeatedly on my university literature course. Although academia is beginning to wake up to the fact that books are still being written today, and that some of them are even quite good, there’s still an enormous amount of infuriating snobbery about genre fiction.

Genre fiction, of course, literally means books about romance, crime, horror, science fiction and fantasy. If I was feeling prickly (as I am when I’m repeatedly told that many of the books I enjoy are somehow invalid as fiction) I’d define it as any book in which the characters do more interesting things than just stand in a room and cry.

The key word here is interesting. I’ve noticed that often, when a book is accused of being ‘genre’, what its accuser really means (but doesn’t want to come out and say) is that it seems suspiciously like it might be fun to read. Many critics – and academics – suspect fun. There’s an invisible rule in their heads that all good books have to be difficult, and so all books that don’t tie your brain in knots of uncomprehending agony must therefore be bad.

'Snuff', the latest novel by Terry Pratchett

In one of my seminars last week, another student brought up Terry Pratchett. It was a valid reference and a relevant comment, and he could have left it at that, but the moment the words were out of his mouth he got a look on his face as though he’d just come to his senses to find himself desecrating his mother’s grave. He backtracked frantically – he’d read one book! Once! When he was a child! It meant nothing! It was just one time! – and then he started talking about Derrida, to prove that he was a serious academic who knew large texts and had important, grown-up, un-fun thoughts about them.

Personally, I don’t see what all the fuss is about. Why can’t you bring up Terry Pratchett in an academic setting? He’s a writer, isn’t he? He puts down words on a page in exactly the same way as Alan Hollinghurst or A. S. Byatt, and those words get published and read just the same as theirs do. And after all, there isn’t an approved list of topics about which you can intelligently write. A passage about an elf, or a pair of shoes, or a bloodstained corpse, has just as much chance of being good as does a passage about sex, or loss, or the unbearable trauma of being. It all depends on the person who’s written it.

In fact, if we take Terry Pratchett as an example, a lot of what he’s doing when he writes about trolls and swords and magic carpets is using them to make extremely subtle and embarrassingly spot-on comments about the society we live in – which also happens to be exactly what Jonathan Swift, who now appears on almost every English literature course anywhere, was doing three hundred years ago. But of course he’s not genre, because he’s from history, and therefore all the funny parts of his books are probably just mistakes.

Actually, as soon as you do look at older texts, the genre-as-worth argument begins to totally break down. Many books that we now think of as classics would probably, if they had been published today, have been shoved on the Genre Shelves of Shame, where only nerds and children can get at them. Dickens and Hardy, for example, wrote specifically for the mass-market and most of their novels were first published in instalments, in popular magazines. Their analogues in terms of sales today would probably be writers like Stephen King or Alexander McCall Smith. Frankenstein? Well, that’s a science fiction horror novel. Dracula? The same. The Odyssey? Fantasy. The Three Musketeers? Historical fantasy. The more you think about it like that, the less literary snobbery makes any sense at all.

As you might be able to tell by now, I think the boxing-in concept of genre is incredibly stupid. It prevents a lot of people from feeling able to try authors they’d probably love, and it prevents a lot of really great authors from getting the recognition they deserve. China Mieville is one of the most creative and intelligent writers working today, but he would probably have to crawl on his knees to the country he’s named after to stand any chance of getting mainstream prizes for his work. It’s a sad state of affairs, because what should matter is the quality of someone’s writing, not what that writing is about. Against all those idiotic people who think that fun is a dirty word, I defend my right to read Zola and Diana Wynne Jones, Nabokov and Meg Cabot, and enjoy them all in very different, but equally valid, ways. And so should you.

Robin StevensSimilar Posts:

The New Culture Revolution

webmaster — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 16:01:56 +0000

Now it’s Chinese New Year, it is time to ditch the Chow Mein Pot Noodle. In the year of the Dragon, cuisine from the far east is being rediscovered as more than just fast food. It comes from a tradition more than 1,000 years old, and each dish is intended to tell a story with poetry and panache. Alexander James, picked up the chop sticks.

There are few cuisines, or even cultures, that are as misrepresented as the Chinese. You don’t have to look further for evidence than its food scene. Take Japanese cuisine; it’s perceived as being up there with the finest, the undisputed darling of the Asian food boom. It’s said that because it can take up to 15 years to make a sushi master, the end result is perfection on a plate.

But it can take even longer to master the art of making Chinese Dim Sum, up to 20 years, by which time most City Bonus-Boys have already retired. Still, most people’s idea of Chinese food is slurping limp and lank soggy noodles after a night on the sauce. It seems only now, food from the grand continent is winning the respect it deserves.

“What we typically think of as Chinese food isn’t really the same thing at all, more a version of what might have been popular in Hong Kong, and exported to the UK,” says Geoffrey Leong, director at London’s Asian food empire, Dumplings’ Legend, one of London’s Chinese restaurants to specialise in Dim Sum. Leong’s family are an Anglo-Chinese Dynasty, who played a part in shaping Chinatown in many gestations, exporting opium and tea in its hay day, along with the odd cow. “As a present from the Chinese to the British, because they liked milk in their tea,” he retorts.

Leong says real Chinese food and culture is largely unknown in the West, and put down to cultural stereotypes. “Think about the size of Europe, and the difference in, say, Scottish food to Greek food – the spectrum in China is the same,” he says.

However, one thing is uniform wherever Chinese food is served. “When the Chinese serve food to their guests, it is as a sign of their generosity,” Leong points out. “It’s about sharing and a Chinese dinner is more about the food more than anything. It’s not important to have flashy or seductive surroundings, as you’ll see from many restaurants, all focus goes into the food not the interior.”

That doesn’t stop many iconic Chinese food places stop trying to bring an element of swish minimalism or Asian bling to their table. Ping Pong restaurants have invested millions into bringing dim sum into a new market, that’s fresh, dynamic and keen to explore new tastes, in the same way Litro brings a fresh eye to literature.

Royal China, Queensway

One classic Dim Dum experience is Royal China in another of the UK’s dim sum eating outposts, in Queensway, London. It’s dining halls had a recent huge refurbishment to bring touches of the former-Emperor’s country to the tables of the UK.

“Dim Dum is intricate, it created by royalty more than 1,000 years ago when an Emperor wasn’t able to eat any of his lavish meals, so his cooks set about creating an alternative,” says Mr Lok manager of The Royal China Group.

“Dim Sum is an essential part of Chinese culture as families will gather over these delicacies for Chinese New Year to the Moon Festival, to celebrate or catch-up,” adds Lok

There’s more behind the dish than just taste, each parcel is symbolic, to fit with the Chinese element of superstition and bringing good fortune. The jiaozi dumpling symbolises prosperity to those who sit down for a family feast on Chinese New Year’s Eve. When the dumpling is crescent shaped it symbolises wealth, like the gold ingot once used in ancient China as money. It’s a tradition more than milliennia old, coming from superstitions about feeding the spiritual world, legends and history.

“In this way Chinese food tells a story, it’s not just about eating,” says Lok . “It’s about an explosion of flavours, all simply cooked, and the best way to learn is to take a lesson from the head chef at your favourite restaurant.”

There are many technical elements to creating a perfectly balanced dish. It is believed food should have a balanced yin yang. Remember that, next time you order that late night Special Chow Mein.

Alexander JamesSimilar Posts:

To Be Or Not To Be: The New-Look Dissertation

webmaster — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 09:00:31 +0000

As I write this, there’s many a final year English student in a library in every university town, panicking about their upcoming dissertations. For many of us, January means sales, snow and sticking to our new year’s resolutions but for the student, January brings with it the dark cloud of looming deadlines and, consequently, panic often begins to set in.

Billed as the ‘pinnacle of one’s academic career’, most English dissertations can be up to 20,000 words and ought to be focussed on a particular aspect of literature, the more specific the better. Gender in Victorian literature, for example, is far too broad a topic, whereas corseting the female body in the works of Margaret Oliphant is much more appropriate. As a final year student myself, I had my own dissertation-induced troubles just before Christmas, when it was time to submit initial ideas and choose a specific focus. As someone who enjoys the broad spectrum of literature, how does one go about choosing just one single area to focus on?

Perhaps you might assume that most third-year literary dissertations would target the big guns – Shakespeare, Dickens and Austen – classic authors that many will study at school and whose work is never out of print or off the screen and stage. At my university, however, this has not always been the case. There are many examples that I know where Shakespeare has been side lined, Dickens disdained and Austen avoided: my fellow students were turning away from the ‘great classics’ of the literary canon, choosing to focus instead on modern authors, such as Margaret Atwood and Stieg Larsson. Indeed, there were plenty of unexpected choices, with one student deciding to study the stories of Roald Dahl, whilst another chose David Nicholls’ recent bestseller, One Day. Many people, however, would be quick to rank the literary merits of King Lear over The Twits. So what is it that attracted my friends and classmates, the latest generation of English Literature students, to pick a novel more likely to be found on the bestsellers’ table rather than on a traditional University reading list? Why boycott the canon?

First and foremost, when it comes to writing a dissertation, it has to be unique. With such a vast body of criticism in existence already on authors such as Shakespeare, Dickens and Austen and, with much of it easily accessible via the Internet, it’s tricky to find something to say which hasn’t already been said before. Books like Noughts and Crosses by Malorie Blackman and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson, although not yet typical fare on the school curriculum, offer an ambitious undergraduate some uncharted territory and a chance to write an entirely original thesis.

Nicholls’ One Day has probably been influenced by classics such as Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice and this might allow the dissertation’s author to provide some interesting comparisons between them. There would be an opportunity to explore how Nicholls has managed to reinvent the old love story that we’ve read so many times before and yet provide a fresh and original take on it. Relevance is another key reason why I believe modern books have become such a popular choice for final year students. A dissertation is one’s contribution to present-day academia and so it’s important that it can reflect current issues, rather than rehash old ones. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, a dissertation topic ought to be chosen because it’s something you enjoy and can be truly passionate about: Roald Dahl might be no James Joyce and The BFG is far from being Ulysses, but if I’m going to devote the next few months of my life to this project, slavishly working away every night in the library and missing out on all kinds of fun social events, I think it’s preferable that I write about some books that I find enjoyable to read. After all, I’ll be reading them more than once over the next three months.

It’s often said that it’s a mistake, as a student, to choose a degree because you feel you ought to, rather than one that you are going to enjoy studying for months and years. So, even before I start typing out a first draft of my dissertation, I’d like to offer an apology to William, Jane and Charles – we are sorry and we still really do like most of your works and promise to return to them later this year. In the meantime, across universities throughout the country, Roald and Stieg await.

Briony Wickes

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Sometimes a Cigar is Just a Cigar

webmaster — Sun, 22 Jan 2012 23:08:30 +0000

A scene from The Pitman Painters at the Theatre Royal

In the first scene of The Pitmen Painters, set in the coal-mining town of Ashington in the 1930s, a group of miners have organised an after-work art appreciation class. The professor arrives and begins to give a slightly snooty lecture about Renaissance technique, but he’s quickly stopped by the leader of the group. They don’t want to hear about how painting is done, he explains. They just want to be able to look at a picture on a wall and know whether or not it’s any good.

I went to see The Pitmen Painters last week, and so this nervous attitude to culture was already in my head when my housemate the actuary turned to me a few nights ago and announced that he wanted to get into poetry, but he was afraid he wouldn’t understand what it was all about. At school, he explained, they were always talking about what poetry meant. What did he need to know, he asked, to be able to understand it?

My housemate may be part of the very suit-wearing, sushi-eating bourgeoisie that the Pitmen spend a lot of time railing against, but their worries about culture aren’t actually worlds apart. There is an assumption, encouraged by the way the arts are taught in schools, that works of art have to mean a particular thing that certain people (defined as those who have the correct, sanctioned bits of difficult-to-understand information in their heads) get and all the rest don’t.

As an English MA student, I’m one of the ones who should be in the know, but even I remember spending what felt like unbroken centuries of torment sitting in an English lesson waiting for someone to tell the teacher what the bird in Tennyson’s The Eagle represented. It occurred to me then, and it still does now, that no matter what ideas Tennyson may have had in his own head about the significance of eagles in general or that eagle in particular, there was no real reason why I or anyone else couldn’t just read the poem as being about an eagle.

There’s a great bit in The Pitmen Painters, after the men have moved on from appreciating art to trying to make some themselves, when they all gather round to critique each other’s work. One of them has done a very nice painting of a Bedlington Terrier standing in a garden. The size of it in relation to the scenery around shows the importance of dogs to the working men of Ashington, says someone. The painting is trying to convey something about the simple beauty in everyday life, says someone else. No, says the man who made it. I just wanted to paint a Bedlington Terrier. And I ran out of space on the board to do the surroundings properly.

This perfectly sums up two (slightly contrasting) things I believe about the arts – first, that there’s no reason why something shouldn’t be both simple and interesting, and second, that there’s not really a meaning at all.

You can look at Millais’s Ophelia, for example, and perfectly validly see a scene from Shakespeare, or the model who nearly froze to death posing for it in a bathtub in the middle of winter, or just a girl inexplicably drowning in very shallow water while surrounded by extremely ornate foliage. Similarly, if you know about Leda and Zeus you’ll be able to literally understand the story Yeats is telling in Leda and the Swan. Even if you don’t, the poem works just as well as a description of what it’s like to be assaulted by an enormous and angry bird. I completely admit that I have no real idea what is going on in Bronzino’s Venus, Cupid, Folly and Time, but that does not stop me finding it both amazingly colourful and completely hilarious (Google it and you won’t be disappointed).

In fact, the more confusing something is, the more you are free to decide what you think it’s about. The Wasteland by T. S. Eliot keeps coming up on the courses I take, and the more I read it, and read what’s written about it, the more I realise that no one in the entire world has any real understanding of what the hell it actually means. Therefore, I have decided that it’s perfectly fine to like it just because it sounds great.

Under the firelight, under the brush, her hair

Spread out in fiery points

Glowed into words, then would be savagely still.

Who is this woman? What is her significance? What does she represent in the poem? Who cares! Her hair is on fire. What I’m trying to say is that culture, like tax, doesn’t have to be taxing. At the end of the day, what it all means doesn’t matter. Although teachers and professors may try to convince you otherwise, no one really knows, anyway. The message of The Pitmen Painters, at least in my mind, is that even though not everyone is capable of being an artist, everyone is capable of being interested in art. Formal knowledge is just an added bonus, something that gives you another way to see a poem or a play or a painting. You don’t need to be daunted by it – one of the most important things about art is whether or not you like it. In fact, it’s still perfectly possible to dislike something even if you know it’s technically good. Ulysses is a masterpiece, and when I read it I hated it so much I wanted to take a flamethrower to its front cover. You should feel free to read and look at what you want to and conclude from that whatever you like. After all, it’s really all up to you.

Robin StevensSimilar Posts:

The Bestsellers of 2011

webmaster — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 11:03:01 +0000

Well, it may be 2012 already but many of the recent weekend papers took the opportunity to look back at the bestselling books of 2011. I always find it good fun to try and spot trends and make a note of a book or two that may have passed me. Previous years and, in fact, much of the last decade has been dominated by the mighty works of Dan Brown and JK Rowling. Love them or loathe them, you can’t deny the sales success. If you look at the overall sales in the UK from 1998 to 2010, Dan Brown occupies top spot (4.5m copies of The Da Vinci Code sold), as well as 4^th and 11^th position, with Harry Potter occupying 2^nd, 3^rd, 5^th, 6^th, 7^th, 8^th and 10^th with only Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight disrupting their dominance at No 9. In terms of value, though, because some of those Harry Potter books were hardback versions, JK Rowling trumps everyone and my quick calculation shows that the boy wizard has brought in around £200m in sales over that 12-year period in the UK alone.

'One Day' by David Nicholls

This year, however, it seems that British homes must be saturated with Dan and Harry, as neither has any book featuring in the top 10. I guess that if you haven’t bought Potter yet, then you’re probably not going to. Top of the list in 2011 was One Day by David Nicholls, a book published nearly two years ago but given a boost last year with the release of the film, starring Anne Hathaway and Jim Sturgess. This did seem to be the book that everyone was reading on the train or on the beach this summer, so I’m not too surprised about its success.

Also no surprise to find the usual cookbooks, with Jamie Oliver at 2^nd and 12^th and solid contributions elsewhere in the list by Lorraine Pascale, Linda Collister and Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall. Similarly, plenty of the multimillionaire regulars feature on the 2011 list, with John Grisham (8^th and 36^th), Patricia Cornwell (29^th) and James Patterson (40^th, 52^nd, 55^th, 57^th and 65^th). Previous years have seen the successes of the celebrity autobiographies of Peter Kay and Russell Brand, for example, but the 2011 list did seem a little light in this area, with Lee Evans at 30^th and the paperback edition of Michael McIntyre’s 2010 book at 42^nd, although Dawn French’s first novel from 2010, A Tiny Bit Marvellous, is still as high as 3^rd.

From a personal point of view, I’m pleased to see the fantasy epic A Game of Thrones featuring in the top 100 (with Book 1 in 13^th place and Book 2 at 76^th), no doubt propelled by the wonderful series on TV, starring Sean Bean. I have a particular soft spot for well-written fantasy sagas, and have read all five books published in the series so far (with two more to come). As the number of characters expand, the series does tend to sag a little but don’t let that put you off. If you don’t mind 1000-page epics of swords and sorcery, then these could be the books for you, even though you might find that you are continually flicking to the 50-page list of characters at the end of each book just to remind yourself who’s who and whether they met with an untimely end in the previous book.

The feature on the list that really stands out for me, however, is the continuing success of Scandinavian crime novels. Again, no doubt helped by film success, along with the TV success this year of The Killing and two versions of Wallander, we find the late Stieg Larsson occupying 7^th, 9^th and 10^th in the 2011 list, with The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo series and five of Jo Nesbo’s books in the top 100, featuring Norwegian Detective Harry Hole. Now, I have read two of the Stieg Larsson books recently and I did admire them, without quite liking them. Perhaps, and I wonder if I’m alone in this, it was just the wrong time of year. Maybe the winter months are not the time for settling down to read a Scandinavian crime novel, set in a cold climate with simply too many hours of darkness. I love crime fiction but with Britain currently lashed by wind and rain, there’s much to be said for reading of dark deeds happening on the sunny beaches and in the sunlit hills of southern California.

Briony WickesSimilar Posts:

Adapt to Survive

webmaster — Mon, 16 Jan 2012 21:48:56 +0000

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.

Robin StevensSimilar Posts:

Review: ‘A Moveable Feast’ by Ernest Hemingway

webmaster — Mon, 16 Jan 2012 09:12:19 +0000

'A Moveable Feast' by Ernest Hemingway

Hemingway is used as a barometer for a manly or literary class. He is everywhere, his name employed as an easy endorsement. In Spain, Cuba, France and the United States you will stumble on ‘the café where Hemingway wrote’, ‘the bar where Hemingway drunk’, ‘the drink Hemingway invented’.

I have fallen sucker to that same trick, no matter how honest, and tried to steal a little of what it meant to be the great man. This might help explain, on a recent trip to Paris, my decision to stay a few doors down from Shakespeare & Co or to eat at certain bistros. My reading for the trip would, of course, be more of the same.

A Moveable Feast is a collection of memories of his time in Paris in the twenties. It is almost a linear narrative, almost autobiography, almost a collection of short stories, but it defies easy categorising. It is true to his laconic polish and an interesting glance at ‘the lost generation’, as well as containing a nice story that rejects that title.

Our protagonist is Hemingway, and readers of his novels or stories will clearly recognise him as the same man at the centre of all Hemingway’s writing. This book clarifies something that I always suspected; he only ever wrote thinly veiled versions of himself. There are moments that seem like parody, the absence of a barrier of fiction between the reader and Hemingway exposing him as too serious, where his fixations on being true and good make you question whether he is laughing at your expense.

At its best, each chapter of the book works as a freestanding short story that deal with familiar themes against the backdrop of Paris. I can think of no better writer or short stories, no better time period to place them in and no better city to have as a backdrop. They deal with gambling, writing in cafes, skiing in the Alps, boxing and making love; the usual stuff.

The narrative that the book provides when held together and the characters that populate it are interesting to anyone with an eye for the Modernist period. We are given Hemingway’s opinions of Ford Maddox Ford, Fitzgerald’s flaws and anxieties, Pound’s attempts to learn how to box, Stein’s jealousy. They are described in such a confident and personal manner and name-dropped throughout. I feel very un-literary stating that some of my favourite parts involved celebrity memoir or gossip column revelations. What avid fan of the Great Gatsby would not want to know that Hemingway comforted Fitzgerald’s fears about the size of his penis by a walk amongst the Greek statues of the Louvre.

For anyone with an interest in the period or artists of the period, the book is essential reading, but Hemingway’s writing makes sure that the general reader will take something away.

Jordan Philips

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Review: Dans Le Noir

webmaster — Fri, 06 Jan 2012 22:20:26 +0000

Can eating the dark be more poetical than dining by candlelight?

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.

Elsa MessiSimilar Posts: