Monthly Archives: November 2007

Here’s Tae Us

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I just heard John Bell of the Iona Community on ‘Thought for the Day’. He was talking, since it’s St Andrew’s day, about the old Scottish saying, or toast, “Here’s tae us, wha’s like us? Damn few, and they’re a’ deid.” That’s, “Here’s to us, who’s like us? Damn few, and they’re all dead,” in case you have trouble with Scots.

Thing is, Bell was bemoaning the attitude he thinks it represents. He thinks it means, “The only people we can emulate are dead.” He thinks it epitomises a ‘national inferiority complex.’

That’s not how I ever understood it.

Rather than looking back wistfully on past glories, to me it was triumphal, celebratory, even arrogant, if you need a negative adjective. It said — it says — “We’re here, and we’re great; there’s no-one like us.”

So happy St Andrew’s day: we rock.

The Scar, by China Miéville (Books 2007, 6)

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.A mindfucking mindfuck of all mindfucks. A great, big, sprawling book, and yet one which can have a curious sense of claustrophobia at times.

That’s because nearly all the action takes place on the floating city of Armada. It’s a big floating city, but it is, nonetheless, essentially a big ship, in the middle of a great ocean, and there’s nowhere for the characters to go.

What they do while stuck there, is where the fun lies.

While I was reading this, my beloved got our son a copy of China’s first book “for younger readers”, Un Lun Dun. He finished it over a long weekend’s trip to Cornwall, and I read the review of it in that Saturday’s Guardian (yes, we buy our kids books in their week of release, why do you ask? Like much of the country, we did the same in July (though to be fair, that wasn’t just for the kids.))

The review ended with a statement of the old canard about SF&F having no characters, “and that’s why some readers like them”, to paraphrase. And while that’s kind of insulting (and not even true for Un Lun Dun), there is some truth in it. But then, that’s not what we’re here for: you don’t come to a book like this to read about the inner turmoil of a North London writer (I can get that by not reading. OK, East rather than North, and would-be, but still.) You read books like this to take you somewhere else; to experience something other; to see something you can’t see down your street.

And you certainly get your money’s worth with this one.

What Exactly Does it Mean to Book a Train Ticket, Anyway?

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I had a slightly weird experience with train bookings a while back. Twice I’ve booked tickets via The Trainline between London and Glasgow (once on my own, once for the whole family). On both cases the tickets arrived with the legend “No Seat” printed in the spaces for the seat details. In both cases I phoned the company and was able to arrange seats (with greater or lesser difficulty and need to switch services)

But the weirdness to my mind is that on The Trainline’s website, you have to select specific trains when you’re booking (even if the ticket you are buying is flexible enough that you can travel on a different service in the end). So you’re always “booking” a particular train; but not, automatically, booking a seat. What, exactly, does it mean to do that?

I mean, let’s assume that all seats on the train are full when you get on, as they usually are on routes like London to Glasgow; is there a particular circle of floor space that is yours? You have a booking on that service, after all: it must mean something.

I recall, years ago, when I used to travel up and down these lines a lot, that there were a lot of services, especially at weekend peak times, on which seat bookings were “mandatory”. There were still people without bookings who got on and crammed in between the carriages, so I’m not entirely sure what that meant, either. But at least it meant that when you booked a ticket (at a station or a travel agent: no web in those days), you also booked a seat.

And having booked it, you nearly always got it; British Rail had its problems, but incompatible systems between the booking agents and the different train operating companies wasn’t one of them, as it seems to be now. The Trainline’s other strangeness was that, after phoning to add the seat bookings, I was sent the details for the outgoing service (on Virgin Trains), but not those for the return (on GNER). When that happened on the first of those trips, I assumed it was a mistake, so I mentioned it when I phoned for the second one. I was told that it was unavoidable because GNER use a different system, and they (The Trainline) were only able to book on paper (and then, what, post the details to GNER?)

I blame the Tories, of course: privatisation was always an appalling idea.

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A New Low For Cattle Class

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I flew up to Scotland the other weekend, by RyanAir. On the way back the plane was a 737-800. It was the same kind of plane as on the flight up, but the inside was dramatically different.

Flying north we had standard velour-covered (or whatever you’d call it: fuzzy cloth) seats, and standard seat-back pockets made of criss-crossed bungee cord.

But southbound we had nasty vinyl-covered seats. Vinyl! Who’d have thought you could still cover seats in such a thing? It looked like the inside of a 1970s Vauxhall Viva!

Worse than that, though: there were no seat-back pockets at all! None!

This arrangement means that the little bits and pieces you want to have to hand — bottle of water, MP3 player, book or magazine, notebook — all have to go on the floor under the seat in front when you’re not holding them.

As well as being inconvenient, those things on the floor all now constitute an added safety risk: if there was some kind of problem before takeoff or after landing, they’d all be sliding about, just perfect for people to trip over or slip on.

So, reduced comfort, convenience and safety. Nice on, RyanAir.

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A Bridge Not Far Enough

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Spoilers ahead.

I watched Bridge to Terabithia last weekend. It is probably the saddest film I’ve ever seen, and despite all the plaudits it has received, it has at its core, I think, a heart of darkness. It is not a bad film, but it has a dark soul.

I came to the film cold. I’ve not read the book; indeed, I’d never even heard of it when the film came out. The book is described in terms of being ‘”much-loved”:http://www.realmovienews.com/dvd/reviews/1667′ and a ‘”classic”:http://www.slate.com/id/2160370/’. It was published in 1977, when I was 12 or 13. So I expect I missed it because I was ‘too old’ for children’s books, and not yet old enough again for them. And I had other concerns in that year.

So all I knew about it was the ‘from the creators of Narnia’ tag line, a quick read of the blurb, and the fact that my daughter (6) was interested in it.

As the early scenes unfolded I realised that that I had read a review of it, though. All that I recalled was a complaint to the effect that in the book, the girl was supposed to be plain, even boyish-looking, while in the film she was Hollywood-pretty (if dressed a little unconventionally compared to her schoolmates).

I think that review explains why my opinion of the film differs so significantly from that of most reviewers: they all seem to have read the book. Inevitably they review the film in comparison to it, and fuelled by their knowledge of the plot.

So they can describe it as ‘bittersweet’, as having an ‘uplifting’ ending; even as ‘transcendent’ (I think that last came from one of the mini-documentaries on the DVD). Because as they watched, they knew what was coming.

I’ve often thought that some films — the later Harry Potter ones are particular examples — must be all but incoherent to anyone who hasn’t first read the book on which they are based. The Potters can get away with it, because so many have read the books first. But in general a film — or any adaptation from one medium to another — must work on its own. It is a separate, new creation, and has to stand or fall as such.

In one sense at least, Terabithia fails on this account.

The trouble is not lack of coherence; rather it is excess of impact, and lack of recovery time. There is certainly some foreshadowing: it is plain that something bad is going to happen. But the tragedy when it comes — and make no mistake, the story is a tragedy — is too deep, too dark, too sudden. Yes, true, that’s how it would be in real life; and I’m not suggesting that movie viewers, including children, should be completely protected from darkness, tragedy or loss. But here, suddenly, shatteringly, we are no longer watching the film that we thought we were.

Which is not necessarily a bad thing. But the film’s fatal flaw — or at least the cause of its failure to achieve the uplift suggested by reviewers — comes after the plunge into darkness.

It is the lack of recovery time, and the content of what time there is. Yes, a significant amount of time for the characters is compressed into a few swiftly-edited scenes. Perhaps enough time is represented for the boy, Jess, to come to terms with his loss, or at least to begin to do so. But it is not enough time for us to do so.

And perhaps because the fantasy elements were (rightly) understated earlier on, we have what feels like a tacked-on fantasy ending. And it’s not even the tacked-on fantasy ending we might want. Me, I’d have liked Jess, the talented artist, to to have ripped out the page of the film’s continuity, said, “No!” and sketched a new one.

That, of course, would have made for a saccharine ending, like the false ending(film)#Scenes_missing_in_American_cut in Brazil, or the original cut of Blade Runner. It would have been deemed a mistake (not least because of differing from the book), or at least have been very hard to make work. It would have betrayed the story.

But the ending that we do have betrays the story too, I think, in a different way. The descent (ascent?) into fantasy may show that Jess had become closer to his little sister; but it writes Leslie out of his memories of Terabithia. It ceases to be their magical place, and therefore fails to honour her memory.

Of course it is all to help him to come to terms with his loss; but as his Dad tells him, it’s by remembering what was special about her that he can keep her alive.

Above all, though, it all happens too quickly: maybe we, the viewers, could have had just a little more time?

I can only assume that the book does, in fact, provide a more gentle exit for its readers, for it to be so popular. Though of course, you can take a book at your own pace.

Yet despite — or more likely, because of — all of the above, it’s a film that will stay with me for a long time; that I’ll probably watch again; and whose source-book I’ll certainly seek out.

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