The Death of Stalin, 2017 - ★★
It's a comedy, but I have to say, I find very little humour in it. Especially not the first half.
Certainly there's farce: moving Stalin's body around, all that. But the terror, the killings, the torture, the rape: none of it shown, exactly, but all right there in front of you. It's mostly just too fucking serious for me to laugh at it.
Finished reading: Death at the Sign of the Rook by Kate Atkinson 📚
I’ve read several of Kate Atkinson’s books, but never one of her Jackson Brodie detective series. This despite having seen the TV adaptations. So getting this as a birthday present was great.
We’re promised a murder mystery set against the background of a country house hosting a murder-mystery party, and that’s what we get, eventually. I really enjoyed it, but if anything I’d like her to spend more time with the titular detective.1 But we get various viewpoint characters, and really very little from Brodie’s viewpoint. Very little actual detecting, too.
Indeed, I got the impression that Atkinson doesn’t really want to be writing a detective story. Or she does, of course, but she’s so keen on multiple viewpoints and character creation — and so good at them — that those are the things she’s doing, more than writing a conventional story of a detective solving a mystery.
Nothing wrong with that, of course, you can tell any story you want, any way you want, and why be bound by conventions?
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Not really titular: Brodie’s name doesn’t appear in the title, after all. ↩︎
Finished reading: The Last Dark: The Final Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, Book 4 by Stephen Donaldson 📚
When the final chronicles were first announced, and indeed on the first two books, it was referred to as a trilogy. I assume that the third volume just became so long that the publishers, and probably Donaldson himself, decided it needed to be split in two. Each of the third and fourth volumes is about the same length, anyway.
And they bring everything to a satisfying conclusion, that’s the main thing. Of course Linden hesitates, and Covenant resists using wild magic (but not to the extent he once did). Of course Donaldson uses fifty words where fifteen would do. Of course his writerly tics come through.
But the pages keep turning, and old friends and enemies turn up, and Wild Magic, Law, and Earthpower do their things, and we all leave satisfied.
Books 2024, 14
Murder on the Orient Express, 1974 - ★★
We've been watching the old Poirot TV series, inspired by me getting the book this film is based on last Christmas. More on the series later, perhaps, but it drops in quality in later seasons, when the production company changes.
And in season 12 it does Murder on the Orient Express and it frankly does quite a bad job of it. Not least in the suddenly-Catholic Poirot's struggle with his conscience.
Having him struggling with his conscience over his decision at the end isn't automatically a bad thing. But in the context of the series, it's just not the same character as earlier.
However, we're talking about the 1974 Sidney Lumet film version here. It's no more than OK. If you didn't know the story maybe it would be better, but I'm not sure. It's quite a stellar cast, and most of the individual parts are played well, but in the end it all just comes out as not very good.
Maybe the source material is to blame. Or more likely, the setting. It's like a bottle episode, in that it almost entirely takes place on the train. That maybe doesn't lend itself well to good cinema.
Finished reading: The Legend of Luther Arkwright by Bryan Talbot 📚
I didn’t even realise there was a third (and final?) volume in Talbot’s Luther Arkwright chronicles. Until friends mentioned it at worldcon.
I ordered it immediately. It’s really good, right up there with the earlier ones. In this there turns out to be an even more highly-evolved, more powerful human than Arkwright and co. And they do not have the best interest of anyone but themself at heart.
Books 2024, 13
Well, I guess that was the last working day of my fifties.
Big Thief were good, if tending toward the prog at times.
At Gunnersbury Park for the PJ Harvey gig.
Took an age to get here, from East London to a long way West. Bar has the worst selection of beers I’ve seen at a festival-like event for years. Red Stripe or Jubel lager with fruit flavours. Trying the peach one atm. It’s not good. I suspect they’ve had to cut it with fruit because it’s piss.
Oh well, Big Thief should be on soon.
Wicked Little Letters, 2023 - ★★★
Billed as s comedy, and based on a true story. It's good, but unfortunately all the funniest moments are in the trailer. So don't watch that if you want the best comedy experience.
It's more drama than comedy, anyway. It's the 1920s in Littlehampton on the the south coast of England, and a woman in her 30s who lives with her parents starts receiving expletive-filled, ranting letters. The whole community is shocked, and who're you going to blame? Obviously the Irish woman who lives next door.
Worth a look.
Finished reading: Against All Things Ending: The Final Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, Book 3 by Stephen Donaldson 📚
Not going to say much about this here, as I’m already well into the next (and final) volume, and they’re very much a single story.
Books 2024, 12
Finished reading: The Crow Road by Iain Banks 📚
You will, I think, be far from surprised to learn that this is a reread. At least the third read, in fact. I suggested it as a possibility for my book club, and when it wasn’t chosen I decided it was time anyway.
There are still books that should be in The Great Banksie Reread that I’ve only read once: Stonemouth and The Quarry. But I’ll get to those eventually.
One oddity about The Crow Road is that I’ve never blogged about it before. Yet I’ve loved it since I first read the opening line, at a convention in Glasgow in 1992, if memory serves.
‘Just read the opening line and you’ll buy it,’ my friend Steve said, when I was hesitant about shelling out the huge £10 price for the hardback. I had already read all of Banks’s earlier books, so I was definitely planning on getting it, but waiting for the paperback was the norm.
‘It was the day my grandmother exploded.’ Steve was right. I bought it, and all he subsequent books, in hardback.
Memory does serve, but not all that well: I’ve written all that before, it turns out, after Banksie died. Though it remains slightly unclear which convention it was that year.
A book is more than its opening line, though. The Crow Road is a family drama, set mostly in a fictional Scottish town not far from where I grew up. Also in Glasgow, a non-fictional city where the titular road exists. The metaphorical one is everywhere, of course: it means death, in the vernacular of that exploding grandmother.
I read it with more of a writerly eye this time, I think, and I wondered whether the structural games really add anything to the whole. I don’t mean the parts that are effectively speculative: the main character, Prentice McHoan, trying to work out what might have happened to his missing uncle. Nor the flashbacks in third-person, when the main narrative is in first. That makes sense, as they’re showing us Prentice’s childhood, or things that happened to other family members when Prentice wasn’t there.
I’m more thinking about a couple of flashes forward, that hint about where the many narrative is going to go. They aren’t enough to really make the reader speculate, and they happen when we’re already well into the story, so they aren’t needed to make us keep going.
They do no harm, though, and maybe Banksie needed to use them to keep his own interest up. And there’s nothing wrong with them, or that.
I do find it hard to explain why this book is so compelling. I think it’s probably his best non-SF book. It’s probably not quite my favourite, though it’s up there. I’ve long thought it was partly cultural for me, in that the characters and locations feel like people and places I knew growing up. But that can’t explain its broader appeal.
I guess Banksie was just a great writer.
Books 2024, 11
Great sense of relief this morning. Starmer’s speech makes me feel like it’s the early days of a better nation.
Well, let’s hope this exit poll is something close to accurate. Labour landslide, as the whole country was hoping for. (What do you mean, not the whole country?) Me, I’m not counting any chickens. At all. I have no chickens.
Andy and Jamie walking out to Centre Court, and the BBC are treating like a final. Quite rightly.
As we settle in for the long night ahead, John O’Farrell’s piece from last weekend is worth a read: Are you suffering from symptoms of hope? Here’s how to cope with the prospect of a Labour victory.
To the Polls!
And don’t forget your photo ID.
It feels like 97, but I have a niggling fear that we’ve been played and it could still go all 92 on us. Articles like this one: Tories concede defeat with 24 hours until general election polls open, from The Independent yesterday, feel like tactics, more than news.
The intent being, of course, to reduce the anti-Tory turnout (and the overall turnout).
So go and vote. Please. Don’t let these fuckers do any more harm to our country.
One More Week to Hang On
I seem to have largely stopped blogging. Certainly, as a general election approaches, I’ve written nothing publicly about politics.
Consider: in just over a week we could be rid of this appalling Tory government. The Labour one we get in its place (or, just possibly, a coalition) will probably not be much to write home about, but even if its policies are far from perfect, its plans to tax the rich and invest in the country’s infrastructure far weaker than I’d like: things can hardly be worse.
Indeed, they can only get better, right?
I saw Keir Starmer speak at the Fabian Society a few years back. 2020, surprisingly, but January, before the pandemic really got going. He came across there as a thoroughly good and decent, left-wing, progressive guy. I can’t remember anything he said specifically, but it was positive, you know?
Now, he’s generally seen as timid, scared of appearing to be too left-wing, that sort of thing, or worse. While at the same time seemingly fierce at purging the left of the party. And poor on women’s rights, to say nothing of his dealings with women MPs and candidates.
Still, after the shitshow of the last few years, I’ll accept competence, as long as it’s not right-wing competence.
Finished reading: Beyond the Light Horizon by Ken MacLeod 📚
Ken finishes his wonderful Lightspeed Trilogy with a flourish. Not all the problems are solved or mysteries explained, but that’s life. All the main characters get good conclusions. And a yellow submarine in space is still an astonishingly cool idea.
Books 2024, 10
I keep thinking I should write about the current state of what we are calling AI. Trouble is, I still can’t quite decide what I think about it. Or why it makes me feel the way it does. Or even what, exactly, that way is.
Currently reading: Beyond the Light Horizon by Ken MacLeod 📚
Not so much currently reading as nearly finished. The final volume in Ken’s excellent trilogy, and looking forward to seeing him at Worldcon in Glasgow in August.