TOP 100 BOOK SITES
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| Illness and Intimacy The professor of psychiatry who discussed her own manic depression in “An Unquiet Mind” revisits her husband’s death from cancer. feeds.nytimes.com |
Nation, The Priory and The Line | Theatre reviews Olivier, London Royal Court, LondonArcola, LondonIt's as if the noses of an entire audience were pressed against a Selfridges Christmas window. There's no mistaking that Melly Still is a designer: her production of Nation is a parade of tableaux. Giant water panels contain shadows of dolphins and the plummeting, graceful figures of divers; a goofily grinning shark looks set to steam headfirst into the stalls. A massive night sky stretches over the stage, with the stars telling their own story in patterns.Very spectacular. But to what purpose? Mark Ravenhill's adaptation of Terry Pratchett's novel is an impressive-looking mush. It begins with the obliteration of South Pacific islanders by a tsunami, and meanders into the meeting of two cultures. A surviving high-born island man meets a shipwrecked Victorian gel, who unleashes her bun, starts to wear a grass skirt over her crinoline frame and tucks a flower behind her once well-scrubbed ear: "You look different, Daphne."He (Gary Carr) ripples magnificently; she (Emily Taaffe) squeaks appropriately. She learns how to deliver a baby, which turns out to be a very cheerful puppet. He nearly gets bumped off. She points out that the British have had some good scientific ideas. He shows her that most metaphysical theories were foreseen by his ancestors, who, though deep, prove to be unprepossessing: it's unusual to see so many gods with very wide pumpkin-style faces; one of them seems to be wearing specs. There's a lot of jigging around on the island, where dead people wear masks that look like brown paper bags with ears, and live people bond in what used to be called native dancing and much unbridled emotion.So far so hippyishly consistent – which is to say, not coherent, but wearing an unchanging smile. Yet the evening ends not with a mingling of cultures but with the triumph of the nation state and the assumption that men and women will behave differently. He stays effortlessly exercising power on his island; she goes off to England because her dad's been crowned, bound for a life of tea-drinking among people who look as if their faces have been ironed. It's a strange combination of sloppy bien-pensant and buttoned-up conservatism.Michael Wynne's last play at the Royal Court sent a frisson across the stalls when a moggy was bumped off. Late in the evening, his new play elicits a similar shuddering gasp, of a kind not often heard in the theatre. The Priory also features a perfectly realised nightmare media-mother, sentimental about her children, beady about her colleagues, chic, boastful yet resourceful in disaster: a woman who makes her friends wilt but saves lives. Rachel Stirling gives her a hyper-plausibility: a schoolgirl bully gleams through her glossy telly-exec repartee and every scornful flick of her limbs. Robert Innes Hopkins's design meticulously parodies a country house in which the cushions are embroidered with stags' heads.Still, this 21st-century version of a 50s comedy thriller isn't sufficiently high-wired in its farce (men in drag expect a round of applause on each entry) nor acute enough in its social comedy, where the big laugh is supposed to come from a humorous cockney putting her ill-bred hoof in it: "I love you gays". The couples spending New Year in a rented old holy house were always bound to disobligingly snog each other, fall out, decide that iPods aren't the answer to everything. It's a given. A priori.The Edgar Degas in Timberlake Wertenbaker's new play The Line is constantly dispensing advice to his talented protégée: line is more truthful than painting that's stuffed with narrative; artists become good by repetition. Wertenbaker has taken it all to heart. Her play is a series of small scenes, in each of which Sarah Smart's Suzanne Valodon rushes into the artist's studio, shows herself to be both talented and unrecognised, squawks the name of a famous man ("His name is Erik. Erik Satie") and scarpers, leaving Degas with art. Then she does it again. Good actors are stuck in poses. Henry Goodman is furrowed; as his housekeeper, Selina Cadell, is smoothly restrained. Wertenbaker spun a successful drama from the art world 17 years ago with Three Birds Alighting on a Field: walking this line proves less rewarding here.TheatreTerry PratchettMark RavenhillTimberlake WertenbakerSusannah Clappguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
Token magical realism is a cheap trick Occasional flourishes of the impossible in otherwise conventional stories have become a fashionable badge for novelists to announce 'I am serious'So I finally got around to Jeffrey Eugenides's Middlesex. In many ways I found it magnificent. I loved the epic scope with which Eugenides traced his protagonist's roots through three generations' genetic history while remaining compellingly realistic throughout. Well – realistic apart from the occasional twitches that appear every couple of chapters or so. Something jarring, a sneaky invader from the land of magical realism, catching the corner of the eye like a reel change marker. For instance, characters in the book have ethnically and socially typical names – except the narrator's elder brother, who is referred to only as Chapter Eleven. And the book's faithful and sympathetic portrait of a Greek immigrant family and its aspirations is disrupted when one of them drowns in an icy lake and turns up 50 pages later, apparently still breathing and having metamorphosed into Wallace Fard Muhammad, the real-life founder of the Nation of Islam.I found Fard's unlikely fictionalised presence particularly off-putting – it seemed to have no metaphorical or logical connection with the rest of the novel. Its incongruous effect was a bit like admiring a medieval tapestry only to notice a Mickey Mouse patch stitched into the background.Now, I don't mind a bit of fourth-wall fiddling if that's what turns you on. The trouble is, when it's just an occasional dip of the toe into surreal waters, I tend to find it works out less majestic Vonnegut, more "zany" John Irving. The whole thing gives the sense of the author stopping his work every couple of hours to shout: "Hey guys, guess what?! This is a novel!!!! I made it all up and if I want the characters to turn green and float then they will! Lol!!"It can work if it feels unforced. I enjoy many authors who sprinkle a little fantasy on their otherwise realistic prose. Jonathan Safran Foer, Paul Auster – blurring the edges of their sharply focused pictures adds to the uncertainty of the worlds they evoke. But when Douglas Coupland keeps showing up in Douglas Coupland novels, or when Jonathan Franzen has his quiet college professor character up sticks to work with crime lords in Lithuania, it just seems to run counter to their natural style.And I guess that's my problem. It seems not just forced, but fashionable – a bit of the needlessly fantastic is apparently a shortcut to gravitas. It's part of the recipe: novels, especially American novels, have to outweigh paving slabs, have plots that plough through several generations of the same family – and, of course, they have to have that sprinkle of the utterly unreal. Otherwise the paperback edition won't be able to shovel in those first five pages of glowing reviews, nor will they have a list of shortlist nominations on the cover. It's as if the serious reader needs a bit of off-putting artifice, because otherwise how will they know they're reading literature and not some crap that any Richard and Judy fan could enjoy on holiday? Book club favourites like The Time Traveller's Wife, which basically nicks Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five device, have even begun to encroach, upping the stakes even further. We're in a cold war of the surreal, with literary authors marking their territory by piddling a bit of BS Johnson experimentalism and a spritz of Joycean excess to give an otherwise straight bit of fiction the right smell for reviewers.So the reader makes their way through an otherwise straight novel and suddenly feels as though the publisher laced the binding glue with a trace of LSD. But not too much, of course. Let's not make this a real effort for our serious readers who, after all, have already been to university and had to suffer all that stuff. Just enough to know where the author's coming from, whose side they're on – and all enough to disguise the fact that what these serious people are reading, and what they are wanting to read, is a jolly little story about people.FictionAlastair Harperguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
The digested classic Penguin Classics, £7.99Laura sat up beside her father on the cart and waved. "Goodbye Laura," the neighbours cried, while Dawn French bounced up and down, overacting in the background. Her leaving had caused quite a stir. It was an epic eight-mile journey from the sleepy hamlet of Lark Rise to the sleepy village of Candleford Green and no one was quite sure if they would ever see Laura again.After stopping for a fizzy orangeade along the way, they reached the Post Office where Laura was to start work as an assistant while Candleford Green was taking its afternoon nap. Yet their arrival did not go entirely unobserved, for the Postmistress, Miss Dorcas Lane, who was widely held to be as sharp as vinegar, which is more than can be said for this prose, had heard the clattering of hooves upon the cobbles and arose from her slumber to greet them."You must be exhausted," Miss Lane declared. "I shall get Zillah to make us tea and scones. I've been rushed off my feet myself, what with the Misses Pratt dropping by for three penny stamps and a gossip."Laura was unable to begin her arduous duties until she had been officially sworn in by Sir Timothy on the morrow, so she retired to her room to unpack her trunk and to recover from such a busy day.The interview the next morning was not as terrifying as she expected. Sir Timothy patronised her courteously, saying she appeared remarkably bright for a 14-year old peasant girl, and Miss Lane commented appreciatively on the depth of her curtsey. Once dismissed from Sir Timothy's presence, Laura was introduced to the other postal workers."I have recently converted to Methodism," said Mr Brown, "and the surveyor tried to make me deliver the mail on a Sunday.""How very distressing for you," Laura replied."Indeed it was, but luckily someone else agreed to do the deliveries in my place.""It was a very worrying hour of prime time television for all of us," said Miss Lane. "I need a slice of Victoria sponge and a lie-down just thinking about it."Over the following months Laura quickly mastered the half-penny and the penny stamps, but the 5/- stamps always caused her grave anxiety from which she liked to recover by reading the sonnets of Shakespeare or – if she was feeling somewhat racy and was certain she was not being watched – Byron's Don Juan. In Laura's time, Candleford Green was still a village and every member of the community knew his or her place, which made it the ideal Sunday night feelgood costume drama. The poor, of course, would have liked an extra farthing a week to spend on dripping, but no one begrudged Sir Timothy and Lady Adelaide their palace as each year on Boxing Day they allowed the hunt to gather just outside their gates. What excitement this grand occasion merited, with all the women planning their wardrobes months ahead!No English village in the nineties was without its idiot, and Candleford could lay claim to more than its fair share. Yet Lumey Joe, an unfortunate deaf mute, was the undisputed king of the idiots. How he used to chuckle as the children gaily threw stones at him and pushed him in the river! It was not all fun and frolics, though, for people did, from time to time, fall sick and die, yet when they did, how the lower orders pulled together, swapping turnips and baking dainties for one another!"Some folk might say Candleford is the kind of village that appears on chocolate boxes," said Miss Lane, waking up from a deep post-prandial snooze. "Which reminds me. Who ate all the toffees?"Candleford was never short of entertainments, for twice a year a man would come to give public readings on the Green. It was at one such event that Laura, her hair cut into the Alexandra fringe that was all the rage at the time, was asked by a Godfrey Parrish, a young reporter on the Candleford News, if she would mind if he were to walk her home. She accepted and they arrived back at the Post Office two minutes later. The village talked about little else for years to come, though Laura and Godfrey never did meet again.During this time, Laura became acquainted with her neighbours, the two Misses Pratt, who ran the haberdashery store and whose father had mysteriously vanished for a year only to turn up in a hedge, yet she continued to throw herself into her work wholeheartedly. She learned to use the complicated telegraph machine and when the delivery man was ill, she would personally walk 25 miles to make sure that Sir Timothy received his letters on time and so fast was her stride she would still have time to press some wild flowers before tea."You're a good girl, Laura," Miss Lane would say. "Have a nice jam tart."It would be wrong to paint too idyllic a portrait of Candleford Green, for even then the village was beginning to show some signs of the changes that would see it become a monstrous suburb of Candleford, complete with its own Spar. Modern bicycles had begun to replace the penny-farthing and once a youth was caught trespassing in Sir Timothy's spinney. On such occasions, the Candleford folk would sigh, "Such is Life" and return to the kitchen to make some nice quince jelly.Laura would often find that the greatest excitements came in threes. First there was the great oak that fell, causing Sir Timothy's countenance to turn most grave; then there was "Old Bob" who found a panel that fetched £5 at a public auction; and last there was the anonymous Valentine inscribed with the rhyme "U-G-L-Y, you ain't got no Alibi. You UGLY, You UGLY". This last incident caused Laura much distress, until Miss Lane reminded her that such were the heady dramas around which Sunday night television schedules were based."I'd better have a biscuit and a cup of tea," said Laura, before going back to the counter to dispense stamps to the four customers of the afternoon. Yet she too was changing. The pace of life in Candleford Green no longer left her quite as breathless as it once had. Some days she could even manage without a nap and then she longed to escape the gossamer threads that bound her. Yet the threads that tied her to a life of boredom were more enduring than gossamer. They were spun from cherished memories of endless repeat fees.ClassicsFictionJohn Craceguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
Books of The Times: Conservation as a Matter of Managing People A continent-hopping examination of the rewilding movement, which stresses the restoration of animal habitats and the importance of migration corridors. feeds.nytimes.com |