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| Nancy Banks-Smith on The Archers Matt and Lilian are not Bonnie and Clyde, but rackety pensioners on the run. God bless their creaky kneesCosta Rica, which pretty much dozed off when Columbus left, awoke to find itself notorious when Matt and Lilian arrived one jump ahead of justice. "He's done a runner, hasn't he?" said Lilian's brother-in-law with audible satisfaction, as she sobbed down the phone from San Jose. Matt is looking at a stretch in Wormwood Scrubs and on the whole . . . give or take . . . after fairly sober consideration . . . well, a couple of scotches . . . would rather be in Costa Rica.The place is a paradise for birds, mostly of a raucous and gaudy nature, like Lilian, but she took against it from the start. The wildlife, as advertised, was abundant, but seemed to be mostly coming up through the plughole. There were giant flying cockroaches in the shower, and a gecko on the balcony was giving her a funny look.It has all led to a lot of shouting from Matt, shrieking from Lilian and rolling thunder (it is the rainy season) reminiscent of the worst excesses of Tosca. As the old Duke of Gloucester remarked once when Tosca leaped off the battlements, "Thank God, now we can all go home." This is a point of view Lilian has been urging with some vim. How much, she pleaded, they would miss Ambridge. All the Archers, the comic yokels, the trendy vicar, the gay chef, the murderous gamekeeper, Midnight ("Whoa, Midnight!") and Meg ("Down, Meg!"). Matt, however, seemed willing to bear the loss of the lot of them with great equanimity. Even cheerfulness.Matt and Lilian are not Bonnie and Clyde, but rackety pensioners in their disreputable 60s. She a far-too-merry widow; he such a thumpingly incompetent crook. Ambridge, if I may say so, can err on the side of somnolence, and Matt and Lilian add a splash of Tabasco to the shepherd's pie. If they leave Costa Rica now, they have just one day to make it back to Borsetshire assizes. God bless their creaky knees, I hope the judge can see the funny side.The ArchersRadio 4RadioTV and radioNancy Banks-Smithguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
From the archive: The Mousetrap – new comedy-thriller by Agatha Christie Originally published on 27 November 1952LONDON, WEDNESDAY.As the snow piles up around the isolated guest-house in "The Mousetrap," at the Ambassadors Theatre, the false clues drift across the stage, deluding the less alert in the audience and appearing to deceive characters in the play who ought to know better. Agatha Christie's comedy-thriller, like a more expensive production which Miss Tallulah Bankhead once commented on, has "less in it than meets the eye." Coincidence is stretched unreasonably to assemble in one place a group of characters each of whom may reasonably be suspected of murder in series. One killing happens in a black-out at the rise of the curtain, another at the end of the first act, and the third is unconvincingly forestalled in time for the end of the second (and last) act.Yet the whole thing whizzed along as though driven by some real dramatic force, as though the characters were not built entirely of cliches and the situations not all familiar. There is the masculine young woman (Jessica Spencer); here as her foil is the effeminate young man (Allan McClelland); and all over the place are the comic major, by Aubrey Dexter, and the suspiciously articulate foreigner (Martin Miller). Richard Attenborough plays an unconventional police-sergeant on skis and Sheila Sim a guest-house keeper in a leopard skin skirt, a good looker but a bad cook – almost too true to life to be borne by anybody who has ever stayed in a quiet hotel. John Paul and Mignon O'Doherty, the strong silent host and the voluble doomed guest, round off a company which makes the most of a middling piece. G. F.[This play continues the world's longest initial run.]"Britain is not finished" – envoy's parting messageWASHINGTON, NOVEMBER 26.Sir Oliver Franks, the outgoing British Ambassador, in a farewell speech to United States journalists at the National Press Club here today, said: "It is not true and will not be true that Britain is finished."The ship was "in better shape than before." Today "we are making ends meet. But it is still true that our economy is not sufficiently strong to play our just part in the world to secure sanity and freedom among the nations. I do not mistake the progress we have made for the final accomplishments. I think we shall go on living in this great plateau of tension for many years as we have to deal with people who believe fanatically in false beliefs." But he added: "Things will get better as we go along, and not worse."Sir Oliver had paid a farewell visit to President Truman.Agatha ChristieTheatreguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
'An intense listener and a great talker' The opinionated and lyrical writer who died of cancer, on 17 July, aged 61, is remembered by the Turner Prize-winning artistGordon would fix you with a stare and you would never quite know what was going on inside his head; his penetrating eyes were always sizing up the situation – you couldn't tell if his thoughts were positive or negative. These were my first impressions of him, and not ones that would entirely go away, but that was the power of Gordon's presence. He was an intense listener and a great talker who was incredibly funny and incisive. In the end I found that he was actually a big softie, devoted to his lovely partner, Carol Gorner.Gordon loved talking about ideas, discussing them with artists, drinking and hanging out with them. He was more like a conceptual artist; he could talk about your work and would give very frank opinions if you asked him, which is rare in most people you befriend. Before I got to know him I had already read Happy Like Murderers, his brilliant but very disturbing account of Fred and Rosemary West. Gordon had got inside the head of Fred West and had been able to conjure up some of his musings and repetitive thoughts. A lot of his interest lay in the darkest side of human nature. He also wrote a very powerful book about the Yorkshire Ripper – Somebody's Husband, Somebody's Son. His articles on art and candid interviews with artists showed how close and deep he could get into their way of thinking. He could be both critical and passionate about art at the same time.Writers are not known for being good at keeping in contact, but if you emailed Gordon he was surprisingly fast at replying, and when I mentioned I would like to read Alma Cogan, one of his novels, the book was sent to me within days. Last year he sent me and Michael Landy, my partner, some fresh fish in the post… I am still trying to work out why.On hearing of his death, I immediately, and very selfishly, thought, "I want another conversation with him." Gordon had so much insight, and he is one person I could have talked to all day, even if it would have been about Strictly Come Dancing, which was one of his favourite TV programmes.The last time I saw Gordon was at a dinner with Carol and Michael. Gordon had been out of action for months due to an inflamed colon, but he was in a celebratory mood, as he had been given the all clear with regards to cancer and was treating himself to a few glasses of wine. But his thoughts, because of this recent illness, had been on death; we spoke about Jade Goody, Angus Fairhurst, who had taken his own life the previous year and who had also suffered from an inflamed colon. He also talked about his recent colonoscopy, how the women doing the procedure were chatting away. That was the last time I saw him. He did have cancer, probably hidden by inflammation.I really will miss Gordon, he still had so much more to give creatively. There are not many people like him.★ Gordon Burnguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
Your Face Tomorrow 3: Poison, Shadow and Farewell by Javier Marias | Book review Stephanie Merritt welcomes the third and final part of an extraordinary work by a great novelist of our ageIn a recent interview in the US, Javier Marias was described as "the most important intellectual figure you've probably never heard of", although readers of the hip New York literary magazine The Believer have been enjoying his translated columns for some time. Relatively little-known in Britain, Marias is widely regarded as one of the most significant contemporary European novelists, and his latest work, Your Face Tomorrow, has been hailed as one of the great literary achievements of our age.Marias describes Your Face Tomorrow as a novel in three volumes rather than a trilogy, although he has published the books separately over the space of several years; thus the final part, Poison, Shadow and Farewell, begins in media res, following immediately from the bizarre and shocking scene that ended Volume 2 without explanation.The narrator, Jacques Deza, a Spanish academic recruited to an obscure branch of the British intelligence service, has just witnessed his boss, the urbane and enigmatic Bertram Tupra, brutally assault a vain young diplomat in the toilet of a London nightclub, because the boy was ill-advisedly flirting with the wife of one of Tupra's contacts. It is worth mentioning that this attack involved a sword. Incident may be heavily outweighed by digression and reflection in Marias's novels, but the violence, when it comes, is primitive and inflicted with swords and spears, atavistic relics of a bygone, martial age.Deza works for Tupra as an "interpreter of lives". His role is to study people of interest to MI6, attempt to know them through observation and predict how they will behave in given situations. In this, his work runs parallel to that of the novelist. The title, borrowed from Shakespeare's Henry IV, alludes to the impossibility of Deza's task: there is no means of knowing another or even ourselves, nor of predicting the face someone will show tomorrow, as Deza discovers of himself.As the third part opens, Tupra takes Deza back to his house after the nightclub attack and uses his act to question Deza's own moral system, his modern attitude towards life and death. "We've become very soft, very thin-skinned, we think we should last for ever," he tells Deza. "We ought to be accustomed to the temporary nature of things, but we're not. We insist on not being temporary, which is why it's so easy to frighten us, as you've seen, all one has to do is unsheathe a sword."Tupra attempts to convince Deza of his own more archaic – one might say amoral – world view, which holds that the death of an individual has little significance and is often necessary. "We're always making calculations," Tupra says, "weighing up whether it's worth letting one person die now if that will mean many others will live." To this end, Tupra shows the Spaniard a series of videotapes in which prominent public figures are shown to be involved in acts of torture, murder and rape. Deza feels this "poison" entering his consciousness as Tupra forbids him to look away, and the rest of the novel is a slow unfolding of the effects of this poison on Deza's sense of self, and his relationship with violence.It is easy to see why WG Sebald called Marias a "twin writer"; both share the same preoccupation with echoes and resonances. Marias also often cites Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy (which he translated into Spanish) as a major influence. Like Sterne, he has said, "I progress as I digress." These digressions, often in the form of Proustian sentences covering the best part of a page, may initially deter the unaccustomed, but once your ear becomes attuned to the rhythms of language and thought, Marias's writing takes on some of the qualities of music.The three parts of Your Face Tomorrow are structured as intricately as a symphony as motifs and phrases recur with subtly varying emphases. Poison, Shadow and Farewell is a breathtaking and complex finale to an extraordinary work of art and ought to establish Marias's place in the modern European canon.FictionStephanie Merrittguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
Robert B. Parker, the Prolific Writer Who Created Spenser, Is Dead at 77 Mr. Parker was the best-selling mystery writer who created Spenser, a tough, glib Boston private detective who was the hero of nearly 40 novels. feeds.nytimes.com |