Wednesday 16 December 2009

A day spent reading Lionel Shriver is an emotionally draining experience

I have just emerged dazed and shaky from almost a whole day reading Lionel Shriver’s The Post-Birthday World. I only started it last night but felt compelled to lose hours oblivious alone on the sofa to finish it. It’s been a long time since a book made that much of an emotional, almost a physical impact on me - I feel fluttery and drained. We Need to Talk About Kevin was a similarly intense experience – I found it immensely difficult to read but at the same time extremely moving and somehow important. Shriver has a gift for making things hit deeply and personally. In the case of both books, as well as being completely absorbed in the stories, I felt as though they were discussing some point of essential importance to me.


Not all books are just a ‘good read’. Some can be a difficult and painful read. Not all books are an escape. Some turn your gaze uncomfortably back on yourself with a sense of the ‘unheimliche’ or uncanny, the familiar made strange.

As a child, I could become utterly absorbed in a book, books were vitally important to me. As adults, I think many of us view books merely as a diversion, something to fill in empty time on the train, but not as a part of our ‘real lives’. I might feel as though I have done nothing today. But if something provokes a deep emotional reaction in you, what could be more real than that?

Tuesday 24 November 2009

TV Review: Life, BBC1

This is a nature documentary of grand scope, of the kind that it seems the BBC can do with its eyes closed these days. After all, nature can provide a seemingly endless array of fascinating creatures, and the Beeb has the resources to get stunning footage from all corners of the globe.


While Life doesn’t disappoint in these respects, it isn’t up there with Planet Earth or Blue Planet. While each segment is excellent, they seem to have been strung together with little effort to make a coherent structure; David Attenborough links them with vague bits of narration about the life having to adapt to survive, or something equally non-specific. He even opened last night’s episode by saying: “Life is at its most intense in the relationship between predator and prey.” “Life is at its most intense”? What does that even mean? And in addition, last night’s episode seemed to re-visit some of the animals already featured in previous episodes.

Having said all that, I still have to admit that the programme-makers can get away with being a little lazy, since the content is so intriguing and beautifully shot. Ants that farm a fungus to feed their colony, tiny frogs nurturing their tadpoles in the water caught in the petals of a rainforest flower, underwater footage of the wonderfully bizarre-looking star-nosed mole – there’s plenty here to keep the viewer amazed at the diversity of the natural world. And, after all, that is the whole point of a documentary like this.

Friday 20 November 2009

Theatre Review: War Horse, New London Theatre

War Horse depicts the First World War from the perspective of a farm horse commandeered by the army, and his teenage owner, who signs up and experiences the horror of the trenches while searching for his beloved animal. It has been rightly praised for the amazing life-size horse puppets. Intricately jointed and operated by three people each, their movements are incredibly life-like, right down to the twitching of an ear, the flicking of a tail. The puppeteers even combine their voices to produce a range of convincing horse noises.


What makes this even more impressive is that there is no attempt at absolute realism; the puppets although perfectly shaped, are not covered with paint or fur, they are just wooden frameworks with the puppeteers clearly visible. But there is something magical about theatre that acknowledges its artifice in this way, especially when the artifice is so ingenious. The audience can get completely caught up in the absolute horsey-ness of these creatures, while simultaneously admiring the craft behind the illusion. Indeed, I found I could flip between the two states of perception, as though looking at one of those trick pictures that can be either a black vase or two white faces.

The human actors in War Horse are unfortunately somewhat upstaged by the puppets, and their performances were sometimes a little strained and over-acted. But this was a minor gripe that didn’t really detract from my enjoyment of a deeply moving piece of theatre, which uses the suffering of animals as an effective window into the horrors of war.

Thursday 24 September 2009

TV Review: Lost Land of the Volcano

I am a little bit in love with the naturalists in this programme. They head off on intrepid adventures through stunning, untouched rainforest in Papua New Guinea, finding fascinating, bizarre and wonderful animals at every turn – and the way their faces light up when they make a discovery just melts my heart. For a start, I am a sucker for a man who loves animals, and who could resist the sight of muscled climber/caver/adventurer Steve cradling in his arms an unfeasibly cute - and hitherto unknown to science - species of marsupial or cameraman Gordon stroking the fur of a newly discovered rat the size of a cat? But there’s something more than that. It’s the sense that they are utterly passionate about their work, and about protecting these species, and that is both touching and hugely admirable.


This series suffers from a very annoying case of short-attention-span editing, and can’t stop cutting backwards and forwards between different strands of the action, constantly reminding the viewer what is happening in each. But it is beautifully shot and the quality of the material and the enthusiasm of the people involved shines through, so this is less of an irritant than it is in some documentaries. If this programme fails to make you happy, you must have a heart of stone.

Sunday 20 September 2009

DVD review: The Wrestler

After I finished watching The Wrestler on DVD last night, I switched over to the TV just in time to see Daniel Craig and some baddies kicking each other down the stairs in Casino Royale, and I couldn’t help but notice that there seemed to be something missing. The blows lacked impact. Bond could get kicked, punched, sent flying, and get straight back up again. It just didn’t feel like he was getting hurt at all.


This is the case with the vast majority of film violence, but not in The Wrestler. There is nothing glamorous or heroic about violence here. I was watching, wincing from behind my hands as Mickey Rourke’s ageing fighter Randy the Ram was beaten, slammed to the ground, cut, and even stapled with a staple gun. This film is honest about pain. You feel every blow.

Rourke is truly impressive, investing his character with a hulking power, whilst conveying a sense of exhaustion, of being a broken man. Faced with a humiliating day job, bitterness from his estranged daughter (Evan Rachel Wood) and rejection from the kind-hearted stripper he forms a bond with (Marisa Tomei), the Ram drags himself through his wrestling moves because it is all he has left. When we see him bleaching his hair and visiting a tanning salon to prepare for a fight, there is a strong sense of the fragility of his performance, the cheap tricks used to maintain it.

Perhaps The Wrestler can be read as a commentary on violence as entertainment. It certainly feels that way when we see the crowds roaring for two men, dripping with blood, slamming each other with sticks wrapped in barbed wire. But more than anything else, this is a moving account of ageing, failure, and the vulnerability of a man whose body is starting to let him down.

Thursday 17 September 2009

Review: District 9

District 9 is a film with two levels and it works very well on both of them: it is a story about aliens, with plenty of action, shootouts, and people exploding in grusome ways, but it can also be read as a film about racial segregation and injustice.
Twenty years before the action begins, a huge alien spaceship has come to a halt in the skies above Johannesburg, apparantly broken down and unable to leave. The world has had to deal with a million stranded aliens, and has done so by enclosing them all in a fenced-off slum known as District 9. A powerful corporation called MNU manages human relations with District 9 in the hope of finding out how to use the aliens' weapons technology. There are many imaginative and oddly convincing details: the use of the derogatory term 'prawn' to refer to the aliens, the attempts to classify their status and rights and the criminal trade in alien weapons that springs up all seem like believable human reactions to the situation. There is an uneasy sense of the injustices that can be commited by people who think they are only doing their best.
District 9 stars virtual unknown Sharlto Copley, who gives a great performance as MNU box ticker Wikus Van De Merwe, who becomes contaminated with a mysterious fluid that cause his body to transform bit by bit into something more and more like a prawn. He is an ordianry man, a decidedly unheroic charachter, horrified at becoming the thing he has always looked down on.
Much of the film is shot in a documentary style, with interviews with Wikus's family and collegues, although this is dropped towards the end, when the more conventional action sequences kick in. However, the best bits are the solo sequences, as Wikus, with one prawn arm and his body starting to deteriorate, wanders through District 9, dressed like a tramp and reduced to eating catfood. It is an affecting depection of how someone judged to be less than human can quickly be forced to lose his dignity and humanity.

Wednesday 16 September 2009

The things that leap out at you on the second time of reading

It’s funny how different a book can seem when you go back to it, especially if it’s some years later. I have been re-reading Eggers’ experimental memoir, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, which I loved the first time (although I’ve never been sure about the title – it’s so awkward to actually say, it makes the speaker sound like a bit of an idiot). This time, I’m enjoying it equally, but I’m also discovering all kinds of things that I didn’t notice before, or at least, that did not stick in my memory. The context in which you read something can affect how it strikes you, can change, if only in small ways, the meaning of the book.


While still at college, Eggers lost both of his parents to cancer, in a stroke of horrible coincidence, in the space of a single winter. He was left to raise his seven-year-old brother, and this book is, among other things, an oddly touching account of their unconventional life together. I’d remembered the book’s brutal honesty about bereavement and the author’s fallibility, the experimental style, with characters breaking out of their roles to discuss the book itself, the yearning descriptions of being young and idealistic in San Francisco and the author’s sense that his strange and tragic life has made him somehow chosen, that extraordinary things, for better or worse, will keep on happening to him.

But it came as a complete surprise to me how insightfully, almost prophetically, he writes about the confessional culture fostered by reality TV and its like. Unlike other writers of ‘misery memoirs’, Eggers is sharply analytical about the need for self-revelation that drove him to write the book. He describes the feeling that by exposing his problems to a huge audience, he can somehow dilute his suffering, that his generation should purge where the previous one repressed.

This theme is most apparent in the section of the book where Eggers applies to be on reality TV show The Real World, a forerunner of Big Brother in which a group of ordinary people were filmed living in a house together, although they were free to go in and out as they pleased. What starts as a record of his interview with the producer morphs into a direct plea to the audience, a self-conscious but heartfelt attempt to explain his desperate need for self-exposure. His words should be seen as the voice of the god-knows how many ordinary people who have thrust themselves recklessly into the spotlight and opened themselves up to public mockery:

“Have I given you enough? Reward me. Put me on television. Let me share this with millions…Everyone must know. I deserve this. I have this coming. Am I on? Have I broken your heart? Was my story sad enough?”

“I need community, I need feedback, I need love, connection, give-and-take – I will bleed if they will love.”