You Don’t Seem Yourself, Mr Bond

Saturday, March 12th, 2011

When I finished reading Devil May Care by Sebastian Faulks last night, I felt vaguely cheated. The book was billed as “A James Bond Novel,” with the author tag: “Sebastian Faulks writing as Ian Fleming.” 

Other writers have taken up the 007 mantle between Fleming and Faulks. John Gardner wrote fourteen Bond novels (and two film novelisations), but never claimed to be writing as Ian Fleming, so felt able to ignore literary criticism like he did not “have Ian Fleming’s vocabulary.” He also felt able to put his own stamp on Bond.

Raymond Benson then wrote six Bond novels and several short stories. Like Gardner, he never claimed to be “writing as James Bond.”

Sebastian Faulks, in this first (and hopefully last) attempt did many things right with Devil May Care. His villain, Dr Julius Gorner, with his monkey’s paw and hatred of all things English, IS a Bond villain. Scarlett and Poppy really ARE Bond girls. But James Bond is NOT himself. He’s physically and emotionally vulnerable, his attempts at banter with Moneypenny are disastrously clumsy and in some ways he’s politically incorrect, while in others, such as his refusal to take Scarlett to bed, he’s been metrosexualised. He’s also not as cold as Ian Fleming’s Bond. Devil May Care contains frequent references to his cruel eyes, but Ian Fleming backed up those cruel eyes with actions and attitudes. Sebastian Faulk’s Bond seems like a rather pleasant fellow.

Unfortunately,Faulks’s effort also falls down with the plot, which appears to end around page 330. yet the novel is 394 pages long. There’s a (short) villainous last gasp, but those last sixty pages feel as though they’ve been tagged on for the sake of giving the book a thicker spine.

And so I felt cheated in a way I don’t think I’d have felt if the publishers hadn’t claimed that Faulks was “writing as Ian Fleming.” If this had been Faulk’s own take on the character, then I’d have felt less dissatisfied. But I don’t feel like I read either an Ian Fleming novel or a Sebastian Faulks one. What I read fell short of both.

So it’s just as well I bought it on a special “Buy One, Get One Free” offer. I’ll treat Devil May Care as the free one, and hope to get my money’s worth out of the other book (Ravens by George Dawes Green).

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“I Don’t Like American Authors.”

Wednesday, March 9th, 2011

“I don’t like American writers,” Jane said the other day.

“What? None of them?” I asked.

“None of them.”

“Have you tried all of them?”

“No. But the ones I’ve tried, I don’t like.”

Jane reads alot of books, and particularly likes quality fiction by Indian authors (Vikram Seth, Rohintan Mistry etc), so she is a reader. Nevertheless, her prejudice against American authors seemed wholly unjustified. So I leapt to the moral high ground.

“Have you tried John Steinbeck?” I asked. “Ernest Hemmingway? Annie Proulx?”

“I read The Shipping News.”

“And?”

“Didn’t like it. All those fractured little sentences,” she said, in fractured little sentences.

I prepared for another onslaught of quality American authors, but then hesitated. After all, I don’t read books by many Indian authors. A Suitable Boy, yes (loved it, and agreed with a review by the Times that said: “It will keep you company for the rest of your life”), but not many others. Which is strange, because the ones I’ve read, I’ve enjoyed. Probably more so than many books by American authors.

The result of this conversation?

I’ve decided to read more books by Indian authors.

And Jane? She doesn’t like American authors, and that’s the end of the story.

Image’s Original Source: http://www.njla.org/

Tags: writers
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Mystery Writing

Sunday, March 6th, 2011

Is Stephen King’s The Colorado Kid a complete or a completed mystery?

As a child, I devoured mystery and detectve stories: The Three Investigators (the name Jupiter Jones has stayed with me ever since), The Famous Five, The Secret Seven, The Hardy Boys, even Nancy Drew. Somewhere along the transition from childhood to grown up reading material, I moved to other genres: science-fiction, mainly, and then on to thrillers and fantasy. Apart from a few books like The Oxford Murders and Death on the Nile, I have seldom returned to mysteries. I rarely even watch them on TV.

But this week, I’ve experienced two very different mysteries: a Stephen King novel called The Colorado Kid and Colombo: Prescription: Murder, a play performed by the Middle Ground Theatre Company. 

The play was based on a television drama of the same title. The actor who played Colombo, John Guerrasio, perfectly captured Peter Falk’s mannerisms and idiosyncracies (”Oh, just one more thing” brought a cheer from the audience). But the play would not have been a success if Colombo hadn’t solved the mystery. If, instead, it had ended with a baffled Colombo shaking his head and saying, “I guess we’ll never know whodunnit.”

(SPOILER ALERT!)

However, that’s exactly how The Colorado Kid finished. Stephen King justified this lack of closure by repetatively having the characters explain that mysteries often don’t get solved - that’s why they’re mysterious - and then, in the afterword, by saying…well, much the same.

This lack of resolution gave the story a lazy sense of complacency; in the same way the final book in The Dark Tower series failed to resolve Roland’s story, so The Colorado Kid failed to resolve the Colorado Kid’s. King justified his Dark Tower ending by saying, “It’s the only one I had.”

But for the Colorado Kid, he claimed he had plenty of endings up his sleeve - he just chose not to play them. Why, though? It didn’t give the story an exciting Italian Job style cliffhanger; rather, it left me faintly irritated, as I often am when someone hasn’t done everything I’ve paid them for.

To finish my mystery splurge for the week, I watched Scooby Doo with my kids today. After Fred’s explanation, the unmasked villain snarled, “And I’d have got away with it if wasn’t for you pesky kids!”

And the mystery was completed.

Tags: mystery, stories, writing
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Life, The Universe And Everything

Thursday, March 3rd, 2011

What do Douglas Adams, David Eddings and David Gemmell have in common?

42

Clearly, that question isn’t going to solve the meaning of life, but what they have in common is they all wrote books that, as a teenager, I reread countless times, and they’re all dead.

Douglas Adams died far too young. Never the most prolific of authors, he would surely have written several more novels if his heart hadn’t given way. His books were part of the reason why I was determined to travel. If I couldn’t see the universe, I could see the world. And nearly all of my ideas for stories have been inspired by my travels.

Athough not as sharply as Douglas Adams’s, David Gemmell’s life was also cut short. Now, he was a prolific author, having written over 30 novels. He once said, “No one gets out of this life alive.” He knew  smoking would probably be the death of him, but when he tried to quit, he claimed the quality of his writing nose-dived. He died aged 57, shortly after a quadruple heart bypass. From him, I learnt the value of a fast plot. he once said he doesn’t care about detailed room descriptions - only what happens in the room.

Although David Eddings started writing relatively late in life, he wrote twenty-seven novels before he died aged 76. So while his life wasn’t exactly cut short, it could perhaps be argued that any author’s life is incomplete if they leave behind an unfinished novel, and Eddings was, apparently, working on a novel when he died. He wrote epic fantasies with repetitive plots, but his characters made them work. Although stereotypical, they were immensely likeable, and their banter was frequently hilarious. From him, I learnt the value of creating sympathetic characters who liked each other; after all, if they don’t, how will the reader?

So: what do Douglas Adams, David Gemmell and David Eddings have in common?  They might not have have helped me learn what the question is to the meaning of life, but they all taught me important lessons about writing.

Incidentally, Terry Pratchett, although thankfully still very much alive and writing, makes a neat little addendum to this post. He recently stated that when he dies, he expects, like David Gemmell, to be found slumped over his writing desk. He then wants whoever finds him, before they do anything else, to save his work in progress on the computer.

Tags: authors
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Pretentious Overwriting

Monday, February 28th, 2011

Who’s guilty of pretentious overwriting?

(Not this man, that’s for sure!)

• Ernest Hemingway.
• Photograph’s original source: George Kargar, Time Life, Getty

A review of a Dean Koontz book the other day accused Koontz of pretentious overwriting, but concluded that the book was still worth a shot - especially for fans of the great man.

I have to confess that I do agree with the reviewer. I’ve read loads of Koontz books, and he certainly can overwrite a scene. His weather personifications can be particularly heavy-handed. Yet he does manage to carry it all off with a deft touch. His characters (well, the good guys) are always sympathetic and their banter can be funny. His villains are reliably deplorable, and his stories - despite the overwriting - move along at a fair clip.

So who else is guilty of “pretentious overwriting”? If we presume that great authors (Charles Dickens et al) are not pretentious because all later authors have pretensions to write like them, the list is, I’m sure, huge. To some extent, pretentious overwriting is the author playing with language, trying to find as many different ways as possible of connecting words within sentences: Guy Gavriel Kay, China Mieville, probably any writer who has ever used a simile, metaphor, adverb or adjective. Anyone who isn’t Ernest Hemingway or Elmore Leonard, in other words.   

But surely we should want writers to be bold, to not all try to imitate Cormac McCarthy. Fiction writing records explorations into the imagination. Some writers might see a series of hard nouns: pebbles in a stream, as Hemmingway once said. Others don’t. They see ethereal, hazy images: shimming iridescence trickling over rainbow rocks. Personally, I see pebbles in a stream, but I’m glad other writers see differently.

What writers do have to be careful is pretentious underediting, however. By all means, write the descriptions and convoluted character introspection. But don’t let it obstruct the story, the race to the last page. Upstairs, I have 950 A5 notebook pages of the first draft of a chess novel waiting to be culled. When I’ve typed it up, I hope it will be 350 A4 pages. And when it’s edited and proofed to the nth degree, I’m aiming for 250 pages. Somehow, I doubt there’ll be any room for weather personification.

Tags: writers
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Once Upon A Wartime

Saturday, February 26th, 2011

The Imperial War Museum’s Once Upon A Wartime exhibition explores and brings to life five children’s war novels in a stylish and informative, but not particularly fun, way.

 Image’s original source: http://www.iwm.org.uk 

Like the children I visted the museum with, I suffered from not having read any of the five books in the exhibition:

• War Horse by Michael Morpurgo
• The Silver Sword by Ian Serraillier
• Carrie’s War by Nina Bawden
• The Machine Gunners by Robert Westall
• Little Soldier by Bernard Ashley

Each gallery within the exhibition brought one of the books to life, explaining the author’s writing process, the historical contents and some of the key features of the book. In the War Horse section, the role of cavalry horses in World War One was explored. In Carrie’s War, there was a lifelike model of the kitchen table where the children could…well, sit down. As if they were at a real kitchen table. There was also an air raid shelter to crawl into, some big blocks to build with and an interactive quiz about The Silver Sword But there was nothing that really excited the children.

Admittedly, my expectations for the exhibition were, like the entry price, rather high. I hoped that it would be interesting for me and, because it was about children’s books, be fun and informative for the children - and would also inspire them to want to read the books.

Diane Lees, the Director-General of the Imperial War Museum, publicised the Once Upon A Wartime exhibition by saying: “…focusing on these extraordinary fictional accounts of conflicts is an innovative and, we hope successful, way of helping children, and adults, understand the experience of war.”

In that aim, I suppose the exhibition was a success. We all left the exhibition with some level of understanding of the experience of war. But as a writer and a father, I hoped it would have another goal: to inspire children to want to read.

And perhaps because sitting at a kitchen table wasn’t quite as exciting as the exhibitors might have hoped, the fun factor that might have brought about that inspiration just wasn’t there. Everything was stylishly wrought, and the objects were all clearly displayed, but it wasn’t interactive enough to retain the interest of non-readers.

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Emotional Literacy

Monday, February 21st, 2011

Real men don’t cry because they’re emotionally illiterate - and asleep in front of the TV.

The BBC’s For Crying Out Loud was all about crying. Why do some people cry more than others? What makes us cry? Are we emotional illiterate if we don’t cry? The investigator, Jo Brand, used to be a psychiatric nurse, so that qualified her to lead the programme - at least in the producer’s mind.

As is often the case with these sort of documentaries, the programme would have been perfectly timed at thirty minutes, but at sixty it felt a bit of a stretch. So much so, the programme felt compelled to inflict upon us Loss,  a group of costumed, masochistic onion cutters who meet in a small, enclosed space and revel in the tears the onions produce. Since the tears caused by onion cutting are not the same as those caused by real loss, there seemed no real point to this segment; even Jo Brand seemed embarrassed when she emerged from the pretension.

There were other speculative excursions into crying: chats with friends in Dulwich, with Jo Brand’s mother, with a comedian, with a writer, with an actor; a visit to a workshop where people tried to make each other cry, apparently through staring.

In thirty minutes, with perhaps a more qualified presenter (Professor Robert Winston or some such), this could have been an informative and educative programme. At sixty minutes, and as much as I like Jo Brand, it bored me to tears.

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Afghan Cricket Club

Monday, February 14th, 2011

BBC4’s Storyville: Afghan Cricket Club - Out of the Ashes is a true underdog story of passion, perserverence and national pride.

Image Source: www.frontlineclub.com

This heartwarming documentary film made me feel happy, sad, relieved, stressed and ultimately rewarded by the 90 minutes I spent watching it. There isn’t much you can watch on TV that does that.

If it was a Hollywood movie, I imagine the pitch would read like this (apologies if this pitch is even rougher than the ones the Afghan team have to train on):

A refugee from his war torn homeland, Taj Malik learnt cricket the hard way, in a rubble-strewn camp in Pakistan. He taught his brothers how to play, and took his love for the game back to war-torn Afghanistan where he set up the national Afghan cricket team, with his brother as opening batsman. Together, they defy the odds by winning a World Cup qualifying tournament in Jersey. But is Taj experienced enough to take Afghanistan all the way?

The title of this film appeals to cricket lovers, yet is ultimately misleading, because the themes are universal: national pride, passion, loyalty, culture clashes, triumph over adversity, betrayal and redemption. It’s all there - and it is outstanding.

My one quibble? Not enough cricket. But then again, the lack of cricket ensured my girlfriend enjoyed the film. If there’d been more wickets given away or thunking sixes, she’d have started demanding I put American Idol or Got To Dance on.

Now that would have been a waste of ninety minutes.

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Diary Stories

Saturday, February 12th, 2011

Image source: www.filmofilia.com

I’ve been thinking about novels told in the form of diaries or letters, such as Dracula, Adrian Mole, Bridget Jones and The Diary of a Wimpy Kid.

While the format is entertaining and serves a clear plot and character purpose, I can’t help thinking it’s   ultimately flawed because it makes the narrator unreliable. When I write my  diary every night, I’m usually too tired to write loads. I would never think of relating entire conversations, so reading a fictional diary in which a single day’s entry goes on for pages always seems slightly unrealistic.

David Morrell said in Lessons From A Lifetime In Writing that the reader has to believe a first person narrator’s reason for writing the story down. While a journal/diary format explains the reason for writing, if the way it relates the story doesn’t feel entirely authentic - because it is too detailed to be believable - it’s solving one problem by creating another, much larger one.

I watched The Diary of A Wimpy Kid at the cinema and enjoyed it (although was struck by how much it reminded me of The Wonder Years). My son and nephew both loved it. I also liked both Bridget Jones novels and all the Adrian Mole ones, but I don’t think I’ll ever try to write a diary format novel. If I can’t write much in my real diary, how on earth could I write more in a  fictional one?

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Tahir Square

Thursday, February 10th, 2011

Passion, pluck and people power in Tahir Square. Wet fish in Whitehall.

Photograph’s original source: BBC News, 10.2.11.   http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-12421000 

As I write, the news is broadcasting images of Tahir Square. The atmosphere looks stunning…tents make it look like an encampment. This is people power reminiscent oof when the Berlin Wall was torn down.  Whether Mubarek going (if that is what he’s about to announce) will solve some of Egypt’s woes, leading to a possibly fairer redistibution of wealth, better job and career opportunities and a more democratic system of government, is another matter. I hope so, for what my hopes and wishes are worth.

What all this does show is how much ordinary people can achieve. It’s taken three weeks to push Mubarek to the point where he could resign today. Makes me wish people in the United Kingdom had more get up and go about them, and would protest more.

Imagine if the scenes in Tahir Square were repeated in Trafalgar Square. If everyone I know who is unhappy with the Coalition Government piled into Trafalgar Square, London would be crippled. And people should be angry - the Government has broken countless election promises in the space of a year, cut essential services, cut education budgets, cut police budgets, cut health budgets, and every time they’re challenged, they say, “It’s not our fault, and anyway, it’s for your own good.”

How do they get away with it, every time? I’d understand if they had some aura of charisma, but George Osbourne, David Cameron and Nick Clegg are as charasmatic as wet fish. There’s an army major speaking to the people in Tahir Square at the moment, full of charisma and passion. I wonder if anyone in the government has ever been as passionate and angry as that soldier? I doubt it, somehow.

And look what happens when they are faced with genuine anger and passion, as in the student protests. Because of the actions of a tiny minority, they denounce the protests. But. Just imagine if all the people who genuinely care in the UK really did protest in Trafalgar Square. Protested and kept protesting, staying there like the people in Tahir Square, until they achieved what they want, peacefully and good-humouredly. But staying there. Imagine tents around the lions, around the fountains, in front of the National Gallery. Traffic halted for weeks on end.

Maybe the people of the United Kingdom could learn something from those from the Land of the Pharoahs. And maybe they should learn it, quick, before our own health care, education system and job opportunities are dismantled.

Tags: Egypt
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