Paul Auster- Man in the Dark

Man in the Dark

Faber & Faber

Paul Auster

2008 

Other Paul Auster Reviews- The Invention of Solitude - In The Country of Last Things - Moon Palace - Auggie Wren's Christmas Story - The Art of Hunger - Mr. Vertigo - Timbuktu - The Book of Illusions - Oracle Night - Invisible

“Betty died of a broken heart. Some people laugh when they hear that phrase, but that's because they don't know anything about the world. People die of broken hearts. It happens every day, and it will go on happening to the end of time."

Continuing on my rapid exploration of Paul Auster's bibliography, I came to this curious, thoughtful and sometimes bewitching novella, taking a premise featuring an amalgamation of some of Auster's most prevalent ideas from both his earlier and later authorship styles. Weaving in a series of short, tangential stories of varying realism into the framework of one dominating main narrative, Auster was attempting the potentially paradoxical (alliterative mood) goal of fitting a meaningful, multi-layered series of reflective stories into the very limited space of a 180-page (in my Faber & Faber paperback edition) novella. Featuring the strong post-modern styles of Auster's ground-breaking and edgy earlier fiction- like obviously The New York Trilogy, which I think I must have mentioned in every Auster review I've written on this blog and have to re-read one day- mixed in with the more grounded, contemplative character-study-based, magical realism-tinged fiction of his latter days, Man in the Dark  is far from perfect, but overall is a great story containing a nice mixture of drama, suspense, and even a bit of action.

The main plot, from which the narrating lead character inter-weaves a series of other stories, is an intense, realistic human interest drama stylistically most comparable to Auster's later fiction, such as Invisible or Sunset Park. Lead character August Brill is an elderly writer living with both his daughter and granddaughter, all three of them grieving over separate losses that are explored further towards the end of the book. As the unwavering framework of the whole book, grief and the search to overcome it permeates every page, as Auster presents it with the utmost seriousness. So seriously, in fact, that when it came towards the very end, where Brill and his granddaughter face-up to the rather horrific death of her fiance, things had become so serious and straightforward that I started to find it actually a bit silly, which I suppose isn't a great recommendation. Thankfully things are kept from being bogged down in a potential mire of seriousness by the other stories that Brill tells with his own, one in particular.

Auster doesn't do colour.

August Brill, the narrator, changes from the past to the present tense to narrate a story he's composing in his head, a story much different in tone and style from the 'real' main story about his family. In this story a man named Brick goes to bed next to his wife one night and then wakes up in the morning to find himself stuck down in a hole, in the middle of nowhere, in a parallel universe. He soon learns that, in this world, the US is embroiled in a bloody, modern civil war, and that he specifically has been chosen to cross worlds and act as an assassin, one who could end the fighting with a single bullet. I'm refrain from giving many details, since half the pleasure of this side-story is the thrilling suspense- for the first time in a while, possibly since In The Country of Last Things, Auster embraces more contemporary popular storytelling techniques and genres, and it's a lot of fun. I don't think I'd want him to switch to this kind of thing more often, but I do think that he was perhaps making a conscientious effort to catch the eye of new readers, to lure them into his web of postmodernism as he balances the stories of Brick and August Brill.

I have to admit that it disappointed me to discover that Brick's story ends rather abruptly, mid-way through Man in the Dark, since it was very entertaining, but the truth is that Auster's key concern was always with the realistic human drama of his center story; August Brill's grieving widower-hood, and his efforts to connect with his daughter and granddaughter, so the three of them can together overcome the tragic losses they've suffered. Brill ruminates on other short stories and memories, with the cumulative effect all relating to the whole. Auster packs quite a lot into a small book, keeping things constantly fast-paced; something that also might appeal to newbies. The same quickness and short length of the book is in some ways a hindrance to the overall story, since I don't think it allows Auster the space he needs to create enough of an emotional impact; especially in regards to the revelations as to how Brill's granddaughter's fiance was killed, something that was meant to shock and move the reader, but left me feeling somewhat unmoved through its over-the-top nature. Very topical, though.

In conclusion then, Man in the Dark is a very enjoyable, but rather flawed novella that thankfully overcomes its flaws to stand as a notable achievement. Though far from Auster's best work from a critical standpoint, the suspenseful nature and quick pacing make it a very easy read with far more crossover appeal than Auster's typical novels. Cautiously recommended as probably a good introductory novel, with a nice blend of the author's preferred styles from across the years.
 

Thompson on Kerouac

For what it's worth, I like both of them.

Jean Cocteau- Les Enfants Terribles

Les Enfants Terribles

Jean Cocteau

1929

“At all costs the true world of childhood must prevail, must be restored; that world whose momentous, heroic, mysterious quality is fed on airy nothings, whose substance is so ill-fitted to withstand the brutal touch of adult inquisition.”

Oh boy, here we go; a new attempt to review a book that, honestly, I don't quite know what to make of. Eagle-eyed readers may have noticed through the quitegoodreads box, hidden somewhere down the right-hand side of this page, that on Goodreads (that ironic bastion of *cough* quality book ratings) I hastily rated Les Enfants Terribles three out of five stars, which is technically above average (if we assume that average should be two-and-a-half stars); but that was almost entirely due to the quality of Jean Cocteau's translated prose. That, by itself, is very, very high in quality, written in the intellectual, vocabular style of prose masters such Joseph Conrad or W. Somerset Maugham- essentially the type of outstanding sentence-structure and word choices that I desperately wish I could emulate, requiring a naturally genius mind that I doubt can ever be taught. A lot of credit must go to translator Rosamond Lehmann for conveying Cocteau's wordy style in a very fluid, natural-sounding manner.

So then, if I respected and enjoyed Cocteau's authorship so much, what's wrong with this book? To be honest, I'm still not quite sure, other than to say that the plot establishment, development and conclusion to this book seemed so very odd to me that it left my critical faculties in turmoil. It didn't help me that, before I started reading and researching, I had no idea whom Jean Cocteau was, nor what this book was about. I bought my copy on a whim (at the same time I purchased Less Than Zero) because it was cheap, published as a Vintage Classic, and undoubtedly French and strange. This latter part was the key, since I've partially explored and enjoyed works by Albert Camus, Jean Paul Sartre, and the admittedly-not-French but very Euro-similar Milan Kundera in the past. I'm by no means an expert in philosophy (barely a novice, in fact), but I do enjoy the vague sensations of existentialism and was hoping for more of that sort of thing.

Cocteau is cool.

What I got with Les Enfants Terribles (which was apparently first released in the US as The Holy Terrors for some reason) was something rather different; essentially a very strange psychological character-based thriller, starring a very small group of characters. The lead characters, and terrible children of the title, are Paul and Elisabeth, a brother and sister with no father, a bed-ridden mother, and exorbitant wealth. The key to the story as it develops is something that Paul and Elisabeth call 'The Game', which is essentially a concentrated mutual effort to annoy and upset each other through any mental games necessary, usually involving innocent, unwitting foil such as their friends Gerard and Agatha. The winner of the game is the sibling able to frustrate the other the most by getting in the last word and presenting themselves as superior, inevitably leading to the tragic ending to the novel (which I won't spoil, but which readers should be able to see coming fairly easily).

Paul and Elisabeth's game becomes more intensely psychological as the book goes on, callously playing with the lives of their friends without much thought. As a result, both of the characters came across as villainous to me, leaving me caring very little about their ultimate fate. To be fair, I think Cocteau's ultimate goal was to leave the lasting impression that all of the children in this story are essentially victims of circumstance, where, despite being granted all of the material wealth they could ever need, the lack of parental love and moral guidance eventually warps them both into irredeemable psychopaths with no understanding of the consequences of their actions. It occurs to me now that it perhaps wasn't coincidence that I found Les Enfants Terribles and Easton Ellis' Less Than Zero on the same shelf.

As I often do when reviewing work by an author whom I'm experiencing for the first time, I feel somewhat inadequate in attempting to properly analyse what Cocteau, an early 20th century renaissance man, was fully trying to achieve. In Cocteau's case that's perhaps going to remain a problem, since Enfants is really his only piece of prose fiction with enough of a reputation to be widely available in English; and I'm not enough of a poetry, theatre, or French cinema fan to search out his other work. In essence, though, Enfants did leave a notable impression on me due to the power of its ideas and quality of its prose, but I can't say I enjoyed it in the way I would've like to. I suppose that might have been the effect Cocteau was looking for with this book; not to be loved as a favourite by anyone, but instead to be remembered for its oddness by everyone, with its key ideas slowly permeating the mind of the reader over time to leave a lasting impression forever.

Charles Bukowski- South of No North

South of No North

HarperCollins

Charles Bukowski

1973 (Collected)

Other Bukowski Reviews; Post Office - Factotum - Women - Ham on Rye - Tales of Ordinary Madness - Notes of a Dirty Old Man

“My objection to war was not that I had to kill somebody or be killed senselessly, that hardly mattered. What I objected to was to be denied the right to sit in a small room and starve and drink cheap wine and go crazy in my own way and at my own leisure.”

When people talk about Charles Bukowski, they almost always only talk about his Henry Chinaski-starring series of novels and about his poetry. His career as a short-story writer unfairly gets overlooked, I feel, though Bukowski was such a prolific author that there are numerous collections available bringing together samples of the many, many articles he wrote for various underground literary magazines throughout the 1960's and beyond. I've quickly looked at a couple of them on this blog, Tales of Ordinary Madness and Notes of a Dirty Old Man, collected in eye-catching new editions by Virgin, and while I enjoyed the material individually I do feel that as collections they're somewhat inconsistent; where the frantic pace and anger of the author's tone combined with the lack of context (for me, anyway) for many of the topics and references ultimately took away some enjoyment when reading them from start to finish as one chronological piece. 

South of No North, however, broke the streak of awkward Bukowski collections by collecting a much more balanced selection of work. Collected early on in Bukowski's career (proceeded by only Post Office in relation to the full-length adventures of Henry Chinaski), the stories collected here are incredibly raw and fresh, lifted of the invisible responsibility of reputation surrounding Bukowski's later work. Initially  collected and published by Bukowski supporters Black Sparrow Press, it's easy to see just how South of No North would've thrown the heavy-drinking, no-care-giving power of Bukowki's evocative and familiar, yet totally unique voice into the American literary conscious, and provided a strong backbone for Bukowski to build his name upon.

Young Charles

 From the very beginning of this collection, Bukowki's voice is in full flow, detailing short stories of low-life hedonism and crime starring ordinary people. You and Your Beer and How Great You Are is an early example of a biting, sardonic narrators voice telling the story of an egotistical boxer and his tired girlfriend. No Way To Paradise is the first story in the book I really loved, partially due to how unexpectedly surreal it is; Hank the narrator (probably Henry Chinaski, but it's not made explicitly clear) is sat in a bar when he meets a woman who has purchased a set of four miniature manufactured people who argue, fight, and sleep together for her amusement. There's a fairly even divide between the semi-autobiographical pieces we're used to from Bukowski as Chinaski and third-person character narratives, such as Love for $17.50, about a man who fills his need for a woman with a shop-bought mannequin. Such stories are strange and compelling, without a clear moral explanation besides the nagging feeling that it's powered by Bukowki's own jet black humour.

Later on in the collection the links between these stories and Bukowki's overarching literary intentions become clearer, as he slips further into the autobiographical fable mode that powered Post Office and would his later novels. The Way the Dead Love and All the Assholes in the World and Mine are great, great reads by themselves, but also seem like prototypes for his next novel Factotum. The longer short-story (nice oxymoron) Confessions of a Man Insane Enough to Live with Beasts is very much an early version of a few chapters from Ham on Rye (released almost ten years later), including the same disturbing hatred of Bukowki's own adolescence. These later stories in this collection are all at least twice the length of the earlier ones, which I felt really added to the balance and variety of this collection, making it easier to read through consecutively.

Easily my favourite of all the Bukowski collections I've read so far, South of No North works on several levels; as a stand-alone collection of ingenious stylistic ideas, as a fascinating curio in relation to his later works, and quite probably as a powerful, undiluted introduction to Bukowki for readers curious about his work. Always powerful, occasionally disturbing, and amusingly poignant, South of No North collects the work of a man forcing himself onto the literary scene.

Haruki Murakami- Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman

Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman

Vintage

Haruki Murakami

 2005
Translated by Jay Rubin

Other Murakami Reviews- A Wild Sheep Chase - Dance Dance Dance - Underground - Sputnik Sweetheart - after the quake - After Dark - Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman - What I Talk About When I Talk About Running - 1Q84- Books I & II - Book III - Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage - Strange Library

“There are three ways you can get along with a girl: one, shut up and listen to what she has to say; two, tell her you like what she's wearing; and three, treat her to really good food...If you do all that and still don't get the results you want, better give up.”

Haruki Murakami's third short story collection, Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman was one of the first works I ever read by the author; taken out from the library in hardback format not long after it was released, almost ten years ago. In the meantime, despite becoming a massive Murakami fan, I somehow managed to forget all about it and, crucially, failed to notice I didn't own a copy (I think I just subconsciously assumed that I did, my mind playing assumptive tricks). It wasn't until after finishing and reviewing Murakami's latest release, Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage, that I noticed via a goodreads list that I was missing this book from my collection. Thanks to the magic of Amazon, that was soon rectified, and soon after I was jetting off to Greece with the rather larger story collection in my suitcase. As it turned out, though, I ended up reading the vast majority of it upon my return to England, during an otherwise torturous seven hour wait for a bus from Gatwick Airport, from two o'clock in the morning.

Like his earlier collection The Elephant Vanishes, Blind Willow is comprised of various previously published short stories,  originally published in various Japanese periodicals and a Japanese-only smaller collection (Strange Tales from Tokyo). The big difference between the two collections, however, is that the range of stories in Blind Willow cover Murakami's writing career for over twenty years, from 1981 to 2005. Such a diverse range, then, gives the reader the opportunity to look at how the authors' style changed and hopefully improved over the years, as well as offering a pretty diverse selection of story ideas. From a more negative standpoint though, the sheer comprehensiveness of this collection left plenty of room for a few inclusions that, for me, brought the standards down just a little.

In the introduction to the book, Murakami explains to the reader that he is, at heart, a short-story writer, one who has to work very hard at composing long novels but who loves to sit down and create a brief window into strange and haunting worlds. I can completely understand this; while I love his long-form work, the effort and composure it must take to create and sustain such intensely specific yet ethereal plots, characters and themes must be immense- a novel like Kafka on the Shore or The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle can be overwhelming to read in long bursts, I find, thanks to the concentrated intensity, but each one of Murakami's short stories revels in its lack of space; free from the confines of expectation, his words float across the page with as much or as little context as he feels like offering, inevitably leading the overall feeling of unsettling magic- something even more powerful when you're reading at four in the morning in the entrance lobby of a massive airport, for some reason. 

So, the stories themselves then. The book opens with its title story, but I found it to be somewhat of a false start., at least in terms of its quality. Thematically it's very recognisably Murakami; the simple story of a very introspective narrator who tells of his strange companionship with his younger cousin, and compares their trips to hospital together to memories of his own youth. It's initially absorbing, but lacks a strong direction and seemed somewhat bland as a choice for an opener- to the extent where I think a reader checking him out for the first time might find him uninspiring. Thankfully I found the second story, Birthday Girl, to be much more interesting, and probably one of his best stories. It's an almost perfect slice of magical realism, the author at his best as he mixes mundane life with unexplainable surrealism, and crucially doesn't try to explain it. The collection continues on in this vein, with a run of stories that I found to almost all be great.

There were a few notable exceptions that broke up the flow as I read them. A 'Poor Aunt' Story is comfortably the longest in the collection, and the silliest, as an example of Murakami extending his postmodern style a little too far for too long. Crabs was just intentionally disturbing with no good reason. "The Kidney-Shaped Stone That Moves Every Day" was very stereotypical for Murakami, almost a plot someone might use to satirise him. Although maybe my viewpoint on all of these was skewered thanks to the circumstances in which I read them, for better or for worse. It's difficult to judge Blind Willow as a whole thanks to the wide timespan in which its contents were written, I suppose, but it does highlight Murakami's early focus on blatantly strange and unnerving ideas verses his later development into an author with a greater grasp on his characters. Personally I've never had a preference for his earlier or later works, since it really depends on what the reader is looking for; the earlier stories and novels are abrubtly odd and disconcerting, while the later ones far more emotionally resonant.

As I start drastically running out of steam in this review, I suppose it's fair but easy to say that Blind Willow is a book for the converted, one that I wouldn't necessarily recommend for a prospective fan of the author. It's collective nature cares preaches to the converted more than anything, with some of the author's weirdest short pieces. I enjoyed it again, as I knew I would, but I do think it struggles as a single piece when compared with The Elephant Vanishes or after the quake. It's a treat for the completest with some individually outstanding stories though, so if you're already a Murakami fan then there's literally nothing stopping you.

Bret Easton Ellis- Less Than Zero

Less Than Zero

Picador Press

Bret Easton Ellis

1985

“She laughs and looks out the window and I think for a minute that she's going to start to cry. I'm standing by the door and I look over at the Elvis Costello poster, at his eyes, watching her, watching us, and I try to get her away from it, so I tell her to come over here, sit down, and she thinks I want to hug her or something and she comes over to me and puts her arms around my back and says something like 'I think we've all lost some sort of feeling."

When I discovered that Bret Easton Ellis was only a twenty-one year old college student when his debut novel Less Than Zero was published, I found it very, very annoying and didn't want to like it, since I'm twenty-eight and all I do is write a blog. Also, when I bought it (for only £3 from HMV, thanks to their desperation to seem like a cool and alternative shop) the girl at the counter vociferously told me how good she thought it was, and she looked like she was about fifteen so that really annoyed me as well. I'm a very awkward person. Honestly though, prior to reading Less Than Zero I had already become a fan of Easton Ellis through reading- and enjoying- perhaps his most famous work, the graphically disturbing black satire American Psycho. While my memories of that book are admittedly too entwined with the Christian Bale-starring film, and while Ellis gave himself the advantage of coming up with a straight-up winning high concept for it, it was still easy for me to enjoy the bleak, minimalist and satirical prose. 

Less Than Zero doesn't have the same catchy psychopathic hook as American Psycho, so I wouldn't have been surprised if I had found it to be disappointing, particularly thanks to the initially wandering plot. The novel is written in the present-tense from the first person perspective of surname-less college student Clay, during a Winter break from schooling where he returns to his home city of Los Angeles to reunite with his like-minded friends and indulge in more than a little bit of unrestrained hedonism. Clay and his friends all seem to be rich and free of responsibilities; the children of uncaring entertainment moguls who unwittingly finance copious amount of drugs and wild parties. To be honest, the first hundred-or-so pages of this fairly short book didn't particularly grab me since it's fairly repetitive and written in such a style as to promote disinterest.

Bret Easton Ellis

Ellis' minimalistic narration is designed to constantly reinforce Clay and his friends' disassociation with the real world, where the huge drug intake and random sexual encounters simply exist as something to do to fill the time. The book absolutely turned a decisive corner for me when the authors' true aim became clear in its second half; where the situations Clay finds himself in become increasingly unpleasant and immoral, and his uncaring attitude towards life around him is challenged by the undeniable despair he feels as he witnesses the horrors around him in LA. I don't get shocked by literature anymore, but if I did this would be the book to do it.

Most of the criticism I've read of this book seems to revolve around the argument that Clay is such a dispassionate character in a book that would designed to be too cool for school, but I massively disagree with all of that; for me, Clay reads as a character desperately trying to avoid having some sort of mental breakdown through his disassociation, and whom eventually does turn a corner somewhat in his desire to remove himself from this environment and go back to the real world. No, he doesn't step in to directly save some of his friends or other innocents he sees, but at no point is he supposed to be a hero, merely a survivor.

One of the overbearing thoughts I was left with upon finishing Less Than Zero was the relation of Clay to the lead character of American Psycho, Patrick Bateman. Less Than Zero could easily be seen as a prequel to Psycho, as the potential origin story for the latter's charismatic madman, and it's obvious that the themes of each book directly relate to each other- with the key difference being that Less Than Zero is decidedly not a satire. Its topics and incidents are very extreme in places, but crucially also believable to a somewhat disturbing extent. While Ellis' prose is youthful and imperfect, it helps capture the tone it needs, combining with the plot to give the events a sense of gravitas that left me dwelling them for some time. In relation to the roadmap of twentieth century American literature, Less Than Zero follows up on the drugged-up horrors of William Burroughs' Naked Lunch and moves them into the 80's alongside Jay McInery's Bright Lights, Big City to create its own unique and depressing insight into the horrors of human nature.

A Good Excuse...

I was on holiday in Greece for a week, so I didn't write anything. Got a couple to catch-up on now though. TBC...

Not Books VII

 

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Movies-

Factotum (2005) 

After not-long finishing Charles Bukowki's second novel, Factotum, I was curious to see how lead actor Matt Dillon would tackle the job of embodying the figure of Henry Chinaski, and of how Norwegian director Bent Hammer would address capturing the tone of Bukowski's writing. Since, in my opinion, Henry Chinkasi is nothing like any typical figure the casual consumer is used to seeing on the big screen, it was very possible that they might have gone in  a different direction to chase viewers. Happily for this grumbling critic, the filmmakers did their best to create a fairly accurate representation of the misery, depression and black comedy of a Bukowski page, and ended up creating a very nice visual and audio intepretation to go alongside the book- though as a context-less film for the non-Bukowski fan, it's probably all a bit mystifying.

Matt Dillon does a very good job with a very difficult task; trying somehow to represent the pure charisma, drunkenness and darkened artistry of the blunt-speaking main character, though honestly I didn't think he had enough of an absorbing persona to quite pull it off. To do the character justice it would've taken a performance reminiscent of Johnny Depp as Raul Duke in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, but with the disadvantage of much less dialogue. I felt that Lili Taylor did a fantastic job as Jan, Chinaski's premier other half for this book, and a probably as complicated as Chinaski with her good and dark moods. The ending, where the pair finally say goodbye for the last time was something I found genuinely touching. almost teary-eyed thanks to the subdued, controlled performances.

Of course this film also has the massive advantage of being adapted from the pen of Charles Bukowski, meaning that Henry Chinaski's musings spoken out loud by Dillon's strong voice sound amazing, especially his voice-over thoughts and poetry readings. Perhaps not surprisingly the film suffers from being adapted from material that simply wasn't at all designed to be adapted in to a modern plot-driven movie, and even though Bent Hammer tries to stamp a more circular conclusion by focusing on Chinaski's unexpected good news of having a short story accepted for publication, I think Bukowski's downbeat, seemingly non-progressive style shines through and gives the whole thing the impression of either an art-house drama, or an extended pilot for a high budget TV show, I'm not sure which.

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Elysium (2014)

There was huge buzz for Elysium during its development, as fans across the Internet hoped for the next great science fiction film with the scope of something like Blade Runner or 2001. Director, writer and producer Neil Blomkamp first feature film District 9 was a surprisingly brilliant film, made on a relatively small budget it looked fantastic, and offered intelligent themes mixed with exciting action; in essence everything you could want from the genre. The concept for Elysium sounded interesting too; set in the year 2154 the Earth is a devastated wasteland, where millions of people live in poverty under the threat of starvation, with not nearly enough jobs or resources to go around. The Earth's rulers, the ones who control the merciless robots who keep the proletariat beaten down under the pretense of policing, live far above the planet in a different world entirely on the space station Elysium. Elysium provides the most gorgeous CGI images in the film, looking every bit the space station heaven it's supposed to be.

When the plot kicks in things unfortunately become more generic, and greatly replicate some of the events of District 9 to a distracting degree. Matt Damon is very good as lead action guy whose name I've already forgotten, who is exposed to deadly levels of radiation early on in the film and is set to die in a week. He contacts his old criminal buddies to arrange an illegal trip to Elysium, and through his efforts ends up discovering some very valuable information that make him a target for the human overlords. Damon's mission to save himself against all odds are very similar to lead character Vikkus from District 9 (and who's also in this film as a crazy mercenary), and this plays out in some of the earlier action scenes on Earth too, where the desolated city of LA looks strikingly similar to the alien slums of Johannesburg.

The movie also fizzles out towards the end, where nothing particularly interesting happens surrounding Damon's mad dash for survival, he just sort of keeps on going like an indestructible force. Blomkamp doesn't attempt to tell any of the history of the world of Elysium, which was a massive shame since the evocative, detailed settings and intriguing social set-up seemed to promise that an origin would be fascinating. Without such an attempt, the surroundings felt pretty, but hollow, in essence summing up the whole film. Far from awful, but very disappointing considering what it might have been.

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The Great Gatsby (2013)

Apparently there's been a fair amount of negative criticism directed towards Baz Luhrmann's $105 million budgeted adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald's classic novel The Great Gatsby, and for about the first hour of that film I was firmly in that camp. The Jay-Z soundtrack particularly annoyed me, since it just felt obnoxiously inaccurate and needlessly contemporary, and combined with the force of fast-moving, colourful parties held in Gatsby's mansion it all felt like the film was dangerously close from abandoning the delicacy and timelessness of Fitzgerald's work. To me, The Great Gatsby is the single most important, definitive work in American fiction, and the mix of classic and contemporary design and styles was overwhelming to begin with, and not in a good way.

But, thank god, around an hour in it felt to me as if everything just calmed down a little, giving room for the acting talents of Leonardo Di Caprio and Tobey Maguire to fully embrace the classic characters and script. I felt myself immersed in the story more and more as it progressed, steadily becoming more dramatic until the tragic ending. It was nearer the ending that Tobey Maguire's qualities as Nick Caraway began to come to the forefront. Earlier on in the film his nervous disposition seemed out of place in the Jazz Age, but as events spiraled out of control he became more and more likable as the eventual sole defender of Gatsby, his out-of-place character making far more sense in emphasis of the differences between he and his friend Gatsby, and the old money families who sign Gatsby's death warrant.

Di Caprio was amazing as Gatsby, charismatic, engaging, and most importantly of all very sympathetic. As the events neared the crescendo I knew they would, the tragedy kicked in even before the final gunshot. In its portrayal it reminded me closely of the great tragic endings of Luhrmann's other great films, Romeo+Juliet and Moulin Rouge, but the final scenes of Caraway putting the finishing touches to his novel The Great Gatsby gave a final, necessary uplift. A superb film, despite perhaps requiring a little bit of patience from the viewer for it to really get going.

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Godzilla (2014)

I've never seen an original, 'real' Godzilla film before, only Roland Emmerich's irredeemably awful 1998 Hollywood version, but I was still very excited with the prospect of this new adaptation from Gareth Edwards (the man behind Monsters, which I quite liked). As a twenty-something card-carrying member of the Internet generation, how could I not be? The very well made trailers promised two things; giant monsters beating each other up, and Walter White- sorry, I mean Bryan Cranston- which is really all I need in my onscreen entertainment life. Two hours later, and I finished the film feeling pretty happy with what I'd seen, but a little bit unable to get over the lack of one of the two things mentioned above. Spoiler warning and all that.

For about forty-five minutes, Bryan Cranston dominates the screen with a now-typically fantastic performance, making the most of a fairly stereotypical role, as a paranoid scientist convinced that the death of his wife in Japan dickity-siz years ago was due to some kind of mysterious conspiracy. After we see the sad death of his wife, amidst some smoky shots of a huge power plant somehow being toppled to the ground, the movie pushes forward to the present day where Cranston has ostracized his incredibly generic son and his family. He somehow manages to convince his son to come with him to Japan to investigate the quarantined sight of the original 'accident', and from there the two are thrust into the middle of explosive events as they become witness to the birth of a giant evil insect thing.

Then Bryan Cranston dies, and the movie goes from being awesome to merely being pretty good. I wasn't expecting that to happen at all and was all set to enjoy the sight of Cranston & Son doing their best to harness and direct the power of the mighty Godzilla to protect the world from this new threat of giant monsters. When the former dies, the latter becomes so incredibly generic as the main hero that it almost ruined things for me since I couldn't care less whether he lived or died. It was made worse by the magical narrative that ensured that CranstonSon (who's character name I can't remember, aside from it was stupid) was somehow at the front of every piece of action, no matter how illogical that was. Seriously, the efforts to make him the heroic saviour almost ruined the film.

Thankfully there was a lot of amazing CGI of Godzilla fighting his monstrous foes, and that made up for it. Obviously it all looked amazing thanks to the sheer amount of money poured into it, but the choreography was exciting too. The animators deserve a ton of credit for showing Godzilla as a character; his pain and aggression as he fought for his life. He was much, much better than any of the non-Cranston characters, and I hope to god they drop all of those for the sequel and just bring back the star. Or have Godzilla resurrect Bryan Cranston through the magic of I don't know what. Anyway, to round these rambling up I really enjoyed Godzilla, but not as much as I could have. The next one should be fabulous though.

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TV Series-

Penny Dreadful- Season One (2014)

For a big Alan Moore fan like myself, it's very tempting to look at the plot set-up for the new Showtime/Sky TV series Penny Dreadful and straight away think of it as a rip-off of his League of Extraordinary Gentlemen comic book series (and legendarily bad film), since it's about a collection of characters from various pieces of classic literature coming together to deal with a mysterious threat. To be fair, I find it very hard to believe that the creators of this show didn't have LXG in mind, but on the other hand the LXG film was so awful that's most likely guaranteed we'll never see a straight screen adaptation, so I was willing to give Penny Dreadful a chance.

Eight fifty-minute episodes later, and the first series of the show left me feeling optimistic, if not massively impressed. On the surface, Penny Dreadful has a lot going for it, including a large budget affording very nice costumes and sets (though sadly not special effects), a Hollywood-level cast including Josh Hartnett, Eva Green and Timothy Daltan, and above all the positive feeling that writer John Logan (who wrote the whole series alone) was trying very hard to reach a high standard of dialogue to reflect what we expect from classic literature. The cast are all very good, and so it was down to Logan to shape his story into something that felt true to the source material while being darker, sexier, and super-heroic. In my opinion he mostly succeeds, avoiding the risk with this sort of high brow fantasy horror that it'll just come across as really stupid- most of the time, anyway.

Having said all that, there's still a way to go for this show if it's to have a successful second season. The characters have been mostly cool and mysterious, but if the audience is to form a strong emotion attachment to them then I think Logan could do with laying off the constantly uber-intense, serious tone just a little bit to allow the characters to breathe. I felt the 50-minute episode length was 10-minutes too long last season, leading to so much introspective brooding that much of it lost its impact. I do admire Logan for remaining patient with some of the more obvious plot twists, rather than bundling them out their for quick shock value, but if he's going to continue to flirt with the main details of novels like Dracula and The Picture of Dorian Gray, then at some point, to put it bluntly, he's going to have to shit or get off the pot.

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True Blood- Season Seven (2014)

Oh Boy. True Blood. How to sum this show up? I don't think anything I write can do justice to how stupid and crazy True Blood has been over its seven series run, but I'm not exactly recommending people rush to buy and watch it. I first started watching True Blood mainly because my girlfriend really liked it and wanted to try and get me in to it. I wasn't as wary as I should've been, mainly because I knew that the show runner was Alan Ball- the writer behind the classic film American Beauty and the morbidly brilliant TV show Six Feet Under, so I was quite happy to go back to his work. In hindsight, the first season of True Blood did mostly conform to Ball's typical style, focusing on the subtext of the main plot, where vampires have just come out of the closet to the world and mean to integrate their race with the rest of us. It's a very X-Men premise, with Ball somewhat replicating the tone and moral quandaries of Six Feet Under, only in a more mainstream, glamourised style.

So yeah, I enjoyed the first season as a good mix of style and substance. From then on everything went completely insane, as Ball became less and less involved with the creative side of things, and the show instead apparently began to more directly adapt the source material novels. Unfortunately the source material seems to be sub-Twilight bullshit designed for people who want to tell others that they read books but actually don't want to, and from season two onwards there seemed to be a constant battle between that and some genuine quality. Sometimes the writing and acting could be really, really good, but as the show went on and plots became dumber and dumber, I think everybody kind of gave up. As a viewer, the most disappointing aspect personally was the almost complete lack of character development for most of the mains.

Going into the final season, I was hoping for a dramatic, bombastic conclusion at least. Since... well, all of it, True Blood has made it a mission to rip-off Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel (two of my all-time favourite shows) as much and as badly as possible, to the extent where lead vampires Bill and Eric basically just play rotating versions of Angel and Spike, going back and forth over which one is which depending on the season and situation. During this final season, curiously Eric is Angel from Angel-Season Five while Bill is Angel from Buffy- Season Three, which was an interesting way to do it. Oh yeah, the plot of this season; there isn't much of one. Basically there's a big new blood disease created by some old villains that's gotten out into the world and is killing a whole bunch of vampires. That's not a bad idea, but they go almost nowhere interesting with it. To put it into perspective how lazy the writing is, the main villains of this series are the fucking Yakuza. Seriously.

In fairness, the theme of the final series seemed to be to round off most of the characters unresolved emotional journeys and such, and it kind of achieved that albeit mostly in an incredibly boring manner. I won't spoil anything but the final episode was possibly the worst final episode of any show I've seen. It's a shame, because there was a point mid-way through the season where it looked like things might be heating up, but  it decidedly did not. Instead viewers were subjected to a drawn-out series of whining and moaning, where the actors desperately tried to look like they cared about the nonsense going on though they obviously didn't. It was kind of a shame that everything ended so badly, but to be honest, I probably should've seen it coming. I'm going to stop writing about True Blood now.

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Video Games-

Monkey Island 2- LeChuck's Revenge- Special Edition (1991/2010)

Looking back at Not Books II it seems that I was quite harsh on The Secret of Monkey Island- Special Edition, the 2009 remake of Ron Gilbert & LucasArt's 1990 adventure game classic, entirely because of the updated graphical style. Aside from the oddly coloured and slightly uncomfortable visuals, the game was a a delight as I knew it would be, since the gameplay is exactly the same as it was aside from the addition of a full voice cast. It was for those same reasons I knew I'd enjoy they sequel remake to Monkey Island 2 nevertheless, but thankfully the developers slightly redesigned the updated look and the result is much improved. Guybrush and the other characters look like the animations they should do, rather than slightly blurry clay models that kind of creeped me out. The colour pallet is way improved, stepping away from the ill-advised decision to try and remake Amiga graphics for the sake of a nicer individual look.

So, the game. I must have played it a dozen times over the years, such was my obsession with adventure games as a teenager, but there was still enough great humour in the script and plot for it to be worth it, perhaps for the last ever time. The voice cast, who all return from past voiced Monkey games, do a pretty good job, and crucially the music is absolutely fantastic throughout. The puzzles are difficult and absorbing, but not overly so, and overall I think this is a slightly better game than the original- although that's all completely subjective. I had a huge amount of fun reliving Monkey 2, but the absolute best news is that I finally managed to figure out how to get the third game, The Curse of Monkey Island to work on my laptop- by far my favourite of the series.

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Music- New segment here, a very quick look at albums I've listened to the most recently, not comprehensive or anything;

Alestorm- Sunset on the Golden Age (2014)

Pirate metal band Alestorm don't mess with their formula one bit for their new fourth album. They've never been one of my absolute favourite bands since trying to listen to a whole album can easily become grating, but they're very fun to listen to in short bursts. While initially they might come across as very loud and aggressive power metal band, like most bands of that genre they tend to rely on as many catchy hooks as they can muster. This album, while nothing earth-shattering, it their most consistent collection of songs yet.

Acrimony- Tumuli Shroomaroom (1997)
Regretfully I only just recently recently found about Acrimony, a real shame since they have exactly the kind of sound I was incredibly into just a few years ago. Taking most of their cues from one of my favourite bands of all time, Kyuss, Acrimony avoid becoming just another of a thousand boring doom metal bands by keeping a steady balance between their doom and stoner metal leanings, taking just enough from the latter to satisfy my curiously specific doom and stoner metal tastes.

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Jack London- John Barleycorn

John Barleycorn

Jack London

1913

“The fortunate man is the one who cannot take more than a couple of drinks without becoming intoxicated. The unfortunate wight is the one who can take many glasses without betraying a sign; who must take numerous glasses in order to get the ‘kick’.”

It took me a while to get around to reading a Jack London book, but it was inevitable following the pattern of my reading habits for a long while- probably a decade, actually. I've always known that London is considered as one of the elite peers of American literature, one of the most influential writers of the twentieth century, up there with Hemmingway, Steinbeck and Fitzgerald as authors who shaped the Western art form for all to follow- in a fashion bridging the gap between the classical US authors of the 19th century who were still heavily influenced by Victorian literature, and the outragous post-World War II hippies and beatniks who fill so much of my time now. I bought two charity-shop copies of London books in quick succession, leaving me with the choice of what to tackle first.

One of these was a Penguin Classics collection of some of London's most famous and most successful shorter stories (including White Fang and The Call of the Wild- the former of which I oddly remember seeing an animated children's TV series, many years ago), the stories that primarily made his name and stand out the most on a fairly-packed bibliography. The other one was a much different prospect; the controversial autobiographical work John Barleycorn. Truth be told, the back cover blurb sold me immediately, since rather than promise stories about a bunch of wolves and whatnot, it promised 'the first intelligent literary treatise on alcohol in American Literature' (Oxford World's Classics edition), with London writing in detail about his massive consumption of alcohol during his younger days; with the name John Barleycorn from the old US folk song used to represent alcohol as a familiar acquaintance.

I've always been interested in quality literature permeated by chemically altered states, and I genuinely think that the best US fiction of the second half of the last century revolved around the influence of certain such texts, by Bukowski, Kerouac, Burroughs et al, and, with that in mind, John Barleycorn read to me like an incredibly important influence; the similarities to Bukowski's novels primarily jumping to mind in terms of the construction of the story, its pacing, characterisation and chronology. London forsakes much of a sense of typical storytelling structure through his constant introspective analysis regarding the physical and mental effects that his huge alcohol intake had upon him. The real people he describes meeting during his youthful days working on the ocean and docks seem to be heavily styled to emphasize their wildness, (reminding me most of On the Road) , which is fun to read, but as a counterpoint he refrains from following an obvious chronological narrative, instead perhaps assuming that the reader is familiar with his life and career already.

Unfortunately I can't actually say I enjoyed the overall effect of London's style for this book, and it actually took me much longer to finish it than it usually does for a 200-page piece. I found that the lack of detail about his life a whole at the time, and his rather straightforward presentation of his younger character prevented me from caring enough about him to want to read on. I also found his musings on John Barleycorn (a nickname that became a drag to read so often) to be repetitive, detached from emotion, and lacking in much of a revelatory impact to conclude things. London's general prose skills are clearly exceptional, written in the Americanised English that always reminds me, through Hemmingway to Steinbeck, of Charles Dickins. It did come across as dry to me though, especially with a lack of story to drive it.

I seem to be criticising the book quite a bit here, but I think that has a lot to do with my own personal biases coming into play. I was looking for London to be another great storyteller for me to indulge in, but I chose a book that focuses on being self-analytical without giving much in the way of further context. Hopefully I'll enjoy London's short fiction a lot more, and it'll put John Barleycorn in a more interesting light. As a taster of London's skills, it was interesting, if a little disappointing, but not off-putting.