Articles in “Reading”

I’m going to blog about the new video game based on Dante’s Inferno.

Yes, you read that correctly.

The game hasn’t been released yet, and I’m already looking forward to the sequel: Dante’s Purgatory. I’m quite certain they have no intention of releasing Dante’s Paradiso. (Frankly, I don’t blame them: I re-read The Divine Comedy at least once a year, and I tend to stop after Purgatory. Heaven is quite dull in comparison to the sufferings of the damned and the penitent.)

Look, I’m not the first person to get a giggle out of this: check out today’s Penny Arcade strip.

But, honestly: The Divine Comedy is important for many reasons. Let me indulge in a brief and shallow list of the ones that spring to mind, in bullet-point form.

• The Divine Comedy is a sustained engagement with the idea of contrapasso, or, as we might term it vernacularly, poetic justice. I’m not sure that this includes . . . but, actually, to say what this doesn’t include would be to preview the end of this post too early. So let’s just stop there.

• it’s an immensely influential work, especially on authors of the Regency period—after the success of Henry Francis Cary’s translation—and afterwards. One of the more interesting engagements with Dante and with contrapasso, to my mind, is Lady Caroline Lamb’s Ada Reis, in which the entire third volume takes place in a hellish Dantean afterlife. But that’s only one example, and less obscure writers such as Walter Savage Landor, Leigh Hunt, and Lord Byron were also fascinated by Dante.

• it represents a significant and influential development of the geography and sociology of Hell, including an engagement with aspects of lore that, while inferred from either the Old or New Testaments, gained greater significance later in the history of the church, such as the Harrowing of Hell.

• it was written in vernacular Italian, rather than Latin, making it accessible to a broader number of readers.

A shallow list? Yes.

But not as shallow as the video game.

And now, for your viewing pleasure, courtesy of my friend Drew, here is the trailer for the video game of Dante’s Inferno.

And if what Dante does in that final scene qualifies as contrapasso, I need a new dictionary.

All three of these illustrations are from Marjorie W. Newman’s Scoring for the School, which, double entendres aside, includes a rousing cricket game in which, presumably, the players score for the school.

That’s not my main concern, though. My main concern is how strangely disparate these illustrations are.

I’m not imagining things, am I, when I get the feeling that these are the work of three different illustrators?

Whoever did the cover doesn’t seem to have realised that they weren’t illustrating the novelisation of Satan’s School for Girls. Or am I the only one who is highly suspicious of that central figure? And what is that girl on the bottom right doing? I think she’s supposed to be playing a harmonica, but she looks like surreptitiously licking something forbidden, judging from her cagey eyes.

But the cover illustration is often done by another illustrator. That doesn’t explain the vast difference between the next two illustrations.

First, a soft, Vaseline-on-the-lens, watercoloury illustration of schoolgirls picking flowers. Lovely: presumably, they’ll go back to the dorm and have a midnight feast, maybe a late swim, or gang up to pick on the fat, spotty kid—exactly what school is for.

But then there’s—actually, what is that? An all-girl jazz band? Or mobsters who wear matching jackets so that people know they’re a serious gang and not just the usual teenage-girl gang?

See, now I have no idea what’s happening.

Seriously, is that girl on the left wearing sunglasses with her drop-waisted school tunic?

Hang on! Maybe it’s a drug cartel? That would help explain the book’s title.

And I mean that quite literally.

I have a small number of the Abbey School series: fourteen, in fact, picked up randomly from various sales.

(Fourteen is not many, when you look at the entire list of Abbey School books. And if that list looks impressive, make sure you also look at the so-called Abbey Connectors, or books that share some characters and, occasionally, plots with the Abbey books, but are otherwise distinct. I do wonder, sometimes, how these prolific writers of girls’ school stories—Angela Brazil and Josephine M. Brent-Dyer are the other two who spring to mind—ever found the time to sleep.)

Of course, the Abbey School series are girls’ school stories in only the loosest sense of the word: few of them take place even partly in school. But I’m not concerned with that here.

Nor am I concerned with the connection with early Cistercian monastic life, though my sister-in-law—whose disciplinary focus is the Cistercians—assures me that the titular abbey is a real Cistercian abbey.

Nor am I concerned with Oxenham’s—and her characters’—obsessive involvement in the English folk-dancing revival.

No: I’m being shallow.

I’m only interested here in how the covers change across my issues, from the early Seagull Library reprints (Seagull Library was an imprint of Collins Publishers) to the later Children’s Press editions.

Take Secrets of the Abbey, for example—one of the middle books (in terms of publication date) or one of the later books (in terms of preferred reading order), originally published in 1939. This cover is from a 1951 imprint:

All perfectly ordinary: a little odd and misty, perhaps, but a perfectly ordinary cover.

Strangers At The Abbey, on the other hand—this one is both very late in the preferred reading order and late in terms of publication date: in fact, this 1956 reprint is close to the original 1951 publication:

Now that’s just odd, although it is nice to see the abbey itself actually making an appearance. But what’s with the girl on the left? I can’t figure out if she’s an albino or a dandelion clock. Still, it’s nice to see the illustrator working to overcome the deficit in severely Anglo-Saxon protagonists in 1950s’ children’s books.

1952’s Selma At The Abbey (which comes directly after Strangers in both publication and preferred reading order) reverts to a less frightening cover, in this 1959 reprint:

Although they are looking rather two-dimensional, compared to the 1951 cover of Secrets.

And speaking of two dimensional, there’s the 1961 reprint of 1923’s The New Abbey Girls, one of the earliest of the series in both preferred reading order and publication date:

Seriously, nothing in this environment is three-dimensional, including the abbey and the daffodils. I also want to know how the woman on the left managed to get her hair to look like that.

Still, putting two-dimensional characters on the cover at least warns the reader of the general approach to all except the protagonists . . .

Come the 1966 reprint of 1924’s Abbey Girls Again (which comes immediately after The New Abbey Girls in publication date and preferred reading order), characters are looking better rounded.

Plus, it’s nice to see an homage to the school-story spirit. Nothing says school story like a midnight feast.

But, finally, the gem of my collection: this 1968 reprint of the early Abbey Girls At Home:

Oh, the eyelashes! And the back-combing! And the aggressively flicked hair! And the orange! And the lamp!

(Just quietly, I rather like the lamp.)

This book, I might add, was originally published in 1929. I severely doubt that this was what Oxenham pictured when she thought of her protagonists.

Warning: This will make absolutely no sense unless you have read the post immediately below.

It may not make sense even if you have read that post—after all, the story makes no sense.

1. Just a thought, but perhaps the sun—sorry, the Sun—deserted your park—sorry, Park—because you’re so profligate with capital letters? You might give a thought to the poor blogger who wants to make fun of the story but keeps missing the shift key. At least you could do it consistently: why is “village” sometimes a proper noun and sometimes not?

2. How does the Queen expect to find a nice, dry, sunshiny park when the sun has apparently deserted all the parks? There’s a flaw in that plan.

3. Why is the Queen such a sycophant? Methinks there’s a dark back story behind her obvious desire to placate the King . . .

4. How does a plan to “take a Hall in the village near” turn into breaking and entering into the home of complete strangers and violating their shoes?

5. Why are the King and Dukes so obsessed with domestic interior design? In what way do “a staircase” and “a passage with some good cupboards” contribute to a space’s suitability for a fancy-dress party? Okay, the kitchen I’ll grant you, but a staircase?

6. Seriously, does the King actually amuse himself by peering in people’s windows and criticising their house-keeping skills? I’m starting to think that my point about his secretly sinister nature in point three about wasn’t quite as facetious as I intended it to be . . .

7. Hang on a second—they’re not just taking the shoes from the people whose house they’re invading in order to hold a fancy-dress party, they’re also going to sneak into neighbouring cottages and steal their shoes, as well? These fairies are total sods!

8. Can anyone figure out how many Dukes the King has? First it’s three Dukes, then it’s “all his Dukes,” then it’s two Dukes—perhaps fairies are cannibalistic?

9. No, I’m sorry—those pictures do not show tiny fairies inhabiting shoes. Those clearly show anthropomorphic shoes—and anthropomorphic shoe brushes. The two aspects of illustrated story telling are at complete cross-purposes here.

10. If the fairies are inhabiting shoes are costumes for a fancy-dress party, why are they shown casually strolling around in shoe form in every single illustration? I’d say that the illustrator never actually read this story, except that it rapidly becomes obvious that the author never actually read the story, either.

11. The fairies managed free decorations for their party by planning it for the day before a wedding? Cheapskates!

12. Hey, Bride and Bridegroom? If you’re so worried about the shoes, why don’t you move them yourselves into what the Fairy King assures me are capacious and convenient cupboards, instead of just standing there and looking at them?

13. Does anyone want to take bets on which drugs Aunt May is taking? Or, alternatively, offer me an explanation of what she means by “I am a Fairy” and why she isn’t surprised about the rambunctious party for supernatural beings that she overhears?

14. The Fairies actually have a Palace? Why on earth do they need to break into someone else’s house, then?

15. Even though the sun shines for a month, they’re still planning on breaking into someone else’s house to hold another party? These fairies aren’t just sods—they’re delinquents.

16. Is there a moral to this story? It seems as though there should be a moral, but I can’t isolate one—unless it’s “Don’t let fairies into your house, because they’re interfering little sods who’ll violate your shoes.”

I plan to take that moral to heart.

Nearly a month ago, when I posted my last set of random weirdnesses from the bookshelf, I included a picture from a story called “The Fairy Shoe Dance.”

But I’ve been thinking since then that I really should include the entire, not terribly long story on the blog, because it’s the strangest thing I think I’ve ever read.

I apologise for any nightmares that the pictures induce, but I assure you that this is exactly how the story appears in the annual Our Darlings, circa 1932.

The Fairy Shoe Dance

It had been a wet Summer. The Fairy King said it was the worst Summer that he ever remembered. The Fairy Queen said she thought they had better leave this dismal old place and find a nice dry and sunshiny Park. “In this Park,” said the Queen, “there are six small rivers and twelve bogs. How can we sit under the trees without umbrellas, or have any fun?”

“Cheer up,” said the King, and his face was as cheerful as the face of the Sun, which had cruelly deserted their Park, and all other Parks, all the Summertime, “I have a plan!”

The Fairy Queen began to feel much more cheerful. She put her arm through the King’s arm, and said, “Be quick, my dear, and tell me what your plan is. I am sure it is a good one—you always know what can be done!” The King became more like a shining Sun than before. It was so nice to be praised.

His plan was to take a Hall in the village near, and to hold a Fancy-Dress Dance. “If it is successful—and it will be—” he said, “and if the wet weather continues, we will have another, and as often as we like. I will arrange the first, and you, my dear, the second, and our subjects will arrange the third. Oh, yes, we shall have some fun!” The King and three of his Dukes went to the Village to look for a Hall for the Fairy Dance. They peeped into every building. There was one big house. It held the biggest family in the Village, and the people said it was the untidiest house anywhere about. It was true, as the King soon found out.

The hall in this house was large and square, and opposite the front door was a fine drawing-room. On the right was the dining-room and round a corner was the staircase, and a passage with some good cupboards, and a kitchen. The King and all his Dukes decided it was a fine place for their Party. But, oh, oh, oh, by the side of the drawing-room door was a long rail of pegs smothered up with coats, jackets and hats. Underneath these garments were rows of shoes of every kind piled on one another.

“If I lived in this house,” said the King, “I would clear these shoes and coats and hats into all the cupboards in the passage, and anyway they must disappear!”

Then he picked up a shoe. “Why not have Shoes for our Fancy Dress? There are many shoes here, and in the Cottages there are plenty more. What fun it will be!” The King chose a Shoe. He began to whisper, “I get a little smaller every minute.” When he had repeated this three times, he was in the Shoe, and his laughing face looked out at his Dukes. In a minute they were both inside Shoes. Then they got out again, and whispered the other Spell. “I am getting bigger every minute.”

As the Family were sweetly sleeping in bed, the Fairies had plenty of time to make their plans to hold the Shoe Dance on the following Thursday. Now it happened that on the following Friday, the eldest of the many daughters and sons was going to be married. On Thursday big bunches of flowers kept coming to the house, and were in every available corner—except the corner where the Family’s shoes, jackets, and jackets still remained.

The Family were used to untidiness. They did not even dream of clearing away the shoals of shoes.

Only three people noticed those shoes. They were the Bride and Bridegroom and Aunt May, who had come to help them with the wedding. The three stood and looked. Aunt May whispered softly, “All right, I am a Fairy.”

Thursday night came. Many Fairies helped the Dukes to get everything ready for the Dance. They carried all the coats and hats away, and hung them neatly on the pegs in the passage cupboards. The shoes only remained in the hall. They awaited the coming of the Dancers. The hall looked as it ought to look, with banks of flowers and nothing untidy.

What a gay time the Fairies had that night! They sang and danced and laughed for hours. The Fairy Queen and her Ladies served a gorgeous Supper from the tables that were to hold the Wedding Breakfast on the morrow.

The Dawn was breaking in the East when the Fairies went home to the Palace in the Park. Not a shoe did they leave in the hall. The shoes were packed row on row in the cupboards.

When the Family came down in the morning they saw the empty corner. “Hullo!” said Papa. Mamma said, “I won’t have those shoes back again here. I don’t know why I let them stay all these years.” Papa looked at Aunt May, his favourite sister. “Who put them away?” he asked. “The Fairies did it,” said Aunt May, “I heard them singing and dancing down here all night.”

The Sun shone all that Wedding Day. He was so pleased with himself that he shone all day for a month, till the bogs went away and there were no more damp lawns and no grumbling.

The happy couple built a bungalow by the big house. It had a big hall, called the Lounge. The Fairy Queen said she must hold her lovely party there. It was just to her taste.

The short answer is because apparently the ABC Network in the U. S. has committed to making a pilot of a possible TV series based on Bill Willingham’s comic series Fables.

(The long answer involves a huntsman spider that disappeared under my sofa two days ago and now I don’t know where it is and it might be planning on running over my face while I’m sleeping and I don’t care if I never know whether it does or not, what if I wake up in the middle of the night and it’s right there next to me on my pillow and . . . but that’s not important right now.)

I’m a massive fan of Fables, though I came to it rather late (only two years ago, in fact, after I was given the first three trades for my birthday, devoured them, and then frantically ran around Brisbane trying to find someone who stocked the next four trades, so I could buy them before the eighth trade came out that December. Shortly after that, I segued smoothly into buying each monthly issue, because I could no longer bring myself to wait six months for the next trade, and Fables is still the only comic book that I buy monthly).

Without giving away significant plot points, Fables centres on the immortal characters from (to begin with) European folk and fairy tales, driven from their disparate homelands by an unknown and unnamed Adversary, and living (for the past several hundred years) in a secretive enclave in the centre of New York City. It’s tightly plotted but a loose enough concept that almost any character can pop up if necessary. Most of the recognisable characters do pop up, but some characters are more prominent than others—most notably, in the early issues, Snow White, the deputy Mayor, and Bigby Wolf (the Big Bad Wolf), Fabletown’s sheriff.

That concept may intrigue you and it may make you roll your eyes.

It intrigued me—and I love every minute of it.

So part of me is potentially very excited about this.

But most of me is terrified that it will be rubbish.

I know nothing about the two writers, Stu Zicherman and Raven Metzner, whose primary credits are shows called Six Degrees (based on the idea of “six degrees of connectivity”), which ran for only thirteen episodes; Life is Wild, which also ran for only thirteen episodes (and was, as though attempting to trigger one of my particular dislikes, based on the British programme Wild at Heart, which had Stephen Tompkinson in it, ran on the ABC here recently, and looked rather silly); and What About Brian, which was a mid-season replacement (five episodes) and then had its second and final season scaled back from the proposed twenty-two episodes to nineteen.

So thus far their success in getting a season picked up for a full run hasn’t been great, but then American television is highly competitive.

They also have a feature film to their name, but it’s Elektra, which I haven’t seen but also haven’t heard great things about—and I’m not the only one, judging from its 9% rating at Rotten Tomatoes.

(If it helps, for comparative purposes, Battlefield Earth has a rating of 3%).

So, yep: part of me is terrified.

Oh, I’ll watch it, when it eventually hits screens. But I’ll be worried.

It’s so hard for a decent programme to be picked up: I’m still waiting with bated breath to find out if the fabulous comic-book adaptation The Middleman will be back for a second season.

The process is a little easier if the programme has the good fortune to be made for one of the major cable stations—and even then, Deadwood was cancelled before its final season.

So the fact that this writing team’s previous outings haven’t lasted isn’t necessarily an indictment of their work.

But this something I really want to work—so I’m a little frightened and a little excited right now.

For those of you who don’t read his books, Reginald Hill writes the Dalziel and Pascoe novels set in Mid-Yorkshire CID: I mentioned how frustrated I was by the television treatment of these books in this earlier post, but this disconnected post (I’ve been Christmas shopping and trying to cook with, you know, vegetables and stuff, so I’m tired) is about the books themselves.

The series started with A Clubbable Woman in 1970, and the most recent book was published this year, though I personally haven’t read anything after 2002’s Death’s Jest-Book.

In this earlier thread on puzzles I’ve noticed in Agatha Christie novels, we segued in the comments thread into a discussion of Poirot’s age, and how an elderly detective can be a problem in detective fiction. There’s something of a problem with this in the Dalziel and Pascoe novels: Pascoe is relatively young in the first book, a newly minted Detective Sergeant, albeit one with a university degree, so slightly older than colleagues who went straight from school to Hendon. He does age as the books advance, but it seems to me that he ages more slowly than time passes.

The second book, for example, An Advancement of Learning (1971), is clearly set in 1971: there are documents and objects within the novel that explicitly date the action. Similarly, On Beulah Height (1998) definitely takes place in the mid to late 1990s, but twenty-seven years have not passed in Pascoe’s private life—his daughter is still a young girl. Once we move into Death’s Jest-Book, in which Pascoe’s nemesis Franny Roote reappears but should be at least fifty-three years old by a conventional reckoning of the time that’s passed since his first appearance, we know time is moving at two speeds inside the books, as it does in most detective fiction.

That doesn’t spoil my enjoyment of the books, any more than an awareness that Poirot is incredibly old in the later books destroys my enjoyment of Agatha Christie (but it is an aspect of detective fiction that fascinates me right now).

(What does bother me is the completely backwards attitude to the novels and television series on the Wikipedia page from which I’ve been getting my publication dates. The brief section on the television series on this page offers this tidbit: “The TV and novel continuities are separate, so both Ellie and Wield still appear in the most recent books despite having been written out of the TV series.” Yep: put that the other way around, and you may have something. Hill is not actually obligated to follow the continuity of the television programme, you know.)

Ranting aside, it might be time for the random quotes portion of the evening, as promised in the title.

On Yorkshiremen in general:

[Ted] Agar was only paid to keep the place ticking over for half a day five days a week, but he liked to keep a closer eye on things, especially on weekends when potential customers, on discovering the Centre was closed, were not above excavating a couple of young bushes and tossing them in the boot before driving off. The previous day, Saturday, he had been otherwise engaged, watching Yorkshire prod their way to a draw in a County Championship match. Today however there was only a one-day game on offer and Agar believed that if God had wanted cricket to end in a day, He’d have rested on Tuesday instead of waiting till the end of the week. (A Killing Kindness, 1980. HarperCollins 2003 re-issue, 307-08)

On the implacability of Dalziel:

But this didn’t affect Dalziel’s gut feeling that this wasn’t one to counter with subtle defensive tactics, this was one to hit in mid-flight with a hospital tackle!

Such was the conclusion he reached after long dark brooding, and now the light of action came back to his eyes, and he rose like that famous bull from the sea summoned by Theseus to destroy his own son as he fled from the scene of his monstrous crime.

Of course, Hippolytus was completely innocent, but Theseus didn’t know that, and it made not a jot of difference to the bull. (Death’s Jest-Book, 2002. HarperCollins 2003 paperback, 312)

And the ambiguity of Pascoe, from probably my favourite of the books:

There had been a time when life seemed a smooth learning curve, a steady progress from childish frivolity through youthful impetuosity to mature certainty, which would occur somewhere in early middle age, whenever that was, but you’d recognize it by waking one morning and being aware that you’d stopped feeling nervous about making after-dinner speeches, you really believed the political opinions you aired at dinner parties, you no longer felt impelled to tie your left shoelace before your right to avoid bad luck, and you didn’t have to read the instruction book every time you programmed a video. (On Beulah Height, 1998. HarperCollins Best Reads paperback, 106)

The books aren’t consistent: the early ones are good detective fiction, but far less complex and not as rich as the later ones.

As I say, the one that pulled me in was On Beulah Height, which is simultaneously a song of praise to and a eulogy for the Yorkshire dales, a book so devastating that it cannot possibly end well—and doesn’t.

But, then, that’s not uncommon for the Dalziel and Pascoe novels, at least in the later ones. They don’t always get their man—sometimes they can’t, but sometimes they don’t even know they’ve missed him.

And while I like a good parlour scene, it’s this ambiguity—in the characterisation and the mysteries—that appeals to me in these novels.

That and the fact that I just can’t be offended by Dalziel, no matter how hard he tries.

And try he does.

In my previous post on books that don’t exist, Matt noted in the comments thread that J. K. Rowling does this with the Harry Potter books.

On that note, I’m linking here to this article in The Australian: Kirsten Tranter’s “Turning Young Muggles Into Readers Not In Harry Potter’s Bag Of Tricks.”

I’ll leave you to read the article by yourselves, but essentially the author responds to suggestions that children’s obsessive reading of the Harry Potter series has not, in fact, translated to a broader interest in literature, and suggests that this is partly because there is no literature within the books themselves.

Textbooks and spellbooks, yes. But no novels, or poetry, or drama. Even girly swot Hermione is primarily interested in non-fiction works.

Tranter does point out Gilderoy Lockhart’s output, but rightly indicates that

he is gradually exposed as a liar and a coward. His fraudulent tales are the closest thing to fiction in the magical world, but become worthless once their invented status is exposed. He might make up fabulous stories but he is not what we would call a novelist.

I would go further than that, myself, since I don’t think Lockhart does actually make up the contents of his books: if I remember correctly, and it’s been a while since I read the books, the events that occur in them are factual—Lockhart’s real skill is in tracking down people who have, for example, saved villages from werewolves, leaching the details out of them, and then performing accomplished Memory Charms so they can’t challenge the publication of his latest best-seller.

But, though we never see Lockhart’s prose, the implication is that the texts are narrative and frequently autobiographical (judging from the pop quiz Lockhart gives in the first class), and certainly the way in which Defense Against the Dark Arts classes devolve into constant reenactments of pivotal scenes from the books (with Harry as the monster in each instance) is the closest thing to dramatic performance in the novels.

Similarly, Tranter points out the eventual fate of The Tales of Beadle the Bard: “the only recognisably fictional story in the whole series [. . .] also turns out to be based on real events (within the frame of the novel) involving Harry’s ancestors, and so is not fiction at all.”

I think some degree of pendantry is necessary here, though: Ron clearly read these as fictional when he was a child, while the Muggle-raised Harry and Hermione have never come across them. True, Ron is made aware of their ultimately factual nature, but he is part of an elite group. Depending on how broadly the events of the final battle with Voldemort are broadcast through the wizarding world, there’s reason to assume that the majority of wizard children will continue to read these stories as fictional.

And yet this pedantry doesn’t seek to undercut Tranter’s main point: to the central characters through whom the readers’ experience of this world is focalised, this book—the only prominent fictional work in the universe—is revealed as factual, instead.

(Tranter does seem to have overlooked—or perhaps considered and dismissed—one text: in Ron’s room at The Burrow, his “school spellbooks were stacked untidily in a corner, next to a pile of comics which all seemed to feature The Adventures of Martin Miggs, the Mad Muggle“ (Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, 35). This suggests that Ron, at least, draws a distinction between fact and fiction in his reading, but the comics are essentially set dressing; they have no further importance in the novels.)

Do I have a point to this post? Only in a manner of speaking.

I was talking lightly in my last post about how frustrating fictional fiction is to those of us who are easily excited by books.

This post is a counter-argument to that, or rather Kirsten Tranter’s excellent article is the counter-argument: while I may be frustrated by the presence of books that I will never be able to read, it had not occurred to me that an absence of such books in literature might cause even greater problems.

And the results for Humiliation, Round Five: Film Humiliation are as follows:

Kirsty, barely humiliated at all: 2 points
Me: 3 points
Drew: 4 points
Nick: 5 points
John and Leigh: 6 points
Sam, Tim, and Wendy: 7 points
Matt: 8 points

I don’t think we can say that Matt’s comprehensively humiliated, since it was a close-run game, closer than most of the rounds of Book Humiliation.

Now, some of you need to go and watch Edward Scissorhands, Pulp Fiction, Jurassic Park, and Breakfast At Tiffany’s.

I’m not going to force anyone to watch Forrest Gump.

So, the nominations are in for round five of Humiliation.

I’ve listed the various contestants and films below. Let me know which films you have seen in the comments thread below, and we’ll see who is the most humiliated!

Drew has never seen Fight Club.
I have never seen The Exorcist.
Leigh has never seen Breakfast at Tiffany’s.
Kirsty has never seen The Deer Hunter.
John has never seen Batman Begins.
Wendy has never seen Jurassic Park.
Nick has never seen Apocalypse Now.
Tim has never seen Forrest Gump.
Sam has never seen Edward Scissorhands.
Matt has never seen Pulp Fiction.

This is a fairly strong field, actually. I’m not sure my choice is looking so good, any more.

Still, let the voting begin!

I’ve been slack on the blogging front the last couple of days, due to enthusiastic birthday celebrations. But a discussion last night that we should really have another round of Humiliation segued into a suggestion of holding a round of Film Humiliation.

That’s an idea I like, but it’s trickier, I think, than books.

For all Bayard argues that it’s not necessary to have read a book in order to claim to have read it, it is fairly straightforward—for the purposes of this game—to say, “No, I have never actually opened a copy of this book.”

But films—it seems to me that it’s trickier to say, “Nope, I’ve never consciously watched this film.”

And I’m not even talking about the broad tendency to use the television set as a kind of aural and visual wallpaper, because I don’t do that myself: I don’t put the telly on unless I’m actually intending to watch it (with the exception of test cricket).

But films seem to be more easily and readily quotable than books—or perhaps I mean that we’re more likely to recognise a quote from a film than from a book. It depends, of course, on the book and on the quote: anyone will spot “To be or not to be” or “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times,” but unless we’re actually looking for literary influences, more obscure quotes may well slip past in casual reading.

But I’m not convinced this works with films, when the quotations are as often visual as they are verbal, not to mention the broad geek tendency to speak almost exclusively in quotations from film and television.

I, for example, have never consciously watched Citizen Kane—how’s that for humiliating? But I wouldn’t necessarily feel comfortable taking that as my offering in this game of Humiliation, because I’ve seen the core scenes, The Simpsons episode based on the film, the episode of Mad About You that focused on when Jamie had seen the film, documentaries about Orson Welles . . . and so on.

But it’s been too convivial a weekend for me to work through these ideas clearly.

So, how about a round of Film Humiliation instead?

Same rules apply as in the book version: in the comments thread below, nominate a film you haven’t seen but that you think everyone else has.

Nominations will close on Tuesday 2nd December at 5 pm. Then I’ll open up a new thread for the voting. One point per person who has seen your film—and the person with the most points will be the humiliated winner.

I’ve written numerous posts, going right back to the first month of this blog, about my frustration with adaptations of Agatha Christie.

Now, to be fair, I don’t recall ever having seen the Joan Hickson adaptations of the Miss Marple stories, which Nick holds in high regard. And I do rather like David Suchet as Poirot. It’s the mucking around with the plots that drives me mad—when Christie is such a careful plotter.

But my recent reading of Reginald Hill, which I alluded to in my last post, is what’s got me thinking here: Hill isn’t treated any better by adaptors than Christie has been.

And so here’s a rant.

Why are Hill’s books treated just as poorly as Christie’s in adaptations?

Here’s a shortlist of things they’ve done to Hill’s books that have annoyed me:

• They separated Pascoe and Ellie.

Now, my understanding is that the actress wanted to leave. All well and good. That doesn’t mean the character has to leave. I’m not partial to recasting myself, but it’s a fairly common technique. Or the character could simply cease to play a significant role in the stories and have faded into the background, heard but not seen.

As far as I recall from a newspaper article at the time of this change (I can’t remember when or where I read it, unfortunately), Colin Buchanan (who played Pascoe) was furious about the change, as well: he felt it played into all the standard stereotypes about television policemen being entirely unable to sustain personal relationships.

And I think he’s right.

Ellie was an important part of the balance of the books: she disapproved strongly of Pascoe’s job but was able to juxtapose that against her desire for a sustained relationship with him, and the way in her engagement with his profession mutates as the books move from 1970 to (at last count) 2008 and the nature of the police force alters is actually one of the aspects of the novels that interests me the most.

And the separation was done is such a daft way, as I recall. For Ellie to then move to the United States with their daughter? (Did they, I wonder, omit the subplot about her father having Alzheimer’s? Because surely she wouldn’t have left if he were still ill.) And for Pascoe to move in with Dalziel? (Why? He didn’t need to live with Dalziel before he was married, so why would he not be able to afford a place on his own now, when he’s significantly higher in rank and, presumably, in pay?)

• On a similar note, why did they drop Wieldy? I stopped watching before this happened, but it still annoyed me.

As with Ellie, Wieldy is a centrally important figure in the books: in later novels, where the focus is on newcomers to the CID, generally fairly low-ranked officers such as Shirley Novello and Hat Bowler, Dalziel, Pascoe, and Wield are known as the Holy Trinity.

Take one away from the Trinity, and it loses balance.

Again, I assume the actor wanted to leave: in fact, I see that he only worked irregularly after leaving the show in 2002 and retired from the profession in 2006 for health reasons.

That’s a shame: he was excellent in the role.

Nevertheless, Wieldy was central to the shape and feel of the books: if you have to abandon two major characters, maybe that’s when you need to start thinking about whether or not the programme is still viable.

• And for my final whinging point, why did they continue the series after they’d worked their way through all the extant novels?

The later storylines were so far removed from the style and panache of Hill’s writing that I wasn’t even faintly compelled to keep watching, no matter how good the actors were.

Oh, I know complaining about this sort of thing is futile.

And I do know that adaptations aren’t going to be identical to the book: I don’t expect that.

But I am thinking of starting up a small society—very exclusive—called “Well, If You Aren’t Going To Pay Any Attention To The Feel Of The Original Books, Why Not Just Call It Something Else?”

I don’t think I’ll get a usable acronym out of it, though.

I’m not talking about books that seem to have existed once but have subsequently sunk without a trace, books that left some mark on the ephemera of the publishing industry—catalogues and advertisements—but don’t exist in libraries, of which Cardenio and Love’s Labour’s Won are perhaps the pre-eminent examples.

I’m not even talking about the fact that I sometimes have dreams in which I’m book shopping, but the books I buy then don’t exist anywhere in this world—sequels to books I love that have no sequels, or entirely imaginary volumes.

No, I’m not talking about those, though they’re closer to the truth.

I’m talking about books that have no existence except in other books.

Perhaps Jasper Fforde’s Thursday Next series provides the pre-eminent modern example of authors who do this.

(And, by the way, Mr Fforde? May we have another book, please? I’ve read all mine. Doesn’t have to be another Thursday Next, but another book would be grand. Ta!)

When Thursday is working as a Literary Detective for Spec Ops and, even more obviously, when she is working for Jurisfiction and moving in and out of The Well of Lost Plots, she deals regularly with books that don’t actually exist, as well as with ones that do.

Some of the ones she deals with don’t fill me with any inclination to read them, such as the unpublished manuscript “Cavendish Heights” or the fantasy novel that doubles as a menagerie, which off the top of my head I think is called Swords of Zenobia.

But some are more intriguing: I admit, I’d like to see what all the fuss is about with Daphne Farquitt’s novels (especially given how much they appeal to the lobsters)—although I suspect I’ve already read most of them in the guise of my disturbingly large number of Georgette Heyer novels.

But Fforde isn’t the only one.

I’ve recently been re-reading some Reginald Hill, specifically the inter-related Dialogues of the Dead and Death’s Jest-Book.

These two novels are intensely literary: with main characters who are academics, librarians, and novelists, they’re full of literary in-jokes and seemingly effortless quotations from obscure fiction that make me feel very poorly read indeed.

They also refer heavily to two authors whom I’ve never read: Heinrich Heine, the German Romantic, and Thomas Lovell Beddoes, the English Romantic.

Beddoes, I understand, is not terribly well read by anyone, so I don’t feel too guilty about not reading his masterpiece, Death’s Jest Book (despite completing an M.Phil. on the Romantic novel. I’m salving my conscience with the fact that Death’s Jest Book is actually a play.)

Heine, though, I probably should have read, since he’s significant to German Romanticism. Alas, I never got any further than Goethe.

But the books are also littered with fictional books, books that don’t exist: some are academic texts, like the two competing biographies of Beddoes that circulate through the sub-plots in Hill’s two novels, Dick Dee’s never-to-be-completed dictionary of dictionaries, or the translations of Heine’s poems on which novelist Charley Penn has been working for many years.

But some are fictional novels: specifically, Penn’s series of successful Harry Hacker novels, based partly on Heine. Though these have been adapted into Sunday night bodice-rippers—or what another character calls “claret and cleavage” television, which is my favourite description—the analysis of the novels themselves makes me desperate to read them: they’re described as “full of verbal wit, lots of good jokes, passages of exciting action, good but not overdone historical backgrounds, and strong plots which often include a clever puzzle element which Harry is instrumental in solving” (394). There’s also a supernatural element, through Harry’s doppelganger.

Harry is himself is said to be a blend of Heinrich Heine; Pechorin, the Byronic hero from Mikhail Lermontov’s A Hero Of Our Time (1839, revised 1841); and the Scarlet Pimpernel, blended with Sherlock Holmes, Don Juan—“Byron’s rather than Mozart’s,” the woman outlining the novels insists—and Raffles, the gentleman thief (393).

Now who wouldn’t want to read those?

Except, of course, that they don’t exist. Which doesn’t seem fair, somehow.

Neither Fforde nor Hill are unique in this respect, of course. Volume four of Neil Gaiman’s Sandman series, for example, allows a glimpse at a shelf of never-written books in the Library of Dreams: books by Wodehouse (Psmith and Jeeves. Perhaps Jeeves has finally had enough of Wooster’s inanity?), by Dickens (The Return of Edwin Drood), by Tolkien (The Lost Road), by Conan Doyle (The Conscience of Sherlock Holmes), by Chesterton (The Man Who Was October).

Also on this shelf are two imaginary books that I am desperate to read: The Dark God’s Darling by Lord Dunsany and Alice’s Journey Behind The Moon by Lewis Carroll. The others I can take or leave, but I’m quite frustrated by the fact that those two don’t actually exist.

There’s no rhyme or reason to this post: just frustration.

Taunting your loyal readers with books that sound fascinating but that they’re never going to be able to read is too easy to be sport.

(All quotes from Dialogues of the Dead from the 2003 Avon paperback.)

Fair warning: this puzzle was impossible to consider with spoilers.

7. What are Lord Edgeware’s vices? (Lord Edgeware Dies, 1933, with reference to Mrs McGinty’s Dead, 1952)

Lord Edgeware is the unpleasant murder victim in Lord Edgeware Dies: we know he’s unpleasant, because we’re told so (and, perhaps, because his daughter is so highly strung and terrified). But we know very little about the actual man.

Yet we know there’s something about him that is outside the normal. He strikes Arthur Hastings as an animalistic, barely human creature who exercises superb self-control (33). Poirot says that “he is very near the borderline of madness” and that “I should imagine he practises many vices, and that beneath his frigid exterior he hides a deep-rooted instinct of cruelty” (34). His daughter speaks haltingly of his “queerness” (85). His nephew and heir’s “fatuous expression of good nature” falters when he is asked about his estrangement from his uncle (89). And his wife shivers when she talks about him, describes him as a “fanatic” and “a queer man—he’s not like other people” (15).

Yes, there’s definitely something odd about this man.

But his wife’s testimony is not reliable: she is, after all, the one who kills him.

And she kills him for gain: she hesitates not at all to admit that. She wishes to marry another man and, since that man is possessed of a violent and rather morbid Anglo-Catholic fervour, he is willing to marry a widow but not a divorcee.

But just because she has one motive, is that any reason to assume she doesn’t have another? What exactly are Lord Edgeware’s vices?

We don’t know for certain, but we do receive a hint from Arthur Hastings: as Lord Edgeware, with a “queer smile” notes, “But I enjoy the macabre. I always have. My taste is peculiar,” Hastings “had been looking at the shelves near. There were the Memoirs of Casanova, also a volume on the Comte de Sade, another on mediæval tortures” (33).

If these books represent Lord Edgeware’s tastes, then we can plausibly assume two things: his vices are sexual and they are sadistic.

Who is more likely to suffer from those vices than a wife? A wife who leaves him within months of the wedding and, despite her other motive for murder, shivers when she speaks of him?

A clever defense counsel could do something with this.

Perhaps I wouldn’t find this so intriguing if it didn’t remind me of an ultimately irrelevant piece of back story in a later novel, Mrs McGinty’s Dead. This novel turns on the recognition, by the late Mrs McGinty, of a photograph previously published in a newspaper exposé of four female murderers: Eva Kane, Lily Gamboll, Vera Blake, and Janice Courtland.

Eva Kane is clearly modelled on Ethel Le Neve from the Crippen Case. Lily Gamboll is a young girl who murdered her aunt and Vera Blake a woman who was more or less implicated (though not legally) in her husband’s crimes.

Little direct text from the fictional newspaper report is repeated in the novel. But what is describes Janice Courtland as the woman whose husband was a “fiend in human form” (66): the narrative voice, paraphrasing the article, speaks only of “peculiar practices referred to in such a guarded way as to arouse instant curiosity” (69).

The newspaper report is clearly sensational—based on the snippets we get—and, at the confession of the journalist who wrote it, occasionally inaccurate. But Janice Courtland still seems analogous to Jane Wilkinson in Lord Edgeware Dies: a woman married to a man who seems to be abusive in a viciously sadistic fashion.

Does this mean Lord Edgeware deserves a knife to the base of the skull? Of course not.

But perhaps there’s more to his murder than simply his wife’s desire to marry a violently Anglo-Catholic duke who looks like a dreamy monk.

(All quotes from Mrs McGinty’s Dead taken from the 1990 Fontana edition. All quotes from Lord Edgeware Dies taken from the 1979 Fontana edition.)

Look what just arrived in the mail!

I found this via the fabulous (and likely to bankrupt me) American Book Exchange, further via (if there is such a thing) the awesome BookFinder.

Actually, it’s lucky I don’t have a credit card: Nick is willing to use his, but far less susceptible to the charms of late-nineteenth-century serial fiction than I am, so he’s talked me down from more than one extravagant purchase.

Not this this was extravagant: far from it, considering that it’s still in its original paper cover:

You don’t find that very often. Of course, the front cover has completely separated from the spine, for which I blame the postman—who curled the parcel up and shoved it between the letterbox and the fence paling. Why?—but then that’s not only reparable but also the downside of Victorian paperbacks. Yellowback collectors have been complaining for years about the relative fragility of the books and, in fact, they tend to be bought for their appearance only: they’re hard to read without damaging.

I didn’t buy this purely for decoration: more as a research tool, if I continue to focus on ephemeral nineteenth-century publishing, which I may well. But I’m certainly not planning to read it in bed.

And now, some context.

Bow Bells Novelettes was conceived by John Dicks as a spin-off to the highly successful Bow Bells, a penny weekly: that is, an inexpensive magazine published weekly, specialising in (largely lurid and melodramatic) fiction, and aimed at the working classes (though almost certainly read into the middle classes, as well).

In my thesis, I dealt with Bow Bells Novelettes in the same chapter as Bow Bells itself, partly because Eliza Winstanley didn’t publish many stories in the former—not ones that I could confirm as hers, anyway—and partly because there’s not much distinction between the two journals, except that the stories in Bow Bells Novelettes are longer: each issue contains one “novelette,” a (generally) sixteen-page story, complete with three illustrations, like this one:

(That one looks to me as though it is by Frederick Gilbert, who did a great deal of illustration work for John Dicks’s publications: he was the less famous and less successful brother of Sir John Gilbert) who also did magazine illustration—most notably for The Illustrated London News and, I believe but I’d have to check, later for The London Journal under George Vickers—but was also a Royal Academician. Also, I genuinely made that decision on aesthetic grounds before I noticed the “FG” in the corner. Honestly.)

John Dicks’s publications achieved some notoriety at the end of the nineteenth century (separate from the type of notoriety attracted in the mid-nineteenth century, when G. W. M. Reynolds was editing Dicks’s publications) as the type of pernicious reading material likely to corrupt the working classes. In George Moore’s Esther Waters (1894), for example, we know that Esther is likely to find trouble in her new situation (she is eventually seduced by a fellow servant and abandoned while pregnant) because of the porter’s reaction to the books he carries from the station for her:

Sarah Tucker—that’s the upper-housemaid—will be after you to lend them to her. She’s a wonderful reader. She has read every story that has come out in Bow Bells for the last three years, and you can’t puzzle her, try as you will. She knows all the names, can tell you which lord it was that saved the girl from the carriage when the ‘osses were tearing like mad towards a precipice a ‘undred feet deep, and all about the baronet for whose sake the girl went out to drown herself in the moonlight. I ‘aven’t read the books mesel’, but Sarah and me are great pals.

(George Moore’s Esther Waters. 1894. Everyman edition. London: J. M. Dent, 1994. 8-9)

To balance that, though, here’s my favourite quote about Bow Bells Novelettes, from G. K. Chesterton (who, among other things, wrote the Father Brown mysteries):

Nietzsche and the Bow Bells Novelettes have both obviously the same fundamental character; they both worship the tall man with curling moustaches and herculean bodily power, and they both worship him in a manner which is somewhat feminine and hysterical. Even here, however, the Novelette easily maintains its philosophical superiority, because it does attribute to the strong man those virtues which do commonly belong to him, such virtues as laziness and kindness and a rather reckless benevolence, and a great dislike of hurting the weak. (197-98)

(G. K. Chesterton’s “On Smart Novelists and the Smart Set,” from Heretics. 1905. London: Bodley House, 1950. 196-215.

I can’t argue with that.

On a final note, it was not until I saw Bow Bells Novelettes in its paper covers (instead of bound in green cloth, as was usual for the yearly volume) that I realised how consistent John Dicks’s branding was across his various publications.

Look, for example, at this cover from C. M. Braeme’s Lord Lisle’s Daughter in Dicks’ English Novels (which reprinted novels to which Dicks had the copyright, mostly serials from Bow Bells or Reynolds’s Miscellany):

(Another Frederick Gilbert illustration.)

I don’t know if there’s anything significant about consistent branding: it did strike me as intriguing for late-nineteenth-century publications, though.