It’s time to watch films from the 1930s

Klara Novak persuades Mr Matuschek to give her a job. (The Shop Around the Corner.)

This might seem like an odd statement, but it’s never been more true. I’ve been thinking it a lot for the last few years (as those who have read my review of Mr Smith Goes to Washington will know) but a post I read recently on Tumblr galvanised me to write-up the interlinked thoughts on this matter that have been batting around my head.

The post was by Robert Reich, and is called ‘Why there’s no Outcry‘. It’s concerned with a matter that’s been close to my heart, lately: the fact that we know the gap between the rich and the poor is widening at an alarming rate, but we are not responding as we have done in the past, with such things as ‘the Progressive Era or the New Deal or the Great Society‘. The answer, Reich posits, is that groups who have previously engaged in the activism that prompted such reforms are too inhibited by their financial and political restraints to demand the change that is necessary. Reich focuses in particular on the working poor, who are too afraid of losing their jobs, and for most of whom unions no longer have the political clout to seem like a viable ally; and on students, who in the past have had the political freedom, intellectual stimulation, and lack of immediate financial pressure, to allow them to participate in activism in a way working people rarely have the luxury and resources to. The working poor are not unionised, students are hemmed in by debt and fear of being unable to obtain a job with which to pay it off. And all people have had their liberty to protest restricted as our civil liberties are eroded.

Technology also plays into this. Whilst the Internet gives us new avenues to communicate, spread knowledge, voice anger, governments and big business also use it, and increasing surveillance, to monitor us. Speaking up becomes a significant risk. Chillingly, protesters in the Ukraine were recently texted by their government: ‘Dear subscriber, you are registered as a participant in a mass disturbance’. And right now the Ukrainian government is preparing to shut down all access to internet, TV, and telephone to cut off communications with the rest of the world to prevent news of the protests spreading. Meanwhile, Net Neutrality is under threat in the US, and the US government plans another war whilst the victims of Hurricane Katrina still languish in poverty, 8 years on. And, as is noted in that link (attributed to Bryan Pfeifer, but I couldn’t locate the original) most of the ignored victims are people of colour – our social divisions deepen along financial lines as rich white people fail to be interested in plights that largely affect people of colour. It’s hard to ignore the comparison to the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927, immortalised in the song ‘When the Levee Breaks’, in which ‘somewhere between 700,000 and 1 million people were displaced’, mostly black people, many of whom were held in concentration camps when they tried to seek refuge elsewhere.

But whilst the similarities to events of the 1920s and 30s abound, our popular media is full of eccentric billionaires and superheroes who right our wrongs in fantastic style, wowing us with showy fights and special effects which offer us nothing that we can turn to in ourselves to fight our struggles with. I love Person of Interest and its evident concern with  surveillance culture, but the answer is not a white billionaire genius computer nerd teaming up with a white super-spy. I’m the first to enjoy a good fantasy, and I love superhero films, but we’re drowning in sedative culture that ignores the pressing concerns of our day to day lives and seeks to make us forget to take our own stands.

As a Jimmy Stewart fan, I sought out a number of his old films simply to watch the great and beautiful man do his thing. What I got was a punch to the gut of people living the experiences we’re feeling right now nearly a century ago. When you mention It’s a Wonderful Life, people think of a feel-good Christmas movie. When you talk about Mr Smith Goes to Washington, you think of a political drama about an Everyman figure fighting the good fight. If you’ve heard of it, then you might think of The Shop Around the Corner as a sappy romance, in a similar vein to its later incarnation You’ve Got Mail. But there are important differences between You’ve Got Mail and The Shop Around the Corner, and these differences chiefly arise because You’ve Got Mail was made in the boom years, where the social pressures of The Shop Around the Corner simply do not apply. Meg Ryan plays a shop owner who is put out of business by the owner of a big chain, but she’s never really in dire financial straights, and neither is he. The stakes are pretty low on both sides. For a film whose premise is to take an old film and try to show that despite changes in technology, things are still pretty much the same, it kind of strikingly misses the point of the original film.

Check it: The Shop Around the Corner starts as Klara Novak (Margaret Sullavan), having been forced to leave a job where she was being sexually harassed, is desperately seeking work at another department store. She approaches Alfred Kralik (Jimmy Stewart), the senior clerk at Matuschek and Company. He’s clearly at the top of his game and a good deal brighter than the store owner, and he tries to let Klara down gently, pointing out that Matuschek & Co. aren’t doing such great business themselves. But Klara gets a lucky break when Mr Matuschek overhears their conversation and is impressed when Klara manages to sell a box that he had disagreed with Kralik over earlier. Klara is hired, but she and Kralik have got off on the wrong foot.

It turns out that Kralik has been engaged in romantic correspondence with a woman he has never met. They arrange to meet, but on the day of their date, Kralik is fired, due to a misunderstanding, and the fact that he’s the only person in the place prepared to stand up to Mr Matuschek. Kralik can’t face keeping his date, but his friend persuades him to go see what the girl looks like anyway. I hope it’s no spoiler to say that it turns out to be Klara. The rest of the plot unfolds as you might expect, with some interesting side plots.

You can already see how economic uncertainty (including how this can be affected by issues like gender) is at the heart of the plot. These are people who are in employment, but still living very much on the edge. Klara is truly brave to leave her former employment after she’s sexually harassed, but doing so leaves her in desperate straights. Both Klara and Kralik are intelligent and self-educated – their meeting of minds is over literature, and Kralik had found Klara’s ad in the classifieds when looking for second hand encyclopedias –  both clearly capable of performing roles much more challenging than those they are employed to perform, and both extremely grateful to be employed at all. Kralik’s bravery in speaking out is noted as rash on several occasions. Kralik’s friend, Pirovitch (Felix Bressart) advises him, gently:

Pirovitch: Kralik, don’t be impulsive, not at a time like this. Not when millions of people are out of work.
Kralik: I can get a job anywhere.
Pirovitch: Can you? Let’s be honest.
Kralik: I’ll take a chance. I’m no coward, you know. I’m not afraid.
Pirovitch: I am. I have a family.
Kralik: Well, I haven’t.
Pirovitch: Think it over. Those were nice letters, weren’t they?

Pirovitch is pointing out that even love has a cost. To speak out is to endanger not only your own health and happiness, but that of those around you. If you lose your job, you can’t support a family, you can’t plan a family, and you become a prospective burden to anyone who might become involved with you. In times of economic hardship, the wise person avoids risks. Maybe money can’t buy you love, but love can certainly leave where the lack of money makes loving too hard.

And it’s no empty warning: we see that Kralik’s intelligence and outspokenness puts him in the firing line when the boss is looking for someone to blame, even though Kralik has been nothing but loyal. He does lose his job, and his boss loses a good worker. But he can afford to do so – there are other good workers who will step up to the plate to fill his place. Of course, this is a romantic comedy, it’s required to have a happy ending, so things work out OK, but every conversation is underwritten with a tension that says that everyone except for Mr Matuschek is living on the edge. And even though Mr Matuschek is basically an OK sort of guy, the extent by which his wealth exceeds those of his workers is striking.

Sure, this is a film about love, but it’s also a film about economics, unfairness, the poverty line, and how this interacts with one’s ability to protest and live a free and independent life.

By the same measure, Mr Smith Goes to Washington isn’t just an underdog film, it’s a film about political corruption, the power of the state and big business to destroy anyone who dares to protest; it’s about media control and the control of education and the right of children of all races to have freedom to learn in a positive environment, and how rich white men will not only take that away without thinking, they will fight viciously, and they will win if we do not have laws in place to prevent it and a populace knowledgeable, willing, and brave enough to make use of those laws.

Similarly, It’s a Wonderful Life isn’t just a tale about how an angel gets his wings by helping a good man see how the world is a better place with him in it. It shows how reckless and selfish bankers can ruin hundreds of lives and leave unfortunate ordinary people to take the consequences in their place. It’s a film about hardship and desperation before the happy ending, and how good people can be driven to take their own lives by economic hardship. And it’s a film about how we need to stand together in difficult times against the rich and privileged who would throw us under a bus.

I don’t know how we get out of this state we have allowed this world to get into, but what I do know is that we have faced these issues before and found a way out the other side. So maybe it would do us some good to watch the films we made the last time around.

The Third Annual Serene Wombles

Sorry this is so late. I had, like, three significant life crises happen all at once, and I only had this half finished by 3rd October, which was my blog’s birthday. I really wanted to get this out on the day itself, but that’s life. Let the post begin!

Wow, we survived a whole ‘nother year, and for some reason you lot are still interested in what I have to say about various forms of speculative media and other awesome shit. Weirdos.

For the n00bs: The Serene Wombles are the awards I give once a year, on my blog’s birthday, for the stuff I liked best of all the things I have reviewed. The skinny:

Eligibility for a Serene Womble is conferred by being the subject of a review on In Search of the Happiness Max in the past year. There may have been better or more worthy things that came out this year, but if I didn’t find them relevant to my interests, or if I simply didn’t have the time to review them, they won’t be eligible for a Serene Womble. I make no pretense that these awards are significant or important in any way, but I enjoy having the opportunity to praise and draw attention to things I have loved.

The Serene Wombles are divided into two categories, those that apply to recent releases, and special Time Travelling Wombles for the most awesome things in my Reviewing Through the Time Machine posts. The division between the former and the latter may at times seem arbitrary – why should a film that came out in 2009 count as a recent release, whilst a TV Show that ended in 2009 requires a time machine? It’ll always be a judgement call, and the call is mine. At the end of the day, these are not the Oscars, they’re the highlights from a blog, and are therefore subject to my whim.

Due to illness and stress and stuff the pickings have been a little thinner this year than I would like. Nevertheless, there have been some really awesome and creative things out there, and I still want to praise them.

The Serene Womble for Best Film

Poster for The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey

Elligible films: Looper, The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, Star Trek: Into Darkness.

So… guess who hasn’t been to the cinema a lot this year?  There are a whole bunch of films that I wanted to go see this year  – summer of bloody superheroes indeed! – but illness and lack of funds have prevented me. As a consequence, this was basically no contest. Looper made me angry. Star Trek: Into Darkness was tiresome and disappointing. And I enjoyed The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey a very great deal. I said when I watched it at Christmas that it would be the one to beat, and, alas, nothing rose to the challenge.

This was an exceedingly pretty film that I found well-paced and which realised the story very well. I didn’t mind the extra stuff added in, and actually like that Peter Jackson took this once-in-a-generation-or-two opportunity to explore Tolkien’s world more fully. Bags of fun!

The Serene Womble for Best TV Show: Hemlock Grove

Eligible TV Shows: Hemlock Grove, Doctor Who, House of Cards, Game of Thrones, Hannibal, America’s Next Top Model, Sleepy Hollow.

For the first year, Game of Thrones is not the winner of this category! I still enjoyed it, and it had some of my favourite moments of the whole series, but the pacing was rocky, and for consistently good value there was some significant competition.

Hemlock Grove was original, genre bending, narratatively interesting, conceptually challenging, and thoroughly addictive. It wasn’t quite like anything I had seen before, in a good way.

Hannibal deserves an honourable mention, but although it was addictive, entertaining, and well-acted, I can’t say it was anything especially new or original, just very well done. House of Cards was well-acted and reasonably well-written, but fairly unoriginal and tiresomely another privileged white man plotting petty revenges that it’s hard to care for when he’s not really received any very great slights. Doctor Who is… Doctor Who. This really isn’t going to be a contender until Moffat leaves. If an episode doesn’t leave me wanting to scream, it’s a good sign. I thought there were a couple of somewhat interesting episodes this year, but that’s all. America’s Next Top Model, much as I am in the business of defending it, is not remotely in the same league. Sleepy Hollow snuck in as a last minute entry. I enjoyed the one episode I’d seen at time of review, but it’s basically entertaining fluff.

So, it’s a hearty congrats to Hemlock Grove. You seriously impressed me and I hope I can spread the love to my readers.

The Serene Womble for Best Novel – Null

There was precisely one entrant in this category: A Dance with Dragons. Given that this is just a couple of chapters from the longer Read Along with Rhube chapter by chapter review that I have been doing for the last year (two years?). It feels a bit cheaty to give it a free pass to a Serene Womble by default of multiple entries and the fact that I just haven’t reviewed any other (current) novels. Plus, it just isn’t that good. Entertaining, interesting enough for the time and attention I have devoted to it? Yeah, I guess. But it’s also deeply problematic and I doubt it would win against any competition it might have had in another year. (It did not win last year, for example.)

Fair? Unfair? It’s my blog, I get to choose.

The Serene Womble for Best Blog – Escher Girls

Eligible blogs: Myths Retold, Academic Men Explain Things to Me, Escher Girls

Oh man, this was a really hard one. I want to give the award to all of them and actually changed my mind a couple of times. One of the difficulties is that Myths Retold is a very different kind of blog to the other two, which are in turn very similar to each other in both content and impact. I considered making a separate category for ‘Best Fiction Blog’, so that I could honour Myths Retold as well, but then I couldn’t think of any other fiction blogs and it seemed like that would be getting needlessly specific. Basically, I’m saying that all three of these are very good and worth your attention.

I’ve picked Escher Girls for the win for the scope of its impact. Escher Girls is the creation of Ami Angelwings, an awesome Canadian woman who started the blog to ‘archive and showcase the prevalence of certain ways women are depicted in illustrated pop media’, namely: women are contorted into physically impossible poses for the pleasure of the male gaze. The blog functions as a demonstration that the way women are drawn in comics and other illustrated media is dramatically different to the ways that men are drawn, that we are sexualised to extremes and that this sexualisation is commonplace, and in ways that do not compare to the male power fantasies of ripped muscles in skin-tight costumes which are so often held up to minimise women’s claims of unfair treatment. The volume of examples that Ami has collected (both personally and from submissions) is staggering, and the comfort this provides to women (who have long been told that their experience of alienation by sexualisation in mainstream comics is a mere subjective impression) is extensive and powerful.

Academic Men Explain Things to Me serves a similar function, in providing a platform for women to voice their frustrations with the phenomenon of ‘mansplaining’, in which women frequently find that men explain very basic things to them, often in areas for which the woman is herself an expert and the man a novice. Again, this is an area in which women have often been told that they are imagining being treated in an overly patronising manner, that there are ‘know it alls’ of both genders, and that our subjective experiences are not as valid as men’s (who, of course, are privileged by a default supposition of objectivity that does not exist). By creating a venue to archive these experiences in detail and volume, Academic Men Explain Things to Me has provided a powerful vindication of women’s experiences – one which I genuinely believe is helping men to rethink their behaviour, as well as providing women with a sense of justification long denied.

In the end, I chose Escher Girls for its breadth of impact. I feel that there has been a palpable shift in comic and visual culture over the past year, where the misogyny in mainstream comics has come under increasing scrutiny from more mainstream critiques and fans. I don’t think Escher Girls have been the sole cause of this. Blogs such as DC Women Kicking Ass have also provided a sustained critique and made significant contributions, as have prominent critiques from individual women, such as Kelly Turnbull and Kyrax2. But to concede that a leading light is a part of a movement need not minimise the specific contribution. I think the impact of Escher Girls can be seen in the fact that it was able to spin off other projects, such as The Hawkeye Initiative, which highlights the discrepancies in treatment of men and women in comics by showcasing redrawings of sexualised female images with the male character, Hawkeye, in an identical pose.

Moreover, Ami’s blog is impressively organised in a way that facilitates citation and comparison from multiple angles – the tags page not only collates posts by trope, but also by artist, company, character, series, and Genre/Medium. And the blog integrates a Disqus commenting feature, allowing for debate and discussion of issues in a way that usually isn’t possible on Tumblr style blogs, and which Ami manages with great sensitivity.

It’s hard to compare a project like this with an artistic endeavour, like Myths Retold, which is not aiming at the kind of social change Escher Girls enables. Myths Retold demonstrates an artistry and poetic sophistication that simply doesn’t apply in assessing the other two blogs. All I can say is that whilst I recommend all three blogs to you, I felt that in this year, Escher Girls seemed most significant to me.

The Serene Womble for Best Webseries: Welcome to Night Vale

Eligible webseries: TableTop, Vlog Brothers, Welcome to Night Vale

I admit to using the term ‘webseries’ loosely. I reviewed quite a lot of things this year that don’t fit neatly into large categories, and although I might call TableTop a webseries, Vlog Brothers a vlog, and Night Vale a podcast, having each win a category for which it was the only entrant, I don’t think that’s a good use of my time and attention or yours. In any case, there is no question in my mind that Welcome to Night Vale outshines the other two, and I do not have the qualms I had for the previous category, in that I feel these compare fairly well, for regularly web-distributed entertainment.

TableTop is a nice idea, and if I were really into game mechanics I might find more value in it, but ultimately it fell flat for me. It’s basically just like watching other people play fun games. The games look fun, and maybe you like the people, but you can’t help but feeling that the whole thing would be more enjoyable if you were actually playing, too.

Vlog Brothers is entertaining, amusing, thoughtful, and informative. I recommend it. But it can’t hold a candle to Night Vale.

Welcome to Night Vale is one of the best, most enjoyable, most original shows I have had the pleasure to stumble across in a long time. The idea of using the podcast format as though it were a radio station for a fictional town is not one I had come across before, and it has been put to good purpose. Funny, strange, and more than a little bit dark, Night Vale is like a ray of sunlight that never fails to make me smile or to delight me with its unexpected changes in direction. It’s also surprisingly durable in terms of being something I can listen to over and over and still find new things to enjoy. I’ve had a hard year, especially the last few months, and being able to tune in to Night Vale any time I would otherwise have been alone with my thoughts has been remarkably soothing. It comforts me to know that wonderful, joyful, eccentric people are making such wonderful, joyful, eccentric works of art.

Not to mention that it manages to be progressive in terms of representation of gender, race, and sexuality without ever being po-faced. I can’t not give this an award.

The Serene Womble for Best Music: Stephanie Mabey

Eligible musicians: Garfunkel and Oates and Stephanie Mabey

Garfunkel and Oates are witty and entertaining, but occasionally problematic. By contrast, Stephanie Mabey’s music is pure joy. I’ve listened to her album, Wake Up Dreaming, again and again, often on loop, since downloading it, and I’m not sick of it yet. Her music is delightful, witty, and often beautiful – a real must for the geek music lover. I can’t recommend her work enough.

The Serene Womble for Best Webcomic: City of the Dead

Eligible webcomics: City of the Dead

OK, this one was the only entry in its category – I haven’t been reading as many webcomics this year, focussing, as I have been, on trying out different new media instead. Nevertheless, this comic is dynamic, atmospheric, and fun, making full use of the online medium to present a fast-paced and cohesively presented story. It’s no Romantically Apocalyptic (the winner from last year), but it’s certainly a cut above the average, and worthy of your time.

The Time Traveling Wombles

The Time Travelling Womble for Best Novel: The Count of Monte Cristo

Eligible novels: The Count of Monte Cristo.

A consequence of the sparse nature of this year is that the categories for the Time Traveling Wombles each has only one entry, but as each are stellar examples of exemplary works, this should not count against them.

I had no idea that The Count of Monte Cristo would be either such a rip-roaring adventure, or that it would be so progressive for its time (I ship Eugenie/Louise forever). Some classics are classics because they are fun as well as intelligent, and I can’t recommend this one highly enough.

The Time Traveling Womble for Best Non-Fiction Book: Wild Swans

Eligible non-fiction books: Wild Swans.

In my original article on this I wrote that this is one of the books I would say everyone should read before they die, so it should be no surprise that I honour it here, also. Wild Swans is a biographical and autobiographical work of heart-rending and exquisite expression of three women’s lives across turbulent twentieth century China. The tale is worthwhile and breath-taking in itself, but for people living outside of China – people for whom the ‘Cultural Revolution’ is just a term – this intimate, detailed, and thorough history is an absolutely essential piece of reading that will change your perspective in the world.

Time Traveling Womble for Best Blog – Inexplicable Objects

Eligible blogs: Inexplicable Objects.

Dating from a time before there was any such thing as a ‘blogging platform’ (the first was launched in October 1998), one can’t help but feel that Inexplicable Objects, which updated weekly from April 1998 to June 2001, would have made a phenomenally successful Tumblr. The archive is still active, more than ten years since it stopped updating, and it’s still one of my very favourite things in the world. Chocked full of delightfully strange objects, coloured by the witty commentary of Bill Young, this little website is a welcome piece of harmless absurdity to brighten your day. It may be the only entry in this category, but it is assuredly worthy of the Womble.

And finally:

The People’s Choice Award 2013: Hemlock Grove, Season One

By far and away the thing you most wanted my opinions on that I reviewed this year was Hemlock Grove. Netflix’s original fantasy/horror/weird show, released as an entire season, all at once, in April this year has garnered nearly 2,500 hits, with over a thousand more than its next nearest rival, Looper. This should possibly give pause for thought, as my review of Looper garnered attention more because it was negative and controversial than because the film was well-liked, but I hope that those who came to read my review of Hemlock Grove came away with a more positive image and their interest was more than car crash theatre.

Incidentally, last year’s winner, The Guild, Season Five, still has more hits than any other page on my website (including the home page) at over 14,000. What do these figures mean? Who knows, but something captured a lot of people’s interest, and maybe that’s something that’s worthy of your attention, too.

And that’s about it for this year. I hope you’ve enjoyed my reviews (or at least found them interesting) and that those who have won Serene Wombles of one kind or another get something positive out of the experience. It’s amazing the volume of wonderful and engaging things out there to culturally consume  in this crazy internet age; I hope I can continue to provide some kind of useful commentary on the tiny section of it in which I partake.

Reviewing through the Time Machine: The Count of Monte Cristo

Title: The Count of Monte Cristo (Le Comte de Monte-Cristo)
Author: Alexandre Dumas
Series/Standalone: Standalone
Genre: Adventure/Revenge/Historical
First Published: 1844-1845 (serialised in Journal des Débats)
Edition Reviewed: Project Gutenberg ebook (released 1998, accessed 2012) and the 1997 Wordsworth Classics edition (introduction and notes by Keith Wren)
Hb/Pb: ebook/Paperback
Price: free to download from Project Gutenberg, available in numerous editions from £0.01 on Amazon/Amazon Market Place

I started reading The Count of Monte Cristo after having gone on a spree of downloading books that are available free because they are out of copyright. In all honesty, I’m not sure I would have ever got around to it otherwise, but boy! I’m glad I did. Even though I broke my Kindle shortly after I began reading and had to find a copy in the library to finish. Woo libraries!

It’s a curious trend that’s emerging from the popularity of ereaders – more and more people are exploring older texts they might otherwise have neglected simply because these texts are now out of copyright and hence, effectively, free. Some are available from Amazon for no charge (although The Count of Monte Cristo will still set you back at least 77p as an ebook), more are available through charitable entities like Project Gutenberg – a fabulous website that has been set up as a globally available, free repository of classic works that are out of copyright. Of course, with works in translation it can sometimes be hard to find accessible editions that are out of copyright (for example, to my mind, the John Cottingham translation of Descartes’s Meditations on First Philosophy is by far the best, but it was first published in 1986, and thus not available for free). However, most editions of TCoMC still rely on the ‘classic’ translation of The Count of Monte Cristo produced by Chapman and Hall in 1846 (I was unable to identify a named individual as the translator), and from my perspective it hasnt aged badly at all.

Plot

Edmond Dantès starts the novel as a young man with everything good in life to look forward to. After the captain of his ship dies, Edmond assumes responsibility of the crew, and gains the preferment of the ship’s owner for assuming the role of captain, despite his youth. This is particularly good news as Dantès has an aging father to support and is planning to marry a beautiful fisherwoman called Mercédès. The future is so bright it practically glows off the page with signals of ‘something bad is going to happen’.

Dantès’s success breeds jealousy in others. The scheming Danglars coveted the captain’s position for himself, and the love-lorn Fernand has been courting Mercédès, despite her protests that she is in love with, and promised to, Dantès. Dantès’s is also subject to jealousy from his father’s avaricious neighbour, Caderousse. Unfortunately for Dantès, Danglars overheard the captain pass to Dantès a mysterious letter, sent from the exiled Napoleon to someone in Paris. Whilst drinking with Caderousse and Fernand he learns of Fernand’s jealousy of Dantès and eggs him on in a plot to frame his rival. Danglars writes an anonymous note exposing the unwitting Dantès of working against the king, advising of where the incriminating letter from Napoleon may be found. When Caderousse drunkenly protests that this is going too far and starts defending Dantès, Danglars declares that it was all in jest and throws the note away; although he does so with care that it should still be easy for Fernand to take up, which he does.

Dantès is arrested at his own wedding feast, before his marriage, completely unaware of the incriminating content of the letter that has been entrusted to him. He is interrogated by Villifort, who can see that Dantès was an unwitting mule, and promises him leniency. However, upon opening that letter, Villefort sees that it incriminates his own father as a conspirator for Napoleon. Knowing that his own ambitions will be thwarted if his father is exposed, Villefort destroys the letter and condemns Dantès to imprisonment.

Shipped off to the fearful Chateau d’If, Dantès is condemned to the deepest dungeons as he continues to protest his innocence and is judged mad. After years, Dantès finally gives up, and begins to starve himself as his only means of taking his life. As he is enacting this resolution, however, he hears a mysterious scraping, and realises he has a neighbour who is endeavouring to escape. Together they make a tunnel between the two cells. His neighbour is the Abbé Faria, who has also been isolated because he is believed to be mad, on account of his insistence that he knows the location of a great fortune, which he says he will give to anyone who sets him free. Faria is disappointed to find that he has misjudged his calculations in reaching Edmond’s cell and not escape, but they are each glad for the company, and Faria begins to educate Dantès – teaching him not only languages and science, but the principles behind them so that he will have the tools of extending his knowledge further. He also reveals the location of the treasure to Dantès, on the rocky island of Monte Cristo.

When Faria dies, Dantès conceals himself in the sack into which Faria’s body is placed, and escapes. He makes his way to Monte Cristo and is stunned to find that the treasure is just as astonishing as Faria promised. Dantès uses this fortune to travel the world and plot for the downfall of those who condemned him to living death for fourteen years.

How was is?

Gripping, exciting, thoughtful, escapist, and surprisingly progressive. The Count of Monte Cristo is not what I expected it to be at all. The basic premise, a wronged man who escapes prison and enacts revenge with a massive fortune, had long appealed to me. Indeed, I now recognise it as what must have been some of the inspiration for the wonderful televisions series, Life, which could be described in much the same way, and which I thoroughly enjoyed. But even as a student of English literature I sometimes found that the ‘classics’, admirable as they were, could be a bit of a struggle. I was not expecting such an exciting romp.

The style of TCoMC changes over the course of the book. The earlier parts, which deal with Dantès’s happy beginning and his imprisonment, read almost like a modern YA novel. The style is simplistic and easy to read, which is not a thing you expect of a book that is nearly 900 pages long. There is an odd break, however, perhaps a third of the way through, as we move from Dantès’s perspective to viewing the introduction of the Count of Monte Cristo to aristocratic society through his interactions with others. The style becomes more detached from Dantès’s viewpoint just as Dantès becomes more detached from himself, assuming the guise of the Count, and so consumed by his revenge that he believes he can hold himself apart from those around him, sitting in cold judgement, helping only those who win his friendship. At the same time, the description becomes much more detailed and full. The text does not become difficult and impenetrable in the manner of some classic works I have struggled through, but it does contrast starkly with the free and easy style of the first third.

Another way in which the book changes after Dantès’s escape and inheritance of Faria’s treasure is that we move from a close focus on his story to a presentation of lots of different stories. We not only see the world from different characters’ eyes, but each frequently has cause to digress to tell some other tale which informs the present circumstances. It took a bit of time to adjust to this, as it was an unexpected and unfamiliar style. However, I soon realised that this was a deliberate stylistic choice, mimicking the embedded narrative structure of One Thousand and One Nights, which is frequently mentioned (indeed, Dantès takes ‘Sinbad the Sailor‘, the hero of some of Scheherazade’s tales, as one of his aliases).

I suspect the embedded multi-narrative technique is employed to highlight the sense of multiple perspective. As Dantès becomes more narrowly focused on his revenge and the ways people have wronged or helped him, we see more of other people’s perspectives. Dantès is our protagonist, and we are clearly meant to sympathise with him, but the text constantly encourages us to take a broader view, and to be aware of how each character has not just one tale to tell, but many – that all of us have not only secrets, but also simply other parts of our lives that our friends, enemies, and family members may be completely unaware of as they make assumptions about us and judgements upon our actions.

There is a surprising psychological depth realised. It’s tempting, at the beginning, to read Danglars as a flat villain, or as an Iago figure who encourages others to commit crimes, but stands back from action himself. But even he is shown as capable of having complex relationships. I wouldn’t say he is ever sympathetic, rather, I felt we were presented with a rather modern portrait of a sociopath. Not that I am attributing to Dumas psychological theories of which he could not have been aware, but I see in his writing the product of a careful observer of people and their characters. Danglars is not ‘evil’ as such, he simply doesn’t care about other people. He marries and raises a daughter and interacts in society as is expected of him, but he views everything as a transaction, always looking for what benefits himself. He thus hardly seems bothered by his wife’s infidelity, as long as it does not affect him financially. Nor does he evince any evidence of shame or pity, as other characters do when the Count’s revenge falls upon them. It’s a careful line to walk, presenting such a character and not making him a stereotype. There is clearly a condemnation of bankers and of Danglars’s obsession with money over people, but in a choice between money and his personal comfort, Danglars ultimately chooses his own comfort and safety.

Despite the psychological realism, the dialogue remains somewhat stilted. Some of this may be a product of translation, as well as the passing of time, but some of it is not. The dialogue of Maximillien Morrel and his secret love, Valentine, is the most striking example. Pages and pages are filled with them explaining in excruciating detail exactly what they mean as they describe to each other the passions of their love and debate how they may resolve the fact that Valentine is promised to someone else, and that her father, Villefort, would never condone the match. It’s a tedious exposition that one doubts would get past a modern editor’s red pen. And yet, this still only makes for minor inconvenience. There’s a lot of what we’d now describe as ‘telling rather than showing’ in this novel which would no doubt be dismissed by those who subscribe rather too fiercely to writing-by-numbers, but most of it adds to the style of the piece more than it detracts. We hear the narrator’s voice in the description of events, and that voice is often accompanied by a wry wit that, whilst it might lack the immediacy of ‘showing’, compliments the work in other ways.

The origins of the novel in a serialisation no doubt account for its gripping pace over what would usually be regarded as an unweildy length, each chapter leaving us with something new to anticipate and wonder about. One might expect a tale with such a premise to be characterised more as a revenge than as an adventure, but the genre fits. Fantastic wealth has enduring appeal, as do charismatic and enigmatic strangers (as the Count is, both to the aristocracy of Paris, and to us, as he differs from the Edmond we met at the start of the novel). It’s action packed escapism and suspense as much as it is dark and psychologically deep.

What was really surprising was how progressive the novel is.

Not in every way, I hasten to add. There are some serious issues of presentation of race. Dumas was mixed race himself, and the descendent of a slave, but some of the attitudes of the time are still present. People are not represented as evil on the basis of their race, but they are certainly exoticised. The characters of Haidée and Ali especially. Haidée is the Count’s slave – a greek princess whose father was overthrown. She is consistently described as exotic and oriental. Far more attention is devoted to her appearance than her character, and although she is presented as beautiful, the terms in which her beauty is described are othering. She is interesting because she looks different and dresses differently to what is normal in France. Ali is similarly exoticised and described as a slave (and seems happy in his slavery). Moreover, he is mute – literally robbed of voice, although he is able to communicate through signs. The Count himself is presented as a very cosmopolitan man, and, in truth, the French society is not held up as superior to any other. Indeed, although countries are presented with reference to distinctive national characters, none are prized or vilified above others – the consistent characterisations of Englishmen in comedic terms is an amusing mirror on my own culture. Nonetheless, the othering and exoticism of non-white people remains disquieting.

In other ways, however, the novel is progressive. The treatment of women was strikingly egalitarian. Although characters at certain points express their own prejudices, the rest of the text provides ample examples to contradict them. There are plentiful female characters, each an individual (with the exception, perhaps, of Haidée, whose sense of self seems almost non-existent) with a character just as rich as that of any male character. Be it the fragile Valentine, the independent Eugénie, the scheming Madame de Villefort, the passionate Madame Danglars, or the intelligent and virtuous Mercédès, each is unique and has qualities that are directly opposed to some of the others.

The most interesting of these is Eugénie. Frankly, I was shipping Eugénie with her friend Louise long before I realised that Dumas was intentionally presenting them as gay. Slight spoiler here: I couldn’t have been happier than when they ran off with each other, leaving very little doubt that the author conceived of them as a couple, and did so with no condemnation whatsoever. There are references to transgender characteristics, too, although I’m not sure our modern concepts map perfectly on how it would have been regarded at the time. Eugénie is frequently described as ‘masculine’, and describes herself as ‘Hercules’ to Louise’s ‘Omphale’ – referencing a tale in which Hercules dresses as a woman. Moreover, when it comes to disguising herself as a man so that she and Louise may travel together, Dumas writes:

… with a promptitude which indicated that this was not the first time she had amused herself by adopting the garb of the opposite sex, Eugénie drew on the boots and pantaloons, tied her cravat, buttoned her waistcoat up to her throat, and put on a coat which admirably fitted her beautiful figure

There is absolutely no sense of condemnation of Eugénie for assuming a masculine role or masculine clothes. And when Eugénie and Louise are rudely interrupted in a hotel room later on, they are found to be sharing a single bed in their twin bed room.

Although one male character dislikes Eugénie for her ‘masculine’ characteristics, they don’t stop most people (or the author) from describing her as very beautiful, and there is no doubt in my mind that Eugénie and Louise’s running away together is meant to be regarded as a positive side-effect of the Count’s revenge.

As regards the revenge itself… Dantès makes a curious character. I’m more familiar with revenge tragedies than tales of this kind, which bring in elements of romance – even happy endings. One expects to sympathise with the character’s motives, even if one personally disapproves of revenge. And it’s hard to blame Edmond Dantès for any action he may take, given what he has been through. And yet some of his decisions made me uncomfortable. Whilst the Count has the power to be very good to his friends, and frequently is, he seems perfectly content to allow them to suffer excruciatingly first – indeed, he almost seems to think it necessary. That true happiness can only be awarded to those who have suffered terribly. In particular, his treatment of the Morrel family, whilst presented as an act of friendship, seems heartbreakingly cruel. (Minor spoiler:) He risk’s his mentor, Morrel senior’s, suicide so as to be able to leap in and save the day at the last possible moment, and he never reveals to the old man that he did not die in prison. The extreme lengths he goes to to punish his enemies are understandable, but it is harder to see why he does not reveal the truth to his friends and simply give them the money they need.

My sense is that we are to take it that this is a consequence of Dantès’s sufferings and long imprisonment. Like his conviction that he is an agent of Providence, Dantès does seem, in some ways, rather unhinged. I can accept this as an aspect of the psychological realism of the novel – I can even praise it. To have endured such punishment only to receive such incomprehensible wealth could conceivably impart odd beliefs about the balancing of happiness with pain, and a general desire to inflict pain on others as one has received unjustified pain one’s self. It is natural to search for reasons to explain suffering in one who has done no wrong. I can accept and even enjoy that Dantès has become rather broken in this way.

It doesn’t mean I don’t think he’s also a bit of a tosser.

And I think we’re meant to. A bit. But, the paperback I borrowed from the library has a note from the donor of the book which reads ‘I adore Dantes. A hero.’ and I just can’t get behind that. He’s likeable and charismatic and he has suffered and his actions are understandable. But he’s also arrogant, cruel, and flawed. His actions are not what I would call heroic. Even where he saves lives he does so with the feeling that it is his right to do so. I enjoy flawed characters, and I like to acknowledge that he is flawed.

Lastly, I want to discuss one thing that really didn’t chime with me, but it’s a bit of a spoiler, so you may wish to leave this part of the review until later, if you haven’t read the book. Be content to know that I enjoyed it and heartily recommend it. For the rest of you, read on:

The part that read wrongly to me regards who Dantès ends up with at the end. All through the book I was rooting for him to get back with Mercédès, but he leaves her in poverty and takes up with Haidée. I’ve seen criticism of the book for its outdated morality, and for the most part, I disagree. I think that Dumas presents us with the flawed actions of a man who believes he is the agent of Providence, but who is really a broken man, struggling to deal with an experience of incomprehensible suffering, which leads to consequences where even slight crimes are awarded disproportionate punishment. Perhaps the punishment of Mercédès was motivated by an outdated attitude to an unfaithful woman, but the flaw is more one of the dramatic expectations set up in the novel. One is encouraged to root for Mercédès and Dantès, and those hopes are disappointed. Moreover, one is given real reasons to believe in their relationship as real love, whereas his relationship with Haidée is not at all satisfying on this point. Haidée serves as more of a plot-point than a fully fledged character. She is presented as beautiful and exotic, and as having had terrible things happen to her, but I never really felt like she had a personality beyond ‘has a tragic back story and loves the Count’.

I’m also just squicked by the fact that she was his slave, still regards herself as his slave even after he has freed her, and that both of them regard their relationship as parental. There’s really just no way not to see Dantès taking her as a lover as an abuse of power. Sure, she begs for it, but he’s still taking advantage of a woman whose sense of self has been so destroyed that she cannot conceive of herself other than as his slave. A slave that he has raised since childhood. Maybe that is my modern sensibility, but I think it is backed by an otherwise empty characterisation of Haidée. She’s basically a male fantasy – a beautiful woman who adores you and begs to be your slave to use however you like. It’s creepy, and I don’t think you can use the defence of the times having been different to claim that it’s not.

This note gave the novel an unsatisfying ending, for me, but I would not eschew the rest for this flaw. I was disappointed by it, but the journey up to that point was exciting and consuming. This is a wonderful book, rightly remembered and deserving of your time, which is all that you need sacrifice, given that it’s available for free.

Reviewing Through the Time Machine: Inexplicable Objects

Today, this most wonderful piece of nonsense rolled across my Tumblr:

An Inflatable Beard of Bees. Click it to go to the shop from which you can buy this treasure!

An Inflatable Beard of Bees!

‘None of the danger of using actual bees’

When a beekeeper wants to impress the ladies, he puts a queen bee in a small cage under his chin and waits for the other bees to swarm and form a “beard” on his face and body. That sounds like a lot of bother… If you want to say “bee mine” to your honey, just wear this Inflatable Beard of Bees and you’ll be all the buzz.

In addition to the incalculable joy of beholding such a fabulous object, I was reminded of one of my very favourite corners of the Internet: Inexplicable Objects.

By the time I found Inexplicable Objects it had already ceased updating, but thanks be to tiny little kittens, the owner of the website is still maintaining the archive. I can only hope that he does so indefinitely, because this little pot of joy can keep even the most world-weary of wombles serene for months.

What it is, is this: once a week (roughly) from 19th April 1998 to 10th June 2001, Bill Young (aka thoughtviper) posted photos of various objects from his uniquely inexplicable collection. Supposedly, this InExObsession started when, on a plane as a child, he had been given a cupcake decorated with a plastic stick topped by the image of a jumbo jet, pointed at the ground. Quoth he:

When I was a kid I went on my first airplane flight.
The stewardess gave me a cupcake with a festive plane-on-a-stick in it.
Even as a kid, my first thought was:
I don’t want to be on a 707 if it’s approaching the ground at that angle…
Plummet the Friendly Skies of United.

With the advent of the Internet, Bill was able to share his obsession with the world, along with a witty commentary rarely to be equalled. The website is simplistic in the manner you’d expect from its era, but this is joy that doesn’t need to be muddied by frills and whistles (thank goodness, we are not treated to 8-bit Greensleeves).

Given that the website has not been updated in over a decade it’s something of a miracle that it still exists. Others have not been so lucky. At Week 47, Bill introduced Inexplicable Links of the Week to accompany the Inexplicable Objects. Most are now dead. In fact, many were hosted on sites, like geocities, which themselves no longer exist. It makes me reflect on the changes the Ineternet has undergone. Sure, the crazy is still out there, but it’s less likely to have a website of its own. It’s more likely to be hanging out on Twitter or Tumblr or Reddit. Even then, I tried to Google for ‘crazy tumblrs’ and all I came back with was a bunch of witty, slightly surreal, generally well-put-together blogs, such as ‘Feminist Ryan Gosling‘, or blogs like ‘Crazy shit people do with their Barbies‘, most of which is quite artistic, if also a bit disturbing. I suppose the independent crazy is still out there, but it gets much less traffic, these days: squeezed out of Google rankings by the millions of well-made, useful, insteresting, or intentionally funny websites out there.

It’s not bad thing, in and of itself – better content is good, right? But it does seem to me that this is a reflection of the passing of the Frontier Age of the Internet, where claims were out there for the staking for anyone with imagination and just a little spare time on their hands. Which I guess is why it’s so wonderful that so dated and-yet-still-amusing a site as Inexplicable Objects still exists.

My first encounter with Inexplicable objects came when a friend of the Lovecraftian persuasion linked to it from their LiveJournal. Or possibly someone had found the site for them and was drawing it to their attention – the details are lost in the mists of time. Anyway, the object in question was this: CTHULHU PEZ. I challenge you not to feel enchanted. In the words of Bill Young:

‘Yeah, big deal, Pez.

Wait a minute–
If it’s a Pez dispenser, then that’s not an octopus–
It’s something with the head of an octopus–

IT’S A CTHULHU PEZ!!
At The Big Rock Candy Mountains of Madness!
The Coloured Flavored Chalk Out of Space!
NyarlahotePez!!

You know–
Eating something that’s been disgorged from some critter’s throat is kinda creepy when you think about it.’

I was so tickled by this that I went to investigate the rest of the site, which then continued bringing me joy for months as I worked through its archive. I was crestfallen when I realised it was coming to an end. Granted, at some point, we must all get on with our lives, regardless of how beloved our Internet sensation has become. We can but be thankful that it is still there to visit.

I hope that this trip through the time machine has allowed me to pass some of the joy on to you, and that perhaps my links will help provide a continued influx of hits to the site and let its owner know that it is still valued.

The Second Annual Serene Wombles

Two years! Woo-woo! Thanks for keeping with me. It’s been another hell of a year, and although Life Events have meant that I wasn’t able to review quite as much as I would have liked, you’ve stuck with me, and that’s awesome. In fact, with 28,000 hits this year, three times as many people have shown at least a vague interest in this little blog as last year. So: thanks! 😀

Those of you who were here last October 3rd will remember that to mark the aniversary of this esteemed blog I decided to hand out some meaningless awards: The Serene Wombles!

What exactly are the Serene Wombles? Well, to quote myself last year:

Eligibility for a Serene Womble i[s] conferred by being the subject of a review [on In Search of the Happiness Max] in the past year. There may have been better or more worthy things that came out this year, but if I didn’t find them relevant to my interests, or if I simply didn’t have the time to review them, they won’t be eligible for a Serene Womble. I make no pretense that these awards are significant or important in any way, but I enjoy having the opportunity to praise and draw attention to things I have loved.

The Serene Wombles are divided into two categories, those that apply to recent releases, and special Time Travelling Wombles for the most awesome things in my Reviewing Through the Time Machine posts. The division between the former and the latter may at times seem arbitrary – why should a film that came out in 2009 count as a recent release, whilst a TV Show that ended in 2009 requires a time machine? It’ll always be a judgement call, and the judgement will [usually] have been made on a case-by-case basis at the time of reviewing. Sometimes I use a time machine for my reviews because I want to review something that came out in 1939, sometimes because I want to review something more recent that’s out of print, or because it’s a TV show that’s been cancelled… At the end of the day, these are not the Oscars, they’re the highlights from a blog, and are therefore subject to my whim.

Exciting stuff, eh? Let’s get started!

The Serene Womble for Best Film: Dredd 3D
Eligible Films: Dredd 3D, Prometheus, The Amazing Spider-Man, The Dark Knight Rises, The Hunger Games

The competition was basically between Dredd 3D, The Amazing Spider-Man, and The Hunger Games. If this category were about which film I’m most likely to rewatch… well, I’d probably rewatch all of those three, but I’d want to watch The Amazing Spider-Man first and most often. But this isn’t just about which film I found most fun. Each of these was well put together and entertaining, and The Amazing Spider-Man was also visually stunning and thematically well-conceived, but Dredd 3D was just in a league of its own – beautiful and thoughtful in equal amounts. It really felt like Dredd 3D was taking sci-fi back – giving us a real vision of the future, beautiful and provocative as well as dark. Breathtaking, is the word.

I doubt this film will sweep the Real and Proper awards in the way it deserves, but here in Womblevonia I’m doing my bit to recognise originality, inspiration, and artistic genius where I see it. Congratulations, Dredd 3D! Well deserved.

The Serene Womble for Best TV Show Game of Thrones
Elligible TV shows: Doctor Who, Game of Thrones, Misfits, The Fades, The Hollow Crown: Part I, Richard II

Tough crowd. I mean, we have The Fades, one of the most strikingly original and well-executed British fantasy TV shows in a good many years – a real tragedy that it was not renewed for a second series. Then there’s The Hollow Crown‘s adaptation of Richard II, which contains some of the very best Shakespeare I have ever seen performed, and for one of my least favourite plays, at that, including a truly spectacular performance from Ben Whishaw, as Richard II, and a simply wonderful portrayal of John of Gaunt by Patrick Stewart. And although Doctor Who has been highly questionable over the last year, I can’t deny that ‘A Town Called Mercy’ was excellent. Yet Game of Thrones is still hands down the winner, for me. It feels unfair to some of the competition to give it the Serene Womble for Best TV Show two years in a row, but given that it was even better this year than last year, I don’t feel that I can really deny it. Performances by Peter Dinklage, Lena Headey, and Maisie Williams were stand outs, but everybody was bringing their A-game. The special effects were incredible – I now believe that dragons exist and that they are both very cute and very dangerous. Pretty much every element of music, direction, and writing was outstanding, and it stands out in my memory as the best thing I have seen all year.

As they say on these here Internets: All of The Awards.

The Serene Womble for Best Web Series The Guild
Eligible Web Series: The Guild, Dragon Age: Redmption

Well, maybe not all of the awards. This is a new category introduced to include the burgeoning genre of web series. I was tempted to roll it into the TV shows Womble, but, upon reflection, I must concede that web series are their own medium. They are usually shorter and are often much lower budget. It’s neither fair nor practical to try and compare them to much longer, much higher budget shows. Moreover, they are developing their own tropes and styles and on the whole exhibit a different character to their televisual brethrin.

That said, there wasn’t a lot of competition in this category. Both these shows are Felicia Day creations, and whilst I did watch other web series over the course of the year, I can’t deny that Felicia is the mistress of this genre – she has not only talent but the extra experience of being one of the founders of this artform. It means that she’s been at it for longer, but also that she’s better known. Nevertheless, it is notable that The Guild greatly outstripped Dragon Age: Redemption. I suspect this is in part due to the fact that Felicia will have had much less control in the latter, but I also didn’t find her own performance as convincing. In all honesty, The Guild is just in a league of its own. It has the geek-following to bring in stars for the extensive cameos that were a feature of this series, and it’s starting to get the money that allows it to do more things. It’s also excellently and knowingly written for the audience that powers the Internet: geeks. Not to mention the spot on performances of the other cast members: Vincent Caso, Jeff Lewis, Amy Okuda, Sandeep Parikh, and Robin Thorsen.

It’s a deserved win, but with more and more people finding it natural to watch their visual content online, more TV stars using short videos as a way to get a bit more exposure and make a bit more cash on the side (see, for example, David Mitchell’s Soapbox), there’s a blooming new arm of the media that I’m thinking I need to investigate further in the coming year. I’m interested to see how things develop.

The Serene Womble for Best Actor Ben Whishaw
Elligible Actors: This category is open to any actor in any recent production that I’ve reviewed in the past year – film, TV, radio, podcast, whatever. I do not discriminate by gender. It’s a fight to the melodramatic death and the best actor wins, regardless of what’s between their legs or how they identify.

This was a tough one. I feel bad for stinting Peter Dinklage for the second year running after praising him so highly, but it was a strong field, and he did contribute to the overall Game of Thrones win – keep it up, Peter, there’s always next year. Lena Headey was also giving all the players a run for their money with her outstanding performance as Ma-Ma in Dredd 3D – a real performance of a lifetime. But I can’t deny the just deserts for Ben. He took a role I’d never especially liked or understood and made me see it from a completely different angle – an angle that was utterly compelling and heart-breaking. In all honesty I was far less impressed with Parts II and III of The Hollow Crown (and I somehow missed Part IV), and I’ll not deny that Tom Hiddleston did a good job, but Richard II blew me away, and Ben Whishaw was the lycnhpin of that production. Incandescent. Any actor that can ellucidate not just the character they are portraying but the themes of the play and have that render their performance more compelling rather than less, and to such a level… sheer genius.

Thank you, Ben, for showing me Richard II the way you see him. Have a Womble.

The Serene Womble for Best Novel Rome Burning, by Sophia McDougall
Eligible Novels: A Dance With Dragons, Kraken Romanitas, and Rome Burning

This one was probably the hardest. Kraken is the most imaginative novel I’ve reviewed this year, and it was certainly a gripping as well as intelligent read. However, it did have some minor gender issues, the attempt at rendering London accents was unconvincing, and although I found the exploration of personal identity fun, it was inconsistent.

Rome Burning‘s alternate history setting was imaginative in a different way. For exploration of gender, race, and cultural issues it was outstanding. The characters were interesting and varied. The pace was fast and gripping. The politics, nuanced and intriguing. And, overall, the harder-to-define ‘squee’ quotiant was just higher than for anything (new) I’ve read in a long time.

Romanitas, the first book in the trilogy of which Rome Burning is the second, was also good, gripping, and squee-worthy, but the writing was not quite as strong and the world-building was more developed in the second volume.

A Dance with Dragons is what it is: a novel to which I have mysteriously devoted a surprisingly large chunk of my life in reviewing; part of a long series that has given me both great joy and great frustration. Perhaps it is unfair to put it up for assessment when the review is as yet incomplete, but I’ll give you a sneak preview and say that, for all its good points, A Dance with Dragons was not really competition for any of the above.

The Serene Womble for Best Comic Romatically Apocalyptic

Eligible Comics: Real Life Fiction and Romantically Apocalyptic

Another new category, and only two in it, but I couldn’t leave them by the wayside. Both of these are excellent, and I thoroughly recommend them to all of you. Both are surreal, hilariously funny, and gender balanced. Romantically Apocalyptic has an edge for me by being, well, apocalyptic; but then again, Real Life Fiction has Manicorn. The real clincher is the artwork, which, as you can see, is stunning. I have never seen anything like it in a web comic. Or any comic. Or ever. And the creator, Vitaly S Alexius, hands this stuff out for free. There are no two ways about it: this comic wins.

The Time Traveling Wombles

The Time Traveling Womble for Best Film The Glass Slipper
Eligible Films: Robocop, Soldier’s Girl, The Glass Slipper

That’s right, I’m giving the award to a film it’s virtually impossible to buy anymore. It’s not available on Amazon (there’s a Korean film called Glass Slipper, but it’s a different movie), it’s never been made into a DVD, the only videos I can find are US vids on eBay, the cheapest was going for about £16 (inc. P&P) at time of posting. I don’t know if it’d even play on a non-US machine. My copy was taped off the telly in the 1980s. But if you can get it, I urge you to make the effort. And this is really what reviewing via time machine is all about: drawing attention to classics and forgotten works of art. How can we get great films like this pressed for DVD if nobody speaks up to say that they are wanted?

The Glass Slipper is beautiful, sweet, and knowing. To me, it is the definitive cinderella story, and that’s not just the nostalgia talking. I feared it would be when I went to rewatch for this review, but it’s not. This was a feminist take on Cinderella in 1955, long before anyone even dreamt of Ever After. And it doesn’t sacrifice the romance for its message; it is a heart-breaking, life-affirming, challenging, witty, and beautiful work of art.

This is not to discredit its competition, however; both of the other films were clear contenders, although each is very different to the others, and it was hard to make the comparison. Robocop is a cleverly written and directed critique of capitalism. Its ultra-violence and gritty realism stand at stark odds to The Glass Slipper’s colourful fairytale punctuated with surrealist dance-interludes. Soldier’s Girl is a moving and powerful adaptation of the true story of a soldier who was beaten to death for loving a transgender woman. It perhaps didn’t have the artistry of the other two movies, but I don’t know that you want a lot of whistles and bells for such a movie – its task is to tell someone else’s tale and command the viewer to witness a crime and recognise an injustice. It would be wrong for a director to grandstand and steal the show. So, what do you do, when confronted with three such different films, ones that resist judgement on equal grounds?

I think you have to go with your gut. The Glass Slipper is the one that had the deepest personal influence on me, playing a pivotal role in shaping my psyche and helping me figure out what sort of a woman I wanted to grow up to be. Children’s or ‘family’ movies are often over-looked as less serious art objects than ‘adult’ films*, but they help to form the worldview a child is exposed to when they are trying to figure out what this existence, this life, is all about. Films like The Glass Slipper, which show a child a multiplicity of roles for women, are incredibly important, especially when they do so in the context of a story that is usually cast to define women as romantic creatures whose ‘happily ever after’ lies in marriage, and not in independant thought. Doing that whilst keeping the romantic centre of Cinderella’s tale intact is a masterful stroke. It deserves this award.

The Time Traveling Womble for Best Actor Lee Pace

Eligible actors: anyone who has acted in a film I had to time travel to watch.

It may not have garnered the illustrious Time Traveling Womble for Best film, but I can’t deny the Womble to Lee Pace – head and shoulders above the rest – there really wasn’t any competition. Lee Pace plays Calpernia, the transgendered woman that Barry Winchell fell in love with, and was brutally killed for loving. The gentle, understated approach to this sensitive role is spot on. I imagine a lot of reviews of this film will have said something to the effect of what a ‘convincing woman’ Lee Pace made – I’m not even sure what that means, but it’s the sort of thing people say when they discuss a man playing a transgendered role. I’ve known a number of transgendered women – they’re as varied as any other random woman would be from another; they’re as varied as people. Which is not the same as saying that they have nothing in common or don’t have shared experiences. I don’t want to make any sweeping characterisations of what it is to be a transgendered woman and then proclaim that I think Lee Pace matched that stereotype. What I’m saying is that he portrayed a well-rounded character – a person with loves and passions and heart-ache, with interests both important and trivial; a person whose story moved me and made me think about an important issue.

The point that moved me most – that stood out – was a moment in the above scene. It spoke to me powerfully even though it was speaking about an experience I’ve never had, and am never likely to have. Because it’s a scene in one sense about a man struggling with figuring out his own sexuality in the high-pressure environment of being a soldier in the context of the US Don’t-Ask-Don’t-Tell policy – only revoked just over a month before I reviewed this film; still in force when it was made. To a large extent, that’s what the film is about. But it’s also about a woman, struggling to be acknowledged as a woman, finding it almost impossible to date, even though she is beautiful and charismatic, because straight men won’t acknowledge her as a woman. And here she has found a man, a man she is falling in love with, and she must always be asking herself: is this just an experiement, for him? Am I his way of figuring himself out? And all this time she has been loving and supportive and understanding that this is hard, for him, but here she finaly shows her pain and anxiety. Yet, it’s still within the context of that loving, caring, understanding character. Once he has affirmed his love for her she subsumes her own pain to his need for support. It is done with so much subtlety and nuance. Lee Pace isn’t the one bawling his eyes out in this scene, but the emotion is nonetheless powerful.

That’s acting. Acting and sensitivity; just exactly what the role needed.

The Time Traveling Womble for Best Novel The Dark Tower, Vol. 2: The Drawing of the Three, by Stephen King
Eligible Novels: The Blazing World, by Margaret Cavendish and The Dark Tower, Vol. 2: The Drawing of the Three, by Stephen King.

I did think about including some of the works of Anne McCaffrey in this category, as I did talk about a number of them in her memorial post, but ultimately I decided that what I was really doing was celebrating a woman’s life’s work, rather than giving a review. Besides, I might want to review some of them properly somewhere down the line.

As for the two remaining novels… well, it was an unfair match. The Drawing of the Three is basically my most favourite book. The Blazing World is an important book that more people should read. It’s historically valuable and truly remarkable for its time. But it’s also the offspring of a genre (novel writing) in its infancy – the very first science fiction novel, in 1666. Don’t believe me? Go read the post.

As for The Dark Tower – ah… I suspect I shall spend my whole life trying to tease apart why it affects me so. My post, ‘Meditations on Death‘ explores just one aspect of my its power – the seductive power of the concept of death-as-release, what makes us resist its allure, and how this is expertly explored in The Drawing of the Three.

And, last of all:

The People’s Choice Award The Guild, Season 5
Perhaps the most arbitrary of all the awards, this is the one you voted for with your feet. The selection for this award is based solely on the review post with the single largest number of hits. And this year it was a landslide, with 8,431 hits and counting, this post has had more hits than my home page. It’s had several thousand more hits than the total for all hits of my most popular month (July). The closest runners up are The Amazing Spider-man and The Hollow Crown (both around 1,000).

And it’s not even because it’s been on the blog since October last year – the hits suddenly started raining in in July. I don’t know what it was, but it seems like all of a sudden the Internet woke up to The Guild, and all I can say is that it couldn’t be more well deserved. Congrats, Felicia and friends: they like you, they really, really like you!

And that’s it! The awards have been awarded, and it’s time to start all over again, selecting novels and films and TV shows and comics and web series, and kittens only know what else, to review in a brand new Womblevonian year.

Stay serene and max for happiness, yo.

*Not that kind, dirty minds!

Reviewing Through the Time Machine: Robocop

Title: Robocop
Cinematic release: 1987
Starring: Peter Weller, Nancy Allen, Ronny Cox, Kurtwood Smith, Miguel Ferrer, Robert DoQui, and Dan O’Herlihy
Written by: Edward Neumeier and Michael Miner
Directed by: Paul Verhoeven
Genre: Science fiction, action, ultra-violence
Awards: Won the Academy Award for Best Sound Effects Editing; nominated for two other Academy Awards and listed numerous times in various Best Film lists
Price: From £1.48 on Amazon at time of posting

The first photos of the new Robocop movie have been revealed online, and the Internet has already begun to turn its nose up at it. The robo-suit is being criticised for looking too much like Batman’s suit in the Nolan movies. I don’t know. In all honesty, the suit from the original movie does look a lot cooler, to me, but it’s an absolutely iconic image and it’s hard to step back and give a dispassionate assessment of the new suit in comparison. Does the new suit look like Batman’s? Not really. I mean, it’s black, but it does look a lot more like robotic armour, as opposed to a costume that is also designed to protect the wearer, which is what the Batsuit does.

They’ve also released an online ‘Omnicorp’ video – a faux advertisement for various robotic commercial law enforcement products, as well as a fake Omnicorp website.

It’s a fun idea, and the video is nice enough, but they’re making a few rookie mistakes. First off: if you want your video to go viral, you don’t call it ‘Viral’ – that is not how viral advertising works. I can’t see an official account that has this video up, but the two copies I found both labelled it as ‘viral’ and one was put up by ViralMan69, who ‘work[s] for multiple production company’s that promote movies and music and try and get the content to go viral’. Telling the denizens of the Internet that you want them to create hype for you usually makes them look sceptically at you in askance. It’s that stereotype of a dad trying to be down with the kids by doing something all the kids are doing and highlighting that he’s only mimicking them by calling attention to his own pretense. Not cool, daddy-o, not cool.

The second problem is that viral marketing works best when you’ve got something quirky and new that catches people’s attention from an angle that surprises them. But this isn’t quirky or new. The omnicorp advertising video is a slick and convincing duplicate of what was quirky and interesting in the original movie, which featured well-observed, dryly ironic excerpts from Omni Consumer Products advertising. It’s not that the humour isn’t still relevant. Indeed, Better Off Ted encapsulated exactly this kind of car-crash horror of soulless consumerist commodification in its genuinely viral videos of Veridian Dynamics adverts.

What’s problematic is that where Better Off Ted and the original Robocop were satirising this kind of fake, corporate chumminess, the new Robocop is unconsciously embodying that which it’s trying to send up. Fans of the old film already have their hackles up wondering why it needs to be remade in the first place, assuming that it’s a cynical attempt to cash in on sci-fi special effects remakes in a capitalist money-grabbing bid. I actually think that Robocop is a film with a lot of relevance today and a strong candidate for a knowing remake, not because the old film needs remaking, but because the themes of consumerism, creeping totalitarianism, and the privatisation of our public services have come full circle again from the 1980s. Science fiction is at its best when it grabs our attention and uses the mirror of the future to show us what’s wrong and dangerous in the present. A Robocop remake that highlighted the way the dangers of the original film are present again in our society today could be a valuable as well as entertaining movie. The trouble is, if the film looks like it’s trying to cash in on a trend it’s completely undermining itself. A cynical attempt to get on the viral bandwagon is not the way to go.

I’m on the fence. I want to be convinced by the new Robocop. I mean, it’s cyborgs, I’m going to see it anyway, but I’d like it if it were good, too.

So, anyway, with these thoughts in my head, and Robocop on Netflix, I decided to look back at the original film and see if it really was as good as I remembered.

Turns out, it was better.

Plot

Detroit is a city in trouble. Its over-stretched police force is being picked off by a criminal with a taste for killing cops, Clarence Boddicker (Kurtwood Smith), and beginning to mutter about strikes. Omni Consumer Products (OCP) is poised to take advantage of the situation. They’ve been developing two lines of research in robotic law enforcement, the completely mechanical ED-209, developed by Senior President, Dick Jones (Ronny Cox); and the cyborg police officer, ‘Robocop’, developed by Bob Morton (Miguel Ferrer). The ED-209 malfunctions during a demonstration in the boardroom, killing a member of staff, and Bob seizes the moment to propose his project to the Chairman (Dan O’Herlihy), who is happy to give the go ahead to a more stable-sounding project.

Now all Bob needs is the organic part of the cybernetic organism package.

Enter Alex Murphy (Peter Weller), a cop newly transferred to Detroit from a cushier posting. He’s partnered with Anne Lewis (Nancy Allen), who is young, but in many ways more seasoned. Despite some good-natured tussling for dominance over who gets to drive the car, they seem to hit it off, but their partnership is short-lived, as they get called to respond to a bank robbery headed by Boddicker. Having chased the criminal gang to an abandoned mill, Lewis and Murphy get separated. Lewis is left for dead after taking a lengthy fall, but Murphy is less fortunate. Believing his back-up (Lewis) to be dead, the gang take their time torturing Murphy, shooting off one arm to a gruesome stump, before taking him out with repeated and extensive gunfire, and finally shooting him in the head. Unbeknownst to Murphy or the gang, Lewis survived the fall and witnessed the whole, shocking scene. She calls for an ambulance, and although Murphy is pronounced dead at the hospital, he’s fresh enough for use in Morton’s project.

Murphy is re-introduced to the force as Robocop, an efficient and completely obedient officer of the law with apparently no memory of his life as a human being. As Murphy had only been with his unit for a day, no one recognises him, at first, but having watched him, for a while, Lewis begins to have her suspicions. It also becomes apparent that OCP were naive in thinking that they could completely write over a man’s personality in that way – Murphy sustained an extreme trauma, and elements of the memory begin to surface, disturbing the perfect veneer of Robocop.

Meanwhile, Morton has made a dangerous enemy in challenging Dick Jones – just how dangerous becomes increasingly apparent as the film goes on.

Can Lewis help Murphy remember who he was? Who will win in the struggle for power between Morton and Jones? Will Boddicker be brought to justice? You may be able to guess the answer to these questions, but the dramatic unfurling of the apparently inevitable is often surprising, as well as clever, shocking, and well-observed.

Analysis

Made at the height of the consumerist, capitalist 1980s, Robocop is as witty and smart as it is violent. And it really is violent. Much more violent than I remember, although a friend tells me it was heavily edited for television airing in the UK, so that may be why. But even without the contrast with my memory, this film made me realise just how sanitised today’s movie violence has become. Dredd 3D is a notable exception. Nowadays, one rarely sees a bullet wound that is more than a tiny red spot. By contrast, the scene where the ED-209 opens fire on the hapless board member at OCP, early on in the film, makes a clear statement about where this movie is going in terms of graphic violence, and it only gets more graphic and more violent from this point in. It was quite a shocking moment to the eyes of a viewer in 2012.

And that’s a good thing.

Violence for the sake of violence is as boring and unwise as any poorly thought through plot element. Violence purely for shock value is just as dull. Violence intended to shock you and wake you up to something can be pointful, useful, relevant, powerful, and poignant. By explosively tearing apart an innocent man in the sterile, soulless perfection of a 1980s corporate behemoth’s boardroom, the ED-209 is metaphorically tearing apart our preconceptions of the clean and sanitsed nature of such businesses. The extreme violence used (and the almost prissy way the other people in the room respond to it) viscerally underscores the contrast between appearance and reality. This film doesn’t just say ‘There’s something very wrong here’, it punches you in the gut and forces your face into the blood until you can no longer deny that there is a shitpile of mess under the smooth, corporate veneer.

The almost omnipresent dirtiness of the scenes outside of OCP underscores this contrast, especially in the film’s other two main locations: the police station and the abandonned mill. The tensions in the police station are evident from its first scene, and one feels palpably both the justified anger and fear amongst the besieged cops, and the dangers of this force actually going on strike. They deserve better: the city would descend into anarchy without them. The city would descend into anarchy without them: how can they even consider striking? It’s a tension that speaks powerfully to our present times, as the TUC discusses a general strike for the first time since 1926. Robert DoQui as Sargeant Warren Reed marks an interesting figure as he strives to hold the police department together under these irreconcilable forces.

The irony is that Robocop is actually very good at his job – he seems to be exactly what the city needs, and, after all, he’s what we, the viewers, also want. What we paid to see. We are complicit in the dark desire to put other human beings into servitude – abuse their bodies and ignore their personal needs in service of the collective wants and demands of the whole. Western cinema is often accused of over-praising individuality and ignoring the honour to be found in placing the needs of the many above the needs of the few, or the one. But Robocop approaches the subject with nuance. We are presented not with an answer, but with the tension. Duty has a valued place in this world. Cops sign up to serve the people, and they shouldn’t abandon their posts. Headlong persuit of money and individual pleasures is dangerous and selfish. And yet society can also demand too much of the individual. If we ask sacrifice of our police, we can’t expect to keep on asking it endlessly without offering recognition and reward of that sacrifice. More palpably, what happens to Murphy seems wrong at a more visceral level. Yes, the alternative for him was death, but what sort of a life has he been left with? Shouldn’t consent have been asked of his family? Shouldn’t they at least have been told? One of the first things we learn about Murphy is that he has a son – a son that he is clearly devoted to – and that relationship is ripped from him. This highlights not only the emotional tragedy of Murphy’s condition, but the competing demands of duty. People are not one-dimensional existents. Cops can be fathers and husbands as well as keepers of the peace.

Has the film dated? A little. In some ways its embedding in 80s culture adds to the political critique, but despite good presentations of race like that of Sargeant Reed, at least one other black character occupies a painful stereotype as a humourous and incompetent henchman. By contrast, Lewis is a fantastic and refreshing female character. She is never sexualised, wearing the same uniform and bulky armour as any other police officer. She is allowed to fight side-by-side with Robocop as an equal (or as equal as any human being can be) and saves his life on multiple occasions. She is allowed to be as tough as nails without being forced into a caricature of a ‘butch’ woman. She may have a practical short haircut, but it’s fluffy with 80s style and she clearly knows her way around a make-up bag. She’s neither feminine nor unfeminine – she’s a character. Moreover, whilst she and Murphy clearly share a bond (I mean, seeing something like that happen to your partner has got to do something to you), there is no suggestion that this is a romantic relationship. Murphy was happily married; Robocop has other things on his mind – and so does Lewis.

People often look at me weirdly when I talk about the skill involved in making a good action movie, but there’s no doubt in my mind when I say this: Robocop is art. Art and knowing political satire. Films like this are important – they become iconic not because they are ‘fun’, but because they are both fun and powerful.

Robocop is even better than I remembered. Does it need to be remade? My jury’s still out. I think it has the potential to do something important for the current generation, and I don’t want to dismiss it just because I think there’s already a good movie called Robocop. I think we’ve all grown-up with movies and tacitly assumed that we know everything that they can and will do for us, but film is still a comparatively young medium. It’s evolving all the time, and not just in terms of technology. For a while it seemed like film formed a way of fixing stories in time. It created an illusion that if something had been done well and could still be experienced in its original form, then that’s how we should experience it. But no one ever batted an eyelid at reimagining Shakespeare plays with every production. Indeed, we tend to think a production unimaginative if we see it performed in exactly the same way by different troupes of actors. Stories emerged in an oral culture where they could mutate in every telling. We talk about remaking films as though it’s a new and somewhat lazy fad, but retelling stories is an old tradition in good standing as a way of using old tales to make new points, or to make the same points afresh for a new generation.

My main concern about the new Robocop is that at the moment it seems to be doing very much the same thing as the old Robocop. Chances are I will still enjoy a production like that, and I do think it may still be valuable for the new generation who, whatever we may wish, are unlikely to rewatch the old film of their own accord. But I would like to see it do something new and innovative. I love me some cyborgs, but it would be something of a sad inversion of the original spirit if this does prove to be another cynical attempt to cash in.

Reviewing through the Time Machine: Remembering Margaret Cavendish

Earlier today something came across my tumblr that perpetuated a common myth. Which is to say that ‘Mary Shelley invented science fiction’. Now, if you want to say that ‘Mary Shelley was the mother of science fiction’… OK, there’s probably a case for that. I don’t want to diss Mary Shelley and her achievement, but it’s important not to let Frankenstein eclipse an earlier work by a woman who was at least as revolutionary: The Blazing World by Margaret Cavendish.

Artwork used as part of the British Library’s ‘Out of this World: Science Fiction but not as you know it’ exhibition, quote from the The Blazing World; although painting was originally from a Rondo Veneziano album cover.

Written in 1666, and republished in 1668 alongside her Observations upon Experimental Philosophy (AKA ‘science’ before there was such a term),The Blazing World was inspired by a visit to the Royal Society (Cavendish was the very first woman to do so). She looked down a microscope and it blew her mind to the possibilities of different forms of life.

The Blazing World is about a woman who journeys to a parallel world before we had a vocabulary for talking about parallel worlds, and before we had even imagined space travel. This ‘twin’ of the Earth was connected at the North Pole. Cavendish’s heroine’s ship is caught in a storm, driven off course, and washed up on this new world. There she encounters strange and wonderful people (before anyone envisioned aliens – although non-human sentient creatures were common in mythology and theology, these are the first I’m aware of whose different physiology is premised on their living in a different physical world). These people elect this strange woman to be their Empress and present to her many scientific marvels (including a submarine). Cavendish uses this set up to satirise her own society and explore a world where a woman was allowed power far beyond what Cavendish herself could hope to attain (even as a duchess with an unusually permissive husband and rare education).

This looks like a pretty clear case of science fiction to me. It not only has the science fiction tropes of soft SF (aliens, parallel worlds, advanced technology), I’d make a case for it being hard SF. The story seems fantastic to the modern eye, and the idea of another world just stuck on top of the Earth just seems bizarre. It’s likely that although Cavendish was permitted to enter the Royal Society and had an understanding of science beyond most people of the time (and certainly most women), she was still merely peeking into a world that she was largely barred from due to her gender. Yet she came away from her experience having gained a new perspective on the world based on scientific evidence and extrapolated a non-actual but plausible (based on the evidence available to her) premise upon which to base a work of fiction designed to transport readers to another world and use that world to make them reflect on this one. Definitions vary, but that sounds like science fiction to me.

Hence: Margaret Cavendish wrote the first work of science fiction, not Mary Shelley*.

The reason I think it is important to remember Margaret Cavendish’s ground-breaking work for the piece of genuinely original, genre-creating art that it is, is that there are reasons we remember Shelley, rather than Cavendish. It wasn’t easy to be a female writer when Shelley wrote, but it was next to impossible when Cavendish did. Writing was principally the preserve of wealthy and educated men. As Virginia Woolf so cleverly observed, it’s very difficult to write if you have no money of your own and no space and time to devote to writing (AKA A Room of One’s Own and £500 a year). You either had to be exceptionally wealthy and well-educated (in which case it would have been scandalous for you to engage in such an activity as a woman) or have a rich patron (which would have been exceptionally rare for a woman to obtain – the only one I can think of is Aemilia Lanyer, who had a female patron). Margaret Cavendish was the former: she was the Duchess of Newcastle, and she was generally judged to be mad. Samuel Peypes called her ‘mad, conceited and ridiculous’, according to Wikipedia (they don’t provide a direct reference for this, but the article does cite an extensive list of academic sources at the end). And I recall a lecture in which it was described how theatre-goers would go to the theatre to watch Margaret Cavendish at the theatre, for she was known for bizarre fashions, including going out in public topless.

Whether she was mad or not is unclear. Anyone reporting on her at the time is likely to have viewed her through the customs of the time. She must have been a real force of personality to achieve all she did, as well as having a very open-minded husband, and it’s clear that in certain ways she was pretty eccentric. But I think it’d take a real force-of-nature-style eccentricity for a woman to be published in the way she was at the time.

On the other hand, I’ve read some of her plays, and they’re pretty bad, it must be said. The Blazing World itself is intellectually exciting, but artistically a bit of a slog. In her defence, it was early long-form prose fiction, so she’d have had little by way of reference points to guide her style, and the idea is as blazing as the title suggests. It’s not Shakespeare, but it’s equal to most equivalent works of the time.

Margaret Cavendish was a woman writing with few peers who was ridiculed for writing at all. That is why we have forgotten her. She would never have had the size of audience that was available to Shelley due to the advances in printing, and her writing was hardly likely to have been championed for inclusion in a gentleman’s literary education. She was seen as a curiosity at best. Virginia Woolf speculated of what life would have been like for a sister of Shakespeare, equal to him in talent and determination, but bereft of the opportunities he would have had simply by being male. She imagines an imaginative woman torn apart by passion and despair, shunned by society for rejecting the norms that confine her, ultimately killing herself. I can’t help but feel, reading this fictional account, that there goes Margaret Cavendish, but for her fortune and sympathetic husband. If she was mad (although I suspect she was not), we should not be surprised; and if she was forgotten, we should not be surprised, either. If they couldn’t silence her in life, they were unlikely to remember her in death.

So, I feel it’s important to say: ‘Yes, Mary Shelley was awesome and we should celebrate her epoch defining achievement; but also, no, she did not invent science fiction. Margaret Cavendish did, and more people should know that.’

*Obviously this comes with the caveat ‘that I am aware of’, but I suspect it’s fair. It’s really difficult to distinguish science from philosophy prior to the 17th Century, when Cavendish was writing. The Royal Society for improving Natural Knowledge was founded in 1660. Early modern thinking about natural philosophy is usually dated to have been sparked by Galileo’s work published in his controversial The Assayer (1623), which challenged the idea that the Church was the ultimate source of knowledge**, and birthed a movement towards observational investigation as an approach to finding things out about the world that became what we now call science. I suppose some might want to argue for Utopia, but I don’t see any science fiction elements in it, myself. It’s more of an extended ‘counterfactual’ as we would say in philosophy – or fantastic hypothetical used to explore a philosophical idea. It’s really a discussion of a possibility suggested by political philosophy rather than an extrapolation from empirical observation to non-actual, but physically possible, worlds, peoples, societies, and technologies (which is the definition I would lean towards if we’re discussing works that predate the term ‘science’).

** Wooyay – footnotes within footnotes, very 17th Century. Anyway: it should be noted that observational empirical philosophy of a sort can be dated back to Aristotle. The trouble is, Aristotle’s philosophy and observations became so dominant as to become stagnant dogma, assimilated into Church doctrine and taught in the Schools***.

*** Caveat on a caveat on a caveat: all of this is very euro-centric. I can only apologise for that. My knowledge of Margaret Cavendish comes from my studies for my BA, which even though it was supposed to be ‘English and Related Literatures’, was mostly English or American literature. My knowledge of the development of science and early modern philosophy come from teaching and studying early modern philosophy, but I must confess that English philosophy is still dominated by the analytic tradition, with a side bar on ‘Continental’ (i.e. continental Europe) philosophy, and with the European cannon of philosophy that leads up to the analytic/continental ‘split’. I’ve never been taught any world philosophy and have barely dabbled in it on my own time. I know even less on the relationship between science and philosophy in non-euro-centric cultures. Any comments on the origins of science fiction should thus be seen as comments on a largely european and american tradition.

The Serene Wombles

Today marks one year since my very first post on this here writing and review site. And what a year it has been! Me with the reviewing, you with the sometimes reading my reviews. Not to mention the occasional paid writing success, the publication of my labour of love analysing the end of The Dark Tower, the completion of my novella, and so many other things. For the first couple of months this blog averaged six views a day, now it averages sixty-two, and around 1,800 views a month. It’s still an itty-bitty blog spewing into the ether, but it’s reassuring to know that some of you found something interesting in what I had to say.

Anyway, in celebration of ISotHM’s birthday, I’ve decided to cap off the year by handing out some meaningless awards: The Serene Wombles!*.

Eligibility for a Serene Womble in conferred by being the subject of a review in the past year. There may have been better or more worthy things that came out this year, but if I didn’t find them relevant to my interests, or if I simply didn’t have the time to review them, they won’t be eligible for a Serene Womble. I make no pretense that these awards are significant or important in any way, but I enjoy having the opportunity to praise and draw attention to things I have loved.

The Serene Wombles are divided into two categories, those that apply to recent releases, and special Time Travelling Wombles for the most awesome things in my Reviewing Through the Time Machine posts. The division between the former and the latter may at times seem arbitrary – why should a film that came out in 2009 count as a recent release, whilst a TV Show that ended in 2009 requires a time machine? It’ll always be a judgement call, and the judgement will have been made on a case-by-case basis at the time of reviewing. Sometimes I use a time machine for my reviews because I want to review something that came out in 1939, sometimes because I want to review something more recent that’s out of print, or because it’s a TV show that’s been cancelled. A show that was cancelled in 2009 therefore seems different to me than a film that was in the cinema in 2009, but may have only recently reached my eyes. At the end of the day, these are not the Oscars, they’re the highlights from a blog, and are therefore subject to my whim.

Let’s get started!

The Serene Womble for Best Film: Captain America: The First Avenger
Eligible Films: Moon, X-Men: First Class, Green Lantern, Possession, Captain America: The First Avenger
There was some stiff and not so stiff competition in this category, but nevertheless, a clear winner. Moon was aesthetically pleasing, but a bit slow, and short on female characters and ethnic minorities. X-men: First Class was exciting and joyful, but deeply problematic in its representation of women and non-white people. Captain America was a fast-paced joy from start to finish that dealt expertly with its subject matter turning out something nuanced and impressive from a premise that could have been uncomfortably ‘all-American’ and patriotic. I’m very happy to award the first Serene Womble for Best Film to the First Avenger.

The Serene Womble for Best TV Show Game of Thrones
Eligible TV Shows: Misfits, Dirk Gently, Outcasts, Being Human (US), 10 O’clock Live, Doctor Who, Game of Thrones, Torchwood: Miracle Day.
Will this be a surprise or not? I don’t know. I’ve done a lot of squeeing and cheerleading for several TV shows over the past year. If I wanted to split this into fiction and non-fiction I’d be able to reward 10 O’clock Live the way I want to, but then it would be the only one in its category. If you’d asked me half a year ago, I’d have said Misfits without a doubt. It’s very close, and I’d love to reward Misfits for its originality and indie-quirkiness. If I were judging on its first series it would have won hands down. I didn’t feel the second series was quite as strong throughout, though, and whilst I still loved it, A Game of Thrones wins in terms of groundbreaking TV for this year, bringing epic fantasy to hugely successful, internationally acclaimed television in a way I don’t think has been done before. Perhaps the closest previous offering would have been BBC miniseries such as Gormenghast and the 1980s Chronicles of Narnia, but I don’t think we’ve ever seen epic fantasy produced on such an international scale that was as sexual and violent and true to its source material. It also offered roles like that of Tyrion Lannister to the superb Peter Dinklage, allowing him to shine in a way that’s rarely possible in the sort of roles usually offered to actors with dwarfism. It was stonkingly well-cast all round as well as being a visually stunning and gripping adaptation of a beloved fantasy series.

The Serene Womble for Best Actor Eve Myles for her portrayal of Gwen Cooper in Torchwood: Miracle Day
Eligible actors: too many to mention. This category is open to any actor in any recent production that I’ve reviewed in the past year – film, TV, radio, podcast, whatever. I’ve also made the decision not to distinguish on gender. It’s not something I really understand in this day an age. It’s not like sport, where physical differences might mean that men won over women disproportionately often. All that matters for this category is the acting. Having said that, maybe Eve Myles will be a controversial choice. You all know I supported Peter Dinklage for his Emmy, and his contribution to Game of Thrones certainly added to its win for TV show, but Eve Myles wins hands down, for me. I was blown away by her acting in Torchwood: Miracle Day. Any previous series of Torchwood? No, she wouldn’t have had a chance. I never really liked Gwen, before, but Eve Myles brought it this series, and she deserves recognition for a consistently shining performance on all different levels.

The Serene Womble for Best Novel Jumper, by Steven Gould
Eligible novels: A Dance with Dragons, by George R R Martin; Witch Week, by Diana Wynne Jones; Charmed Life, by Diana Wynne Jones; Hexwood, by Diana Wynne Jones; The Dragon Keeper, by Robin Hobb; Dark Lord of Derkholm, by Diana Wynne Jones; Jumper, by Steven Gould; Reflex, by Steven Gould; Jumper: Griffin’s Story, by Steven Gould; I, Zombie, by Al Ewing.
This was probably the hardest category to judge. So many entries, so many good books. It was particularly complicated by the whole Time Machine issue – unlike film and TV books can remain ‘current’ for a long time, and, for the most part, I only put them in the Time Machine category if they’re out of print (at least in the UK, where I live) or otherwise over-looked. So new books like I, Zombie are up against classics like Hexwood. This was further complicated because I reviewed some books before I introduced the Reviewing Through the Time Machine category of posting, and, what’s more, I reviewed a whole bunch of Steven Gould books in one post, two of which are out of print where I live, but three of which aren’t. Helm and Wild Side I had to order second-hand as ex-library books from the US, whereas Jumper, Reflex, and Jumper: Griffin’s Story I bought new. Give me some slack, I’d only been doing this blog 20 days by that point. Anyway, I decided to resolve this by saying that the three Steven Goulds I bought new belong in the ‘recent’ category, whilst the others will go in the Time Machine one. Once I decided this, my life became much easier.

I, Zombie was astoundingly original and tickled me, personally, but it has an odd break in the middle where it almost becomes another book and starts following a character much less appealing than the main character. Very close to winning, but not quite. Hexwood is a classic and one of my all time favourites – a got-to comfort book. It’s more cohesive than I, Zombie, and just as original, in its own way, but it’s also of a very similar mould to a lot of other Diana Wynne Jones books, with the strong female character who falls in love with a broken-yet-powerful charismatic and enigmatic man. In all honesty I would have felt I’d slighted one or the other if I’d had to choose between them. Jumper, on the other hand, is simply excellent. Tight and fast-paced, but full of interesting and engaging characters. This is the best superhero novel I’ve ever read, and much more interesting and original than most superhero plots full-stop. If only the film had been closer to the book! It’s got everything, as well as hitting some of my particular happy buttons, such as an expert handling of secret-identity angst.

The Serene Womble for Best Podcast The History of Philosophy Without any Gaps

Eligible podcasts: The History of Philosophy Without any Gaps and Marco and the Red Granny
Only two entries in this one. I’ve mentioned more podcasts in passing, but these were the only two I reviewed. I was torn. I sort of felt like I should choose Marco and the Red Granny simply because it is an SF story, and the general purpose of this blog is to review SF/F/Spec Fic. But I also review stuff if I love it really hard, and The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps is well worth your time. Ultimately, I felt that although the ideas are bright and original, the pacing for Marco and the Red Granny was uneven and the central character a little difficult to engage with. I still think it’s a great podcast and think Hub are awesome for experimenting with the field of podcasting for longer fiction, but The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps won out. Hard to compare two podcasts of such different genres, but the latter is polished, entertaining, and informative.

Peter Adamson has a smooth and engaging podcasting voice. He’s also an expert in his field, and he brings in other experts to supplement his accounts and offer alternate view points. This podcast is pitched at just the right level – accessible for the interested layman but also informative for the experienced philosopher or historian. I’ve taught Ancient Philosophy, and I felt it really filled out my existing knowledge. This is great easy listening for the lady or gent on the go, looking for a bit of ear candy on the way to work, or down the allotment. You’ll drift in and out of an ancient world, feeling soothed and entertained, and you’ll actually come away having learnt something, as well. Of course, it’s not the same as reading the texts themselves, but I’m sure you’re all aware that there are more books worthy of your attention than anyone could read in lifetime. Let Peter Adamson do some of the work for you.

The Time Traveling Wombles

The Time Traveling Womble for Best Film Mr Smith Goes to Washington
(Embedding has been disabled for this clip, but you can go watch it here. Please note that this is the climax of the film, and as such both very famous and spoilerific. It contains nothing I didn’t know before watching the film for the first time, but if you want to avoid spoilers this is the clip I linked to in my original review.)

Eligible Films: Silent Running, Mr Smith Goes to Washington, Bell, Book, and Candle
In a year when politics and big business has been prominently in the news, where a lot of people have felt the rich have been squeezing the poor, where democracy has sprung from revolution and here in the UK we debated and voted on voting reform, Mr Smith Goes to Washington held a particular relevance. 1939 to 2011, the issues are still the same. I was watching it in my bedroom with tears rolling down my face. I’d seen it before and known the plot long before I saw it, but it didn’t matter. ‘Filibuster’ is nearly synonymous with the above scene, to me. Maybe it doesn’t have quite the same familiarity with non-US audiences – I have a slight trans-Atlantic background, and it can make it difficult for me to judge these things – but people everywhere should watch this film. If they remade it now, it wouldn’t be as good, but if they released it now, it would still be relevant. Sometimes a classic seems ponderous and clichéd when viewed through modern eyes, but this one isn’t weighed down with its worthiness. It’s funny and moving and electrifying. It’s also quietly feminist in a way a few modern films could learn from. Clarissa Saunders is an icon to be envied – probably the brightest, most savvy person in Washington, embittered by politics, but still willing to hope when prodded by Mr Smith’s naïve enthusiasm. And this is 1939, folks!

Make time for this film. If there’s only one film I recommend that you go and watch, make it this one. It will reward you.

The Time Traveling Womble for Best Actor James Stewart
Eligible actors: again, too many. Anyone who acted in any of the productions I reviewed through my time machine. Jean Arthur and Lee Pace are honourable mentions, as are Kristin Chenoweth and Kim Novak, but there was really no contest. When Jimmy Stewart brings his game to town he’s incandescent, and there’s no denying that he’s on fire in Mr Smith Goes to Washington. And I’m not just talking about the filibuster scenes where he’s all sweaty and hoarse, for which he supposedly swabbed his throat with mercury. I’m talking about the quiet naïvety and straight played simplicity that makes his earlier scenes a delight as well. Well done, Jimmy. Not that you need praise from the likes of me to go with your Oscars and 80 odd years of critical acclaim. I hope that we’re still singing your praises long after I’m gone, too. A stunning performance, simply stunning. Can’t think of when I last went to the cinema and saw a performance like that.

The Time Traveling Womble for Best TV Show Pushing Daisies
Eligible TV Shows: Pushing Daisies
OK, so it was the only one in its category, but it still would have won. I did have plans to review other TV Shows, but time got away from me. My description from the review is still true: ‘The most beautiful, funny, poignant, stylish, and original television show ever to get axed.’ I still ache inside over the fact that there were only two seasons, and both were only half as long as a proper season, due to the writers’ strike and the cancellation. If I had one credit to spend on giving one cancelled TV Show the time it deserved… well, I don’t know, it would be a very tough competition between this and Firefly. It’s that level of originality and quality. If you haven’t seen it, do so, now!

(Incidentally, Brian Fuller is still my top choice to make a Chrestomanci TV series. Lee Pace would make an ace Chrestomanci/Christopher Chant. Just think about it – a quirky show with magic and style, Lee Pace in exquisitely cut formal wear. Brian Fuller, hear my prayer…)

The Time Traveling Womble for Best Novel The Wolf Within
Eligible novels: Helm, by Steven Gould; Wild Side by Steven Gould; The Silver City, by Pamela Belle; The Wolf Within, by Pamela Belle.
One of my favourite novels. This book is just awesome for the secret identity angst, pushing all my buttons. It just goes to show that it isn’t always a mistake to jump into the middle of a trilogy. This is the second book of the Silver City trilogy, but, although I enjoyed the first book, the second is a tighter, more swiftly paced, more deeply characterised novel. The first couple of chapters are a little awkward, but once it gets going this is a book that grabs you and won’t let go. Credit should also be given for the range of different cultures, mix of races, and positive depictions of women and gay characters. In all cases the characters are fully rounded and not simply there to make for diversity. If only there were more books like this.

And last, but by no means least:

The People’s Choice Award Torchwood: Miracle Day
Perhaps the most arbitrary of all the awards, this is the one you voted for with your feet. The selection for this award is based solely on the review post with the single largest number of hits. Until a few days ago it was Doctor Who, ‘A Good Man Goes to War’. I assumed it still would be until I checked just now. That post is still the one with the largest number of hits in a single day (210), but Torchwood: Miracle Day, has hedged into the lead with (at time of posting) 446 hits to 434.

What does this signify? Who knows. Attention could mean love or hate, although I imagine I would have received more trolling if it were hate. Would the number of hits for all my ADwD posts add up to more if I put them together? Maybe, but let’s not forget that this was just the first post out of several for Torchwood as well, and I’m not sure it would be right to pit multiple posts against single reviews. You might suppose that this is also unfair on my more recent posts, having had more time to garner hits, but given that this beats my most popular Misfits post from last autumn by 162, I think it legitimately says something regarding what you guys enjoyed reading about.

Thanks again for staying with me through the year and helping me build this blog into something worth both my while and yours. It’s been fun!

*I use ‘womble’ here in the sense that derives from gaming speak, i.e. a combat womble is a character maxed for combat skills – they might have strength, dexterity, and constitution at 18, but wisdom and intelligence scores of 6. I therefore figure that someone who had maxed for happiness would be a serenity womble. No copyright infringement is intended for The Wombles, which are cute, rubbish collecting rodents.

Reviewing Through the Time Machine: The Wolf Within, by Pamela Belle

It’s all been very current around here lately, and although I’m desperately trying to reign in my impulse to post (because twice a week is really enough) I’m also conscious of things I said I wanted to review at the start of the year, and haven’t yet. Top of that list is The Wolf Within, which will always have a place in my heart, and deserves to be better known. Let’s start the show!

Title: The Wolf Within
Author: Pamela Belle
Series/Standalone: Book two of the Silver City Trilogy
Genre: Fantasy
First Published: 1995
Edition Reviewed: 1995
Hb/Pb: Hardback
Awards: British Fantasy Society Award nominee
Price: N/A Out of print, but available from £4.57 (pb) and $10.76 on Amazon Marketplace at time of posting.
Read my review of book one, The Silver City, here.

Cover Art

The Wolf Within, Cover

I have to start with the cover art, as this is what originally drew me in. I saw it from across the library, and it called to me in every way, hitting all the right notes to capture my wombling heart. Cover art is so important. It has helped me to find some of my very favourite books and added to the atmosphere and feel of the reading experience. I value my Kindle, but one thing it truly does lack is cover art, and I think it’s a great shame so many ebooks skimp on providing eReader suitable art. I mean, just take a look at this:

Admittedly, the choice of colours for the typography is terrible. Although it does pick up on colours within the painting you can barely read that red title on that orange background, and that bright blue writing stamped right over the top of the ghostly wolf’s head in the sky is just awful. But the cover art itself is pretty good. I love that kind of sunset light. We see an arid, desolate landscape that somehow, despite its openness, manages to create a sense of claustrophobia – of encroaching night. You just know, looking at this image, that that ghostly wolf is going to be fucking over those two people in the foreground.

And let’s take a look at them. We have a hot Christian Slater look-a-like who seems in a pretty bad way, being watched over by a hot black lady. That snaking river in the background speaks of a journey – they’re going somewhere, and they’re all alone. And why does he look so fucked up? What happened to these people?

Now, I’m not going to lie to you, part of the reason this book jumped off the shelf at me is that the guy looked really hot. I must have been 14? 15? Well… sex sells. And sexy men with angst sell to 15-year-old girls. I wasn’t really in to vampires, but this was right up my alley. Plus, I was just starting to get really fed up by the way that all the smart strong women in Anne McCaffrey novels always ended up falling for even stronger men. You don’t know much about who that woman is on this cover, but you can tell just from how she’s holding herself that she’s strong, and it’s pretty clear that she’s the one who’s looking after him. AWESOME. Target demographic achieved.

Also, let’s not gloss over this, given the white-washing scandals of recent years: this is an inter-racial couple, and that black character still looks black. That stuff shouldn’t matter. It shouldn’t be a big deal that there’s a black woman on the cover and she actually looks black – the cover itself isn’t making a big deal out of it, after all – but the world is what it is. Having read the book, it would have been equally representative if he’d been shown standing protectively over her, as so many fantasy novels do. Especially given the dark lighting, it would have been easy for the artist to maybe pale her out a bit and at least make her race appear ambiguous. But they didn’t. This is a cover that isn’t drawing on stereotypes for male/female relationships, and it isn’t assuming that I’ll be less likely to buy the book if, *gasp*, I know in advance that not all the characters are white. I like that about it.

I can’t tell if this cover was done by the same artist who did the cover for The Silver City, as my copy is the very same one I first saw in the library and later bought, and I think whatever credit there may have been must have been cut out, but it looks like the same style, and its equally worthy of praise. Well done to you, unknown artist!

Plot

Bron is a young boy with immense magical power. He was bred for it in a world where most people believe that magic can only be obtained through taking the drug Annatal. Under the control of the priestess D’thliss, his father, Ansaryon, a prince of Zithirian, was coerced into raping his sister, and Bron was the result of that union. Bron was raised by D’thliss in secret, as she used the boy’s power to enhance her own. She planned to overthrow the city, with the help of Ansaryon’s brother, Tsenit, and the fearsome warrior tribe, the Ska’i. Both D’thliss and the Ska’i worshipped the death god, Ayak, and D’thliss dedicated Bron to him as a small child. Realising Bron’s power, the Ska’i kidnap the child and his foster-brother, but in trying to force Bron to use his power for them, they kill his foster-brother, and Bron reacts with anger and grief. He kills them all.

This is the terrible secret that lies in Bron’s past. He’s taken to the beautiful hidden city of Sar Dyenyi to recover and grow up in peace with Ansaryon’s cousin, Kefirri, whom he loves and trusts. But he is haunted by what he has done, and by visions of the wolf god, Ayak, who tries to persuade him to use his power again. During a visit from his father, now King of Zithirian, Bron falls from a high tower and, in front of everyone, slows his descent with magic to save his life. Although their king is a sorcerer, magic has long been viewed with suspicion by the people of Zithirian and Sar Dyenyi, and it is clear that Bron can no longer stay in his mountain seclusion. Ansaryon takes him back to Zithirian to train him, making it known to all the people just what Bron can do, and, indeed, what he has done.

Bron has few friends in Zithirian, but he does renew his acquaintance with Herris, son of Kaydi, a leader of the resistance under Tsenit’s rule. He reluctantly accepts training in magic from his father and grows into a man. He decides to enter the Bridal Race – a test of endurance seen as right of passage in Zithirian – a year early, but as he does so, tragedy strikes. Part of the race involves swimming across the Kefirinn, the river that runs through the city. As Bron goes to cross he sees a large log that is being swept downstream, and which is going to hit a man he knows. He calls out to the man, but because of past rivalry, Gorseth ignores him. Bron goes in to save him, but is hit by another log, which he hadn’t seen following the first. Both of them die… except that Ayak is not willing to accept the death of such a prize as Bron, yet. He calls to Bron’s half-brother, Hommen, and guides the child to where Bron can be found.

Realising that Bron is still under Ayak’s control, and concerned for his other children, Ansaryon decides that Bron must be sent away – to his wife Halthris’s people. But Bron knows that this will not be good enough. He makes a plan in secret to escape the city, with Herris’s help – to head south in the hope of somehow finding away to the semi-mythical island of Jo’ami, ancient island of sorcerers. He hopes that once there he will be able to find help to free himself from the wolf within.

Bron’s journey is far from straightforward – there are no easy routes to Jo’ami, and as a young man travelling through strange countries on his own, Bron still has some growing up to do, which is somewhat complicated by his peculiar talents, and by Ayak’s constant threat. He travels through wilderness, finding the ruined city of Tyr. He passes through Kerenth, land of women, and unwittingly attracts the attention of the young ruler, Inrai’a. She wants him for her consort, but he is rejected by the goddess Sarraliss, who can see the mark of the wolf upon him.

At last he makes his way to Toktel’yi, seat of the empire, and most dangerous city in the world for Bron. Unlike Zithirian, sorcery is openly embraced in Toktel’yi, and Bron is aware that he would be very easily detectable if he should draw attention to himself with his magic. His magic makes him a prize in his own right, but he is also the son of the northern king Ansaryon. The ruthless young emperor, Ba’alekkt, has been looking hungrily towards the silver city, and to have Ansaryon’s eldest son in his possession would be a coup.

Bron finds work as a musician in the Golden Djarlek, and attracts the attention of the proprietor, Mallaso – that formidable lady you see on the cover with him. Mallaso is a former slave, captured in the Toktel’yan conquest of Penya, saving up her money in the hopes of one day retiring to Tekkt with her daughter, who is living there with a kind family under Mallaso’s pay, away from the dangers of the capital city. They begin a tentative romance, but when Bron reveals his magic in anger in the middle of the race day crowds, they are forced to flee the city.

Mallaso longs to rejoin her daughter on Tekkt, but Bron must still complete his journey to Jo’ami, and now the emperor knows he is alive and within the bounds of the empire…

Why do I love it so?

Come on, a hot man with god-like magical powers, cursed by a terrible thing he did in his past – when he was a child and didn’t know any better – who also happens to be a bastard prince (the fruit of an incestuous union, no less), forced to conceal his identity? You know why I liked this. Add to that the plentiful strong women, a rich world that unashamedly departs from the standard western fantasy tropes of faux-feudal Europe, a good mix of races, plus several gay characters to boot… this book really has a lot going for it beyond the fact that it hits my personal sweet spots. No wonder it was nominated for the British Fantasy Society Award.

Not that it’s perfect. The first couple of chapters really struggle under the strain of info-dumping as the author fills us in on the considerable back story of the first book. The nice thing about this is that it means you can jump right into The Wolf Within even if you haven’t read The Silver City – just as I did. On rereading, however, its somewhat torturous. Just take my word for it that things really, really pick up.

Bron is an intensely charismatic character. Even though we view most events from his point of view, he remains somewhat enigmatic in his quiet reserve. This is a person who has grown up with the burden of intense self-control and the knowledge of what could happen if he allows his guard to slip. He doesn’t make friends easily, as a result, and I’m not sure how well I could sustain a conversation with him if I were to meet him in real life, but as a character he’s deeply appealing.

Mallaso, although we don’t meet her until half-way through the book, is a wonderful character in her own right. So much more than a love-interest – full of goals and intense emotions of her own, many of which have nothing to do with Bron. In fact, it’s fair to say that he does nothing but wreak havoc in her life. As a former slave and prostitute she could have been the worst cliché of a whore with a heart of gold, but her past forms a rich tapestry that contributes to both her strengths and her sorrow. She is never ashamed of her sexuality, and it becomes an expression of strength when she performs the dances of her people. Here we see how erotic dancing can be integrated into a character and the customs of a people without reducing the performer to a sexual object (Mr Martin, take note!).

Of course I adored the tense moments of revelation as Mallaso learns more of Bron’s past, that he is a sorcerer, and then the extent of his sorcery when he reveals too much at the race course. This book is full of moments that tickled my Secret Identity Angst button, but it has many other wonderful moments besides. One hidden treasure is Bron’s discovery of the ruined city of Tyr. With the modern obsession of cutting out anything that isn’t integral to the action, I wonder if this would have made it past the editor’s cut. In many ways, this is ‘just’ colour, but it fills in the rich background of this world. And, I love a good ruined city. I love a mystery. I loved this.

Some of the best moments of the book occur further down the line from where I had to stop my plot summary. I would hate to spoil it all for you. In truth, I adore the ending. I am denied the opportunity to discuss the wonderful character of Al’Kalyek, Ba’alekkt’s High Sorcerer, and friend of Ansaryon from the first book. The interactions between Al’Kalyek and Bron, and Bron and Ba’alekkt, are compelling. The ending is haunting and satisfying.

Where The Silver City was over-long, The Wolf Within is tighter and stronger. The opening chapters are a little awkward, but I would urge you to read on – you will be rewarded. Where the antagonists of The Silver City lacked depth, Ba’alekkt is complex, terrible, and charismatic.

The wealth of different societies and cultures is also a joy. Belle is adept at evoking the atmosphere and feel of her different settings. On earlier readings, I was not overwhelmed by the depiction of Kerenth. I found Inrai’a childish and annoying, and the gender role-reversal a little simplistic, but on rereading, I found it more nuanced. Inrai’a is young and foolish, but not without strength. The exploration of sexuality and how we read sexual attitudes in terms of vitality and weakness also has some interest. In a land where a warrior class is not needed due to the protection of a goddess, it makes sense that the physical strength of men could be seen as suited to more menial, physical tasks, whilst women take care of the more cerebral business of ruling and politics.

This is a book with much to offer on top of a rollicking good story. It deserves to be rediscovered in the new millennium. Go find yourself a copy and have a read!

Reviewing Through the Time Machine: Pushing Daisies

Title: Pushing Daisies
Original Run: 2007-2009
Starring: Lee Pace, Anna Friel, Chi McBride and Kristin Chenoweth
Created By: Bryan Fuller
Genre: Comedy-drama, Fantasy, Mystery, Quirky/Odd-ball
Awards: Nominated for 57 awards, including 17 Emmy Awards; Won 18 Awards, including 7 Emmy Awards
Price: Season 1: £5.99; Season 2: £9.99 (Amazon prices at time of posting)

The most beautiful, funny, poignant, stylish, and original television show ever to get axed.

Premise: Ned has an unusual gift: he can touch dead things and bring them back to life… but only for a minute. If he touches them again, they go back to being dead, but if he leaves them alive for more than a minute then something else has to die in their place. Ned discovered his power as a child when his dog Digby was run-over, and learned the limitations on his power when his mother died, suddenly. He restored her to life, but at the cost of his childhood sweetheart’s father, who died in her place. He grows up to become a pie-maker who avoids close personal attachments, for fear of what he might do if someone he loved were to die. A private detective named Emerson Cod discovered his power, and now Ned works with Emerson to solve mysteries by waking the dead (but only for a minute!) and asking them who killed them.

But when Chuck (aka Charlotte Charles), dies in mysterious circumstances, Ned cannot stop himself from bringing her back, for good. As Chuck helps Ned and Emerson investigate her own murder, she and Ned renew their affections for one another; the only trouble is… they can never touch. Or Chuck will die again, this time, forever.

Why you should love it

Pushing Daisies achieves an unlikely, but perfect balance. Its bright colours, cartoonishly surreal style, and impossibly sweet hopeless romance could very easily be sickeningly saccharine, and yet it is not. Similarly, the morbid subject matter could just as easily be too grim and depressing for a light-hearted comedy. However, together, each provides a perfect counter-balance to the other, producing something so quirky and wonderful and dark and heart-warming that it is like no other show I have ever seen.

Every element is in harmony. The casting could not be more spot on. Lee Pace is an inspired choice for the sweet, physically awkward Ned. Anna Friel positively glows off the screen as Chuck, effusing exactly the renewed zest for life needed for a woman who spent most of her life cooped up looking after her shut-in aunts before being killed on the cruise that was her first independent venture into the world. Kristin Chenoweth deserves every bit of her two Emmy Awards for her portrayal of Olive, the diminutive waitress who has long pined for Ned, and the foot and a half difference in height between them provides the perfect opportunity for some sweet and well-played physical comedy. Chi McBride’s sarcastic but good-hearted Emerson Cod grounds the show with a dash of practicality.

Much credit should be given to the costume and visual design, which perfectly complements the vibrant surreality of the show. This is probably the most stylish television programme I have ever seen (although Mad Men offers some stiff competition from a different genre). Accents of 1950s and 60s fashion are mixed with something thoroughly modern in joyfully bright colours that speak of the fairytale undertones whilst lightening the darker elements of the show.

Most of all, the fast-paced and snappy script is both witty and poignant as it brings the characters to life, exploring their unusual issues and unveiling the weekly mystery they must solve.

This show was always going to hit a sweet spot for me. The Ned/Chuck romance with its associated angst is just exactly the sort of thing I like to curl up with, and you guys know how I adore someone with superpowers who is forced to hide his ability. But Pushing Daisies is never weighed down by its angsty elements; it soars with them to new heights, and somehow always leaves you at the end of the episode somehow feeling better about the world. Because even if their world is not our world, wonderful men and women alive in our world dreamt it up.

Moreover, it’s a wonderful programme for race and gender, for the most part because it doesn’t make a fuss of them. Although the two leads are white, it is otherwise unusually racially diverse for an American TV show, Emerson Cod being just one of several black men and women, and although he’s the only non-white show regular, many of the guest stars are Asian or latino. There are also more female regulars than men, which is very unusual, and although there are romantic plotlines, Pushing Daisies passes the Bechdel Test so well it’s not even an issue. Yet this is not a show with any overt feminist themes, it’s just a show that thinks about people in terms of their characters first, not their genders.

It is a true loss to the world that this show was cut short. Its ample awards demonstrate that the brevity of its run is not a reflection of its quality or critical reception. It was just a victim of the writer’s strike. Its first season was cut in half, and it wasn’t able to build on its early success to develop the following that would ensure viewing figures to satisfy the networks in its second season. This is nothing but an act of short-sightedness on the part of executives who dismissed the shows clear potential for future growth on the basis of present figures at a very difficult time. Not that I’m bitter, or anything.

Anyway. If there’s one new TV show you want to try this year, make it this one. Just get it. £6 will get you the whole first season. You could spend more at the cinema getting a headache from a poorly made 3D film. And if you’re worried about the inevitable lack of resolution for a show cut short: Bryan Fuller has been working on a comic to tie up the story.

Besides, Lee Pace is very pretty.