Margaret Edson. Wit (1993)

      Margaret Edson. Wit (1993) Presented by Espanola Little Theatre, Friday, 16 March 2001, at the Quonta Festival, Sault Ste Marie Ontario. Vivian Baring, a 50 year old professor specialising in John Donne’s poetry, has 4th stage metastatic ovarian cancer. The play shows her experience as a patient, as human being facing death. Intelligent and moving script, Sharon Sproule at the top of her form, beautifully simple set consisting of movable white panels, well-designed lighting, and a very strong supporting cast. A very good play very well done. It’s on at several theatres in Canada and USA, and a film with Emma Thompson is to be released later this year. The script is almost actor proof, which means that it takes a superb actor to show us all the subtlety in the writing. I doubt that the pros did any better than Sproule. **** (2001)

Christopher S. Claremont et al. Star Trek: Debt of Honor (1992)

     Christopher S. Claremont et al. Star Trek: Debt of Honor (1992) Graphic novel treatment of a convoluted ST tale about Kirk’s Debt of Honor to T’Cel, a part-human Vulcan woman, who saved him from an attack by bugs that have invaded the galaxy via a space-time rift. Now, he comes out of retirement and teams up with her and an Klingon frenemy to defeat those bugs. The original Enterprise was destroyed in the earlier fight with these creatures. The whole crew comes together for this final battle. Subplots involve other debts of honour. The book looks very much like a scenario, not a complete script. The style is DC Comics naturalistic, with sometimes difficult to follow dialogue balloons. The jump cuts don’t help; perhaps paradoxically, they’d be easier to follow in a movie. In fact, this story would work better as a movie, I think. Still, it was fun to read, but I’m a diehard ST fan. It ends with T’Cel departing through the space-time rift, and her daughter (who may be Kirk’s child) left on the Enterprise. Clearly To Be Continued, but I don’t know of any sequels. **½

Robert Robinson. Landscape with Dead Dons (1963)

     Robert Robinson. Landscape with Dead Dons (1963) UP and AR gave me this in 1987, for Christmas. It’s been languishing on the shelf ever since. The plot is set in an Oxford college; the author apparently went down shortly before he wrote this book, and it’s an ironical hymn of love towards the University.
     A Vice Chancellor is murdered, then a Fellow, and finally a pornographer is almost drowned, too. Inspector Autumn is the cop, and he would have made a nice series, but I suppose Robinson didn’t have any more stories in him. Autumn’s not from Oxford, so he would have to do his stuff in various parts of the kingdom. A new-found poem by Chaucer (The Book of the Lion, alluded to by Chaucer himself, but never found), a little decorous hanky-panky, academic infighting, and so forth, along with a nice smattering of eccentrics make for a pleasant entertainment. A police procedural this is not – perhaps that’s another reason Robinson didn’t make a series, not having sufficient knowledge to make it believable – but with the usual suspension of disbelief, it works quite well. There are a few oddities, which disappear when one remembers the date of composition. **-½ (2003)

Boese, Alex. The Museum of Hoaxes (2002)

     Boese, Alex. The Museum of Hoaxes (2002) A cursory catalogue of hoaxes from the Middle Ages to the present. The book is apparently based on a doctoral dissertation, and its author maintains a website. Superficial, especially in its attempts at providing some sort of sociological explanation for the hoaxes; flat, surprisingly boring style, considering the subject matter; and not enough pictures. Also strongly unbalanced in its selection, with recent hoaxes far outnumbering those of the past. A more subtle analysis of hoaxes and their varieties would have been interesting, too. For example, what about unintentional hoaxes such as the Tulip Mania, in which the public creates the hoax? Perhaps the book was dumbed down from the dissertation, but I doubt it. Not worth the money. I’m trying to get a refund, as the book is mounted upside down in the case. * (2003)

Martha Grimes. I Am the Only Running Footman (1986)

     Martha Grimes. I Am the Only Running Footman (1986) Grimes has a very high reputation, but if this book is a fair sample of her work, I think it’s undeserved. The plotting is muzzy, with a lot of necessary information withheld until near the end, the characterisation is superficial and derivative, and the resolution is unsatisfactory. I suppose a good team could make a decent movie out of this book --  certainly a lot of the writing seems based on some inner screen vision of the scene -- but as it stands I was disappointed. Richard Jury is the cop, two girls are the victims, a dysfunctional but fiercely loyal family is the link (and one of the family is the murderer). The writing is cute, and in place self-consciously funny. Grimes is American, and critics have acclaimed her skill at doing the British atmosphere. Not at all. It’s all very Masterpiece Theatre, and really doesn’t work. Perhaps the fact that this book comes well along in the series is at fault; we are supposed to know why Melrose Plant appears, for example. But other characters, such as the St Clairs and the Warboys, have no function other than lugubrious, oh so veddy British comic relief. I won’t be reading another of these books. * (2003)

Spider Robinson. The Callahan Touch (1993)

     Spider Robinson. The Callahan Touch (1993) I didn't finish this. The first book in this series had some point, ie a plot and characters that one could care about. This excursion into fantasy is just that, fantasy, and rather infantile at that. The bar is now the location of a permanent party, and there’s a lot of sentimental claptrap about absent friends, and such. I suppose some sort of problem turns up and the denizens have to solve it to make the universe safe for beer drinkers. But at the halfway point there was not much indication of what the plot point might be. Browsing the last few pages confirms that everything turned out all right, but I really didn’t care enough to find out what and why. The writing is amusing enough, if you’re half cut and your critical faculties are dissolved in a haze of alcohol, or whatever drug you use, but otherwise this is a tedious example of what happens when a writer tries to be cute. (2003)

Lewis Lapham. Money and Class in America. (1988) (re-read)

     Lewis Lapham. Money and Class in America. (1988) A long and mostly witty rant, combined with semi-autobiographical anecdote, and social history and analysis. Like all good observers of the social comedy, Lapham is good at seeing the significant moment or comment, and having been born into the “equestrian classes”, he can see the rulers of America close up. His testimony rings true , truer than a library full of sociological analysis and statistics. Lapham has the ability of a good novelist to show the general in the particular. He knows when the mask slips, and the primitive animal within peers out, aware and frightened of death.
     The net effect is a portrait of a sad, confused, self-absorbed, and somnambulent bunch of fools. Only the fact that they wield so much influence, and that they can directly intervene in government, prevents one from giving in to the dual impulse to laugh and to pity.
     Lapham claims that the general wealth of the United States has infected the whole culture with the pathologies of the rich. He makes a good case. In particular, he notes the ability (if that’s the word) of the rich to persuade themselves that their view of the world is the only one, and that the rest of the universe is mere stage set for the drama of their lives. When I look at the current stumbling towards war with Iraq, Lapham’s perspective helps one understand the inexplicable. Only a nation or ruling class caught up in the fantasies of power could plan such a stupid venture. Bush and company talk as if they are playing a game on a large table in a dimly lit “library” while sipping bourbon and chatting languidly about next year’s golf or their neighbours’ indiscretions with their neighbours’ wives. One can almost see them pushing little metal figures around on the map spread over the pool table, occasionally congratulating each other on a particularly witty move.
     Lapham’s chapter on the corrosive effects of the love (and fear) of money, of the worship of Mammon, is worth the price of the book, which in my case wasn’t much (I bought this copy at Value Village). I suspect that Lapham based this book on his Harpers essays; there is some repetition, the kind that a person who repeatedly writes essays on the same themes is liable to produce. That’s really the only flaw of any consequence. **** (2003)