Ruth Dudley Edwards. Carnage on the Committee (2004)

 

    Ruth Dudley Edwards. Carnage on the Committee (2004) Hermione Babcock, the chair of a literary prize committee dies of ricin poisoning, which is an excuse for Georgie Prothero and Robert Amiss to arrange the appointment of Jack Troutbeck, well known curmudgeon and Mistress of St Martha’s at Cambridge, for the post. Three more members of the committee are offed before the murderer confesses, via letter, mailed on his way out of the country into his private crook-protection scheme.
     The plot is rather thin, but Edwards is really more interested in satirising the literary prize racket and all that goes with it than with concocting a proper police procedural. The book may be a roman a clef, but I wasn’t interested enough to pursue the necessary research. It’s a funny and for the most part well-aimed satire on the pseudo-intelligentsia and dimwit academics and other infestations of civilised society. See, I approve of Edwards’ targeting these types, and so I was amused enough to keep reading.
     The resolution is the butler ex machina ploy, which suggests that Edwards was also needling the crime genre. Or else she just ran out of ideas, and decided to end the story while she was ahead. Edwards narrates the novel almost entirely in dialogue, which allows for lots of bon and not-so-bon mots, as well as the kind revelations that make us feel we know the characters and their relationships better than we actually do. Well done, but not quite as well done as the cover blurb promises. It says “Devilishly funny...  beautifully written satire”. I wouldn’t go that far, but I still rate it above average. Found on the library’s discard shelf at $1, and worth it. **½

Maureen Jennings. Season of Darkness (2011)

     Maureen Jennings. Season of Darkness (2011) I borrowed this book because of The Murdoch Mysteries TV series, which we’ve been enjoying. This is the first story in a trilogy. Set in late summer/early fall of 1940, it deals with the murders of two Land Girls, both of which were accidents in that they weren’t pre-meditated. The girls just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. The connection is a German spy embedded in an internee camp, and several more people die before he’s caught. Ironically, the information he killed for is forwarded to Germany by MI5 moles.
     Inspector Tom Tyler investigates, but he doesn’t so much solve the mysteries as stumble upon their solutions. The cast includes his family, his first lover, MI5, the camp commander, a motley crew of internees, several soldiers who survived Dunkirk, and some villagers whose back stories will no doubt be expanded in later stories, and so on. This makes for a rather laid back narrative, and some plot difficulties, which Jennings solves by giving us “meanwhile, the spy is thinking...” and other such ploys to fill in details that she can’t provide through Tyler. He’s the focus of the novel, and we get to know him quite well. He’s a flawed nice guy, with a strong sense of duty, and enough imagination to appreciate the ironies of his life, his task, his profession.
     The 1940s setting is well done considering that Jennings is too young to know it even at secondhand, as I did when we visited England several times after the war. Post-war England took a long time to recover from the effects of the war. The real difficulty with writing a historical novel is language: it’ s remarkably difficult to write in the right tone, to avoid anachronistic idioms and pop-culture references. Recognising these errors diminished the effect of this novel, but overall it was a good read. **½

Moses (1975)

     Moses (1975) [D: Gianfranco de Bosio. Burt Lancaster, Anthony Quayle, Ingrid Thulin et al.] A spaghetti Bible epic, and not very well made. Lousy visual continuity, and nothing remotely resembling a coherent script. Anthony Burgess is credited with writing the script, but so are de Bosie (the director) and Vittorio Bonicelli, whoever he is. A mess. There are glimpses of the human story within the Moses story (and there are plenty of hints of that in Exodus, I think), but there’s no coherent vision. De Bosio obviously thought he could do a better job than Burgess. He was wrong.
     There are five or six sequences worth a look, about the Pharaoh on the one hand (he’s a complex character), and about Moses relationship to his god on the other (a prickly one). Both characters are (intermittently) presented as beset by doubts and wearied by the burdens of leadership. Both feel the conflict between their public roles and their private lives. From what I know of Burgess’s writing, I’m sure these are the remnants of his script.
     The movie holds some interest to any student of Bible-based movies, but I don’t recommend it to anybody who wants to understand the power of the epic recounted on Exodus, an epic that gains mythic power precisely because we can see in it the human struggle for freedom, from oppressive tyranny, from oppressive human law, and from oppressive superstition. Still less do I recommend it to a believer who wants to see a plausible interpretation of the Bible story. The script doctors for one reason or another did not take Exodus on its own terms.  Bomb
   Update: I discovered that this movie was edited down from a 6-hour TV series, so no wonder it\s a disjointed mess. But that information doesn't explain for the bad writing.

Silence at the Heart of Things (2009)

Silence at the Heart of Things (2009) [Documentary by E. Thalenberg, by Stormy Nights Productions]
     Oliver Schroer died in 2008, one month after his last concert, which he devised and performed while waiting for his death from cancer. I knew nothing about this remarkable man until we saw the last few minutes of this film last summer on TVO. This time, we saw the whole movie. As a documentary, it’s very well done, intercutting archival footage, interviews, and the concert. The filmmakers have a good sense of how to stitch together the bits and pieces of other people’s relationships with Schroer and his own words (and music) to give us a portrait of a great human being.
     And it’s that human being, Oliver Schroer, that stays with us. He touched many lives, I think because he never hid himself from other people, he didn’t put on the masks that most of us use to protect ourselves from intimate contact. He understood that music is more than entertainment, it’s a means of creating community, and a path into one’s self.
     At one point he talks about music as a sacrament. Yes, it can be, and Schroer shows us why. Listening to his long flowing explorations of melodic lines, I felt that the music was familiar, that it took me to places that I recognised, but could not reach any other way. Susanne Langer in her Philosophy in a New Key (1942) quotes a musician: Music sounds the way feelings feel. Yes, and music can reveal ways of feeling that we didn’t know we were capable of. Feelings are the essence of what we think of as our personal experience; they make the world we live in. Schroer says that music grows out of the silence at the heart of things. His gift was to share his music so that we can follow him into that silence, where grief and joy are reconciled.
     You can find several videos on YouTube and Vimeo. ****

The Stalking Moon (1968)

     The Stalking Moon (1968) [D: Robert Mulligan. Gregory Peck, Eva Marie Saint, Robert Forster] Army scout Sam Varner quits to work his ranch in New Mexico. On the last raid, Sarah Carver, a white woman who was kidnapped by Salvaje, an Apache warrior, is rescued with her half-Apache son. She wants to get away as fast as possible, as she knows Salvaje will come after her. Sam doesn’t want to be burdened with her, but agrees to take her to Silverton to catch the train, then offers her a job as cook on his ranch. Salvaje is a vicious killer, who wants his son back, and also wants to punish all those who in any way involved in Sarah’s escape. At least eight bystanders are murdered by him. Sam wins the showdown, of course. The final shot shows Sarah helping him into the ranch-house.
     A well done Hollywood bread-and-butter Western, the kind that provided a steady income for the studios, and later became a staple of 1950s and 1960s TV. There’s very little dialogue, which means the story has to be carried by the photography and the acting. Gregory Peck is one of those actors who can convey much with his face. It’s not just an eyebrow twitch or a narrowing of the eyes, the whole face changes. Eva Marie Saint is almost as good.
      The movie is engaging while you watch it, although a modern audience knows too much to accept all the twists in the plot. Sam is too eager to leave the ranch and go after Salvaje, a tactical mistake that costs his two friends their lives. There are touches of humour, for example in Sam’s attempt to get Sarah and the boy to make small talk during meals. The ethos and dangers of the West are nicely represented. The movie’s look and characterisations are heavily influenced by the “adult Westerns” of the 60s. Sam is not a superhero, he nearly dies in the last fight. The stage coach post is a grungy looking assemblage of poles and adobe that somehow manages to be a corral and an inn. There is more than a hint that any encounter with a stranger could be lethal. And so on. But it’s still an old-fashioned Western in storyline: the hero, strong and taciturn, is a perfect gentleman with the ladies. Salvaje represents the wild and untamed society that was being replaced by order and lawfulness, often by brutal means (his name is the Spanish for 'wild, savage'). The violence is necessary, even when it’s regrettable.
      For the fan of Westerns, a good couple of hours, for the movie fan, a nice example of how movies used to be made. **½ (IMDB: 6.6/10)

Honour

Honour
     Last August I listened to a radio piece about Albanian feuds, which supposedly are “all about honour”. The presenter tells the story about a feud that was re-ignited when a couple of guys were drinking in a bar, and one made a remark about a feud that went back several centuries. An argument ensued, escalated, and the other guy shot him dead. This reactivated the feud, and more people killed each other.
     Which raises the question,  what’s “honour”? The word refers to different things in different societies, I mean, we generally don’t think our honour is seriously compromised when someone makes a mildly offensive remark in a bar. Here in Canada, we may even think that the person making the remark has compromised his honour, not ours, because he’s shown himself to be a boor. We also don’t have the same kind of extreme clan or family feeling that Albanians have, so a remark about dead family members usually wouldn’t bother us much if at all. But other subjects might very well rouse us to attack.
     Honour is person’s sense of his reputation. Reputation is a large part of one’s self image. It’s related to our sense of shame. We not only want to think well of ourselves, we want others to think well of us, too. “Honour” is our perception of other people’s perception of us. Shame is the feeling that comes from believing others think badly of us.
     In short, my honour is what I think my reputation is. It is always and inevitably at least partly an illusion. It is not  knowledge of our reputation, because we can't actually know our reputation. We may get some sense of what our reputation really is, but what people tell us about ourselves is usually more or less complimentary, so the dark side is missing.
     So what’s going on in a culture in which even slight injuries to one’s honour can prompt lethal rage? I think that in societies that overvalue honour, there is a tacit conspiracy to avoid telling anyone what you really think of him. The reason is paradoxically simple: by doing so you damage his “honour”. Weird, no?
     It’s even worse when honour is linked to someone else’s behaviour. Then the opinion of a person’s family becomes tangled with his reputation. “Family” can and often does extend many generations into the past. But the terrible consequence of this version of honour is that to maintain your own honour you must somehow control your family members’ behaviour. Thus so-called honour-killings and other abominations. It’s really bad when this twisted sense of honour is codified in law and custom. Then the whole community can and will do the most evil things to each other, all in the name of honour.
     However, a sense of honour can make us behave well. When we say a person acts honourably, we mean that he or she is living up to their good reputation, especially when that’s done at some cost to oneself. In the limited reference to one’s desire to maintain a good personal reputation, “honour” promotes everything from courtesy to honesty. It helps you to control your behaviour it helps you to act more morally and ethically than you would might otherwise act. It’s when reputation becomes linked to things over which one cannot have control that “honour” becomes evil.

Another show at the Algoma Art Gallery

     Cheryl L’Hirondelle’s Why the Caged Bird Sings (to April 26th, 2014) is one of those shows whose significance and import the artist thinks has to be explained. I don’t like that; I think the artist should trust the viewer to make sense of what’s presented. L’Hirondelle is song-writer, which may account for her reliance on words. There’s a large poster with lots of words at the beginning of the installation.  I wish I hadn’t read them. If you intend to visit this show, don’t read the rest of this review.
     A number of iPads connected to telephone handsets are mounted around the room. You listen to people videoed listening to First Nations music  on a public payphone. Apparently, the intention is to help us empathise with people in prison, who communicate with their loved ones mostly by phone. In this limited sense, the works are successful, but the whole thing feels more like an “educational experience” than a work of art. It’s not that art doesn’t educate, but it does so by surprising us with new emotions, and insights. It teaches us to experience our world in ways we never imagined. This installation attempts to do that, but the maker focussed too much on the message and too little on the medium. If the explanation of the work’s intention had been withheld, I think working one’s way from one iPad to the next would have been far more involving. Our experience would have been driven by a mystery which we would have had to solve on our own. As it is, the explanation raises expectations that aren’t met, which is a too common effect of talking too much about one’s intentions. An interesting and thought-provoking show, but not engaging.
       L'Hirondelle's website here. She's made a lot of art and music. *½