Hannah Swithinbank

In which I talk fuzzily about Ryszard Kapuściński

The Shadow of the Sun, by Ryszard Kapuściński

I’m having a moment of interested consideration about the new biography of Ryszard Kapuściński which claims that much of his reporting was heavily fictionalised and about some of the outrage about this.  As outrage goes, it’s fairly mild and seems mostly confined to those working in journalism (for example in Jon Snow’s latest blog post)  – but then Kapuściński is hardly a household name in the UK, and I’d be prepared to bet that the majority of people here who have read his work have come to it as travel literature, where the line between ‘truth’ and ‘atmosphere’ is more easily, and perhaps more legitimately, blurred than in journalistic reportage.    I came to him through his collection of essays/reportage, The Shadow of the Sun, which I thought sounded interesting based on a review I read and which I then bought with some Christmas money and enjoyed immensely.  It’s been a while since I read it, but I’m still inclined to think that it’s one of the best collections of writing about Africa that I’ve read – not necessarily factually, but in terms of painting a picture and capturing an atmosphere.

So, assuming that this biography is right about the level of fiction in Kapuściński’s work, I want to ask how much it matters.   And I want to suggest that how much it matters depends on two things – what the audience is reading it for, and what Kapuściński sold it as.   With regard to the second point, if you were a reader of Kapuściński’s work in newspapers in which it was presented (by him, or by the paper) as news reporting then yes, you’re right to be concerned about the level of fiction involved.  The standard convention now is that journalism represents accurately what is going on, and you can be challenged on your sources and evidence.  I’m ok with that.  However, if you’re coming Kapuściński’s work as travel literature, then the level of importance of absolute fact in telling the story is, arguably, less important.  It’s important to emphasise that this does depend upon what you, as an individual member of the audience, want from your travel writing, but I want to suggest that you as a reader shouldn’t just assume that a travel writer is just ‘telling the truth’ in some abstract, definable sense.   A writer is always going to shape the narrative they’re presenting, it’s going to involve subjective choices, and yes, it may deviate from what some people will say is true of the place being written about (and yes, you should probably go and read some Hayden White now).     The ‘rules’ of journalism might be said, to steal from Captain Barbossa, “More like guidelines.”  They’re conventions – just like the rules of historical writing or travel writing – and your understanding of them does depend, frankly, on what you’re used to.   I would argue that Kapuściński’s work isn’t journalism like BBC’s ‘From Our Own Correspondent’ is journalism, or like Fergal Keane’s Season of Blood, about the Rwandan genocide, is journalism, and yes, I would argue that his work doesn’t belong in the ‘news’ section of the newspapers. I would argue that his books are travel writing and that yes, the reader should probably be aware that the writer has shaped his narrative to tell a story that might not be absolutely ‘true’ under the modern, western demands of factual reportage.    But I don’t feel like Kapuściński sold me down the river by not fulfilling these demands.    I like my travel writing to bring me a sense of time and of a place, and I accept that such work may not be 100% accurate, or even as accurate as it’s possible for it to be, and that if I want to start talking factually about the times/places/events I’ve read about in such work, I’m going to need to do some more research.

Here’s the thing.  People writing non-fiction narratives about things they have experienced have always shaped these narratives to work as stories. People always will.  Even historians do this. Within the rules of modern, ‘scientific’ history, with its demands for evidence and proofs, historians still have to interpret evidence and shape an argument, a narrative of cause and effect, and any historian who says their personal perspective on the world doesn’t influence the way they do this isn’t thinking self-reflexively enough.  I’m not going to start arguing that all historians insert a declaration at the front of their work stating their personal background and subjective positions, if only because I think their readers ought to be smart enough or get smart enough to think about these things for themselves.      I’m an ancient historian, and from the beginning of my education as such, I’ve been taught that you have to ask questions of your sources, and I’ve learnt that you stand a much better chance of getting somewhere close to an objective understanding of what went on by understanding what conventions story the writer was trying to tell – and this goes for ancient historians (whose conventions, btw, were nothing like those of modern historians).  If you want to ‘know’ what happened in, say, in Iran around the time of the fall of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, which Kapuściński wrote about in Shah of Shahs, you’re going to need to compare it to other sources and be aware that it is one writer’s take on it.  I don’t think it invalidates Kapuściński’s book as a perspective on those events – it’s just not the only perspective.

And here’s a question – should we even be surprised that Kapuściński’s work contains a strong fictional/fabulist element?  This is, after all, a man who wrote a book called Travels with Herodotus and who apparently travelled with a copy of Herodotus’ Histories, which are hardly the most scientific or factually accurate even of ancient historical texts.  Herodotus is a writer who likes to say, ‘Oh I saw this,’ or ‘Oh, this guy told me this,’ and who, alongside his account of the Persian Wars, includes stories of flying snakes and giant ants.  If you put all the Classicist and Ancient Historians in one building and divided them up by subject area, ‘understanding what’s going on in Herodotus’ Histories’ would take up an entire wing.   Why would we be surprised that someone who appears to have enjoyed and felt some connection to Herodotus’ work didn’t hew to strict journalistic conventions in his work?  Surely it’s more interesting to think about what Kapuściński was doing with his work and what its success or otherwise says about our interaction with the world outside our own borders than it is to hold our arms up in the air and wail about how a writer wasn’t really where he claimed to be at a particular time.  That said – it’s also interesting to think about what that particular tendency says about us and our relationship with journalism.   Jon Snow isn’t necessarily wrong to dislike the idea of a journalist being a ‘fake’ – but isn’t it important to be aware that that is a subjective position and think about what we want journalism to be?

Do I think Kapuściński was a ‘journalist’ under the majority of expectations of the term? No.  Do I wish he’d left a nice, helpful little document outlining his position on what he thought journalism was, and what he thought his work was? Yes.  But do I think he should have had to? Not necessarily.  I think he should probably have been aware that it didn’t meet a lot of journalistic convention, and not sold it as journalism – but honestly I don’t know enough about him and his work to know what he did say about it or how he did sell it.  Should we challenge his narratives and discuss them? Absolutely – but not just in terms as polar as ‘true’ and ‘false’ – can we please be a little more nuanced about things?

ETA: This piece in the Guardian is interesting on the subject – drawing a line between Kapuściński’s despatches and his books.

Books and Films of 2010

As ever, if I don’t list ‘em, I don’t remember all of them.

Books
1. Manhood for Amateurs -Michael Chabon
2. Naked – David Sedaris
3. The Tipping Point – Malcolm Gladwell
4. When You are Engulfed in Flames – David Sedaris
5. Shades of Grey – Jasper Fforde
6. Consider Phlebas – Iain M. Banks
7. Barrel Fever – David Sedaris

Films
1. The Princess and the Frog
2. Invictus
3. Sherlock Holmes
4. A Serious Man
5. Up in the Air
6. The Ghostwriter
7. Shutter Island

Last Year’s Lists

Noughties lists…

I wanna join in! Lists of the year, PAH. Lists of the decade, HURRAH. Though, at the risk of turning into Toby Ziegler, why does the decade end this year, and not next year? Why is the  decade not 2001-2010, rather than 2000-2009?  Can we bring up the bit where there wasn’t a year nought, or is that all cliche and annoying? Anyway, moving on…  Lists! Lists are fun. Top Tens!  I can do books and TV and movies of the decade, although we should all bear in mind that I have not yet started watching The Wire.  I probably can’t do theatre, not sensibly, since I don’t go very often (as often as I’d like), though I can wave my arms up and down and talk about the few things I did see and the plays that really stuck with me, and music. Hmmm, I’ll try, but that might get quite random, and will essentially be ‘Ten records what I have loved with absolutely no critical or aesthetic thought behind it’. I think they’re going to be unordered lists, because, well, trying to rank things like The Assination of Jesse James, The Lord of the Rings, and The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind against each other is kinda daft. They’re also going to be lists that mix up the things that I think have been really really good with things that have become a part of my personal furniture. So the Eyre Affair may knock Fortress of Solitude out of the books list because it has been a bigger part of my decade.  Just be warned, it’s going to be a little bit bonkers, and pretty much all about me, with no real grounding in any theories of aesthetics.

Books. Ok, I give up. I’m having a fiction and a non-fiction list. No arguing from the back.
Fiction
Purple Hibiscus – Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
The Algebraist – Iain M. Banks
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay – Michael Chabon
The Eyre Affair – Jasper Fforde
A Life’s Music – Andrei Makine
Atonement – Ian McEwan
Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell
Kafka on the Shore – Haruki Murakami
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix – J.K Rowling
Anathem – Neal Stephenson

Non-Fiction
Pedant in the Kitchen – Julian Barnes
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius – Dave Eggers
The Zanzibar Chest – Aidan Hartley
Code 2.0 – Lawrence Lessig (I haven’t read Remix yet, but I suspect it’s more important for the noughties and the future).
The ecstasy of influence: A plagiarism – Jonathan Lethem (yes, ok, it’s an essay, but do I care? no)
The Audacity of Hope – Barack Obama
An Utterly Impartial History of Britain, or 2000 Years of Upper Class Idiots in Charge – John O’Farrell (well, it’s not fiction…)
A History of Britain – Simon Schama
A Constitution of Many Minds – Cass Sunstein
Consider the Lobster – David Foster Wallace

Movies
The Assassination of Jesse James
The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
Gosford Park
Infernal Affairs
In the Mood for Love
The Lord of the Rings (I will count three as one, but if you make me pick just one, I’ll go for Fellowship every time)
Pan’s Labyrinth
The Royal Tennenbaums
Shaun of the Dead
Wallace and Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit

TV
Band of Brothers
Battlestar Galactica
Black Books
Bleak House
Doctor Who
Firefly
State of Play
The Thick of It
The West Wing
Veronica Mars
(plus a very honourable mention to Dr Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog, which is not strictly television, but which must go somewhere on the list for being ACE)

Music
Carastini: Story of a Castrato – Philippe Jaroussky
DZf – Guy Barker
The Eminem Show – Eminem
Fleet Foxes – Fleet Foxes
Gua – Emmanuel Jal and Abdel Gadir Salim
The Lord of the Rings Soundtracks – Howard Shore
The Orpheus Suite – Colin Towns’ Mask Orchestra
Raising Sand – Robert Plant and Alison Kraus
Savane – Ali Farka Toure
Smile – Brian Wilson

Theatre I’m willing to jump up and down and wave my arms about… and I include ballet.
The Bacchae – twice over, Kneehigh’s version at the Hall for Cornwall, and the Alan Cumming starring version at the Edinburgh Festival
Giselle – The Royal Opera House, with Alina Cojocaru and Johan Kobborg.
Jumpers – Tom Stoppard, at the National Theatre
Noises Off – Michael Frayn (I was in actual physical pain from laughing so hard), at the National Theatre
The Nutcracker Sweeties/Orpheus Suite/Shakespeare Suite Triple Bill – Birmingham Royal Ballet.
The Real Thing – Tom Stoppard (I saw it at the Albery in January 2000, ok, so it counts)
Tristan and Yseult – Kneehigh Theatre at the Minack
Waiting for Godot – Samuel Beckett, in Edinburgh with Ian McKellan and Patrick Stewart
War Horse – Nick Stafford, at the National Theatre

J'adore.

From Pictures for sad children. It’s perfection.

Infinite Jest

So, in order to Get It Read, I packed David Foster Wallace’s Monumentally Huge Novel Infinite Jest in my bag for Tanzania. And now I find that bunches of other people are also reading it this summer, and blogging about it. For example – here at Infinite Summer, or here at A Supposedly Fun Thing. Matt Yglesias, of Think Progess is reading it too. There’s also an Infinite Jest wiki, and a guide to reading Infinite Jest that I really wish I’d seen in advance – although I would have skipped to page 223, because I am that person.

A little bit of me is doing the dance of ‘I read it first’. Because I have now finished Infinite Jest, so clearly I am ahead of the pack, making me cooler than cool. But a little bit of me is sad, because it is an amazing idea to read Infinite Jest at the same time as a bunch of other people, and share the experience with them. I keep wanting to talk to people about it, and no-one I know has read it. I think I have Eleanor convinced to read it now, because I kept telling her about it whilst we were away. And I know Joe wants to read it, he just needs to find the time. And time is the issue – I wouldn’t have had time to read Infinite Jest over the summer, because I am embarking on the final editing process of my thesis, and Big Fat Absorbing Books are a big no-no. So I’m just going to enjoy watching other people enjoy it. It’s an amazing piece of literature, though, and I’m going to read it again just as soon as I can find the time because I still need to puzzle out the ending a little. I know I love it, even without entirely getting it, but I want to try and get it a little better.

So here’s the story (you sort of need a story about how you came to read Infinite Jest, I feel, it’s just that big a deal). I first picked up David Foster Wallace’s work just before Christmas last year. I’d heard a lot about the guy after his suicide, and though, “Huh, why haven’t I heard of him before.” So I asked Joe if he had any DFW, and Joe supplied a collection of essays, which featured a DFW essay about a Conservative Talk Radio host, and which was, frankly, barnstormingly awesome. So barnstormingly awesome that I went straight out and bought Consider the Lobster, the DFW collection that featured that essay, as well as Up, Simba, his essay about his time on John McCain’s 2000 Straight Talk Express, an essay about the American porn industry, one about the Maine Lobster festival, and another about sports autobiographies entitled, ‘How Tracy Austin Broke My Heart.’ And that was it. I was besotted. I scoured the internet for his complete publications, and ordered Infinite Jest.

Then, it arrived, and I picked it up and started. And realised I’d gone not just from 0-60 on DFW, but 0-60 bajillion. It was just out of my world, and it made my head spin – and not just in the ‘this is amazing’ way the essays made my head spin. In the ‘I’ve never read anything like this in my life’ way. It took me the best part of five months to read the first 100 pages. I tried reading it like I would any other big book, a chapter at a time, in the evenings, waiting for it to click with me. But every time it felt like a slightly different book – I couldn’t work out who the hell anyone was, or when anything was or anything, and that’s before the wild use of language kicked in. So I set it aside. I decided I needed a good solid chunk of reading time to get through it, and that I would take it travelling with me.

I picked it up again at the beginning of June, a week into my trip, and started over. Having fought with/read the first 100 pages once, I raced through them second time, and started to get what was going on. By the time I was 200 pages into it, I was hooked. It was my own personal addiction (and it’s a novel about addiction and tennis – amongst a million other things) and I never wanted to leave it. It was a pretty good thing I had a nine hour bus trip from Arusha to Dar es Salaam to read the thing on, and even better that I then spent three days on the beach on Zanzibar just munching my way through the book. I finally finished it on the plane home – it lasted just the perfect amount of time. It wasn’t like reading any other book I’ve read – it was more like falling into a world and watching it unfold around me, but unfold in a spectacularly non-linear way. The level of observational detail in this thing is simply awesome – a bit of me wonders how a reader copes if they have no background knowledge of tennis, but then I think, they probably cope in the same way I coped with the stuff about drugs, you just read it, and your brain picks out the key points in all the colour, the themes if you will.

I almost can’t say what Infinite Jest is about, or what happens in it – I sort of suspect that it’s about different things for everyone who reads it. I tend to describe it as being about addiction and tennis, because that’s an easy description, but it’s not just that. It’s about happiness, and communication, and addiction and tennis, and pressure and relationships and politics and entertainment, and pretty much the whole of humanity. And it nearly broke my heart, but then it did something totally different than what I was expecting, and didn’t quite break my heart, or at least, not in the way I was expecting it to.

See – it doesn’t quite make sense when I say it like this, unless perhaps you’ve read it too. Which is why this whole ‘Let’s all read Infinite Jest over the summer and talk about it’ thing is such a great idea. You may not be able to make sense of the book or your reaction to it and the way it just won’t leave you alone after you’ve finished it. But at least you can not make sense of it with a bunch of other people who are also getting incoherent over it.

In which my inner fanboy goes awry

Oh Watchmen Watchmen Watchmen.

So here’s the thing, I get why the Watchmen fanboys have gone to town on their love for it. And I get why the snotty-nosed (and also, few less snotty-nosed) don’t. It is both a brilliant film adaptation of the comic, and a fairly rubbish film. Simultaneously.

It’s just too damn faithful, which is the reason for its success and its downfall. They clearly haven’t massacred the source material, so yay, BUT, it also doesn’t add anything to it, and if it doesn’t do that, what is the point of filming it at all? It tries to bring in everyone’s backstories, and everyone’s arcs, and get everyone from character point (a) to character point (b), and completely fails to focus the viewers attention on any particular elements. And the film just can’t cope, it’s collapses under the weight of the material of the book – a book just can do so much more than a film in that regard. The film really needed to decide whether it wanted to focus on either Rorshach *or* Nite Owl/Silk Spectre, and do more with Ozymandias before the end, and follow that through in a way that would do at least for them what the novel does for them all – which is to show the problems inherent in “superheroes”.

So although it’s a very faithful film, it just doesn’t really work as a film. You might as well read the comic whilst listening to the soundtrack.

Things I discovered last year…

1. There’s tension involved in travel, even when you go on your own. The ‘why am I here’, ‘what’s my purpose in life’, am I just jumping through tourist hoops’ kind of tension. I think it happens every trip, and yet, when you come back you just sort-of forget about it. So, just learn that when it happens you should consider stopping seeing the things you’ve got on your list that you want to see – even if you really really really want to see them – for an afternoon and find a park or a sofa to sit and read a novel, or write screeds of nonsense working through your tourist-monkey issues, or email all the folks at home. And then go out the next day and get over it – chances are you’ll find something wonderful that makes you think that even if you are being a tourist-monkey, it’s probably worth it (hello, Kinkaku-Ji and Nanzen-Ji, Kyoto.

2. There’s more tension involved in watching other people travel – especially to historically sensitive places like Auschwitz. You have to work through that too – normally with the aid of pen and paper, but you’re allowed to talk to other people about it, ‘cos it’s not just emo-esque self-indulgent wank. It’s something worth thinking about. What kind of photos should you take in such places?

3. Japan. Despite the emo-tourist-monkey-ing moment, and the wearying aspects of spending three weeks in what is, pretty much Wonderland, with only a very few people to speak English too (damn my lack of Japanese), it was wonderful. And though when I came back I initially thought that it probably wasn’t going straight to the top of the list of ‘Places I’ve Been, Loved, and Want to Go Back To,’ it’s rapidly moving up the list. Mostly, I want to see Hokkaido.

4. David Mitchell. This is a vague corollary to the above, since I initially picked up Ghostwritten because I was looking for stuff to read about Japan before I went, and its first chapters are set in Japan. And then I fell in love with this wild and wonderful author, and found myself reading all four of his books (Ghostwritten, Cloud Atlas, number9dream, and Black Swan Green) between about March and September.

5. Various other authors, but most particularly Iain M. Banks and David Foster Wallace. I read The Algebraist at high speed whilst in Bulgaria for a wedding, but did at least manage to put it down for the duration of said wedding. Now I have a pile of Banks’ sci-fi to read, and am currently deep in The Player of Games. I came to DFW at the end of the year, sadly. Having heard so much about his work after his suicide, and hearing Joe mention that he was reading Infinite Jest, I borrowed a book of non-fiction essays from J, which contatined ‘The Host’, a DFW essay about conservative talk radio in the States. I’m hopelessly hooked, I’ve just finished Consider the Lobster, and ordered Infinite Jest, and I’m so sad that ever thing of his that I read takes me one step further to there being no more new DFW to read. I wish I’d discovered him earlier.

6. That despite the above, and my generally cultural snobbishness (Whaddya mean, you’ve never read Dickens???), I do have a soft spot for cultural candyfloss to leaven the load from the old brain-pan at times. It’s probably no coincidence that my affection for the awfulness of the Twilight series, and the insane camp colour of High School Musical Three: Senior Year hit me mid-supervisory crisis this autumn and further developed as I reached a point by Christmas where I was, quoth supervisor, “Written Out.” It’s also no coincidence that after a week away from the PhD I’ve started devouring non-fiction essays, high powered sci-fi and Simon Schama’s latest book, The American Future: A History.

7. Rhetoric isn’t ‘just words’. I knew it already, but after nine months of watching the US elections whilst concurrently writing a doctoral thesis about political thought and expression, all of which involves rhetoric, I have a much better understanding of it and what you can do with it, and what I don’t want to see the people running for things doing with it.

8. Economics matters. Still don’t understand it though. Paul Krugman is my guru. But I should probably pay more attention.

9. See above, re. physics and maths, which are really interesting, especially at that point where they meet theology and philosophy, but you need to have the basics down first. If only all physicists could write like Neal Stephenson did in Anathem.

10. It can still be hard to work out which friends you should make the effort to hang onto, and which you probably shouldn’t, but you shouldn’t get out of the game all together. Every so often you end up with the ones who come to visit for New Years and spend time drinking tea, reading novels and making up ludicrous top trumps games with you.

Books and Films of 2009

The annual attempt to keep track of at least part of my life…

Books:

1. Consider the Lobster – David Foster Wallace
2. The New Kings of Non-Fiction – Ira Glass
3. The Player of Games – Iain M. Banks
4. Watchman – Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons
5. The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen – Alan Moore
6. A Constitution of Many Minds – Cass Sunstein
7. America: Empire of Liberty – David Reynolds
8. Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail – Hunter S. Thompson
9. America: Empire of Liberty – David Reynolds
10. The Men Who Stare At Goats – Jon Ronson
11. Starbook – Ben Okri
12. Scott Pilgrim’s Precious Little Life – Bryan Lee O’Malley
13. Sandman: Preludes and Nocturnes – Neil Gaiman
14. Lost in a Good Book – Jasper Fforde
15. Scott Pilgrim vs. The World – Bryan Lee O’Malley
16. Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Season 8: The Time of Your Life – Joss Whedon & Jeph Loeb
17. Scott Pilgrim and the Infinite Sadness – Bryan Lee O’Malley
18. Matter – Iain M. Banks
19. Infinite Jest – David Foster Wallace
20. Scott Pilgrim Gets It Together – Bryan Lee O’Malley
21. Scott Pilgrim vs. the Universe – Bryan Lee O’Malley
22. The Wine Dark Sea – Patrick O’Brian
23. A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again – David Foster Wallace
24. Ghost – Robert Harris
25. Pride and Prejudice and Zombies – Jane Austen and Seth Grahame-Smith
26. The Year of the Flood – Margaret Atwood
27. Turbulence – Giles Foden
28. Much Obliged, Jeeves – P.G. Wodehouse
29. Men and Cartoons – Jonathan Lethem
30. Better than Sex – Hunter S. Thompson
31. This is Water – David Foster Wallace
32. The City and the City – China Mieville
33. Whatever Happened to the Caped Crusader – Neil Gaiman
34. A Tale Etched in Blood and Hard Black Pencil – Christopher Brookmyre
35. Snow Crash – Neal Stephenson
36. Everything is Illuminated – Jonathan Safran Foer
37. Lustrum – Robert Harris
38. And Another Thing – Eoin Colfer
39. Brief Interviews with Hideous Men – David Foster Wallace
40. The Boys on the Bus – Timothy Crouse
41. Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Season 8, volume 5: Predators and Prey – Joss Whedon et al.
42. Sputnik Sweetheart – Haruki Murakami
43. The Gone-Away World – Nick Harkaway
44. Playing the Enemy: Nelson Mandela and the Game that changed a Nation
45. Me Talk Pretty One Day – David Sedaris

Films

1. Slumdog Millionaire
2. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
3. Milk
4. Watchmen
5. The Young Victoria
6. Frost/Nixon
7. State of Play
8. In the Loop
9. Let the Right One In
10. Wolverine
11. Star Trek
12. Coraline
13. Public Enemies
14. Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince
15. The Proposal
16. The Time-Traveller’s Wife
17. Inglourious Basterds
18. Funny People
19. District 9
20. Up
21. Taking Woodstock
22. Away We Go
23. The Informant
24. Twilight: New Moon
25. Fantastic Mr Fox
26. Where the Wild Things Are

The 2008 list

Coraline

It’s been a wee while since I read Neil Gaiman’s Coraline, but I do remember really enjoying it. Gaiman is a greater storyteller than he is a writer, I think, so it makes sense that his kids stories and fairytales are better than his adult novels. I far prefer Stardust to American Gods, for instance.

Anyway, the trailer for Henry Selick’s film version is now online. As I can’t bring to mind too much of the plot of the novel, I can’t really comment on that aspect of it, but I really do like the look and tone of it. Stop motion is beauteous.

catholicism makes you miserable. no really.

I went to see the tnew film of Brideshead Revisited last night. Brideshead Re-edited.

First off, I’ll admit that it was not at all the trainwreck I was expecting. Nor was it wholly and unentirely unlike the book – except that the Catholicism Screws You Up Theme was much much stronger in a way that Evelyn Waugh might not have liked. And of course the inevitable plot changes – Julia in Venice, WTF?

It was, however, Brideshead Revisited at Warp Speed as whole years went flying out of the window and everything crashed about at the same time in the plot. Bridey and Cordelia nearly ended up flying out of the window after them. Surely the fact that Cordelia is by-and-large content should be important, especially in contrast to her siblings? And whilst Ed Stoppard is a thoroughly repulsive Bridey, he is thoroughly repulsive, where beloved Simon “Arthur Dent” Jones in the TV series was perfectly disconnected, which is how I think Bridey should be. Cousin Jasper wouldn’t say of FilmBridey: “Brideshead went down last year, a very sound fellow…” FilmBridey is not sound to any point of view.

The film is held together by Matthew Goode, who really is a very good Charles. He doesn’t quite match up to Jeremy Irons, but he doesn’t get the material (or the voice over) to do it with. He’s also, perhaps, a little too likeable (or maybe that’s just me nurturing a little crush) – he’s not quite as ill-at-ease in Brideshead as Irons’ Ryder. His outsider-ness is made clear in the fact that he comes from Paddington, and is continually stated, rather than shown. Ben Wishaw is a fairly annoying Sebastian. I didn’t really care at all when he fell apart – which happened FAR too quickly. I think the genius of Anthony Andrews’ performance is that everybody fell in love with him alongside Charles. Perhaps part of the problem is the speed of the film – the first year at Oxford blinks in a click of the fingers, and the languid days at Brideshead exist only in montage – so there is no time to get to care about Sebastian. But it is a problem nonetheless. Poor Julia is also hard done by – her marriage to Rex slams in out of nowhere, with no understanding of wherefores and whys until later – whereas Charles always understood why, and wasn’t personally injured at the time. In this Julia is running away from Charles as much as her family. Emma Thompson is a glorious Catholic Matriarch though. She’s tougher than Claire Bloom was, but it’s just a slightly different take on the character – both are valid, and indeed, the speed this film works at requires that Lady Marchmain be much more forcefully insidious. She and Goode are probably worth going to see the film for – or for waiting for it on DVD.

It wasn’t a bad film. Neither was it a particularly good film, and it certainly was not as good a version of the novel as the TV series. In fact, if there were no novel, it still wouldn’t be a good remake of the TV series. And it really is impossible not to compare the two, especially if you know the TV series well. But I think the book requires a longer telling, where there is dialogue that isn’t simply there to advance the plot, and perhaps a quieter one. The story is a slow burning move towards misery and emptiness – the film features a crashing downfall.