Book Review: School for Love (1951) by Olivia Manning

Ever read a perfect novel? One in which the similes and metaphors are all pitch perfect, not a single word or sentence is out of place or redundant, the characters are fully-formed and resonate in the real world, and the novel is neither too long or too short? School for Love is such a novel. This isn't to say that it's one of the world's great books, but if it's not in the Champions League of novels, it's definitely well up in the First Division.

The setting is Jerusalem in 1945, just after the end of the war, and a young orphan named Felix has temporarily come to stay with Miss Bohun, a distant relative, before shipping back to England. Also boarding in the house is Mrs Ellis, a young and pregnant war widow. Bohun is the leader of the Ever-Readies, a small Christian sect with a fundamentalist bent. Felix, like any polite, well-brought-up middle-class boy, assumes Bohun will always act in a well-meaning and honourable fashion. He's sadly disillusioned. In the weeks that Felix and Ellis spend with Bohun while waiting for a ship back to England, she doesn't miss a chance to make their lives just a little bit more miserable, not to mention trying to line her pockets at their expense.

Bohun is one of the great, yet petty, monsters of modern fiction. Manning shows that Bohun's holier-than-thou moralizing is, like patriotism, the last refuge of scoundrels. This is not a wildly eventful or dramatic novel, but it shows how tyrants like Hitler and Stalin can also come in more innocuous packages. Bohun is a narcissist, and her self-love stems from her belief that her adherence to Jesus makes her immune from committing the smaller sins. She's parsimonious, mendacious, vindictive, petty, vengeful, not averse to a minor swindle or two, and has a profound lack of empathy. Bohun sees her faith as a trump card to be played on any occasion when her honesty or ethics are called into question by others or even by herself. She's a personality most of us have met or worked with, and the ranks of evangelical Christians in the U.S. are absolutely stiff with this type of person. 

Mrs Ellis is pretty much Bohun's opposite. She's been badly treated by the war but hasn't allowed that to make her bitter or vicious. But she's not a saint. She befriends Felix, who falls slightly in love with her, and eventually loses patience with his dog-like affection and hurts his feelings. At least Ellis is aware that she's hurt Felix. For Felix, his sojourn at Bohun's is a coming-of-age experience that shows him that the adult world is a slippery and untrustworthy place.

School for Love, as mentioned off the top, is brilliantly written. Like other English writers such as Evelyn Waugh and P.G. Wodehouse, Manning has a deceptively simple writing style that flows beautifully and delivers maximum results with a minimum of fuss. This is such a tight, elegantly-constructed novel it's a wonder it hasn't been filmed. I sense that there's an Oscar or a BAFTA waiting for the woman who gets the role of Miss Bohun. Manning's The Balkan Trilogy was filmed for British television, and the novels that make up the trilogy do belong in the Champions League of great novels.

Film Review: Kontroll (2003)

The Hungarian film Kontroll ticks all the cult film boxes: it's got loads of quirky characters; the plot is fanciful and mostly opaque; the humour is deadpan; the setting is unusual; and the ending is ambivalent. The fact that it succeeds has less to do with these qualities than it does with more traditional cinematic values: solid acting and excellent cinematography.

The story, such as it is, concerns a team of ticket inspectors on the Budapest Metro. Their job is to check that everyone on the metro has actually bought a ticket. It's a crappy job. The public hates them and doesn't  disguise their animosity. The team, as is the case in films like this, is a motley crew that includes the obligatory raw rookie, and, for the purposes of eccentric variety, a narcoleptic who passes out whenever he loses his temper. The team leader is Bulcsu, who is actually highly educated but has chosen to settle into this lowly job. We also learn that for the last few days (weeks? months?) he's been living in the metro, sleeping on platforms and never returning to the surface.

Our team is facing three challenges: they dearly want to catch a scofflaw nicknamed Bootsie who takes a keen pleasure in outrunning them; a rival team of ticket inspectors who taunt them; and a demonic figure who's taken to pushing people in front of speeding trains. Bulcsu also finds himself attracted to a woman who travels the metro wearing a bear costume. All these plot lines reach a conclusion of one kind or another, but it's clear that the director is mostly interested in creating an atmosphere and a look rather than constructing airtight plots.

The entire film has the feel of a dream by way of a fairy tale. In fact, it could even be that everything we see is being dreamed by Bulcsu. The fairy tale aspect comes from the "bear" who turns out to be a beautiful princess and leads Bulcsu up and out of the metro at the film's end. I suppose Bulcsu's prolonged tenancy in the metro could also be a political statement about communist-era Hungary, but that's just a wild guess.

The film's assorted quirks, oddities and eccentricities represent the boilerplate standard in cult films. What's different here is that the acting is first rate. Cult films usually suffer from wonky and/or erratic acting (click here for my list of the Top Ten Overrated Cult Films), but Kontroll seems to be populated by the cream of the local acting community. If you're a Hollywood talent agent reading this blog I heartily recommend that you make a scouting trip to Budapest with the Kontroll cast list stored in your iPhone. The cinematography might be even better than the acting. I say this because the Budapest Metro doesn't look like the most photogenic subway system in the world, but the cinematographer, Gyula Pados, manages to make it look mysterious, dramatic, and beautifully stark. That's quite an achievment given that he does it simply through clever lighting and shot framing. Kontroll is too long and too pleased with its own oddness, but it's always entertaining and great to look at.

Book Review: Partitions (2011) by Amit Majmudar

Over the short lifetime of this blog I've frequently touted Rafik Schami (my reviews here, here and here) as a writer whose fiction provides some background to the whys and wherefores of the Arab Spring. Majmudar does something in a similar vein in Partitions, a novel about the cruel, chaotic and bloody division of Imperial India into three separate countries in 1947. Majmudar's novel isn't political in tone or outlook, but the horrors he so artfully describes go a long way to explaining the past and current tensions between India and Pakistan.

Partitions is plotted like a thriller and written like an epic poem. The novel follows four individuals caught up in the two-way exodus that preceded the creation of Pakistan. Muslims are heading west to resettle in land that will become Pakistan, and Hindus and Sikhs are fleeing east to India. All the refugees are preyed upon by murderous sectarian mobs, as are those who choose to stay on the wrong side of the border. Hundreds of thousands of people would eventually be killed in the upheavals surrounding Partition. The four people at the centre of the novel are Masud, a Muslim doctor; Simran, a Sikh teenage girl; and two Hindu boys, Keshav and Shankar.

All four characters face death on more than one occasion, and their progress to safety is fraught with tension and harrowing episodes of violence. It's in this regard that Partitions reads like a thriller: characters are left in cliffhanger situations and frequently leap from the frying pan into the fire. The novel has an epic poem quality thanks to the author's audacious decision to make his narrator a ghost. Yes, a ghost. The spirit is that of Dr. Jaitly, the father of Keshav and Shankar. He died months before Partition and he now watches over events, flitting from place to place like a Greek god in The Iliad to observe events and, on occasion, to make ineffectual attempts to intervene in the life and death struggles he witnesses.

Majmudar's decision to make the narrator a ghost is a bold one. Some readers are going to find that this is a distracting or ridiculous narrative device, but I think his intention is to give the novel a voice of humanity and empathy that's divorced from a sectarian viewpoint. Jaitly the ghost sees horrors in a way that Jaitly the mortal would never be able to. Having a ghost as a narrator also lends itself to Majmudar's finely crafted prose. Majmudar is a poet as well, and it shows in sentences like this one describing Masud standing beside a column of refugees:

The family is staring at him. A gentleman heron perfectly still against a background of shuffling migration.

Jaitly has an impressionistic view of what goes around him, conveying violence and distress and hatred with finely-formed, terse descriptions that seem all the more powerful for being brief. Another writer might have gone for lengthy, gritty descriptions of the various horrors of  Partition, but the economical, poetic approach seems to work better in this case. And on a purely aesthetic level there's no disputing that Majmudar is fine writer.

The only problem I had with Partitions is that the ending brings together the four characters in a symbolically convenient manner that's a bit too cozy and predictable. That aside, Partitions is yet another world-class novel from the Indian sub-continent. In the last few years just about every novel I've read from that region has been better than the last. Here are my reviews of novels by Manu Joseph and Yasmine Gooneratne, and although I haven't reviewed it yet, I have to mention Sujit Saraf's The Peacock Throne, which may have to rate as the Great Indian Novel.

Book Review: Brushback (1998) by K.C. Constantine

If you've never heard of mystery writer K.C. Constantine you can probably blame the man himself. Constantine began his series of mystery novels set in fictional Rocksburg, PA, in 1972, and until 2011 he avoided publicity and interviews with the single-mindedness of a J.D. Salinger. That's a pity because he's a writer who deserved a much higher profile.

Rocksburg and its environs are to Constantine what Yoknapatawpha County was to William Faulkner. K.C. loves and hates Rocksburg. He has a love and respect for the hard-working Italian and Hungarian immigrants who settled the area and built its steel mills and coal mines, and he has a red hot hatred for the politicians at all levels who have slowly and consciously let the local economy slide into Rust Belt oblivion. Like Faulkner, Constantine is fascinated by his own "little postage stamp of soil" and over the course of 17 novels he introduces us to a very wide variety of its citizens.

Most of the Rocksburg mysteries feature Mario Balzic, the town's police chief. Balzic is not so much a detective as he is the town's confessor-in-chief. Rocksburg's citizens are an exceptionally talkative bunch and Balzic is adept both at listening to them and at drawing out their stories. Balzic doesn't solve crimes through forensic evidence; he talks and listens and talks some more and teases out the motivations that lead to murders. Constantine eschews the evidence side of detection because he's more interested in creating a portrait of the people he grew up with.

Constantine's writing style is best described as regional vernacular. His novels consist almost entirely of dialogue, and they're rich in the slang and accents of western Pennsylvania. And Constantine isn't interested in crisp, tight dialogue. Constantine writes duologues that wander off in all directions, with asides that can last for a sentence, a paragraph or a page. In this way, layer by layer, he builds up his portrait of people whose lives are defined by hard work and blue collar pleasures. The dialogue is always pungent, frequently humorous, and always respectful of the characters. It's normally the case that when an author writes dialogue for a working-class character we're meant to be amused or appalled by the tortured syntax, the dropped g's, and the grotesque malapropisms. Constantine, as Faulkner did, puts poetry and truth into the words of his townspeople.

The sympathy and interest Constantine has for his working-class characters is pretty much unique in American crime fiction. The working-class world in most mysteries is usually just a breeding ground for crimes and criminals. Constantine makes the working class the heart and soul of all his novels. This is another reason that his novels have flown under the radar. The working-class is almost a taboo subject in the U.S.: no one wants to be identified as a member of it or even be reminded that it exists. It takes a certain courage to write a whole cycle of novels that revolve around a social class most readers ignore or feel frightened of. Constantine even likes to discuss the issue of class, particularly the way in which America's ruling elites have ignored and harassed the working class.

Having praised Constantine I now have to knock Brushback. This novel is one of the last in the series and it's pretty weak. There is barely a plot and the dialogue has lost a lot of its punch. What's worse, Constantine's commentaries on class and politics have become straightforward editorializing. Brushback still has strong elements, but it's not the equal of the first eight or nine novels. I can't really recommend Brushback but it's a reminder of how unique and brilliant the balance of this mystery series is.

Book Review: The Dark Side of Love (2004) by Rafik Schami

By the time I finish writing this post, or by the time you finish reading it, the odds are good that President Assad of Syria will have fled his country or will be swinging from a lamp post. Syria looks certain to be joining the lengthening list of Arab countries that have shown their dictators the door and/or the business end of a Kalashnikov. One of the best ways of understanding how all this has come to pass is to read the works of Rafik Schami, a Syrian-born writer living in exile in Germany since 1970. Schami, an Arab-Christian, writes in German and has scooped all the major German literary prizes. Only a few of his novels have been translated into English, and the finest of them is The Dark Side of Love. It's also the novel that does the best job of giving some cultural background to the so-called Arab Spring. I first read it just before I started this blog, but now seems like a good time to review it.

The Dark Side of Love is a multi-generational saga of a blood feud between two Christian families in Syria. The story begins in the early 1900s and ends in the late 1960s, and along the way Schami introduces dozens of characters and almost as many sub-plots. If this sounds dense and daunting, it isn't. Schami is a storyteller in the same class as Dickens. He can create memorable and interesting characters with no apparent effort, and their stories, all looped around the central theme of the feud, are never less than fascinating. Schami's story is basically serious and, in parts, tragic, but the novel is also shot through with moments of beauty and humour. Schami is also unafraid to send his story off in some unusual directions, most notably, for example, when one of the major characters has a sexual interlude with a donkey. That's right, a donkey.

The Dark Side of Love is nothing less than a combination MRI, X-ray, and CAT scan of life in Syria, from high to low, in the 20th century. What we learn from this is that Syria, like many other Arab countries, is a  country in name only. People in Syria take their identity from, and are only loyal to, their family, clan, tribe, religion and sect, roughly in that order. The state falls into the same category as the weather: unpredictable, frequently unpleasant, and beyond the influence of man. Until lately. It's clear that these scabrous regimes have lasted as long as they have largely because the citizenry have tried to live their lives without being noticed by or involved with the powers that be. It's always been the safest way to go through life. Once the state goes too far, however, tribe and clan loyalties provide a powerful rallying point for revolutionary forces.

Don't give a toss about Syria? That's fine, because this novel can be enjoyed entirely without any knowledge of the history or politics of Syria. My only problem with the book is the title; it sounds far too much like something Danielle Steel might have written. For my reviews of Schami`s other novels, The Calligrapher`s Secret and Damascus Nights, click here and here.

Top Ten Films Begging For A Remake

Normally I'm opposed to remakes and reboots. It's not that the concept offends me, it's just that so many remakes were either pointless, like Gus Van Sant's Psycho, or turkeys on steroids like The Haunting. The odds of a successful remake seem to be very low. Despite that fact, I'd love to see someone take a crack at these films, some of which I've included simply because it's shocking they haven't already gone through the Hollywood recycling machine.

10. The 10th Victim (1965)

In the near future bored sophisticates enter a game in which they hunt each other and then in turn become hunted. The whole thing's legal and televised, and the government uses it as a form of population control. This Italian film sounds dystopian, but it's really a black comedy and it comes with a double dose of 1960s style. Marcello Mastroianni and Ursula Andress provide beauty and cool, and the soundtrack has one of those maddeningly catchy tunes Italian films of the time specialized in. Running Man was a bit like this, but it's a wonder Victim hasn't been given the full Hollywood makeover.

9. The Magnificent Seven (1960)

There's supposedly a remake of this classic western in the Hollywood pipeline. The bad news is that Tom Cruise is attached to the project. I'm guessing that means the other six actors will be riding ponies just to balance out the height differential.  A straight remake is a bit pointless; what astonishes me is that no one has updated the concept to seven American mercenaries defending a Mexican town against drug cartel baddies. Wait a minute...that sounds good...hands off, Tarantino, it's my idea and I'm copyrighting it first thing tomorrow!

8. The Dirty Dozen (1967)

I know, I know, Inglourious Basterds was a de facto remake of The Dirty Dozen, but it didn't have the purity of the original concept. Not to mention that it was a self-indulgent load of shite. Given the success of Saving Private Ryan you'd think someone would be game for another stab at this action classic.

7. Mister Johnson (1990)

Virtually no one has seen this film, and that's a good thing. It's about a British colonial officer in West Africa in the 1920s who's trying to build a road through the bush. He's both helped and hindered by Mr. Johnson, a native who is a product and victim of colonialism. The novel this film is based is by Joyce Cary, and it's brilliant; one of the first and best novels about the corrosive effects of colonial occupation. The film is barely mediocre, despite Pierce Brosnan in front of the camera and Bruce Beresford behind it. If any youngish black actor wants to earn himself an Oscar, get this remake done in a hurry.

6. Gormenghast (2000)

This is actually a four-part BBC mini-series based on Titus Groan and  Gormenghast by Mervyn Peake. The Beeb threw all kinds of money and talent at this project and they got it completely wrong. They gave it a Felliniesque feel which was totally off-base. The novels are hard to define, but I'll try by saying that they're kind of a collision between Dickens and Lewis Carroll. What's really missing from this mini-series is the humour of the original books, which are often LOL funny. And to do the books justice you'd need a series that's at least twice as long. Here's my review of the original novels.

5.  Troy (2004)

This plodding toga epic is based on Homer's The Iliad but manages to prune out all the best bits. More specifically, the film does away with the supernatural influence of the gods on the battle for Troy. That's a bit like making a western without horses. In Homer's story the gods are constantly interfering in the battle, and given the state of CGI these days I don't see why a remake shouldn't give them lots of screen time.

4. Excalibur (1981)

I don't actually mean this particular film needs to be remade, I'd just to like to see one film about King Arthur that doesn't suck like a Dyson vacuum cleaner, Monty Python's version excepted. Think about it: every attempt to dramatize this legend has gone down in flames. King Arthur, First Knight, and, going back to 1953, Knights of the Round Table have all put a blot on the record of everyone who participated in making them. The worst of the bunch is Excalibur, but only because John Boorman was an otherwise talented director. To be fair, Excalibur did have the late, great Nicol Williamson giving an intriguing performance as Widow Twankey Merlin.

3. Sands of the Kalahari (1965)

This is an odd one. A small plane crashes in the Kalahari desert and the survivors are menaced by a large band of baboons. The survivors also fight amongst themselves for who will be, in simian terms, the silverback male. It's a great idea for a film, but the execution was very B-movie. The worst decision was to have Stuart Whitman, a beta actor, play the alpha male. A decent male lead and some CGI would work wonders for a remake of Kalahari.

2.  Red Sun (1971)

If you're like me you're continually wondering why there aren't more westerns featuring samurais. It's a puzzlement. In fact, there's only one: Red Sun starring Charles Bronson, Toshiro Mifune and Alain Delon (my review here). Jackie Chan did martial arts in the old west in Shanghai Noon, so I don't see why we can't have a samurai kicking cowboy ass on the prairies. It's a better idea than Cowboys & Aliens.

1. The Naked Prey (1966) 

Actor Cornel Wilde turned to directing as his B-movie career started to wind down and he produced this classic about the hunter becoming the hunted. Set in Africa in the late 1800s, Wilde is a hunting guide, who, along with the hunters he's guiding, is captured by angry natives. The guide's clients meet sticky ends (really grisly stuff for 1966), but because the chief respects the guide he's given a slim, but fighting chance to escape. He's stripped naked and given a brief head start before being pursued by spear-wielding warriors. And the hunt is on. The story is beautifully simple and it's told with brutal efficiency. It's not without it's faults (Wilde was in the same acting class as Stuart Whitman), but it begs for a remake with a bigger budget and some dialogue that's a bit sharper. I'm not only one who loves this film: it got the official film geek seal of approval by being released as part of the Criterion Collection.

Book Review: The Scorpion Signal (1980) by Adam Hall

In the spy thriller genre, Adam Hall never got the respect he deserved, probably because his spy, Quiller, fell between the twin poles of Fleming and Le Carre. A Quiller thriller isn't as over the top as the former, nor as realistic as the latter. Hall is, however, a better writer than either one. Quiller, who never uses a gun, is an expert driver, pilot, martial artist, and has the Bureau's highest rating for being able to withstand torture. The Bureau, a special section of the British Secret Service, is Quiller's employer and is tasked with the hairiest assignments. What distinguishes the character of Quiller is his almost clinical ability to analyze his own physical and psychological reactions to stress, danger, fear, and violence. These passages have an almost Proustian attention to sensory details that might strike some readers as strange, but there's no doubt they set Quiller (and Hall) apart from the common herd.

Hall is also an exceptional writer of action sequences, often using a sudden, jolting stream-of-consciousness technique that generates a real feeling of excitement. The Scorpion Signal concerns a rogue British agent who may be plotting an assassination attempt on the Russian president, and, like almost all the Quillers, the tension doesn't let up until the very last sentence. Reading a Quiller is a text book exercise in how to write a thriller that's both exciting and a credit to the profession of writing. Hall puts sentences together in the same way Enzo Ferrari crafted parts to assemble a GTO. His muscular prose is a wonder of efficiency, flows beautifully, and with a few, deft words he can artfully sketch a character, a place or an emotion. Lee Child (my review of Worth Dying For is here) writes equally compulsive thrillers, but, in keeping with the automotive metaphors, his prose is more of a Detroit muscle car: loud, brash, and not very elegant in the corners. 

As good as Hall was, The Scorpion Signal was effectively his swan song. He wrote ten more Quillers, but they became formulaic, and Hall's right-wing politics began to make distractingly polemical appearances. The most action-packed of the Quillers is The Kobra Manifesto (1976), but possibly the best is The Tango Briefing (1973), in which our hero must deal with a shipment of nerve gas that's gone missing in the Sahara. Hall, whose real name was Elleston Trevor, was an absolute writing machine. He wrote under eleven different pen names and produced dozens and dozens of books in virtually all genres. As Elleston Trevor he wrote The Flight of the Phoenix, which has been filmed twice. I don't think the Quillers are still being printed, but there seems to be a good supply in used book stores. Now if only used book stores were in good supply