|
Jottings
King Kong
The name Peter Jackson fills
my heart with dread. If I saw it in a shop I’d cross the street and buy
what I wanted elsewhere. I’ve seen movies where breaking an egg to make an
omelette (Big Night) has more drama than all of Jackson’s dinosaurs
stampeding down a gulch. After King Kong the phrase “special
effects” is meaningless: where everything is “effect” nothing is
“special”. But my self-imposed word limit for trash is 100. As Stravinsky
said of Fantasia (a masterpiece alongside King Kong) “Of
unresisting imbecility no criticism is possible.”
Twelfth Night
Wasn’t this Illyria? Don’t
they speak English there? At first the Russian dialog was puzzling, but
soon it didn’t seem to matter: we all knew we were watching the
performances of a decade. Malvolio’s tangled self-love and
self-deception—in a creamy linen summer suit, the garters only discreetly
showing—was a quiet study by Dmitri Shcherbina. Sir Andrew Aguecheek’s
unmanageable bluster, explosively played by Dmitry Dyuzhev, never seemed
more dangerous to himself. But the night belonged to Alexander Feklistov
as Sir Toby. This was clowning as only great clowns can do it. The full
comic kaleidoscope.
Presented at this year’s Sydney Festival, all
delicacy, lightness, and high style, the production allowed
three-dimensional characters to come alive, a fresh and attractive feature
in a play often insufferably buffooned. Mr Declan Donnellan had his name
plastered all over the place, but we know whose theatrical gifts really
made it a success: first of all the gifted Russian players; then whoever
made the adaptation; then Shakespeare himself.
Saturday
There are novels you wish you
had written. Pure wishful thinking of course, but even non-fiction people
like myself can feel when reading William Trevor that, well, perhaps… with
a bit of luck and encouragement I could have done that. Anyway a page or
two… or a sentence. I almost felt like that reading Tobias Wolff’s Old
School, a gift at Christmas. And then there are novels you know you
couldn’t write in your wildest dreams—couldn’t even think of writing, for
the entire performance lies right outside the dim imaginative domain of
one’s own experience and will forever.
One such book is Ian McEwan’s Saturday,
24 hours in the life of a London neurosurgeon and a tour de force by any
standards. However, some controversy surrounds the novel, as indicated by
the notice by Craig Raine that appeared in the TLS “Books of the Year” for
December 2nd 2005. Since Raine’s comments throw light on both
the book and its critics they may be worth quoting in full:
* * *
“Ian McEwan’s Saturday (Cape) should have won
this year’s Booker Prize. It was harmed by two things – envy and envy.
After the novel’s catastrophic Royal Flush of laudatory reviews, John
Banville’s notice in the New York Review of Books spoke to, and for, every
disconcerted rival pained by mention of the Nobel Prize.
“It was an extra irony that Banville’s novel
should carry off the discredited prize. McEwan’s novel isn’t perfect, but
it has bravura evocations (perhaps a couple too many) of surgical
operations that are unrivalled in fiction. The happy family of the surgeon
is a little too implausibly gifted, but the meticulous formal organization
of the novel around the theme of brain damage is elegant and Euclidean.
“Banville’s damaging review was a coarse
caricature that couldn’t even get the result of the squash game right. It
centred on two ‘implausibilities’: first, the idea that a husband might
kiss his wife on waking in the morning, regardless of ‘morning breath’.
Mightn’t love outweigh squeamishness? Ignore it, even? I daresay
Banville’s morning breath is a thing of legend – capable of bringing up
bubbles on varnish.
“The other summary criticism can be
summarized as a joke: why bother with a burglar alarm when you can screw a
copy of Matthew Arnold’s Poems to the side of your house as a
prophylactic against psychopathology?
“Readers will remember that the murderously
violent Baxter is deflected by a recitation of ‘Dover Beach’. This is
neither a surprise nor a contrivance to the careful reader: Baxter
experiences violent mood swings because he suffers from Huntington’s
Disease. Arnold’s poem occasions one of them – an unpredictability that is
predictable enough.”
* * *
Virtuosity is an unqualified merit in music
and in dance. And as a critical term of approval that’s where it most
naturally belongs. The more virtuoso the performance the more
breathtaking, whether in ballet or playing a violin. In neither can there
be virtuosity to excess—and the more risky the successful performance the
more an audience cheers.
But Raine’s mention of “bravura excess” in
Saturday reminds one of the ambiguousness of virtuosity in the world
of words. The novelist’s main task is to create believable characters and
tell a believable tale. Words are the means: they cannot be an end in
themselves. When you feel—as you do sometimes in Saturday—that the
writing is showy and the vocabulary provocatively esoteric, attention
drifts from the central issues, the characters and the story fade, and you
become more aware of words and sentences than you should be. [Arnold’s
poem ‘Dover Beach’ is reprinted at the end of McEwan’s novel and has a
place in the plot. That it was used here a month ago is an odd
coincidence.]
Excerpt
He takes his
keys and phone and garage remote from a silver dish by the recipe books.
His wallet is in an overcoat hanging in a room behind the kitchen, outside
the wine vaults. His squash racket is upstairs on the ground floor, in a
cupboard in the laundry. He puts on an old hiking fleece, and is about to
set the burglar alarm when he remembers Theo inside. As he steps outside
and turns from closing the door, he hears the squeal of seagulls come
inland for the city’s pickings. The sun is low and only one half of the
square—his half—is in full sunlight. He walks away from the square along
blinding moist pavement, surprised by the freshness of the day. The air
tastes almost clean. He has an impression of striding along a natural
surface, along some coastal wilderness, on a smooth slab of basalt
causeway he vaguely recalls from a childhood holiday. It must be the cry
of the gulls bringing it back. He can remember the taste of spray off a
turbulent blue-green sea, and as he reaches Warren Street he reminds
himself that he mustn’t forget the fishmonger’s. Lifted by the coffee, and
by movement at last, as well as the prospect of the game and the
comfortable fit of the sheathed racket in his hand, he increases his pace.
Robert Lepage
Sydney has hundreds of miles
of sunny beaches. Montreal has a choked and muddy river. Sydney has
weather to die for, while most seasons most of the year Montreal is where
you’d least like to be. Sydney’s Opera House is one of the wonders of the
world. Montreal has… what? A mouldering 30-year-old Olympic complex that
has yet to be paid for. Australia has so many advantages over Canada the
comparison is downright absurd—so how come we have Edna Everedge when
Canada has Robert Lepage?
|
