Garbage cans, rats galore… Scram!

“His claws arced up, up, and slashed a vicious curve through Cludge’s soft, wet nose.

The big dog howled. He twisted away, turning his face left and right, spraying blood into the snow. He stumbled back from Razor’s claws, and hid behind Varjak, trembling, whimpering, bleeding from the nose.

It was over.”

SF Said, The Outlaw Varjak Paw, p. 20.

Mr Shaggy Guerrier Esq., smallest and hairiest member of the family, bought this for the Dr for Christmas. He seemed much taken with the first Varjak Paw novel, and its none-too-brave black cat fighting a world of wicked felines.

I assume the eponymous cat’s name is a play on “Paul Varjak”, the blocked writer of the 1956 novel “Nine Lives” and star of Breakfast at Tiffany’s. (And played by Hannibal Smith some years before Nam and the crime he didn’t commit.)

“I’m like Cat here. We’re a couple of no-named slobs, we belong to nobody and nobody belongs to us. We don’t even belong to each other.”

Holly Golightly, Breakfast at Tiffany’s.

(I’m sure there’s an argument for how both the cat-books-for-kids and the hip-flick-for-grown-ups make the same sort of plea, that it’s a tough, mixed-up world and us kooks need to stick up for each other. But it’s probably trying a bit hard…)

Knocked through this new adventure in a couple of evenings – though there’s 260 densely plotted pages, its set in a heavyweight point size and illustrated throughout. Dave McKean’s sketchy illustrations are integral to the story, as violently clawed and sinister as the text they accompany.

In it, Varjak and his chums Tam, Holly and Cludge (shockingly, a dog) are finding the “free” streets hemmed in by an ever more ‘orrible gang. Those that don’t pay due deference to Sally Bones get their ears and tails pulled off, and they’re not even sparing old women and children. It’s got so bad that even some of the other gangs and hoodlums are looking to Varjak for help…

It’s a grisly and violent read with constant blood-spilling, death and disfigurement. Amid the steady low drumbeat of CRACK! and CRASH! and SMACK! and THUD!, cats plummet from tall buildings and wade through sewage. There’s also love, with Varjak’s squirmy feelings about the girl-kitten he sleeps with.

That’s not to say this is only for older kids; it’s no more vicious than the last two Harry Potters. What’s more, aged 11ish I devoured 2000AD and the novel of Doctor No because – with their torture and Nazis and sex and explosions – I thought I was getting away with something adult, that the parents wouldn’t approve if they only knew how sophisticated my trashy reading really was.

Not that this is an original thought:

“If you say you want to stay up until the end of a movie they're never going to let you do that, but if you say "I just want to finish this chapter" it's okay.

Little do they know you're reading about a troll hacking off someone's head.”

CBBC Newsround, Authors on the spot: Lemony Snicket, 2 June 2006.

The violence is vivid and scary, even if a lot of it happens off-camera. It reminded me in some ways of The Iron Man – a succession of stark, brutal images ever threatening the kind, easy-going yet wily hero (in that case, a small boy).

Though Varjak is unnaturally good at fighting, he never enjoys it. We see him struggle to build and maintain alliances so he doesn’t have to fight any more. And we see how his insistence that everyone works together ultimately pays off.

It’s exciting all the way through, though I’m surprised there aren’t more cliffhanger endings to chapters. The loss of a major character (which happens quite a bit) occurs mid-chapter rather than the end. I guess this means the book works better as a bed-time story; you get all the thrilling plot developments in your instalment, rather then being left on sleep-preventing tenterhooks.

The mystical stuff with Varjak’s long-dead ancestor, the kung-fu master Jalal, is all a bit Jedi. I half-expected, as Jalal reveals his own weaknesses, that evil Sally Bones would turn out to be Varjak’s mum. And we still don’t know how or why Varjak has these lurid dreams, or what his special connection to the Way is.

Otherwise, Outlaw seems to tie up everything neatly, there’s no “coming soon” in the endpapers (as there is in the first one) and the official website says nothing about book three. But I can see where Said might go for Varjak’s next perilous adventure – without giving anything away for this one, using a character who at the end has one “ice-blue eye, seeing his secrets, laying him bare” (p. 260). And that would really be putting the poor scraggy cat through the ringer.

Googling to see what might have been mentioned, Said told Newsround that he thinks there’ll be a third book, but that,

“there's another story I want to work on. It's a sort of science-fiction samurai story, so there'll still be martial arts - but there might also be spaceships...”

CBBC Newsround, Q & A with Varjak Paw author SF Said, 14 November 2005.

Cor! Kendo in space... Oh, no wait. Has't that be done?

For one week only…

…you can hear the Dr’s broadcast debut, via Radio 4’s Listen Again wossname.

She pops up about halfway through (by which time you might have
lost the thread of what Malc McClaren’s going on about, bless him).

We’ve also watched the first three episodes of Talons of Weng-Chiang, the Dr mesmerised by Li H’Sen Chang. Ducked off to bed early to escape the seminar on ethno-racial stereotyping. Though I notice Chang’s not shown on the packaging…

On which point, I’d recommend Alex’s post on profiling. Surely terrorists who almost out-think airport security (with a method devised by the Joker, where different, innocuous chemicals become lethal when blended) are cunning enough to thwart looking “a bit foreign”...

And I have an answer for airlines and passengers complaining about all the delays: airports provide an option for no-frills security. It's quicker, it's cheaper and you can carry anything you like in your hand luggage.

But it's your own fault if you don't survive the journey. Now shut your moaning!

Lazy boy

I’ve not come anywhere in the Writers Inc competition, and wonder what of the two stories sent in can be salvaged for use elsewhere. Humbug. And, indeed, fizzy fish.

The problem with having lots of work on is how it eats up all the thinking time. Or, to use the technical term, “idling”. Or, to use the Dr’s phrase, “I thought you were going to do some work today.”

Today I made much use of an unpatented creative process for getting story outlines to work. The trick is, having researched diligently and got a pretty good idea where it’s all going, to then not get up too early and lie in bed thinking it through.

It’s amazing (to me, at least) what can come out of idling. This morning the trusty left hemisphere (have I got that right?) rustled up a whole new character, a nice thing about how to play the bloke alone in his escape pod, and the right place for a big revelation.

The next stage is to get all this down in the notebook. And then, after a lunch of cheesy crumpets, tea and Dr Who magazine, I settled down at the computer to type up the outlines entirely from memory.

Relying only on the grey matter means you only get the essentials of the story, and it’s a good way to see what really matters. Yes, that bit about the escape pod works nicely, but I entirely neglected it as the thing got typed up.

This uber-outline is saved and then saved-as, and I leech through the notebook putting back all I’d forgot. Have chipped 2,626 words off the 12,000 monolith, and it’s now just a matter of knocking down those pins.

And, having set the stories in stone, of finding ways to keep it interesting for myself as I write it. Which usually means changing it all as I go.

Or 26 in my case

“By this time I was pretty well convinced he was going straight with me. It was the wildest sort of narrative, but I had heard in my time many steep tales which had turned out to be true, and I made a practice of judging the man rather than the story.”

John Buchan, The 39 Steps, p. 21.

Richard Hannay is an ex-pat who’s tired of London, meeting the old bloke from the flat upstairs. The old bloke, Scudder, seems like any other paranoid drunk with dreadful conspiracies to spin about how Jewish anarchist group the ‘Black Stone’ are plotting to drag us all into war. Yet Hannay believes him. Soon it looks like the conspirators are to force Europe into massive war (the book was published in 1915).

This pulp thriller (or “shocker” as Buchan himself called the form) is concisely told in blunt, stark prose and is all over in 126 pages. This makes it feel more quick-witted and modern than its contemporaries (at least, I’m thinking of thrillers and intrigues I’ve read by Wells and Joseph Conrad where the whole world still seems answerable to the wrath of the Empress Victoria).

The gratuitous anti-Semitism is probably the most shocking thing about the book, though I did note that for all we’re told it’s a global plot, we only ever see four of the villains.

(Part of me wonders if that’s all there is of the Black Stone, and they’ve just faked a bigger crowd. Like Macaulay Culkin’s party of cardboard cut-outs in Home Alone, or the cheeky practice of sales reps for magazines to say things like, “Well it sells 20,000 each month, but every copy’s read by at least two or three people…”)

Of course, we later discover that Hannay’s not entirely been told the truth, but there is much throughout the book about being able to judge a man – Hannay believes and is believed on the look of a fellow alone.

It's lucky Hannay knows who he can trust, because none of the secret service can. Even when Hannay presents all the evidence, Sir Walter is still incredulous:

“‘I don’t know what to make of it,’ he said at last. ‘He is right about one thing – what is going to happen the day after to-morrow. How the devil can it have got known? That is ugly enough in itself. But all this about war and the Black Stone – it reads like some wild melodrama. If only I had more confidence in Scudder’s judgement. The trouble about him was that he was too romantic. He had the artistic temperament, and wanted a story to be better than God meant it to be. He had a lot of odd biases, too. Jews, for example, made him see red. Jews and the high finance.’”

Ibid., p.94.

By the end of the page, Sir Walter has been convinced that everything about the plot is true. Which all panders to egoist fantasy, in which the hero knows better than everyone else and is the only one can foil the baddies. Having been a surly layabout with no love for the mother country, Hannay has the rulers of the Empire reliant on his every move.

Hannay solves the riddles on his own where even the heads of the Secret Service cannot, based on what he admits himself are some lucky guesses and the courage (or pig-headedness) to stick to them. It seems only he can stop the coming war…

Actually, the idea of foiling some foreign plot on the eve of the inevitable war reminds me a lot of Sherlock Holmes’s Final Bow. Only Hannay’s not sporting the comedy beard.

It also relies on an awful lot of coincidence – meeting an old acquaintance in the middle of the countryside while out on the run, or and then bumping into him again at the worst possible moment.

And yet, its decades ahead of its time, more like the thrillers from after the Second World War than from just prior to the first. It’s paranoia about the sinister plottings of “anarchists” is not unlike current worries about terrorists. Though I’m amused that anarchists can be so organised, and have such a clear, military chain of command.

It’s certainly a great influence on later spy stories. The doppelganger plot appears again in Thunderball. Hannay’s pusuit by a plane over the Scottish hilltops seems to have inspired Hitchcock’s North by Northwest, which in turn inspired a sequence toward the end of the (film version of) From Russia With Love where Bond is chased over by a helicopter over the Yugoslav hilltops. Which shows how these things come round – the sequence was in fact filmed in Scotland.

Like Fleming, there’s also the bollocksy “tricks of the trade” – the plot depending on icky generalisations about racial and national types (such as Germans who cannot change their plans). Likewise, Hannay’s various disguises rely not so much on his skill with make-up as just his believing in the “atmosphere” of the part. It’s interesting to see these cheats and clichés so early in the spy genre.

Like Bond, Hannay is a snob:

“What fellows like me don’t understand is the great comfortable, satisfied middle-class world, the folk that live in villas and suburbs. He doesn’t know how they look at things, he doesn’t understand their conventions, and he is as shy of them as of a black mamba. When a trim parlour-maid opened the door, I could hardly find my voice.”

Ibid., p.119.

And, like Bond spotting a villain because he selects the wrong wine, this snobbery is a way of driving the plot forward and making the hero distinct from the hoi-polloi readers.

What is very different from these descendants is the absence of ladies and sex, which leaves it all rather cold and charmless. The story would be infinitely richer led by a wise-cracking Cary Grant or Sean Connery.

And then suddenly it’s all over – Hannay bluffs some men playing cards and they run off into the night. If this can be considered a victory then it’s a Pyrrhic one; the war comes anyway, and Hannay signs up to the army feeling (again, as if it’s a good thing) that he’s already done his best service.

More Dick than is good for you

Have (I hope) finished my toil on something that's taken longer than expected. The chap I've been working with has been very accommodating and I'm just tightening up his good work. But it needed thinking about from various angles and I was almost done when I realised how I'd written us into a corner. Now it is done. Phew.

So I can throw myself at the 12,000 words due in by the end of the month, some of which requires my being knowledgeable about a bloke called Phil from Istanbul. To help, I am currently reading Michael Grant's "From Alexander to Cleopatra - the Hellenistic World". This is because I have a clever wife.

I also have clever friends. Having watched Matthew Sweet present highlights from Edinburgh last night (and steal the word "TARDIS" into it, too), this morning I discover Phil has written for the Guardian a piece about Philip K Dick.

It's a good summary of the crazy-arsed dude (and I am terrible envious), though I think it misses something important. Dick was hugely prolific, but only a small percentage of his many publications are actually any sort of cop.

This was something of a bummer to discover, having keenly absorbed his work in my teens. Back then, a wise friend advised which to read - Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Dr Bloodmoney, We Can Build You, Valis, Ubik, The Man In The High Castle, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, Mary and the Giant and A Scanner Darkly (though YMMV and shit). Everything since then has been a bit of a disappointment.

I suspect this is less to do with me just getting older and more discriminating, and may be down to Dick's editors. Writing under the influence and all through the night until he'd met his wordcount, Dick would sometimes forget the names of his protagonists or things he'd already done to them.

It happens in stories (and I've had to compensate before for characters who've returned from the dead, or have swapped genders in a couple of paragraphs). And his free-wheeling brilliance is at its best when approaching some semblance of structure.

But this is just a guess based on my own sorry prejudice. It may also be that Dick's mania was like pretty much everything else in life - occassional greatness from the morass of the okay.

Mary and the Giant is not sci-fi, and is about a girl in a record shop falling for the wrong guy. It really struck a chord with the me aged 17 and I can't really recall why. I think it was just a nice story, about being misunderstood and unsure in love, and generally well meaning but fuck-knuckled. The only other thing I remember is that the giant used cheap, wooden picks on his record player.

(Other) Phil's article has made me: hotly envious; want to see the film, and; look up Mary on Abebooks.

Part-time punks

Lots on just at the mo as I race to get things finished. But regular readers may wish to tune in to BBC Radio 4 on Monday (14 August) at 3.45 pm.

"To celebrate 150 years of the National Portrait Gallery, well-known people select a portrait from the gallery to comment on.

Malcom McLaren on Andy Warhol's silkscreen images of Queen Elizabeth II

McLaren knew Warhol and tells us why he thinks Andy's portraits have lost their power and become fashion."

Discussing the portrait with Malc will be one Dr Debbie Challis. Cor.

Law of the jungle

On the train home on Sunday I read the first three chapters of the Jungle Book, which took me greatly by surprise.

Not least because it’s only those first three chapters which are about the wolf-boy Mowgli. The remainder of the book seems to be made up of other stories based on or pinched from Indian legends and experience.

I can’t help wondering how much is what he got told and how much is his own experience of India. As my dad pointed out, Kipling spent a relatively short period in the country he’s remembered as such as expert on. He was born there, yes, but returned to England aged six. Later he did a seven-year tour of duty as a journalist (where he obviously met Sirs Michael Caine and Sean Connery), and it’s this period – the same length as a doctor’s training – that provided the material for the rest of his career as a writer.

It’s no surprise that the book is darker, nastier and more animalistic than the bowdlerised Disney cartoon. Mowgli’s schooling by Baloo here is a neat twist on the savage law of the jungle. The jungle is full of danger and violence yet its wiser inhabitants abide by an etiquette.

The law is an ideal, not an absolute, a way of negotiating the harsh realities. It only exists where it is backed up by (the threat of) violence. So that the real law of the jungle – where power rests with the one who can kill his adversaries – is always glimpsed underneath.

There are those who flout the law – the tiger Shere Khan and his allies because they are building their own empires, the monkeys because they’re too reckless. And this lawlessness makes things unpredictable and dangerous, and threatens to overturn everyone.

These are complex relationships, and any plan of action requires involved negotiation. Any alliance is made warily.

Mowgli spends his time cut and bruised all over, taking tumbles that we’re told would kill any other child. It reminded me a great deal of Tarzan (written 12 years later) – at least, it reminded me of the film Greystoke, because I’ve not read the book.

Chapter 1 starts with Mowgli being found by a family of wolves, who bring him up as their own just to spite the miserly tiger. Having had him accepted by the rest of the pack (and sponsored by a bear and a panther), and just got the story started, we then just skip to the end.

“Now you must be content to skip ten or eleven whole years, and only guess at all the wonderful life that Mowgli led among the wolves, because if it were written out it would fill ever so many books.”

Rudyard Kipling, The Jungle Book, p. 22.

Kipling’s not really got the hang of the freelance thing yet if he’s pointing out to his readers that there’s probably more in this. (Says someone who’s only just pitched a rejected novel synopsis to someone else as a short story.)

Anyway, Shere Khan and his allies challenge the wolf leadership and win, but Mowgli stops them from killing Akela by threatening them all with fire. Then, because the use of fire means he has chosen the way of men over the jungle, he goes off to the local village. The end, it seems.

Chapter 2 jumps back a bit, recalling an episode from Mowgli’s schooling. It’s a valuable lesson in obeying his godparents and not playing with the naughty kids from down the street. Ignoring the warnings about what monkeys are like, Mowgli soon finds himself being carried off into the trees. The monkeys are dangerous not because they’re evil but because they are reckless and silly. They cannot hold an idea in their heads for more than five minutes.

In this anthropomorphic society, I wondered who the monkeys were based on – Unruly children? Those who do not attend to their school books? As the monkeys sit about the ruins of once-great buildings, unable to appreciate the grandeur around them let alone being able to reclaim it, I wondered if there wasn’t something more distastefully imperial going on, and these wild, silly creatures were some version of Kipling’s own dealings with native Indians.

More surprising is how Mowgli escapes his predicament – there’s no merry king of the swingers here. Instead, Baloo and Bagheera make an unlikely alliance with the cunning python, Kaa.

Together, these three amigos fight off the monkeys in a battle that’s hard-won and nasty. It nearly all goes pear shaped, with monkey reinforcements on their way and Bagheera hiding in a pond. But then Kaa hypnotises all the monkeys (and nearly Mowgli and Bagheera too), and we’re left with the deeply unsettling suggestion that the entranced monkeys all file up to be eaten. It’s terrifying and surreal and vicious.

Then Mowgli needs beating for his disobedience, because “sorrow never stays punishment”. He’s left bloody and bruised all over, but takes it like a man. The end.

And it’s this weird and brutal chapter that the Disney version is based on, of course.

Chapter 3 picks up after the end of Chapter 1 with Mowgli returning to the village from which he was snatched as a baby, and to his natural mother, a rich woman called Messua. We are told his real name – Nathoo.

Mowgli (because the village take him to be a replacement for Nathoo, not necessarily Nathoo himself) learns to speak the language and to look after their cows, but he finds the men’s sleeping habits and tales of jungle beasts ridiculous and he can’t fathom the caste system or money. He doesn’t really fit in.

What’s more, the belligerent Shere Khan is stalking him. So, with the help of his old wolf chums, Mowgli stages an ambush and kills the tiger in a stampede which seems to have inspired a scene in the Lion King.

Yet the killing of Mufasa is a cowardly act, and Mowgli’s tactics hardly feel noble. He further dismays a man warrior by refusing to surrender his kill, which warrants a big reward. (The people of the village are variously superstitious, stupid and greedy.)

As a result, Mowgli is cast out of the village for being a sorcerer (and able to command the wolves). By the time we leave him, he’s settled his old scores and lived by Baloo’s law, but is an outcast from both man and beast. Perhaps this is again Kipling’s own experience of those neither wholly English not wholly Indian, so cut off from both societies.

And then it ends:

“But he was not always alone, because years afterward he became a man and married.

But that is a story for grown-ups.”

Ibid., p. 121.

And I realised I’d forgotten it was all meant for kids.

(The Second Jungle Book apparently continues the story, with chapters about a much older Mowgli returning to rescue his real mum.)

Nature versus nature

“The plot meanders almost incomprehensibly through an all-too-familiar futureworld.”

So says the Guardian’s Guide of Code 46, which held me mesmerised last night on BBC2. Until seeing it in the listings on Saturday, Michael Winterbottom’s oedipal sci-fi had entirely passed me by, which I blame on the shortcomings of my usually impeccable medley of recommenders. (Though I note my boss Joe was similarly wowed by it two years ago.)

Spoilers follow.

Tim Robbins is investigating fraud in a genetics factory and falls for Samantha Morton when she talks back to him. Nothing unexpected there. They meet up on the Tube after work and go clubbing, and then end up back in her bed. Nothing unexpected there, either. But fortune is out to make fools of these star-cross’d lovers, and the future’s pernicious technological brilliance is all out to scupper their affair…

Despite what the sneery preview said, the futureworld is effective because it’s so familiar – a dystopia waiting just a couple of years from us now. We can recognise some of the buildings, the concrete and toughened glass of Canary Wharf architecture pinched right out of decades’ old SF comic books. The cities are packed full of people (the Tube only empty in dreams), and there are no trees or green spaces left anywhere but the desert.

(Yes, I know. I think it's meant to be ironic.)

The global village of pristine urban spaces may be the place to be in this deprived and environmentally scarred future, but the cities consist of small, cramped areas for living and just as imposing and totalitarian wide-open work areas. This is a place of invasion, where a virus can steal the subtext of someone’s life out of their innocent gabble, where memories are deleted as sickness and the state uses mind control to make criminals self-harm.

In all, it’s a deft bit of sci-fi that pays dividends if you only pay attention. Everyone speaks English but peppered with bits of other languages – a mish-mash of French and Spanish and Hebrew and what-have-you that’s in many ways more effective and more credible than the incomprehensible future slang of Bladerunner. The future is also more readily multicultural, though I did mutter, “But the two leads are both white!” before realising why they’d have to be the same race.

The social structures are also nicely delineated – not just between those inside and outside the cities, but between Robbins at the top of the heap with his clinically immaculate apartment and office, and Morton on the bottom rung and commuting through the rubbish and squalor.

I loved that Robbins asking his suspects to tell him anything about themselves is not explained until late in the movie. And the kooky nova of viruses that can make you sing well or speak Mandarin (so that you’re the only one not able to understand what you’re saying) turns out to be a crucial plot point.

The wheeze behind it all is that there’s a lot of IVF going on in the future, and that cloning ups the chances of (inadvertent) incest. Morton turns out to be a 100% clone of Robbins’ own mother – though, as one expert explains, her environment and circumstances have brought her up as someone very different. But to keep the human stock healthy the two must not be lovers…

This plot loses something explained out of context (as I found trying to catch up the Dr, who wandered in some way through). I also think the mystery would have been better if the titles had not defined “Code 46 violations” right from the off. I suppose there’s an argument to be made that this adds to the tragic inevitability of all that follows, but it just felt like fumbling the big twist.

But as it’s played out, the film is strange and unsettling, arousing weird empathies in a sex scene where Morton’s body is both compliant and resisting. A lot of the film's effectiveness is down to the two leads, but it’s also busy with images that live on long in the mind – such as camels racing along beside their escape in the desert, signs of life in an otherwise unnatural world.

I can see that it’s not for everyone – sci-fi about relationships bothers those who prefer big guns and explosions as well as those who sneer at anything that dares to admit openly being set in the future. (In Dr Who terms, that means alienating those who can’t see what Jacqui and Mickey added to the show as well as those who didn’t like it whenever the TARDIS left the Powell Estate.)

It may well have done better critically if Winterbottom had played to these silly prejudices and denied it was any kind of SF (and so many authors like to do). Which is a back-handed compliment, because when you start being embarrassed that a film’s thought of as sci-fi you know you’ve got something rather good.

Lost

A post entitled "Tastes a bit of pine needles" has gone missing from this blog and I think Picasa must be responsible. It mentioned the brother being on the front page of both the BBC News site and the Sunday Times, as well as letting you know that the Dr has a blog. The title was from something I've been writing.

Bah. You'll have to go without.

End of the road

The littlest brother is reaching the last few metres of his mammoth trek across Oz and finds himself on page 3 of today’s Telegraph. The reactionary sell-out.

Have dutifully bought him a copy while out handing matters of import to the Post Office.

Tom’s been out there since February, which means his mega-epic has lasted about as long as Judge Dredd’s, though without the flying surfboards or evil clones of himself camped inside Uluru. I hope.

Word is he’ll be back in the next few weeks. Which is good as we need someone to babysit the cat.

Today, not being wanted for my cut-and-paste genius, I have written a letter for another brother, posted some things, chased some others, rewritten the beginning of something (or rather, begun to rewrite something) and eaten some Crunchy Nut Cornflakes.

Off now to a leaving do for someone who isn't entirely leaving. The liberty. But curry is included so hooray.

Catch it

A relation of mine - he shall remain nameless here - is spoken of in family legend for his ability to eat rice pudding when small. He would eat it with his hands to begin with, then tip the bowl over his head. In the disrobing and washing that followed, he had managed to get rice pudding even inside his shoes.

Cats, of course, are meant to be less entirely disgusting than this. They are meant to have a certain grace and poise and elegance. They are, afterall, not dogs.

But not my cat. My cat is special.

Last night, while the Dr, M., Nimbos and I finished our decadent puddings, the shaggy cat wolfed down his own meal in a mouthful and then felt the need to make toilet. He clambered into his poo-box, turned himself awkwardly round 180 degrees and stuck his head brazenly back out into the daylight. He likes to oggle you squarely in the eye while he goes about making his bears.

Now he can be a pungent little blighter at the best of times but last night's effort has to be a personal best. The sort of sly fug you first notice when your nostril hairs catch ablaze.

The cat bolted from his box to escape what he had made and it was then the ladies squealed. Quite a lot of product was still attached to the little sod's back legs.

A chase worthy of the Best of Benny Hill ensued, women chasing cat up and down the stairs, him dropping moist morsels in his wake. I, heroically, stood my ground and let him come fleeing right to me.

Ensnaring him we discovered he'd even managed to get a splodge of his own poo-juice right on the top of his back. I held on to the twisty, turny animal thinking, "But cats just don't bend that way..."

My Herculean labour was to hold him pinioned while the ladies administered wet wipes and - because it was already setting in - the scissors. The hairy gent sulked superbly and scritched an artwork into my forearms resembling a later Jackson Pollock.

He then spent the rest of the evening wauing about the surprising lack of food on offer in his bowl.

I am reminded of the wisdom of my Best Man just a few weeks ago. "Your cat," he explained, "is weird."

Unstructured and class

Work ploughs ever onward and today I lunched with the Chief and the new recruit, and got all kinds of things done and agreed. I may still be running about like a headless ostrich but its getting to be in more of one direction.

Went to see Market Boy at the National last night, which ticked lots of the Dr's boxes. It's about shoes and rude naughties and Thatcher and 80s music - plus there were slow-mo fight scenes and people from Dr Who to keep me happy.

The Chief had also seen it, but said he'd left at the end of part one. "Wasn't really a musical, was it?" he said.

The politics were also a bit easy - a parody of Mrs T and her policies but one that never really seemed to say anything but "Witch!". More than 1.5 decades after she left her job, Margaret seems a bit of an easy target for that. How much better to critique the new Labour new broom brushing on at the end, who carelessly bins the market's vocabulary along with all its rich history.

Still, a fun night out.

Some reviews of my own hard-made things: Joe Ford enthuses about the Settling though he calls it "unstructured", by which I think he must mean "very carefully structured". Bah. You do not appreciate my genius.

Richard McGinlay likes The School, which demonstrates "considerable class" and wins 8 out of 10 - which I think qualifies as an A or A-. Today I am the swotty kid and expect to get bullied at play time.

That said, McGinlay looooooves Crystal of Cantus. It'd be nice to say that any good stuff is down to the script editor, but the bits he cites are all Joe. Phooey. Won't be employing him again...

Bounder of adventure

“'And what does that make you! The feted artist, the dashing dandy. But by night - philanderer, sodomite and assassin!'

As a thumbnail sketch of me that wasn't half bad.

[Spoiler] aimed the revolver at my face and cocked it. 'And so... farewell...'”

Mark Gatiss, The Vesuvius Club, p. 238.

Knocked through this leisuredly in the last couple of days. Lucifer Box is a caddish, Edwardian portraitist and secret agent with rather beautiful hands. Having deftly seen off an anarchist for his country, he’s set investigating the death of a colleague who may have stumbled on something sinister in the proximity of Naples...

As you'd expect from one of the The League of Gentlemen this is a frothy adventure full of monstrous invention. Characters have names like Tom Bowler (ha ha!), Bella Pok (ho ho!) and Cretaceous Unmann, and there's some horrifying punnery - at the prospect of sharing a bike ride, Lucifer admits he’s never been a “fan de cycle”.

It's witty, yes, but rather than a comic novel it's a ghoulish genre piece with a wry narrator. Box is a callous rogue who'll neatly undercut the tension with a well-placed, savage bon-mot.

As a genre novel, it's very generic - reminding me variously of: Austin Powers; Devlin Waugh; the Avengers; Flashman; Jason King; that Steve Coogan Hammer-horror spoof; Wodehouse's Psmith; and even the Phantom Raspberry Blower of Old London Town. Oh, and lashings and lashing of Bond. The villain of course has a secret base inside a volcano.

This is not necessarily a criticism – it’s a comfy read, cosy because its stylings are so familiar. Yet it's still full of surprises.

Like the recent Rupert-Everett-as-Holmes (with Sherlie discussing Freud with Watson's emancipated bit of skirt), being this side of the Empress Victoria means it all feels so zestfully modern.

(Holmes is suffused with modernity, the canon chock full of the latest gadgets and theories – finger printing, psychology, photography, bicycles, telegraphy and high-speed trains. There's also one about genetic experiments (that results in the concoction of monkey serum, admittedly). Sherlock could not have achieved his prowess in any earlier age.)

References to Wilde and Beardsley (as well as King Edward) place Box's sexual dalliances in context. It's all a lot ruder than I’d expected, though the frequent lubricities are never gone into.

It’s never more explicit than any James Bond, but Box’s candid disclosures about the broad sweep of his sex life are what really sets this apart from its generic stablemates. There's something thrillingly seditious about Bond as a bit of a nancy...

The belle epoch stylings extend to the physical book – Ian Bass’s lovely line drawings owe something to Beardsley without being entirely pastiche. The dust jacket also appears worn and frayed, as if a much beloved second-hand copy. Really nice touch that.

Speaking of the high arts, the July 2006 issue of the glossy British Art Journal (£10.50 from your usual supplier of lavishment) includes the first published material on old Greek stuff as written by the elegant Dr. We shall sup fine wine.

One of us is green

In December, the Harrogate Theatre will be home to Sleeping Beauty, as written by friend and mentor, Nick “Is it ‘cos I is Black Dalek?” Pegg. He tells me the place is,

“a beautiful late Victorian auditorium, its red-and-gold colour scheme replete with chandeliers, gilt plasterwork and velvet upholstery.”

Although the phrase he first used to conjure this image was,

“a Muppet-Show-of-Weng-Chiang.”

Wow.

What a glory those words make in my brain.

They have replaced "festival”, “of” and “food" as the mantra to repeat at myself when stumbling headlong down the valley of the shadow of death. Or being shoved about on the Underground by untall and jostly natives. Or just feeling a bit aggrieved and weary about how much work there is in how much stifling hotitude.

Have borrowed Weng-Chiang on DVD for the edification of the Dr (my Dr) and find myself too often drawn to casting the Muppet version.

Gonzo would, of course, be Magnus Greel. But who would play Onnabol Chang?

I reckon Kermit – in a shocking twist on his usual, nice-guy image. He’s just the chap to get John Bennett’s sympathetic Fu Manchu.

And then: Rowlf as the gravely-voiced Tom Baker Dr Who; Miss Piggy as street-fighting savage Leela; Rizzo as Mr Sin; Scooter as Litefoot and Fozzie Bear as Jago; Sam the American Eagle as the policeman in episode one; Janice from the Electric Mayhem as one of the honest working women of the night; Clifford (yes, Muppets Tonight is canon) as Casey; Snookums as the rat…

But who to get in the key role of Peter Ware’s Uncle?

Insultants

Trying to explain why a consultant I'd worked with had made himself None At All Friends, this analogy popped into my head - and right there when I needed it and not on the train home. Which never happens.

"No," says the consultant, "you gave me twenty quid to go to the bar. Now I need money to buy the drinks."

Habitual coke user

Joined those siblings not in Australia last night to celebrate my dad's significant birthday. Dined well on chicken livers and steak, and am also now the proud possessor of a USB rocket launcher, much to the delight of the cat.

Saying farewell to the family at Waterloo, the BBC News plasma screen played an odd exhoratation for some new kind of Coke. "Zero" is exciting because of what it doesn't have, advertising this virtue with a flashy cartoon that weaves between grown-ups at a pop concert.

"Gigs WITHOUT tall people," it says, as if such segregation were a good thing.

I do like Coke, but of the fatty, sugary, sickly variety best accompanied with aspirin after a night on the tiles. Coke was afterall invented in an age when people quaffed opiates openly and required hangover cures with bite. It's a marvellous, miraculous pick-me-up.

Am not offended by Zero targetting tall folks so much as disallowed from joining in with the fun. I boast (yet again) the wrong dimensions; it's more for the shorter breed of groupie.

And for the larger, shorter ones at that. Am not entirely sure what Zero has zero of - sugar, calories, Alzheimer's-inducing chemicalia - but it's odd to see something promoted for not even touching the sides.

Sieg heil, Jeeves!

"131. We all act through life, and each of us selects the special audience he wishes to impress. When this audience is not looking at us we are never really happy, however many other people are applauding."

PGW Notebooks, Wodehouse Archive, cited in Robert McCrum, "Wodehouse - A life", Penguin Books (2004), p. 80.

What with work spewing from my ears, it's taken me a month to get through this and reassess what I thought I already knew about Wodehouse. The chums kind enough to comment on that previous post both quickly leapt to Plum's defence – that no, he was never a Nazi.

Yet that's not quite what my concerns were getting at.

McCrum's book is largely taken up with the consequences of five broadcasts Wodehouse made in the summer of 1941 on German radio, which have variously been described as naive, criminally treasonous, revolutionary and anti-British, or even just plain dim.

The reason for the emphasis on this one particular episode may just be that Wodehouse is not otherwise the most exciting subject. Literary biography tends to explain how an author’s best works can all be put down to plagiarism – copied down from real people, real incidents and the works of other authors.

Wodehouse, though, made his name by secluding himself in a fantasy world entirely divorced from the real. Blandings Castle could be based on any number of places he actually went to (McCrum names several), and he hits the big-time as a writer only when he stops basing it all on his schooldays and job in a bank. (Still, McCrum is keen to point out the plethora of aunts in his youth.)

He also defiantly refused to change with the times, to update his characters or worldview beyond an occasional wry reference to things he’d aglanced in the news.

As a result the biography struggles to make sense of the Wodehousian creative process. When he wasn't writing fiction he was talking about it. The biography is littered with snippets of fret about plotting, character and cash. The long hours of grind at a typewriter struck a chord with this particular hack, but I can see it might not ignite joy in fans of Wodehouse's giddily witty prose.

We are told time and again how the writing came first, like an obsessive affliction. He worked at an astounding rate right from the get-go – the only way he could be so prolific.

While his wife, Ethel, threw indulgent parties, Wodehouse would be squirreled away in his study at the type-writer secluded in his fantasy world as much as his characters are.

As the Dr knows only too well, juggling writing commitments (and the insatiable need to write) with real life can be difficult. But a selfless devotion to the craft (I've never felt comfortable with scribbling stories as "art") can be selfish. There's something ungallant about his correspondence as a POW, enquiring after possible book deals and articles but never as to the welfare of Ethel. This lack of concern led his adopted daughter Leonora, struggling to keep track on the far side of the fighting, to assume that her parents were still in touch.

But this selfishness does not make him a collaborator. McCrum’s real strength is to track the myriad accounts and reactions to Wodehouse with the available, provable facts.

Wodehouse did not buy his early release (some months before, aged 60, he'd have been let out anyway) in exchange for speaking propaganda. He was already out by then. He was not a stooge of the SS, who only took advantage after he’d made the recordings. Nor was he venting anti-British feelings so much as letting his American readers know he was okay.

"The events of June 1941 hardly convict Wodehouse of anything worse than gross stupidity."

Ibid, p 304.

Yet this acquittal from charges of treason is really nothing new. George Orwell’s spirited 1945 defence of Wodehouse (which Psychonomy sent me the link to, though it was having read it already that got me thinking on these lines – honest) says something suspiciously similar.

"It is important to realise that the events of 1941 do not convict Wodehouse of anything worse than stupidity."

George Orwell, “In Defence of PG Wodehouse” (1945).

Orwell’s argument is that Wodehouse “had no conception of Nazism and all it meant,” and that we can only understand what happened by appreciating Wodehouse’s mentality.

"One of the most remarkable things about Wodehouse is his lack of development," Orwell goes on. And again, "His moral outlook has remained that of a public-school boy."

But this doesn’t get Wodehouse off the hook. Rather, it reminds me of Skimpole, the parasite in Bleak House whose persistent claims to being "like a child" are expected to excuse his behaviour - selling introductions to crooked lawyers or deserting his wife and children. Note that his childish ignorance of all adult affairs never stops him getting what he wants or walk away from anything he doesn't.

I guess I'm bothered with the argument that Wodehouse didn't know any better because really he should have done.

Orwell argues this was not unusual either. In not damning the Nazis unequivocally, Wodehouse – always living in the past anyway – had missed out on a relatively new idea. Over to Georgie:

"In left-wing circles, indeed in ‘enlightened’ circles of any kind, to broadcast on the Nazi radio, to have any truck with the Nazis whatever, would have seemed just as shocking an action before the war as during it. But that is a habit of mind that had been developed during nearly a decade of ideological struggle against Fascism.

The bulk of the British people, one ought to remember, remained anæsthetic to that struggle until late into 1940. Abyssinia, Spain, China, Austria, Czechoslovakia -– the long series of crimes and aggressions had simply slid past their consciousness or were dimly noted as quarrels occurring among foreigners and ‘not our business’. One can gauge the general ignorance from the fact that the ordinary Englishman thought of ‘Fascism’ as an exclusively Italian thing and was bewildered when the same word was applied to Germany.

And there is nothing in Wodehouse's writings to suggest that he was better informed, or more interested in politics, than the general run of his readers."

Ibid.

So perhaps the vehemence directed against Wodehouse came from those who were similarly, childishly innocent until recently. There's an old adage about new converts being the most evangelical, so perhaps they saw in Wodehouse's stupid broadcasts a chance to purge their own failings. Of the witchhunts going on as he wrote at the end of the war, Orwell conceded, "at best it is largely the punishment of the guilty by the guilty."

I think that’s maybe too easy. The perceived “betrayal” came at a time when the stakes were genuinely life and death while the merry, country-house-and-butlered world Wodehouse made his fortune describing was in tatters. Orwell himself calls it a “ghost”. The care-free wit he’d made famous were of no solace to those caught up in the war, especially if their author seemed so at ease with the enemy. At best his cheery indifference to the war, comfortably off in a Nazi hotel, is horribly tactless.

That’s not to say that arty people should not express their political views – but a celebrity backing a political party often leaves you feeling they’ve got something to sell rather than something to say. And that can taint the rest of their work.

This is not to say Wodehouse was a collaborator, but to acknowledge the buttons he pressed.

Where I disagree with Orwell (and where I thought he'd have been harsher) is the lack of responsibility on Wodehouse's part. Orwell seems, for all he acknowledges Wodehouse's own tacit acceptance of class and finacial hierarchy, to share the idea that a bit of money can somehow cocoon you from the world - and worse, that this means we should treat Wodehouse more leniently.

No, you don't have to do the washing up when you can afford a maid, but that doesn't mean you can skive off all social responsibilities. You don't get to live in a bubble. A failure to engage with others is anti-social.

How much is the "stiff upper lip", which McCrum speaks of so often, a virtue, and how much a failure to engage with others?

(The phrase comes from cowardice anyway - sailors pretending to be dead to escape the harsh life of the navy. before being thrown out to sea, their "dead" bodies were sewn up in their hammocks, a stitch put through the lip to check they weren't faking.)

Emotions are a very modern preoccupation in many ways (though we tend to be sniffy of other era's sentimentalities). Wodehouse's writing, for all its comic mastery, remains somewhat detatched and cold. Bertie keeps his friends and relations at arms length. He's never in love, finds the idea of marriage appalling, and gets by just being generally affable but never committing to anything.

Wodehouse was not funny in person, and apparently did not laugh at his own jokes when writing. He cuts a lonely figure, obsessed by his work and himself, though McCrum never really explores this in depth. That may be because there aren't any - and Wodehouse himself was as much surface as his work.

His books skate around on the surface of proper behaviour. There's mention of socialists, women's rights and political groups like the black shorts, but the humour is based on not caring about the big things, and reacting with shock to the fripperies.

All actions, ultimately, are political. It was not stupidity. Wodehouse was intelligent, astute and wanted his reader to know that he was all right and there'd be another book in the bookshops soon.

He didn't care about the other stuff - the war, the suffering, the politics. None of that mattered to him, and that's why he made people so angry. That he'd up till then so delighted them is why they felt so betrayed.

Heavy plant crossing

With the Dr back tomorrow from her sojourn north of the border and after a very long day’s toiling myself, I’ve just finished the 1981 BBC Day of the Triffids.

Cor!

I’d have sworn I’d seen it when smaller, but it was all so unfamiliar that this may be wishful thinking. I remember elder siblings speaking of it in hushed, horror-stricken tones, so probably conjured a version inside my head. Yes, I’d seen clips (some at school, when we read it in the second year), but that’s all.

Bill Masen (John Duttine from the hugely good and hugely different To Serve Them All My Days) is in hospital, his eyes bandaged up because he got stung by a triffid. He works on a triffid farm, studying the mobile, venomous plants and the precious oil they were created to produce.

Since he’s all bandaged up, he didn’t get to see the exciting shooting stars like almost everybody else did – and so is one of only a few in the whole of the country not to have lost their sight. London is soon a ruin of blind scavengers, bristling with violence and disease. But even the few able to see are being picked off by the organised triffids…

More than John Wyndham’s wonderfully vivid book, it seems it’s this version that’s the influence on 28 Days Later. Part six’s snapshot montage of the long-empty London – and a litter-strewn, quiet Piccadilly – was especially reminiscent, as is the not-brilliant guff with the soldiers at the end.

There’s also the same clumsy need to make the cosy catastrophe relevant (“It was star wars that did it!” or “It was animal experiments!”) where the end of civilisation is all the more chilling in the book for being so unexplained.

Yet it manages some very nice subtleties. Gary Olsen is not just (as the BBC’s old Cult site has it) “Man with Red Hair” blithely shooting at Masen’s gang in part four. Without it ever being commented on, it’s him again in part six, the officious war-monger running the police-state in Brighton (and maybe the inspiration for Eccleston’s character in 28 Days Later).

There’s also some great model work, with triffids surrounding a country house in panorama, and looking more scary than ridiculous throughout. Kingdom of the Blind is troubled by their “uncomfortable phallic appearance”, which I must admit I missed. They’re orchids not Vervoids, though they do seem to natter by rattling multiple willies against their stems.
Having put the thing on in tribute to the late, great David Maloney, I was not disappointed with the brilliant viciousness. There’s a lot more suggested than seen – Masen and Jo (his posh totty) listen at night to people being killed in the streets, rather than seeing the slaughter. I guess they also saved cash on those night scenes.

It’s a high-budget epic and Ken Hannam’s direction is thrilling, even giving life to the fixed studio sets that so show the production’s age. Breezing through other reviews of the thing, Hannam’s “documentary realism” is often referred to. For all the conventions of TV production at the time – where telly drama looked like they’d film in a theatre – this feels less staged and more like a movie. The shingly beach in the final episode reminded me especially of Get Carter.

There’s plenty of Dr Who people to spot, all practised playing “serious dread”: that bald bloke from the Mutants; Pat Gorman without lines; Sevrin accepting his disabilities and sure that the Norm will help out; Lytton being thuggish and then turning out good; even some mugging from Morris Barry. There’s also one of my friends in episode two.

Christopher Gunning’s score reminded me of Lygeti. The simplicity of the title sequence made me think of Nigel Kneale’s heydey, and the neon-tube typeface of the BBC’s other newly good-looking sci-fi of the time.

The end of the world is all rather abrupt, as is the end of the serial. Part five ends on a cliffhanger that’s left hanging for six years, and part six cuts out just as things are getting exciting, guns are being fired and the triffids are attacking en mass.

So it’s probably fitting I couldn’t think of a conclusion to this blog entry either.

"He smells of the ocean, of seaweed and brine."

Yesterday's mention of sea changes reminds me of something else. I'd not realised until recently that the world being someone's oyster is another one of Shakespeare's coinages.

(I'd be surprised if he didn't have a claim to "how strange the change from major to minor" or "I've got a brand new combine harvester", too. Or "daddy or chips?")

Oysters are pretty, shiny things and I'd always assumed the phrase meant that for whichever opportunistic soul as was the subject, the whole planet seemed like a pretty bauble for the taking. If only you'd bother to try... You know, the heartening sort of thing they tell you in your career advice as a teenager (along with how it's absolutely impossible to make a living as a writer).

But there's more to it than that. The bloke who says it does so because he can't get any money out of his mate.

"Well," he says in Act 2, Scene 2 of the Merry Wives, "then the world's mine oyster. Which I with sword will open."

So people to whom the world is an oyster are less cheery doers with a bit of pluck and get-up, as violent, cut-throat thieves. Just to make the point, the bloke who says it is called Pistol.

I assume that's a nickname. It does make him sound like one of the lesser, hairyer, squawkier-laughing CB-tastic truckers in a Burt Reynolds movie.

Coming back to you now at the turn of the tide

From his hilltop retreat on the far side of the Continent (living what might almost be a monastic existence were he not shacked up with two russet-haired beauties), O. wonders where this week’s bloggings have got to. Keep your tractor on, old boy. I have merely been working.

And no, not the grubby, hands-in-the-soil, satisfying, constructive manual labour you gad about with. I speak of gentlemanly, gallant and not-at-all-gay employment, doing typing and getting the spelling right.

Monday and Tuesday was in the studio, which went exceedingly well despite the heat, some last-minute changes and me managing to piss off someone I was genuinely trying to make life easier for. Words have been exchanged and I think I have expressed the meant sentiments. Things will be different and better now, but golly, I haven’t got it this wrong since my teenage self tried to impress girls.

(I’ve since learned the painful lesson to that one: don’t try to impress the ladies. At best endeavour to be tolerated. Or barely even noticed.)

Anyway. Have also interviewed a lot of people, scheduled some things, written some other stuff, sorted various oddments out for my sister, been to the Dr’s leaving do (for she has of Friday joined the ranks of mercenary freelance hacks) and to a works outing stuffed full of writers, managed a good couple of hundred words’ worth of research and seen off four full days at the cut-and-paste grindstone.

This exciting daytime monotony continues all week, but is much needed and pays well. Today I was able to solve a tricksy bit of pasting with the sly remembrance of tables. My trs and tds were enough to do the business, but getting the sub-heading td colspan (of six, code fans) to match the brand palette was really pretty clever.

No, nobody else was much bothered either. But the only other highlight of four days’ grind was finding the phrase “genuine sea change”. Yeah, well, it seems funnier when you’ve done nothing for hours but CTRL+A, CTRL+V and staring into the white abyss of the screen while it hints at saving changes.

Anyway, what is a sea change? And how can such a thing be ingenuine?

Of course, Michael Quinion has the answer:

“Pundits and commentators who think it has something to do with the ebb and flow of the tide, and use it for a minor or recurrent shift in policy or opinion, are doing a grave injustice to one of the most evocative phrases in the language.”

Michael Quinion, World Wide Words, SEA CHANGE.

But this is not all. The Dr and I toddled along last week to a private view of Gillian Westgate’s paintings at the City Inn round the back of Tate Britain (to be there, it says on the back of my commemorative postcards, until next month). Her East London vistas busy with street furniture (a fancy way of saying lampposts and overhead cabling) reminded me of the detail in the work of Robert Crumb, a faithfulness to the ugly technicalia that crowds our urban lives (and makes his grubby, lusty tales all the grubbier).

The streets themselves are threatened with Olympic regeneration (though “threatened” is probably not the right word at all), so these also document social and architectural history, like that St Etienne movie I caught last October.

I also liked Gillian’s quirky Quink series, pen and ink drawings of cowboys in the same East London setting, playing off the lost Victoriana of both the wild west pioneers and the heydey of Shoreditch’s now decayed buildings. But I’ve always been a fan of illustration, and bored the Dr on the way home with musings about David McKee and the work of Colin MacNeil…

The Dr is in Scotland until Thursday and saw seals playing in the water, a castle, some Whistlers and the work of Rennie Mackintosh. Yet I have the cat canoodling on my lap as I attempt these words, so reckon that I am the winner.

More soon, if this little update hasn’t put you off altogether. And in the meantime, my friend Falldog is just starting out, so go give him some encouragement.