"Please enjoy this book and, most important, enjoy the movie. I have no doubt that there will be more."I reread and wittered on about Dune last year and, as a result, have been commissioned to write something looking at the book and the film - hurrah. As part of that, I read Ed Naha's The Making of Dune (the film) and am a bit surprised by how little it's been of use.Dino De Laurentiis, "Introduction" to Ed Naha, The Making of Dune (1984), p. 2.
"It has usually been a nice book, telling the world how much everyone who made the movie liked every moment, how the relatively few little problems that arose were quickly solved. Too often, such books are only fairy tales.Yet, unsurprisingly for an officially sanctioned tome, The Making of Dune is largely taken up with how the cast and crew triumphed over the challenges to produce an ambitious, grown-up, effective motion picture that deserves to be a success. As so often in these things, everyone's very complimentary about each other and they praise the food.
Making a movie, an inexpensive movie or one on the scale of Dune, is always an exercise in the impossible. There are no small problems: personal difficulties, technical foul-ups, financial over-runs, the weather, the food - all become major concerns."Ibid., p. 1.
"The women's [stillsuits] looked rather unfeminine ... so we redesigned the suits to have larger breasts. That's also why most of the Fremen women characters have long hair. It softens their looks in the suits. It works quite well."But there's almost nothing on the script. When David Lynch - who directed the film based on his own script - is asked why previous scripts had not worked, he answers:Ibid., p. 72.
"I don't know ... There's no logical reason why they failed. Maybe they were scared about the script. Maybe they were scared about the money. Maybe they were scared about so many major roles."But there's nothing on how he adapted the book: what he thought was essential and what could be stripped back, what needed improving or changing, or even what he felt the book says. "Tell the fans they're making the real DUNE" says an endorsement from Frank Herbert on the back of the book - but the book doesn't address the adaptation.Ibid., p. 16.
"At right: No longer in the film, this photograph is of the original version of Paul's Water of Life scene. In the final version of Dune, this scene occurs in the desert."The other is right at the end of the book, as the film is in post-production:Ibid., p. 186.
"En route to a final cut, only one major story change has been made; the subplot involving Paul's killing of Jamis and his subsequent involvement with Jamis' mate Harah and her children has been completely excised.She refers to the scenes as "boring". Lynch concurs, explaining how he tried to keep the "feeling" of the missing material if not the scenes themselves.
'That has caused me some worry,' admits Raffaella. 'That whole sequence was very important in the book. It's a turning point for Paul. We had to eliminate it because it got very involved.If we kept Paul's fight with Jamis in the movie, then we had to deal with Jamis' wife and Jamis' children. It stopped the whole film.'"Ibid., pp. 289-90.
Come, Tell Me How You Live is a lively, funny and sharply observed memoir of Agatha Christie's time in Syria in the mid 1930s, assisting her husband Max Mallowan, the archaeologist. Wikipedia says that Christie mixes up the chronology of the real excavations, and there's surprisingly little about what they found and learned from their months of work. This is not a field report but a memoir of happier times, written in the midst of the war.“Agatha Christie remained inwardly detached from archaeology. She relished the archaeological life in remote country and made good use of its experiences in her own work. She has a sound knowledge of the subject, yet remained outside it, a happily amused onlooker.”
Jacquetta Hawkes, 1983 foreword to Agatha Christie, Come, Tell Me How You Live (1946), p. 15.
“Once when we were digging near Mosul, our old foreman came to Max in great excitement. 'You must take your Khartún to Mosul tomorrow. There is a great event. There is to be a hanging – a woman! Your Khartún will enjoy it very much! She must on no account miss it!' My indifference, and, indeed, repugnance, to this treat stupefied him. 'But it is a woman,' he insisted. 'Very seldom do we have the hanging of a woman. It is a Kurdish woman who has poisoned three husbands! Surely – surely the Khartún would not like to miss that!' My firm refusal to attend lowered me in his eyes a good deal. He left us sadly, to enjoy the hanging by himself.”But it's a shame there's not more on the archaeology because, when she does address it, Christie is good at making the past vibrant:
Ibid., pp. 144-5.
“All the Bible and New Testament stories take on a particular reality and interest out here. They are couched in the language and ideology which we daily hear all around us, and I am often struck by the way the emphasis sometimes shifts from what one has commonly accepted. As a small instance, it came to me quite suddenly that in the story of Jezebel, it is the painting of her face and the tiring of her hair that emphasizes in puritanical Protestant surroundings what exactly a 'Jezebel' stands for. But out here it is not the painting and tiring – for all virtuous women paint their faces (or tattoo them), and apply henna to their hair – it is the fact that Jezebel looked out of the window – a definitely immodest action!That observation then leads Christie's group to ask themselves if they would stop to help someone out in the desert. Christie laughs when one man states baldly that he wouldn't - but that he would stop to help a horse. It's not a joke - he means it - but Christie's response is telling. She delights in his blunt honesty, the insight into the dark workings of his mind. Little wonder: it's like dialogue from one of her books.
... The Good Samaritan story has a reality here which it cannot have in an atmosphere of crowded streets, police, ambulances, hospitals, and public assistance. If a man fell by the wayside on the broad desert track from Hasetshe to Der-ez-Zor, the story could easily happen today, and it illustrates the enormous virtue compassion has in the eyes of all desert folk.”
Ibid., pp. 166-7.
"Foreigners nearly always wish to simplify the Middle East, Agnes. They cannot tolerate to feel ignorant long enough to understand it."When all her family die in the 1918 flu pandemic, middle-aged American schoolteacher Agnes Shanklin finds herself suddenly free. Without her overbearing mother to tell her otherwise, she goes shopping for the latest styles and has her hair cut. She also books passage to Cairo, where she just so happens to stumble into Lawrence of Arabia, Winston Churchill and Gertrude Bell as they struggle to carve up the Middle East...Mary Doria Russell, Dreamers of the Day (2008), pp. 197-8.
"The effect of [Agnes being dead], which I take to be deliberate, is to break the immersion associated with historical fiction. Agnes's times are not for us to live in—they are for us to watch."Perhaps that's my objection: as a narrative device, it stops us losing ourselves in the story and the rich, tangible world that's created. That's a shame because the book otherwise feels very credible: the characters - both real and invented - feel like flesh and blood. That's quite a feat, to paint Churchill and Lawrence not as myths but as men.
"And remember, please, all the other invisible forces that had so recently become a part of our lives in these days. Madame Curie's radiation, and Signore Marconi's radio, and Dr Freud's unconscious. Even before I died, it seemed possible that there might be some scientific basis for communication with the unseen soul. There might be a sort of telephone of the spirit, or maybe radio waves, which were there to be heard if only one were tuned to the right frequency."I was intrigued by mention of Lady Churchill, Winston's mother:Mary Doria Russell, Dreamers of the Day, pp. 70-1.
"Jennie Churchill was, according to Winston, one-quarter Iroquois".But that turns out to be a myth. There's a nice bit of history when one woman suspects Karl of being homosexual because he wears a "bracelet watch". Agnes snaps back a reply:Ibid., p. 155.
"They're called wristwatches... All the soldiers wore them in the war."Karl, the unreliable spy who Agnes falls for, is a fascinating character. Russell tells us in her acknowledgements that,Ibid., p. 199.
"As often as possible, I let historical figures write their own dialogue".But Karl is not a historical figure, and his job here is to question the statements by Lawrence, Churchill et al. According to Niall Harrison, this creates a game of "knowingness", where we question and interrogate what these people say. I think it's simpler than that: Karl makes us more suspicious of what Agnes takes on face value. Plus, his status as a Jewish German (not a German Jew, as he says himself) makes us less trusting of the claims made by westerners about nations, religions and race in the Middle East.Ibid., p. 375.
"When they started excavations at the northeast wall of the Temple, archaeologists had to dig through something like a hundred and twenty-five feet of debris before they got to the level of Herod's city. My field was Hittite, but I think this Jerusalem is probably the eighth ... The city of David sat on an even earlier settlement. Then there's Solomon's Jerusalem, which last about four hundred years. Nehemiah's - three hundred for that one, I believe. Herod's Jerusalem was magnificent, by all accounts. That's what everyone expects to see when they come here, but Titus destroyed it. Later on, a small Roman city was built on the ruins. Since then, Muslims and Christians traded this place repeatedly, and burned it down occasionally. And yet... the pilgrims come."Agnes protests that it's a nineteen-hundred-year-old scam (and is most upset by the thought that her late sister devoted so much of her short life to it). But Lawrence counters with a surprising argument:Ibid., p. 281.
"'Jerusalem has always been important strategically. It's been one war after another for millennia. But if you can convince enough people that this place is sacred ...?'
He let me consider this until I could admit I'd understood his point: 'Then maybe the next army won't destroy it.'
The corners of his long mouth turned up, but the real smile was in those tired eyes, already lined at thirty-two. 'The present city has survived six hundred years,' he said. 'That's the longest stretch on record.'"Ibid., pp. 282-3.
"everything from illegal abortion groups to real-life radium dancing girls, the evolution of forensics, '30s restaurant reviews and the history of '80s toys."What really makes the book special, though, is that the person on Harper's trail is also one of his victims - a girl who he thinks he killed. Kirby is funny, furious and liable to plunge headlong into trouble. She also feels very real, which makes it easier to accept the convenient, unexplained time travel stuff.
Lauren Beukes, "Acknowledgements", The Shining Girls, p. 387.
A big thank you to everyone who has bought Big Finish's debut short film Cleaning Up, starring Mark Gatiss and Louise Jameson. All profits from the sale go into a fund to make a feature film version of Cleaning Up – a Big Finish movie. We asked Guerrier brothers Simon and Thomas how the film project is progressing. Read on...
'Brilliantly!' says Simon. 'I'm currently hard at work on the script, reworking and revising our initial treatment. It's all go!'
Thomas adds: 'We've spoken to a number of production companies and individuals who might help take the film forward – and being able to show them there's already an audience buying the short has really helped.'
'It's looking very positive,' says Simon, 'though there still a long way ahead of us. So thanks to everyone who's supported us, bought the short and spread the word about what we're trying to do. We'll keep you all posted!'
Cleaning Up is still available to buy in two versions:
'Rookie' Standard Edition for £1.99:
HD version of film
'Hitman' Special Edition for £4.99:
HD version of film, 'first cut' with commentary, behind the scenes film, trailer, image gallery, soundtrack, PDF scripts, posters and wallpaper.
All profits go to developing the Cleaning Up feature film.
"a work of Norman design cannot simply be maintained, it must be constantly under construction, otherwise it falls down almost at once."Along the way, there are plenty of fun historical references. For example, hearing of some "vanished" money, Roger sees that story-tellers are already embroidering the legend of a dead man:
James Blish, Doctor Mirabilis, p. 166.
"It's said this was more of Robin of Sherwood's doings; the harpers will not let that poor highwayman rest at his crossroads."Still, the historical setting is quite hard work to begin with. That's largely down to Blish's decision, discussed in his foreword, over how to depict the languages of the time:
Ibid., p. 64.
"As for the English, I have followed two rules. (1) Where the characters are speaking Middle English, I have used a synthetic speech which roughly preserves Middle English syntax, one of its central glories, but makes little attempt to follow its metrics or its vocabulary (and certainly not its spelling, which was catch-as-catch-can). (2) Where they are speaking French or Latin, which is most of the time, I have used modern English, except to indicate whether the familiar or the polite form of 'you' is being employed, a system which cause no trouble."I'm not sure what suddenly made the going seem easier: that Roger starts to converse more in modern English or I just got used to the archaic bits. Worse, though, is Blish's decision to quote at length from the primary sources.
Ibid., p. 16.
"The reader may wonder why I have resorted here and there to direct quotations in Latin ... The reason is that these exceptions, these ideas and opinions written down seven centuries ago, might otherwise have been suspected of being a twentieth-century author's interpolations."It's all very laudable to cite the sources faithfully, but it excluded me from what was being said. Ironically, in the novel one character notes the limits of Latin for sharing knowledge:
Ibid., p. 15.
"That precisely is why Latin is only spuriously a universal language, friar Bacon. It is never spoken to women any more. Women are confined to the vernacular, whatever that may be. On this account alone, Latin is dying."Bacon - always a bit behind when it comes to women - fails to understand the point. I think Blish may miss it, too, as surely his readers are also confined to the vernacular.Ibid., p. 199.
"a guide to everything about Roger which pretends to be factual, even encyclopedia articles and the scrappiest of pamphlets."He also addresses the legend surrounding Bacon - which, he says, Easton ignores.Ibid., p. 318.
"Roger Bacon ... was a scientist in the primary sense of that word - he thought like one, and indeed defined this kind of thinking as we now understand it. It is of no importance that the long list of 'inventions' attributed to him by the legend - spectacles, the telescope, the diving bell, and half a hundred others - cannot be supported; this part of the legend, which is quite recent, evolves out of the notion that Roger could be made to seem more wonderful if he could be shown to be a thirteenth-century Edison or Luther Burbank, holding a flask up to the light and crying, 'Eureka!' This is precisely what he was not. Though he performed thousands of experiments, most of which he describes in detail, hardly any of them were original, and so far as we know he never invented a single gadget; his experiments were tests of principles, and as such were almost maddeningly repetitious, as significant experiments remain to this day - a fact always glossed over by popularizations of scientific method, in which the experiments, miraculously, always work the first time, and the importance of negative results is never even mentioned. There is, alas, nothing dramatic about patience, but it was Roger, not Sir Francis [Bacon] who erected it into a principle: 'Neither the voice of authority, nor the weight of reason and argument are as significant as experiment, for thence comes quiet to the mind.' (De erroribus medicorum.)"The old system that Roger was part of as a Franciscan monk and which he broke away from was neatly explained by James Burke in his 1985 series The Day the Universe Changed. He discussed how monks copied ancient texts - copying even the errors in typography rather than challenging the handed-down word. The works of Aristotle and other ancient philosophers, and the study of nature itself, were either proofs of a Christian order of being or strictly forbidden as heresy.Ibid., p. 315.
"The whole monastic experience was a bit like jumping into bed and pulling the blankets over your head. It was a mystic experience - unreal. And it all still, hundreds of years after the fall of Rome, looked back to an age of greatness that was gone for ever. Everything these people knew - and this is extraordinary for us to grasp in our world - everything they knew was old".A key moment in Blish's book is when Roger decides not to write an introduction or commentary on a pre-existing text, but a whole new book based on his own experiments. Later, he develops a theory of what is so often wrong with inherited knowledge:James Burke, "In the Light of Reason", The Day the Universe Changed, 20 October 1985.
"Since the days of revelation, in fact, the same four corrupting errors had been made over and over again: submission to faulty and unworthy authority; submission to what it was customary to believe; submission to the prejudices of the mob; and worst of all, concealment of ignorance by a false show of unheld knowledge, for no better reason than pride."Doctor Mirabilis is, then, a novel about the struggle to make sound scientific progress. Amid the grumbles, there are complaints that seem familiar today. There's the battle over knowledge being used as a commodity to be bought and traded. One Italian laments the shortage of ancient texts available to buy because they're being bought up for private collections. He blames this on the Romans.Blish, p. 246.
"Our imperial ancestors invented few new vices, but private art collecting seems to have been their own authentic discovery. It would hardly have been possible to the Greeks ... Why, it was the old Romans who wrote into law the principle that the man who owned a painting, for example, was the man who owned the board it was painted on, not the artist; and the same with manuscripts. Private collecting really began with that, because it made it possible for a man to become wealthy without having done any of the work involved, simply by saving the board until the painting on it became valuable."But while we might recognise much of Roger's struggles to produce good work under difficult circumstances, his is a very different world to ours. His adventures are bound in the struggles to find appropriate patrons and mentors, or with the difficulties of developing his ideas when he doesn't have enough parchment. So much of his work depends on permissions from people who can't understand his work, or the Catch-22 of needing his work copied but knowing the copyists will pirate it.Ibid., p. 196.
"the final statement of the case for salvation through science".Despite his revolution in thought, he's still a product of the theocracy of his time. In fact, the book often uses the fact that we're ahead of Roger in our scientific understanding.Ibid. p. 308.
"Perhaps, if he sealed the room... and thrust a torch in it after... Clearly there was some connection, but Roger could not grasp it."The court then tries to use the "earthquake" to suggest God is unhappy with what King Henry's up to. The embryonic science is quickly lost to the politics and the threat of revolt.
Ibid., p. 92.
"would be hard to find any branch of modern science which was not influenced by Roger's theoretical scheme",but that its slow-working nature meant much it didn't fit the needs of a novel. He then cites some examples of things he couldn't include, such as that,
"the whole tissue of the space-time continuum of general relativity is a direct descendant of Roger's assumption, in De multiplicatione specierum and elsewhere, that the universe has a metrical frame, and that mathematics thus is in some important sense real, and not just a useful exercise."A footnote explains this extraordinary claim at greater length:
"I have quoted part of Roger's reasoning on this point in Chapter XII, but there is really no way short of another book to convey the flamboyancy of this logical jump, which spans seven centuries without the faintest sign of effort. The most astonishing thing about it, perhaps, is its casualness; what Roger begins to talk about is the continuum of action, an Aristotle commonplace in his own time, but within a few sentences he has invented - purely for the sake of argument - the luminiferous ether which so embroiled the physics of the nineteenth century, and only a moment later throws the notion out in favour of the Einsteinean metrical frame, having in the process completely skipped over Galilean relativity and the inertial frames of Newton. Nothing in the tone of the discussion entitles the reader to imagine that Roger was here aware that he was making a revolution - or in fact creating a series of them; the whole performance is even-handed and sober, just one more logical outcome of the way he customarily thought. It was that way of thinking, not any specific theory, that he invented; the theory of theories as tools."
Ibid., p. 316.
One last point: Doctor Mirabilis is all set in the 13th century. There are no robots or spaceships, aliens or technology, and it's all based on historical sources. And yet on the back cover, just above the price, the book is marked "Science Fiction"."After Such Knowledge poses a question once expressed by Blish as: 'Is the desire for secular knowledge, let alone the acquisition and use of it, a misuse of the mind, and perhaps even actively evil?' This is one of the fundamental themes of sf, and is painstakingly explored in Doctor Mirabilis, an historical novel which treats the life of the thirteenth-century scientist and theologian Roger Bacon. It deals with the archetypal sf theme of Conceptual Breakthrough from one intellectual model of the Universe to another, more sophisticated model."I think that's stretching definitions a bit far: surely a conceptual breakthrough is not exclusive to science-fiction. I don't think Doctor Mirabilis does count as sci-fi. I can see why its publishers thought it would appeal to fans of Blish's other, more sf books and fans of science-fiction more generally, but I suspect that a publisher wouldn't do that now. I can think of too many people who'd be intrigued by this novel but would never venture into dark corner of a bookshop where the fat books about robots are found.
Peter Nicholls, "Blish, James", The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, 15 January 2014.
"the noble lords began to yawn, with the exception of a few of the soap and pickles lords, who suddenly started to make computations in their note-books, and exchanged looks of intelligence".At the end, Wimsey makes a desperate dash across the Atlantic to extract the last, telling clue to untangle the whole mess. It's well handled, though there's a sense at the same time that we're meant to celebrate the fact that a sexual affair is kept secret. More than that, the ultimate solution all hinges on a dreadful contrivance, as the defence has to admit.
Dorothy L Sayers, Clouds of Witness (1926, revised 1935), p. 173.
"I have used the word 'incredible' - not because any coincidence is incredible, for we see more remarkable examples every day of our lives than any writer of fiction would dare to invent - but merely to take it out of the mouth of the learned Attorney-General, who is preparing to make it return, boomerang-fashion, against me. (Laughter.)"Despite these slight misgivings, this is a joy of a book. I can't wait to read more Wimsey.Ibid., p. 191.
The House of Silk by Anthony Horowitz is a thrilling, richly drawn new Sherlock Holmes adventure, that gets Holmes, Watson and their world pretty much perfectly right. It's a gripping read, and even though I was ahead of Holmes with several of the clues, it kept me guessing till the end. Yet, it left me disappointed. Why?"You must swear on everything that is scared to you that you will never tell Holmes, or anyone else, of this meeting. You must never write about it. You must never mention it. Should you ever learn my name, you must pretend that you are hearing it for the first time and that it means nothing to you."But are these characters' roles surprising? As Horowitz admits,Anthony Horowitz, The House of Silk (2011), p. 260.
"In each case, I added very little to what was known about them simply because it seemed to be taking liberties."Where he does develop the world of Sherlock Holmes. As Horowitz says, in Doyle's stories,Ibid., p. 404.
"Victorian London is economically sketched in".Horowitz digs a little deeper: there's an insight into the kind of awful existence lived by the Baker Street irregulars when not engaged in cases for Holmes; there's a visit to one of the prisons to which villains are dispatched when Holmes has caught them. In both cases, Watson seems surprised by the oppressive conditions, as if a practising doctor in London would not already know. But I liked the attempt to explore the world Holmes lives in and furnish extra depth.Ibid., p. 397.
"My publishers, Orion Books, had requested a novel of between 90,000 and 100,000 words (the final length was around 94,000) - big enough to seem like value for money on an airport stand. But actually, this goes quite against the spirit of Doyle's originals which barely run to half that length".Horowitz's solution is to have Watson recount two cases, not one - a trick also used in the later episodes of the TV series starring Jeremy Brett, where they blended Doyle's stories.Ibid.
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| The assassination of Empress Elisabeth of Austria, via Wikipedia. |
"After Lucheni struck her, the empress collapsed ... Three men carried Elisabeth to the top deck and laid her on a bench. Sztaray opened her gown, cut Elisabeth's corset laces so she could breathe. Elisabeth revived somewhat and Sztaray asked her if she was in pain, and she replied, "No". She then asked, "What has happened?" and lost consciousness again...Niall also provided me with two snippets of Sherlockian interest from the Lancet archives, which he's kindly allowed me to share. First, here's Conan Doyle weighing in on the case of George Edalji - the case that's the subject of the novel Arthur and George by Julian Barnes, which I blogged about in 2007.
The autopsy was performed the next day by Golay, who discovered that the weapon, which had not yet been found, had penetrated 3.33 inches (85 mm) into Elisabeth's thorax, fractured the fourth rib, pierced the lung and pericardium, and penetrated the heart from the top before coming out the base of the left ventricle. Because of the sharpness and thinness of the file the wound was very narrow and, due to pressure from Elisabeth's extremely tight corseting, the hemorrhage of blood into the pericardial sac around the heart was slowed to mere drops. Until this sac filled, the beating of her heart was not impeded, which is why Elisabeth had been able to walk from the site of the assault and up the boat’s boarding ramp. Had the weapon not been removed, she would have lived a while longer, as it would have acted like a plug to stop the bleeding."
"No time travelers were discovered. Although these negative results do not disprove time travel, given the great reach of the Internet, this search is perhaps the most comprehensive to date."Hmm, I thought. And again, hmm.
KATE:That might well be a direct response to Nemiroff's study. And, just to rub it in, The Power of Three was first broadcast on Saturday 22 September 2012 - the day after Comet ISON was first spotted, and so months before Nemiroff even started his research.
Within three hours, the cubes had a thousand separate Twitter accounts.
DOCTOR:
(UNIMPRESSED) Twitter?
Doctor Who: The Power of Three by Chris Chibnall.
“… there is no way to guard against flattery but by letting it be seen that you take no offense in hearing the truth: but when every one is free to tell you the truth respect falls short. Wherefore a prudent Prince should follow a middle course, by choosing certain discreet men from among his subjects, and allowing them alone free leave to speak their minds on any matter on which he asks their opinion, and on none other. But he ought to ask their opinion on everything, and after hearing what they have to say, should reflect and judge for himself. And with these counsellors collectively, and with each of them separately, his bearing should be such, that each and all of them may know that the more freely they declare their thoughts the better they will be liked. Besides these, the Prince should hearken to no others, but should follow the course determined on, and afterwards adhere firmly to his resolves. Whoever acts otherwise is either undone by flatterers, or from continually vacillating as opinions vary, comes to be held in light esteem …
Hence it follows that good counsels, whencesoever they come, have their origin in the prudence of the Prince, and not the prudence of the Prince in wise counsels.”
Machiavelli, The Prince (1514), XXIII. That Flatterers Should Be Shunned.
A.H. I was on a train going from Boulogne to Paris and we were moving slowly through the small town of Etaples. It was on a Sunday afternoon. As we were passing a large, red brick factory, I saw a young couple against the wall. The boy was urinating against the wall and the girl never let go of his arm. She'd look down at what he was doing, then look at the scenery around them, then back again at the boy. I felt this was true love at work.
F.T. Ideally, two lovers should never separate.
A.H. Exactly. It was the memory of that incident that gave me an exact idea of the effect I was after with the kissing scene in Notorious.
Hitchcock Truffaut (1984), p. 262.
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| Happy birthday, Doctor Who |
In short: A vastly entertaining barnstormer that put the title character front and centre.I'd worried that nothing could surpass The Five Doctors (1983), and there'd been rumours and grumblings about what might be happening behind the scenes. And yet, and yet...
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| "Time Trick" from Doctor Who Adventures #333 (6-26 Nov 13) written by Craig Donaghy, art by John Ross and colour by Alan Craddock. |
"And then, just before Christmas, the blow had fallen. Onkel Julius had received an official letter revoking his pass to the Zoo. No reason was given. The fact that he had a Jewish grandmother was enough."In the recent Imagine documentary, Hitler, the Tiger and Me, Kerr confirmed to Alan Yentob that this was a true a story, and Julius a real friend of her father's. Kerr's response is extraordinary:
Judith Kerr, When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit, p. 230.
"Apparently, in 1938 they made a law that Jewish families couldn't keep pets and they had to be collected. You weren't allowed to kill your pet, you had to hand it over and didn't know what was going to happen to it. And then in 1942, when they must have had other things on their mind, somebody decided that mixed families - you know, if there was a marriage between a Jew and an Aryan and they'd stayed together - that they couldn't keep pets either. Who thinks of things like that? I mean, why?"It's this response to the Nazis - not one of horror but of bafflement at the petty needlessness of the cruelty - that really lingers after the end of the book, when Anna and her family reach London in 1936.
Judith Kerr speaking on Hitler, The Tiger and Me, BBC One, 26 November 2013.
The story is then continued in Bombs on Aunt Daisy (originally The Other Way Round (1975)), with Anna in her teens during the war. Again, it's told in sparing, simple prose where she doesn't tell us everything and gets us to puzzle out the meaning."A familiar voice said, 'This is the BBC Home Service. Here is the news, and this is Bruce Belfrage reading it.'For all the excitement and danger of the war - including a couple of moments when Anna is nearly killed - the story is really about how life carried on regardless: Anna going to the cinema, studying shorthand, eating a knickerbocker glory, buying her first pair of trousers and falling in love for the first time. She's especially good on telling details about how war intruded into life, such as the early days of the air raids.
The voice did not quiet sound as usual and Anna thought, what's the matter with him? It had a breathlessness, a barely discernible wish to hurry, which had never been there before. She was listening so hard to the intonation of each word that she hardly took in the sense. Air battles over most of England... Heavy concentrations of bombers... An official communique from the Air Ministry... And then it came. The voice developed something like a tiny crack which completely robbed it of its detachment, stopped for a fraction of a second and then said slowly and clearly, 'One hundred and eighty-two enemy aircraft shot down.'
There was a gasp from the people in the lounge, followed by murmured questions and answers as those who did not understand much English asked what the newsreader had said, and the others checked with each other that they had heard aright. And then the elderly Pole was leaping up from his chair and shaking Mr Chetwin by the hand.
'It is success!' he cried. 'You English show Hitler he not can win all the time! Your aeroplanes show him!' and the other Poles and Czechs crowded round, patting Mr Chetwin on the back, pumping his hand and congratulating him.
His grey hair became untidier than ever and he looked bemused but glad. 'Very kind of you,' he kept saying, 'though it wasn't me, you know.'"
Judith Kerr, Bombs on Aunt Daisy, pp. 98-9.
"It was curious, thought Anna, how quickly one could get used to sleeping on the floor. It was really quite snug. There were plenty of blankets, and the heavy wooden shutters over the lounge windows not only muffled the noise but gave her a feeling of security. She never got enough sleep, but nor did anyone else, and this was another thing one got used to. Everywhere you went during the day there were people having little catnaps to catch up - in the parks, on the buses and tubes, in the corners of tea-shops. One girl even fell asleep over her shorthand machine at the secretarial school. When they talked to each other they would yawn hugely in the middle of a sentence and go straight on with what they were saying without even bothering to apologise."At the same time, there's plenty on the horror of war - the sudden deaths of young men, the effect on Anna's parents and the awful state of one old refugee who was roundly beaten by the Nazis.
Ibid., p. 114.
The final book in the trilogy, A Small Person Far Away (1978) is set over a week in 1956, when Anna - now married to a famous TV writer and with a new job as a writer herself - must rush to Berlin because her mum has attempted suicide.
