Thus was it written

I've just received a copy of The Mythological Dimensions of Doctor Who, the book of 10 academic papers for which I scrawled an introduction. Reading my bit over again, I realise it's basically my notes from when I wrote The Slitheen Excursion, swiped wholesale from Ken Dowden's book. But, er, reworking ideas as your own is what myth is all about. Ahem.

Looking forward to meeting the proper contributors at the BSFA event on Wednesday 26 May - will have reread the book by then so can appear all wise and knowing. Do come along to cheer.

Speaking of events, tomorrow I'm off to Milton Keynes library to discuss things Doctor Who with Guy Adams, Mark Morris and Sarah Pinborough - though I gather the event is now sold out.

Also of great excitement is the announcement of the winners of Big Finish's thing for new writers. No less than 22 new scamps will be writing short Doctor Who stories for audio, alongside such long-in-the-tooth hacks as Arnopp, Dinnick, Moran and me. Oh, and Doctor Who himself will be writing one, too.

ETA: My story is called "Letting go".

And also, you can vote for my esteemed employer Doctor Who Adventures in the Maggies.

No? Spelt like Yes?

I first read Doctor No when I was 11. I was all about James Bond at the time, thrilling at the new guy in the films and trying to work out which ones I'd not seen. Bond had been a staple of Sunday afternoons and bank holidays for as far back as I can remember, but at 11 I suddenly got it like a fever.

The books, I knew, were not like the films. They were harder and nastier, proper Grown-Up books. There were fewer jokes and explosions and a lot more stuff about sex. And while the films were all modern and gadgety – almost set in the future – the books were from the 1950s, packed with details about the clothes, foods and medicines of that prehistoric age.

Hooked on Bond, I was desperate to at least try them, whatever warnings I'd been given about how hard they'd be to read. Then, at some second-hand book stall, Raymond Hawkey's tinglingly simple cover (right) used nothing more than a cobweb to suggest the visceral thrills inside. I could not resist.

It's odd reading the thing again now and glimpsing the 11 year-old me in its pages. It's really not suitable reading – and I'd never had got away with it, or dared to pick it up, the version I've just reread, with the cover by Michael Gillette in which a sultry blonde is wearing only a belt. I remembered it as a serious, gritty thriller full of close and brutal violence. And, because I aspired to adolescence, I thought this made it somehow more gritty and real than the cool and enjoyable films, as if Bond – and Doctor Who and the other comics and books I adored – improved the more stark and humourless they were. Surprisingly, the book turns out not to be an experiment in documentary realism.

Like the film, Bond is despatched to Jamaica to investigate the disappearance of local Secret Service agent Strangways. It's meant to be a routine job, almost a holiday – Fleming killed Bond off at the end of the last book, so he could do with taking it easy.

As with the film Castaway, before we get to the sunny islands, we start in drab, cold London, cursing the “hail and icy sleet” (p. 13). It's ten o'clock in the morning, but it's dark enough outside for M to need to turn the lights on.

It takes two whole chapters to brief Bond on his mission, even though M already assumes that Strangways has merely run off with his secretary. M is all about the infodump, lecturing us on guns, poisons and the bits of the body a man can do without (important, since Bond has just been resurrected). As always, there are mentions of academics who've written papers on this stuff, and a string of brand names also help make it all seem authentic.

Bond swaps his Beretta for the famous Walther PPK 7.65 mm – though it's the hammerless Smith and Wesson Centennial Airweight revolver .38 calibre that he actually uses on the job.

Then we're out to Jamaica, and with all the exotic description, there's a constant casual racism as Bond sizes up the local ethnic populations. His friend Quarrel, last seen in Live and Let Die, is a good friend and it's never made an issue that he's Black, yet he's also characterised as a big, superstitious child and Fleming's attempts to convey his speech suggest he's fluent in Minstrel.

At surprising speed, Bond and Quarrel are soon on the heels of Doctor No, who owns an island that mines bird guano as fertiliser, and who has upset some American bird geeks. Strangways also just happened to be looking into the complaint when he disappeared. Even if the trail wasn't any more obvious, Jamaica's “Chigro” (“Chinese negro”) population are all terrified of him and Chigroes keep trying to kill Bond.

With this useful clue, Bond races ahead far faster than he does in the film. So there's no Felix Lighter, no “He's just dead”, no Chinese girl up in the mountains who Bond shags even though he knows she's a villain, and no coolly killing an assassin that Bond's just disarmed. These are all inventions of the film, making Bond smarter and drier and a million times more cool.

When he finally meets Honey Rider on the beach, film Bond has bedded two girls already and gets stuck right in to the flirting. Book Bond has gone without since From Russia With Love and spends until the last page resisting Honey's advances and trying not to notice she's naked.

Yes, there's no white bikini in the book, but instead, scampering about on the beach:

“It was a naked girl, with her back to him. She was not quite naked. She wore a broad leather belt round her waist with a hunting knife in a leather sheath at he right hip. The belt made her nakedness extraordinarily erotic.”

Ian Fleming, Doctor No, p. 101.

Lucky he added that last sentence, in case we hadn't noticed. The description continues more oddly:

“The behind was almost as firm and rounded as a boy's ... She was not a coloured girl.”

Ibid., p. 102.

This before he's even told us the colour of her hair, which suggests some rather odd priorities. When Honey turns round, though, there's something odder. She's got a beautiful, perfect body and a broken nose that makes her – Bond will keep telling us until the final pages – somehow all the more perfect.

Though Honey then puts some clothes on, they don't stay on for long. There's a lot of nakedness in the book – taking her clothes off to wade through the swamp, or in the bathroom and bed before dinner with Doctor No, or when the dastardly villain leaves her pegged out to be eaten by crabs. That's not merely for titillation but to make her vulnerable – Bond is likewise naked in bed when a deadly caterpillar climbs over him. (Yes, that really happens.)

I'd remembered the naked girl on the beach from when I read it before, but had not registered how much of the adventure takes place in the nude. But then I was also a little naïve. My dad enjoys reminding me that he'd had a quick look at the book I was so avidly reading, and I'd got to the bit where Honey tells Bond about the career she's planning.

“And,” said my dad, “do you know what a call-girl is?”

I rolled my eyes. Of course I did. In the old days you couldn't just phone people. There were girls who connected the call... I was allowed to continue reading.

To Bond's horror, Honey confirms all Quarrel's superstitious talk of a dragon on the island. There's some discussion of the strange things that exist in nature, which Honey knows all about because she's read the first third of an encyclopaedia and was friends with the rats in her house. We're reminded of the giant squids, who have never been seen alive but whose tentacles have been found inside the bellies of whales. It clangs a bit as proof that dragons might exist.

They then discover that the dragon is real, if it's really a customised dune buggy with a flamethrower. Quarrel is killed – and really horribly – and Bond assumes he'll be next. But there's then a brilliant twist where he and Honey find themselves in a luxury suite, with all the pedicures and pampering they can eat. Doctor No is a perfect gentleman for all he's a perfect villain.

The oddness goes a bit too far when, over dinner, he taps his eyes with his metal fingers. It's revealed he's wearing contacts, but at the time it suggests he's got metal eyes. For a moment, Fleming fumbles the line between the compelling grotesque and the madly daft. Because for all the strangeness of the story, it's utterly absorbing. The more Bond is put through – spied on, attacked by caterpillars and spiders and a metal dragon – the more vivid and thrilling the story. It ends with him forcing himself through an endurance course of horrors, which ends with him battling single-handed against the legendary kraken – the giant squid Fleming nicely set up by mentioning on the beach.

The madness of events is tempered by continual reminders of the mundane. It's not a realistic story in any sense, but Fleming's good at making it seem just about credible long enough to keep us hooked until the next outlandish moment. Like M, Doctor No can quote the authors of recent papers that back up his claims. His fortune is based on nothing so grand as bird shit – and it's the bird shit that ultimately kills him. Bond and Honey escape in the dragon, which we've been carefully told already is the perfect vehicle for the terrain.

As a result, though I made notes on all the odd and incongruous details – Bond mentioning his war service in the Ardennes on page 118, or Doctor No's endurance test including an “asbestos baffle” on page 249 – I couldn't put the book down. It's a very silly, convoluted story, full of casual racist, sexist and culinary assertions. And it's nothing like the serious tome that I remembered. That's what makes it so good.

Also, while the Bond of the films has no compunction about killing a man in cold blood, the Bond of the books is made of nobler stuff – which is funny for a man with a licence to kill.

“Bond knew he wasn't going to like this, killing again in cold blood, but these men would be the Chinese Negro gangsters, the strong-arm guards who did the dirty work. They would certainly be murderers many times over. Perhaps they were the ones who had killed Strangways and the girl. But there was no point in trying to ease his conscience. It was kill or be killed. He must just do it efficiently.”

Ibid., pp. 278-9.

James Bond will return in Goldfinger.

Inexpensive fizz

Issue 15 of Vortex - the Big Finish magazine is now available online for free and includes me rabbiting on about how Graceless came about. There'll be plenty more on Graceless as we approach the release. Sorry.

Also, director Neil Gardner has a few things to say about the audiobook of The Slitheen Excursion. I listened to it for the first time yesterday and am very pleased. Though Neil seems to have missed that the book is a serious and gritty exercise in documentary realism, on the model of the Killing Fields.

Gallivanting

Having kept my head down a bit over the last few months, I am suddenly Mr Performing Seal. Had a fun day yesterday at Sci-Fi-London, trying to be wise about writing and then reading in the stage directions for the live version of "Closure" by Paul Cornell.

This Thursday, 6 May, I'll be at the Petrie Museum, where from 5-8 pm there's a free sci-fi trail what I have written. Come along, grab a glass of wine, and explore the real bits of ancient Egypt which have been reworked into bits of Doctor Who, Stargate, Lost and Battlestar Gallactica. Details on the Petrie Museum's what's on page.

On Friday, 14 May, I'll be back at the Petrie, where Steven Wickham will be reading Arthur Conan-Doyle's spooky stories "Lot 249" and "The Ring of Thoth" - the latter the basis for most Mummy movies. Very excited by this, but think it's now full. Sorry.

On 15-16 May I'll be at the Utopia convention in Oxfordshire.

On Wednesday, 26 May, there's the UK launch of "The Mythological Dimensions of Doctor Who", a collection of academic cleverness by clever people with a less-clever introduction by me.

On 12 June I'll be at Alt-Fiction in Derby with a bunch of other writers. Couple of other things coming up, too. Will speak of them when I've all the details.

Books finished, April 2010

I wrote about the two Roald Dahl books, The Magic Finger and Esio Trot, yesterday.

Gene Wolfe's The Book of the New Sun 1 has taken me most of this month, though that's more to do with other things going on in my life than the book itself. Severian is a torturer, brought up as an orphan by the guild of torturers in a huge and complex city. The city feels medieval but is really millions of years in the future, and reminded me a lot of Neal Stephenson's Anathem.

When Severian is exiled for an indiscretion (which I'll not spoil here), we get to explore the strange, rich world of superstition and base villainy. There are travelling show people (like Riddley Walker), and alien creatures and plants. There are prophecies and goblins and sexy, sneaky ladies. And a plot against - or is it for? - the Autarch.

It's a full, absorbing read, and one much written on elsewhere. I'm aware it's much loved - this particular dog-eared copy is volume one in the Fantasy Masterworks series. But I must admit I tuned in and out of it, not always following events. For a wandering, free-wheeling sort of story, there's a lot of coincidence, stumbling into characters we've met before because it suits the plot.

This is really two books, or the first two in a series of four. The second volume completes the adventure, and though I'm curious to see what happens (and what it's all been about), the rather abrupt ending to each book doesn't exactly inspire excitement.

"Here I pause. If you wish to walk no farther with me, reader, I do not blame you. It is no easy road."

Gene Wolfe, The Book of the New Sun volume 1: Shadow and Claw, p. 597.

HG Well's The Invisible Man was first published in 1897; my battered Laurel and Gold series edition was published in April 1940. It's the story of Griffin, an albino student at University College who uses science to make himself translucent and then goes on the rampage.

The book shows its age in the details of travel and communication, and the suburban settings. A later section, set round Bloomsbury and Tottenham Court Road, suggests long-vanished slums and criminals just round the corner. I know those streets today, and it's a glimpse of a world both familiar and distant.

There's some uncomfortably forthright stuff about a Jewish landlord and "working like a nigger", while in other areas the book avoids spelling things out. The invisible man of the title spends pretty much all of the book larking about naked, but there's no mention of his invisible chap. (As with a lot of Wells, there's a lot of people ejaculating furiously, but it just means they're talking.)

Griffin is a strange character. We're led to believe on several occasions that his experiment has turned him mad, but he admits he's stolen money - and inadvertently killed his father - long before his researches bear fruit. That he's an albino before he begins his researches is, I think, meant to suggest some kind of racial predisposition or something. I kept feeling it was about to expound on some racial theory, but whatever idea Wells might mean to illuminate remains dodging around in the shadows.

Wells' writing style, though, feels impressively modern - punchy, evocative and absorbing. He's got a deft eye for character, and the suburbs are full of gossiping, bickering, funny individuals. There's a lot of "It seems that..." and "It may be that..." as if the story is presented from disparate sources, which gives a sheen of verisimilitude to the unlikely adventure.

Similarly, Griffin describes at length the processes by which he's disappeared himself - and there's lots on "invisible" creatures and why white paper turns clear when wet. The conjuring trick is not Griffin's technology, but convincing the reader such a thing could be possible. There's a long discussion on the pigments in the eye being the hardest thing to disappear.

But really the book is a series of comic and horrific set-pieces. There's the glimpses of nothing inside the bandages, or the outline of a mouth while eating or smoking. There's the horror of fighting this invisible and ruthless creature. And even the sympathy one feels for him as he tries to hide his footprints from children. The last section is a very effective thriller.

There's a nice twist in the epilogue regarding the tramp, but I felt Griffin's own ending a bit of a fumble. He is caught and beaten to death by some policemen, and then slowly fades back into sight. How much better - and foreshadowed by the fate of his invisible cat - if it were his invisibility that kills him. He's caught in a river or storm drain, and his pursuers struggle to help but can't find him...

Dahling again

Roald Dahl's The Magic Finger was one of my favourite books as a kid, mostly because I could read it in a single sitting. With illustrations, it's a mere 57 pages. I read it this time over a cup of tea.

The unnamed girl narrating is a proto-Matilda, with magic abilities that allow her to enact revenge on the horrid people around her. She turns nasty teacher Mrs Winter into a cat, and the Gregg family - who like shooting - into ducks. It's a simple reversal, told with delicious glee.

Esio Trot seems to be Dahl's last book, published after his death. It's a similarly slim, one-cup-of-tea volume, and altogether something more odd. Mr Hoppy fancies Mrs Silver in the flat downstairs but can't pluck up the courage to say so. Mrs Silver has a beloved tortoise, Alfie, who she worries is not big enough. So Mr Hoppy concocts a convoluted scheme to make Mrs Silver think Alfie is growing.

Dahl explains in a caveat that this story "happened in the days when anyone could go out and buy a nice little tortoise from a pet-shop", back before the government stopped traders who "used to cram hundreds of [tortoises] tightly into the packing-crates without food or water and in such horrible conditions that a great many of them always died on the sea-journey over."

Yet it still seems a bit cruel, Mr Hoppy buying a whole bunch of tortoises of different sizes just to fool the woman he fancies. The tortoises might not mind - and they eat up the lettuce he gives them greedily and all live happily ever after. But there's still something uncomfortable about Mr Hoppy's plan. He tricks Mrs Silver into liking him.

This is a terrible cliche in stories and adverts for deodorant - that the way to a woman's heart is through subterfuge. It's not enough - as Mr Hoppy eventually does - to just stumble up to the lady in question and tell her that she's lovely. You need to contrive the Right Words and the Right Attitude and the Right Smell; you need to start lying to her from the start.

Something I read in the last few weeks (I've completely forgotten what) talked about the standard wheeze in masculine fiction being the chap winning the lady through adversity. He rescues her from a tower or a dragon, or survives a war. It makes getting together with a nice woman something decisive and acted, and suggests she gets no say in the matter. It happens too often in Bond films: Bond saves the day so the woman is his, without him ever winning her over himself.

Perish the thought that a woman might like you not because you stop villains or enlarge her tortoise (so to speak), but because she thinks you're nice.

Three, Ten and Eleven

A few things to announce, excitingly. First, I've written for the eleventh Doctor Who. My four-page comic strip "Booked Up" appears in Doctor Who Adventures issue #164, available from tomorrow for a week. Artist John Ross has worked wonders on my silly script: I could not be more delighted.

Also just out is "Shadow of the Past", an audio "Companion Chronicle" featuring Caroline John as the third Doctor's chum Liz Shaw. Am thrilled at how it's come out - the cast and crew really going for the excitement and emotion. Hooray! As a bonus, you can hear me stumble through an interview at the end.

(ETA: Oh! And they've put up a trailer for "The Guardian of the Solar System", out in July. I know what happens but it still makes me tingly.)

And from May (next week!) you can download the audio version of "The Slitheen Excursion", featuring the tenth Doctor and his one-off companion June. This entirely unabridged version is read by Debbie Chazen, who was so splendid in The Smoking Room.


On Sunday, the director of the audio book, Neil Gardner, and I will be speaking on "The Birth of Modern Doctor Who" at Sci-Fi London, along with other slebs. Do come along and join us.

Technical nuts and bolts

I've done a quick interview with Nebula One about writing Doctor Who stuff. Also busy on all sorts of things. More soon.

Volcano Day

It's grey and rainy in Glasgow today, so rather than gadding about at museums and getting a tan, I've stayed in my hotel room working. Not exactly working hard, but working. When the Dr gets back from being an important academic, we will go to the Willow Tea Rooms and then watch Doctor Who.

I escaped the hotel room earlier so the Nice Lady could make the bed and towels all tidy. The Nice Lady warned me to watch out for falling ash and hellfire, as the papers are warning its not good for your health to stand downwind of an explosion.

The hotel reception was packed full of airline cabin crew and other people all hoping desperately for rooms. It's the first sign of the fall-out from Iceland that I've seen (though apparently my brother and his family are also stranded in Crete, having a lovely time.)

Anyway, with the imminent prospect of death, I headed to the cathedral to see the Necropolis, which is apparenltly based on Pere Lachaise in Paris. It's high on a neatly-mowed hill overlooking the city, and suitably bleak and Mad Victorian. It pattered with rain as I nosed about. Other tourists check nervously to see it was only water. But I knew we were being watched over by a guardian angel, parked under the no parking sign just by the Necropolis gate...




(There are also, of course, TARDES parked all over Glasgow. The Dr has taken pictures of me sulking by the fine example on Buchanan Street.)

Joanna Briscoe can fuck off

"We, the war children's adult offspring routinely see shrinks, talk about our IVF (all those granny-alikes wheeling their girl-boy twins round can't really avoid confessing); air our sobbing psyches to the nation on reality TV or cut-you-into-shape shows, and blame it all on environment or poor attachment."

Joanna Briscoe, "Blissful denial - I'll drink to that", Guardian, 10 April 2010, p. 35.

No, we talk about our IVF because of the stupid, cruel and idiotic things said about it by sneery fucking shitsacks like you.

Game over

The IVF didn't work. Me and the Dr can't have our own kids.

It's not unexpected - the odds were always stacked against us - but it's still a cricket bat in the face. And it's also weirdly a relief. This cycle has been really, really tough. With building work at King's, we were being seen by two hospitals and there were delays and hold-ups and confusion. Can't help picking over every detail - would we have done better if we'd been in one place, if we'd not had to ferry eggs across town by taxi, if they'd not kept the Dr on the drugs two weeks longer than expected... At the very least these things didn't help (and often they felt cruel). But the bottom line is that the drugs didn't have the effect that we hoped for.

We're not going to try it again. The Dr doesn't respond well enough to the drugs, and the side effects are harrowing just to watch. We vowed before this cycle that we'd only continue if we saw an improvement on last time and we ended up doing worse.

So, game over. After nearly five years of tests and procedures, we have come to the end.

We've both been working, trying to keep ourselves busy and not to collapse on what this all means. Am finding it hard to care about rewrites and pitching. Went to a workshop on "pervasive media" yesterday and was okay until the bar bit at the end where I found I'd lost all powers of small-talk.

Instead we went out with a couple of other, barren friends and reintroduced the Dr to wine. Then I took her for a meal where she could glut on sea-food, which has also been off the menu for months. Good long chat about what we do next. For the first time in a year we can plan trips away together. (Going to be in Glasgow next week, and then there's Malta and maybe France and, we hope, America...)

Still not really up to seeing large groups of people. Still likely to cancel engagements at the last minute. And still closer now than we've ever been. Both feeling old and hollow and such loss.

But onwards. A summer of doing things and drinking. And then we try for adoption.

My informed opinions

I've been added to the otherwise impressive line-up of guests at the Utopia Doctor Who convention at posh Heythorp Park Hotel over the weekend of 15-16 May. Think I'm there to stand next to Jean Marsh and flog lots of Sara Kingdom product. Do come along and say hi.

ETA: I'll also be at Sci-Fi London on 2 May for "The Birth of Modern Doctor Who". Very excited by the live Bernice Summerfield reading.

Also, here's what I wrote immediately after Saturday's Doctor Who and then fired off to the Sunday Herald. It appeared on page 3 the next day. (Typical: they want my smiley, happy views on important topics of the day, but not a smiley, topless picture.)

"So: immediate reactions on having just watched the new Doctor Who. The closing theme is still playing, my heart's hammering through my ribs and the wife and her friend Gemma are cackling away as they recall all the rude bits.

Matt Smith is immediately compelling as the Doctor, a fantastically funny and wild performance. We never know which way he'll go next – and neither, it seems, does he.

Karen Gillan's Amy manages to be smart and sexy and real, with a life and job and all sorts of friends and relations to ground in her that reality. She's as wary of the Doctor as she is entranced.

All those brilliant, simple ideas right out of a child's imagination – a crack in a bedroom wall, a small girl who has to wait, monsters with the wrong voices. The visceral terror of a monster you can only glimpse who's sneaking up behind you.

A script packed full of perfect jokes and details, crying out to be picked over again and again.

Patrick Moore! Amy not looking away when the Doctor puts his clothes on! The new TARDIS! All of it bold and new and full of promise and excitement. And yet still no shadow of a doubt that this is the same old man who first appeared through the London fog back in black-and-white and the sixties.

Awesome. Properly awesome, before the word got all devalued. Provoking awe and amazement and not a little fear.

There are people who don't like Doctor Who. Like people who get no joy from biscuits or balloons. How can you not have loved that? I feel like a kid again.

And what's even more exciting, the wife says that if I'm good there'll be more Doctor Who next week."

He is risen

At Easter, we true disciples celebrate the resurrection of the saviour of mankind. And then over-earnestly debate the merits of bow-ties and the new theme tune.

There's a spoiler ahead for those who haven't yet seen last night's Doctor Who. I loved it and have said as much in today's Sunday Herald (think there'll be a web version later in the week).

The papers are all over the new show and seem generally to have fallen under its spell. Yesterday's Times supplement Playlist had this fun interview with Matt Smith. It's also got a very odd preview of the episode.

You'd think writer Andrew Billen might understand that while he gets to see the episode early, the ordinary mortals reading his paper on Saturday morning have to wait till the broadcast. Surely that's the whole point of there being a preview: he writes to whet our appetite. It shouldn't be difficult: tell us if it's worth watching and maybe what it's about. Try not to spoil the jokes and surprises, since that's why we'd bother to tune in.

And generally, it's an enthusiastic shout out to the "assured debut by Smith" as the Doctor in what's "the usual monster fest". And then...

"He is helped / hindered by a sassy young Scottish assistant, Karen Gillan's Amy Pond, who has met the time traveller as a child and has, spookily, her wedding dress all ready for their eventual nuptials."

Andrew Billen, David Chater's choices (sic), Playlist, April 3 2010, p. 28.

Billen spoils the final shot of the episode - a petty, dickish thing to do in itself - but hasn't understood it.

Books finished, March 2010

I have already blogged about James and the Giant Peach, Revolution in the Head and Fantastic Mr Fox. Will write up my notes on The Defence of the Realm - the Authorized History of MI5 when I've finished a few pressing bits of work. I'm reviewing Blonde Bombshell for Vector, so you'll have to wait for my important insights on it. Note I how write that like you care.

Graceless

Just this second handed in a script, to find that Big Finish have announced the Graceless mini-series. The three CD box-set is written by me and stars Ciara Janson and Laura Doddington as a pair of troublesome sisters packed with special powers.


I created the characters for the Doctor Who mini-series the Key 2 Time; this is them gallivanting off on their own.

Guest stars include David Warner, Patricia Brake and that nice Alex Mallinson in the pivotal role of "Nicholas Payne". Alex has also designed the rather lovely cover.

All very exciting to be able to speak of it. And the series will be launched at the HurricaneWho convention in Florida in October. Dang, I'll probably have to be there.

11th floor

View from the 11th floor of Tower Wing at Guy's Hospital.

Fantastic PR, Fox

I don't think I'd ever read Fantastic Mr Fox, though I knew it backwards from an audio version released on tape in the early 1980s. It's another lively, exciting adventure full of simple yet vivid descriptions. Good manners and pluck help our heroes get revenge on the horrid villains.

The hero is Mr Fox, a cravat-wearing fop who calls people “Darling” and who might be related to Basil Brush. (The recent BBC Four documentary Sidekick Stories pointed out the gag of making a fox part of the landed (i.e. hunting) gentry.)

Mr Fox has been thieving his meals from the stores of three local farmers, Messrs Boggis, Bunce and Bean. The farmers take revenge by shooting off Mr Fox's tail then attacking his home with diggers. Mr Fox and his family dig for their lives, but the countryside is covered in the farmers' men, waiting to kill anything that moves. Soon the Foxes are starving. Until Mr Fox has a rather splendid idea...

The short book – 82 pages with a lot of illustrations – is largely a great long list of all the things Mr Fox then provides for his family to eat. That's especially evocative after all the stuff about them starving.

“The table was covered with chickens and ducks and geese and hams and bacon, and everyone was tucking into the lovely food.”

Roald Dahl, Fantastic Mr Fox, p. 75.

There are also carrots for the Rabbits to eat. It might strike us as odd that Fox has invited Rabbits to the feast, and as guests rather than as main course. It's also odd that these wild animals are such fans of roast dinner. But there are a whole lot of things going on in the story which struck me as propaganda.

All the humans are horrible. All the humans we see carry weapons – guns and sticks and, in the case of Mr Bean's maid, Mabel, a rolling pin. When the farmers eat and drink the produce of their farms it is greasy, greedy, smelly and ick. When Mr Fox does the same, it is a lovely feast. The farmers are rude and disgusting. Mr Fox belching is such a good joke he does it again.

(The only good humans are the children in the first chapter who have a rhyme about the farmers being “horrible crooks”. Having dispensed this authoritative verdict, they are not seen again.)

Almost all the other animals love Mr Fox. They don't blame him for the trouble he's got them all in. Mrs Fox never blames him for risking their sons' lives. Badger and Rabbit don't point out that this argument is nothing to do with him.

The one animal who doesn't love Mr Fox is Rat, who is drunk on Mr Bean's cider. Badger remarks,

“All rats have bad manners. I've never met a polite rat.”

Ibid., p. 72.

Which is not what he says in the Wind in the Willows.

The animals on the menu are not given voices. The chickens do not have characters. Mr Fox is also careful about killing them – selectively, quickly, humanely. That's really not what foxes do (as my mum, who keeps chickens, has to lament all too often).

Mr Fox not only endangers his children, he also encourages them to drink cider.

“You must understand this was not the ordinary weak fizzy cider one buys in a store. It was the real stuff, a home-brewed fiery liquor that burned in your throat and boiled in your stomach.

'Ah-h-h-h-h-h-!' gasped the Smallest Fox. 'This is some cider!'”

Ibid., p. 64.

For all Mr Fox is a daring rebel, the depiction of women is a little old skool. Mrs Fox is left behind to cook dinner while her husband and son have adventures. Mrs Badger is likewise too weak to do anything but turn up at the end. Mrs Bean and her maid Mabel stay at home while the farmers are out hunting, their only job to provide supplies.

And there's an odd attempt to square the circle in chapter 14, “Badger Has Doubts”. He's a more sensible, reasonable fellow than the hot-headed Fox, and tries to articulate his disquiet about what they're up to.

“Suddenly Badger said, 'Doesn't this worry you just a tiny bit, Foxy?'

'Worry me?' said Mr Fox. 'What?'

'All this... this stealing.'

Mr Fox stopped digging and stared at Badger as though he had gone completely dotty. 'My dear old furry frump,' he said, 'do you know anyone in the whole world who wouldn't swipe a few chickens if his children were starving to death?'”

Ibid., p. 58.

Fox goes on to argue that, unlike the humans, the animals are not planning to kill their foes, merely to take food they won't even miss. But it's Mr Fox's stealing that has started this whole mess. His actions have endangered his own family and also his friends and his neighbours. There's no suggestion of their anger at him, let alone their considering handing him over to the farmers.

His brilliant wheeze of building a community underground, with shops and schools, is a cause for celebration. But it struck me that the animals are condemned to spend the rest of their lives in a bunker. And surely the farmers won't wait for ever...

A fun and richly told adventure, but I can't help wondering what happened next and feeling we were only told half of the story. I know it's a kids' book but I'd argue that makes worrying about this stuff all the more important.

And I call myself a hack

To quote my wise chum Toby Hadoke, “Who needs facts when you've got an opinion?”

First, in the Independent, Gerard Gilbert slags off the forthcoming new series of Doctor Who without having seen it. He admires Russell T Davies – who is not involved in the forthcoming series – “not least in resisting what you might call a glossy Americanisation of the property, and in retaining the show's essential, and very British, spirit”, but then decides Doctor Who would be better were it, er, more like a glossy American TV show called Caprica.

“Caprica delves into some pretty meaty themes, from religion and racism to terrorism and what it means to be human, while it directly addresses current developments with the internet and its virtual worlds. It's light years more ambitious in scope than Doctor Who, and it's still not too late to catch.”

Except, recent Doctor Who – a fun family show as opposed to a tediously dour one for tediously dour grown-ups – has also covered religion (the faith of people in Gridlock, the Doctor meeting the devil in The Satan Pit), racism (in the experiences of Martha Jones, but also in the way humanity treats aliens), terrorism (from the Slitheen attack on London to the Government deciding which children to give to the aliens in Torchwood: Children of Earth), what it means to be human (all of Season 3, especially Human Nature / Family of Blood) and the future of the internet (come on, the Doctor Who did that in 1966).

The article is petty, lazy and factually wrong. The comments that follow it afford the usual edifying spectacle of the public speaking their brains, but include a beautifully polite reply from Doctor Who's producer Piers Wenger.

Second, the Dr took me to see The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo this afternoon. She'd read the book (and is on to book three now) but I have not. So obviously I'm now qualified to lecture on both.

No, that would be ridiculous wouldn't it? So I'm baffled by Viv Groskop's blog for the Guardian (an edited version also appeared in print in the Review section yesterday). Groskop admits avoiding the book to begin with because of the hype.

“I imagined clichés and extreme violence. I was pleasantly surprised, then, to discover it is neither formulaic nor disturbingly graphic. And it was indeed Larsson's take on feminism that made it stand out as an original read.”

So she liked it, then? But Groskop goes on to quote from a number of reviewers who found the book sexist or misogynistic – though, note, that's not the view Groskop herself had of the book. She then says the film, which she has not seen, has been “universally panned”, and quotes criticisms of “Larsson's misogynistic fantasies” and scenes “glibly indulgent of those visual horrors”. Groskop concludes:

“In the novel Larsson spares us many graphic descriptions, leaving a lot of the worst to our imagination. It seems, then, that the film has betrayed not only some of the book's original subtlety but also its feminism. I waited too long to read the book. I think I'll give the film a miss altogether.”

Again, the argument is based on not having seen the subject. Having seen the film, I thought it showed remarkable restraint in its depictions of violence. We know what's been done but the camera avoids explicit detail. The events are not pleasant, but the point seems to be that the specific brutality of the killer here is part of a wider misogyny. The violence done to women and men – it is done to both – is shocking and horrific, but never celebrated or dwelt on. It's really not there as titillation.

The Dr also feels the book contextualises the violence – before each chapter Larsson provides real statistics on domestic abuse and assaults on women in Sweden. The point made is that though the events are fictional, these are not “misogynistic fantasies” but grounded in reality. Liberals, says the Dr, tend to think of Scandinavian countries as having all the answers, but this book and things like Wallander suggest something nasty lurking under the surface. The secrets of one rich and influential family stand for the whole country. That's what makes it so disturbing.

Groskop says she took from the book the message that, “gender is irrelevant”. But I wonder whether there'd be anything like this criticism had Larsson been (or written under a pseudonym as) a woman.

For a more sensible opinion, see Nyssa's review of book and film.

Some photos

Four images for your delight and excitement.

1. Bernice Summerfield toy

A fantastic surprise present from Monster Maker yesterday, a custom-made toy of Bernice Summerfield in the cat-suit she wears when drawn by the splendid Adrian Salmon.

Benny's creator, Paul Cornell, is also in receipt of a more old-skool Benny, as off the cover of the novel Love and War. Apparently, there is also a toy of her in Frontier in Space style shoulder pads.

2. Moo

Nimbos has been raving about the glories of online printer Moo.com for some time, and I've envied his collection of prettily printed, prettily packaged cards and stickers. So, with permission from Red Scharlach for the use of her picture of Archibald the space-pirate badger, I have got some new business cards done. And they are a magnificence of beautiful, tactile coolitude. I want to hug them and squeeze them and call them George.

3. The Guardian

You can now order my Doctor Who story The Guardian of the Solar System, out in July. And this is the magnificent artwork by Simon Holub.

4. Acrostic apostles


And the church down the road has new signage.

Film Focus: The Great Escape

The last of my old Film Focus reviews, this done for a special edition DVD of The Great Escape (1963).

The Great Escape
Reviewed 13 May 2006

Everyone knows the Great Escape. We know it’s based on true events. We know that McQueen doubled for one of the Nazi motorcylists pursuing him – meaning he’s chasing himself.

We’ve heard Eddie Izzard point out that Hilts reaches the Swiss border on his motorbike before two guys in an airplane, and that it’s only the British who get shot.

(You haven’t heard it? For shame! Go buy Dressed to Kill now.)

With a new deluxe-edition DVD out this week, here’s a few more top facts for the next time you watch it.

“Every detail of the escape is the way it really happened.”

The film is based on the book by Paul Brickhill, who’d himself been a prisoner of war in the Stalag Luft III camp and taken part in the great escape there on 24 March 1944. Various things have been changed – characters combined, their nationalities changed, and some stuff with a motorbike added.

The real forger was James Hill who – having neither gone blind nor been shot – later became a director. His credits include The Man From ORGY and episodes of Worzel Gummidge.

The actors, too, could base their performances on real experience. Donald Pleasance and James Garner had both been prisoners of war while Charles Mason had been a miner.

Steve McQueen’s prior experience was that… well, he was keen on motorbikes. So the script got rewritten to have Virgil Hilts on a motorbike.

Hilts doesn’t like to be called by his first name. Presumably he’s named after the 1st century BC poet Publius Vergilius Maro, whose Aeneid covers the mythic origin of Rome. Since the early United States based much of its legal and governmental structure on Rome, there’s an argument that his name makes him an archetype for American values.

Then again, his embarrassment may just mean he had pretentious parents – though Virgil was also a popular name. Less pretentiously, Virgil Tracy is the pilot of Thunderbird 2.

“Mole” Ives is played by Angus Lennie, probably most famous for his six years as Shughie McFee in the soap opera Crossroads. In 1975 he leant his voice to another great movie – Bob Godfrey’s musical, animated, Academy-award-winning biography of Isambard Kingdom Brunel, Great!

Which makes it all the more odd seeing Lennie chummy with Hilts. Think about it: super-star idol Steve McQueen best mates with the strange little man from the Crossroads Motel.

(Nearest equivalent in movies: Bruce Willis shoulder-to-shoulder with comedian Lee Evans during a gunfight in the Fifth Element.)

Some other fun cast stuff: Nigel Stock would later play Watson to Peter Cushing’s Holmes for the BBC. David McCallum, after starring in the Man From UNCLE (note: not ORGY), was Carter in another Nazi-foxing caper, the BBC’s series of Colditz. And William Russell went on to more daring escapes, too, leaving the Great Escape to become one of Dr Who’s very first travelling companions. He can also be seen as one of Marlon Brando’s polo-necked courtiers in the opening minutes of Superman.

The cast includes Englishmen of different classes, Scots and Americans. James Coburn plays an Australian (though I’m not sure he bothers with the accent) and Charles Manson plays a Pole. It’s interesting that while Coburn later meets up with French and Spanish resistance, we see nothing of Germany’s allies. It implies that Germany fights alone against the rest of the world.

“We may all sit out the war as comfortably as possible?”

There’s some interesting stuff going on with the Germans. Von Luger, the Kommandant is seen to be a reasonable man, who regrets any violence. We feel for Werner as James Garner’s Hendley plays him for a sap. The Luftwaffe come across not as evil people but as genial jobs-worthies, doing the best at their jobs.

This is all the more evident when we know that the Kommandant doesn’t lose his job because of the escapes but (in scenes omitted from the film) because the investigation into the escapes discovers his black marketeering. As far as the film is concerned, he’s a decent enough bloke.

It’s the Gestapo who are the villains. Thuggish and vicious, it doesn’t justify the killing of 50 prisoners that Bartlett had been given due warning at the beginning of the film. The implication is that they’re responsible for his scars, and the great escape is his way of getting back at them. He makes no distinctions between Luftwaffe and Gestapo – he tells Ramsay that they’re “all the same”.

“Two hundred and fifty!?!”

Bearing in mind it’s all based on true facts, there’s some peculiar things about the plan.

If the tunnel’s using up all the cross-beams from the bunk-beds, where does everyone sleep? The guards would surely notice them sleeping on the floor… So are they sharing bunks?

The home-made clothes, stitched from blankets, old uniforms and boot polish, would have been less noticeable in time of war, as everyone was having to make do and mend. But where did Hendley get all the materials from? (That’s actually a question asked in the film, to which the response is “Don’t ask.”)

The escapees are all very immaculate for people who’ve scurried through 300 feet of dirty tunnels. Did they have time to wash and brush up prior to boarding their train?

Why isn’t Hilts in uniform? If he’d just been prepared for being shot down over Germany, he’d surely have packed something less conspicuously American than slacks and a tee-shirt.

And where did he get his baseball glove from?