lördag 30 december 2017

New Year’s resolution: to read more (or better) books

“Ooh, look, she’s reading a book, isn’t that nice”, a mother cooed to her toddler on the bus the other month, when same toddler was intrepid enough to take an interest in my reading self. It was a heartening comment as it shows how books (real ones made of paper) are still generally considered to be A Good Thing. At the same time, I felt a bit of a fraud. 2017 has not been a great reading year for me. Increasingly, I have been so little engaged in the book I’ve had on the go that I’ve preferred spending spare moments trawling the net or partaking of mood-lifting villain clips on Youtube.

Mind you, I haven’t completely neglected the reading part of life this year. I started on some of my impulse buys from this and previous years and managed to finish at least some of them. Tainted by Brooke Morgan (an impulse buy from the Strand, no less) proved to be well and evocatively written, though the genre – domestic chiller – isn’t really my cup of tea. With the irresistibly named If We Were Villains by M. L. Rio it was the other way around. I found the prose style a little precious, but the genre and setting was exactly the kind of thing I enjoy: the novel followed a group of drama students at a prestigious, seemingly idyllic College for the Creative Arts in Illinois. I’ve been stage struck since childhood and I love stories taking place in a theatre/drama school setting; it didn’t hurt that the College specialised in teaching its drama students nothing but Shakespeare. (It’s a little unlikely, though: surely, a successful drama education needs a bit of range?) The novel owes a heavy debt to The Secret History as we see a group of talented but not necessarily wise group of young students grapple with collective guilt. Fortunately, though, they don’t let the guilt get in the way of a lot of Shakespearean acting scenes.

Another impulse buy was the promising-looking family saga Roses by Leila Meacham – however, I’m ashamed to say I gave up on this one. My shame stems from the fact that it was written in a very enjoyable, page-turning style, so quality-wise there was no excuse not to finish it. The problem was I just couldn’t get behind the story, which seemed to follow the old pattern of “tough female neglects what really matters (family, love of her life) in favour of something that matters less in the great scheme of things (her family’s plantation)”. If you have no problem with this storyline and would like to try a doorstopper that’s unusually well-written, this could well be worth a look. For my part, I just thought the heroine’s family and love interest were tiresome and felt full sympathy with her for prioritising the plantation.       

Truth be told, there have been few novels this year that I’ve felt like losing myself in. This is irksome. I want to be the lady on the bus who reads a nice, old-fashioned book; being bookish is part of my identity. Steps will have to be taken in 2018: the question is, which ones?

At the end of the year, I always feel full of ambition regarding the cultural consumption of the year ahead: there’s so much to explore and whole new worlds to be discovered. Once the new year gets started, though, my ambitions tend to shrink very fast. I have a theory that this could be connected to sleep, and the lack of it: it’s always easier to set yourself life-expanding goals after a good lie-in. Also, once you get started, it’s discouraging if you happen to read more than one book in a row by authors you’ve not tried yet and find them disappointing. Much as I’d like to make new discoveries, perhaps I should be more open this year to re-reading classics from favourite 19th-century authors and reading more Ambitious Book Projects by the few high-prestige authors I’ve already tried and liked. It may not be the most innovative way to go, but it could be a way to get properly into the reading habit again.

There’s no denying that my Once Upon A Time obsession has got in the way of reading a bit, more than Downton Abbey ever did. Downton at least had the saving grace from a book point of view of making me interested in family sagas (admittedly, my search for the perfect family saga was not a great success). So maybe 2018 will be the year when I discover fantasy?       

torsdag 7 december 2017

Class: A curate's egg of a Doctor Who spin-off

Doctor Who spin-offs are a bit of mixed bunch. For my own part, I gave up on Torchwood about half-way in the first series, as I didn't care for its grim tone or outlook (I'm a fan of Captain Jack whenever he's in real Doctor Who, though). The Sarah Jane Adventures was a great series, however, and a pleasant surprise. The only thing I found strange about it was the level of scariness. Judging by the age of Sarah Jane's sidekicks, this series was supposed to be suitable for kids slightly younger than Doctor Who's target audience, yet several of the adventures were actually more frightening than the average episode of the parent show. True, nothing beats the Doctor Who double episode"The Impossible Planet" in terms of scariness, but I do think The Sarah Jane Adventures managed to trump "The Silence in the Library" when it comes to nightmare scenarios which tap specifically into childhood fears. Heck, it even has a nightmare-themed episode, which certainly frightened me. For the nerdy adult Doctor Who fan, though, The Sarah Jane Adventures was a delight.

So last year, when a new spin-off series was announced which was to take place in Coal Hill Academy (the school where Clara used to work, and before that two companions of the very first Doctor), I was optimistic. It seemed to be closer to Sarah Jane than Torchwood in its premise; also, unlike most people, I really enjoyed the Doctor Who episode where the Doctor goes undercover - very unconvincingly - as Coal Hill's caretaker in order to neutralise an admittedly lame alien threat. A school environment is mostly fun in a fictional context, and Class also promised to use the "cracks in time and space" gambit which my geeky self usually enjoys. Admittedly, even before watching it, you could see  a problem with the setup in the story: the series starts off with a guest appearance from the Doctor where he entrusts a bunch of teenagers to police the aforementioned cracks in time and space centering on Coal Hill. I know the Doctor is hardly Mr Responsible, but come on: these are teens! Why on earth would he put that amount of responsibility on their shoulders?

Regardless: I was prepared to buy into the whole teenagers-as-savers-of-the-world concept if the series turned out to be as good as Sarah Jane. Sadly, though, I was badly disappointed in the first episode. The kid protagonists were a bunch of stereotypes: the friendless good girl; the cool guy and football player i.e. jerk; the chippy prodigy; and the neat-looking uncool boy who turns out to be gay - and an alien prince. There was also something forced about the show's multicultural agenda. Doctor Who has as diverse a cast as they come, but it takes care to provide worthwhile, non-stereotypic parts all round; the characters' personalities aren't defined by their skin colour or sexuality for that matter. In Class, it felt as if the show was trying too hard to get the right-on mixture right and cared more for outer attributes than character content. Ram, The football-playing cool kid, is from a Sikh family; Tanya, the fourteen-year-old girl bright enough to take classes with the seventeen-year-olds, is black; and Charlie (his cover name), the gay extraterrestial, hooks up with a Polish boy. It felt a bit like one of those jokes with people of different nationalities: "There was an Englishman, a Scotsman and an Irishman..." Tanya's chippy comments didn't improve matters. I know she's supposed to be a fourteen-year-old - albeit a bright one - but her two sneering references to "white people" in the space of one episode didn't exactly endear the character to me (and yes, one was in connection with Downton, but try to believe me when I say that this wasn't my main problem with it).

The Doctor, for his part, acted most un-Doctor-like, and not just because he left a handful of school children with a dangerous mission. What's more, he condoned the fact that the sarky Physics teacher Miss Quill, also an alien and a sworn enemy of Charlie's people, was kept as a slave to/protector of the young prince. She is hindered from causing any harm to him or to anyone by a worm-like creature operated into her head who would do damage to her brain if she tried anything. I don't care how belligerent the Quills as an alien race are, that's just barbaric - also, the fact that Miss Quill can't use a gun kind of makes it harder for her to help the kids fight alien threats.

The series did pick up, though, and the protagonists became fleshed out and less stereotypical. This has happened so much lately (see also Game of Thrones) that I just have to wonder: why start out with a stereotype at all? I know a character in a TV drama generally needs time to become interestingly layered. Nevertheless, why use something so unpromising as, say, a football-playing school bully as a starting point? If the characters can't be complex from the word go, can they at least be a little different?

Nonetheless, the characters shaped up, and by the end I could vaguely see the point of all of them. Good girl April was my favourite among the kids, especially as it turned out she had a dark side. But the highlight of the series was Katherine Kelly's acid Miss Quill, well deserving of the starting credits' "and" spot (if an actor's name comes last in the starting credits and is prefaced by "and", it basically means "if this person leaves the show we may as well cancel it"). There were some neat sci-fi ideas - for instance the "metaphysical engine" which could take you into different species' ideas of the afterlife and creation myths. The finale proved to be a mess, however: overly grim (come on, two parents of protagonists slaughtered just like that?) and too reliant on the prospect of a second series. As it turned out, Class was cancelled, and the story left up in the air.

I can understand why the powers that be didn't continue with this series. It was hard to see who the target audience was: would the kind of cool teens the show seemed to be hoping to attract tune into a Doctor Who spin-off in the first place, and if they did, how would they react to random alien killing of fond parents? From a nerdy adult perspective, I resented attempts to get down with the kids and a certain finger-wagging tendency. It wasn't as dour as Torchwood, though, and I enjoyed some of it - but it's not a patch on The Sarah Jane Adventures, not to mention Doctor Who.