I like these little BFI books, but sometimes you’re rolling the dice a bit. Some authors present a wide-ranging critical companion piece to the film iI like these little BFI books, but sometimes you’re rolling the dice a bit. Some authors present a wide-ranging critical companion piece to the film in question, others pick a single interpretation and hammer away at it, and if their particular take doesn’t click, you can end up wondering if they’re talking about the film you expected to be reading about. I’m glad to say Roger Luckhurst’s look at one of my favourite films takes the former approach.
Concentrating on the original 1979 film, with only a brief look at the sequels (in a section wonderfully titled ‘Did IQs drop sharply while I was away?’), Luckhurst doesn’t go into a blow-by-blow account of the making of the film — a subject adequately covered in other books, as well as DVD and Blu-Ray extras — but provides a brisk critical commentary on various aspects of the film, including the evolving state of cinema at the time, and science fiction and feminist criticism, among other things. He even ends with a brief look at how the whole film might best be viewed as starring Jonesy the cat. Finally, there’s a more personal afterword on the film franchise’s place in his own life, which underlines his credentials as a fan as well as a critic.
Overall, one of the better BFI Film Classics books I’ve read....more
A revamp of Rigby’s previous edition, which looked at the slow rise and decline of the British horror film industry in the 20th century, this 2015 updA revamp of Rigby’s previous edition, which looked at the slow rise and decline of the British horror film industry in the 20th century, this 2015 update of English Gothic adds a chapter on the flourishing of Brit horror films in the 21st century, as well as an appendix looking at horror on TV.
Like Kim Newman’s Nightmare Movies, English Gothic threatens to overwhelm you, at times, with the sheer number of films mentioned. In a book that sets out to present the history of British horror film by film, this can lead to a certain amount of readerly exhaustion, as Rigby (necessarily) presents a welter of facts, doing his best to provide links and brief critical comments. (Which are certainly not dry, as in this: “Long used to dovetailing a distinguished theatrical career with his cinema status as the poor man’s Vincent Price, Gough was over 50 by this stage and his face had taken on the leathery, watchful look of an unblinking lizard…”)
It’s evident Rigby has seen all the films he mentions, and has a real feel for the genre, both its artistic heights and its gruesome, guilty-pleasure depths. (One of the themes running through the book — particularly evident in the review quotes Rigby provides for the 100 films he highlights as key moments in British horror — is how much UK film critics reviled homegrown horror films simply for the fact of their being horror, whereas US critics were happy to praise a good film whatever its genre.)
I think, having read English Gothic from cover to cover, I might have been happier with a straightforward film-by-film reference book, perhaps with a short chapter on the general outline of the commercial and critical fortunes of the British horror film industry. Still, Rigby’s book is an achievement, and a welcome addition to my shelves. I now have a rather long list of films I have to see…...more
Butler’s book looks at the work of Alan Garner, Penelope Lively, Diana Wynne Jones and Susan Cooper, four authors who share some biographical similariButler’s book looks at the work of Alan Garner, Penelope Lively, Diana Wynne Jones and Susan Cooper, four authors who share some biographical similarities (all were born between 1933 and 1935 and so were children during World War II, and all were contemporaries at Oxford in the early 1950s when Tolkien and Lewis taught there — Cooper and Jones even attended their lectures), who rose to prominence writing fantasy fiction for children (or young adults) in the 1960s and 1970s, and whose work shares ‘a profound concern with time, myth, magic, the nature of personal identity, and the potency of place’.
Given the intriguing biographical and thematic links, I was hoping for an investigation into why this might be, but although Butler looks at the work of his four writers in several thematic chapters (‘Applied Archeology’, about their interest in the past; ‘Longing and Belonging’, about their focus on place; and ‘Myth and Magic’, about their use of fantasy), generally he deals with each author separately, aside from those broad-stroke links.
Not being much of an academic myself, I felt Butler spent too much time defending his chosen authors against potential modern criticisms. For instance, he feels the need to defend them against the possible charges of racism and Imperialism merely because they don’t explicitly speak out about those issues (or do so only fleetingly). I’d far rather he’d focused on what the writers do actually write about, rather than the potentially endless list of things they don’t. (Alan Garner has said that it’s the writer’s job to find universal truths by delving deeply into the personal and local — hence his focus on his own region of England, and his own family history. Need this be read as exclusionist? Butler says no, but it’s a pity he spends so much time having to say it.) Even the conclusion, about these four writers’ choice to write for children, is a defence against criticisms by other critics, rather than a summation of the book’s look at its chosen four writers.
Still, Butler makes some interesting points — but only ever points, rather than what I was hoping for: the sort of grand, sweeping statements it’s probably considered rather naive to make in academic circles. Still, I like grand, sweeping statements — which may be why I also like fantasy....more
Published in 1979, this was the first ever monograph on J G Ballard, and was also the first book of literary criticism I read. Pringle begins by groupPublished in 1979, this was the first ever monograph on J G Ballard, and was also the first book of literary criticism I read. Pringle begins by grouping Ballard with other writers who found their feet in science fiction and went on to be accepted by the wider literary community — comparing him, in this regard, with Ray Bradbury and Kurt Vonnegut, though also contrasting him with them — and addresses points about Ballard’s writing that have distanced him from the more popular side of science fiction: ‘Ballard’, Pringle says, ‘is not so much a difficult writer as a resolutely anti-sentimental one.’
Three chapters look at some of Ballard’s themes and symbols. Ballard is, as Pringle points out, a symbolic writer, using variants of the same landscapes, images, and character-types again and again. He points out how Ballard’s landscapes, for instance, can roughly be divided into four elemental types (water, sand, concrete, and crystal) which can be linked to four views of time (the past, the future, the present, and eternity). He also looks at the archetypal nature of many of Ballard’s characters: the rather bland Ballardian everyman for protagonist (almost always a white, male, middle-class professional), the lamia-like woman, and the Prospero/Caliban-like pairing between a presiding older, richer character and a working-class servant/jester-type. Finally, there are four key themes: imprisonment, flight, ‘Time Must Have A Stop’, and superannuation.
Far from reducing Ballard’s fiction, in my opinion Pringle enriches any reading of it by pointing out the continuities and resonances between so many of the short stories and novels. He notes changes in Ballard’s writing (from his early ‘Romantic’ period which concentrated on inner landscapes, to the middle ‘dark’ period — including The Atrocity Exhibition and Crash — which looked at contemporary outer landscapes), and looks forward to what, at the time, was an emerging new strand that returns to the early Romanticism. (I think, at the time, Ballard’s next novel would have been The Unlimited Dream Company.)
As I say, this was the first book of literary criticism I read and it’s certainly the type I prefer — providing the reader with a deeper appreciation of a writer’s work, while in no way restricting or reducing it to one interpretation....more
This is the first of the Black Archive series I’ve read, and it certainly won’t be the last. I wasn’t sure, at first, that you could write a book-lengThis is the first of the Black Archive series I’ve read, and it certainly won’t be the last. I wasn’t sure, at first, that you could write a book-length examination of a single Doctor Who adventure, but Simon Bucher-Jones proves you can, going into the Gothic roots of Image of the Fendahl, the actual and fictional histories of the ‘Fifth Planet’, an examination of the ultimate implications of what the Fendahl’s evil really leads to, and a look at both the good and the bad points of the story itself.
It was only halfway through the book that I realised I’d never thought about the title of this particular story before. Why Image of the Fendahl? And right along comes a section exploring the different possible meanings of that word, ‘image’. Bucher-Jones has certainly deepened my appreciation of this Tom Baker adventure. Good job....more
Published in 1977, Briggs’s study of the English ghost story starts with something of a misstep. Blurring the boundaries by treating the term ghost stPublished in 1977, Briggs’s study of the English ghost story starts with something of a misstep. Blurring the boundaries by treating the term ghost story ‘with something of the latitude that characterises the general usage, since it can denote not only stories about ghosts, but about possession and demonic bargains, spirits other than those of the dead, including ghouls, vampires, werewolves’, Briggs goes on to declare the ghost story a dead form: ‘a vehicle for nostalgia, a formulaic exercise content merely to recreate a Dickensian or Monty Jamesian atmosphere’. Besides missing the irony of ever declaring a ghost dead, this misses the fact that the 1970s saw a massive horror boom — mostly, yes, driven by an American author, Stephen King, but including some Brits, too, such as James Herbert and Ramsey Campbell — which not only brought ‘ghouls, vampires, werewolves’ to the fore again, but a good number of ghosts, too. (Ramsey Campbell’s The Influence being one of my favourites.)
What Briggs does do, here, though, is follow the ghost story through a difficult transition period, after which the ghost story (in the strictest sense) really did seem to have reached a point of exhaustion, when the more literary use of the ghost to explore aberrant or awry psychology was ousted by Freud’s theories — which allowed the irrational to be treated directly, rather than only metaphorically — and then ended entirely by the very real horrors of the Great War. But Briggs, who’s best when looking in depth at individual works or writers, nevertheless finds writers who use ghosts or the supernatural in their own personal way even after this: Elizabeth Bowen, for instance, whose 1945 collection The Demon Lover ‘reveals her ghosts as somehow necessary to their victims, occupying spiritual voids left by the shock of war’, or Walter de la Mare. (If she’d mentioned Robert Aickman, it could well have destroyed her argument about the death of the ghost story, in its broadest sense, altogether.)
Still, an interesting read, written at a time when such stories weren’t accorded much academic attention....more
“One does not simply read Lovecraft; one rereads and ponders him—one is haunted by him.” Thus writes Donald Burleson in this in-depth overview of H P “One does not simply read Lovecraft; one rereads and ponders him—one is haunted by him.” Thus writes Donald Burleson in this in-depth overview of H P Lovecraft’s fiction. Burleson takes a Jungian approach to analysing Lovecraft’s fiction — looking at his use of mythic and imaginative archetypes, such as the inverted use of the ‘Twin Cycle of the hero myth’ in “The Dunwich Horror”, or Cthulhu as ‘the archetypal motif of death and rebirth of a god, the mythic motif of the god whose return is gloriously awaited’. I like this approach, and could have done with more of it, though I found Burleson’s book too much given over (necessarily, perhaps) to detailed plot summaries of Lovecraft’s stories, too often followed by only very brief critical comments. Perhaps, then, this is more useful as an introduction to Lovecraft’s work than a study for those who know it well. Worth a quick read for those moments of insight, though....more
Byfield divides Leiber’s fiction output into four phases, each identified with the influence of a particular writer. There’s the ‘pulp’ period charactByfield divides Leiber’s fiction output into four phases, each identified with the influence of a particular writer. There’s the ‘pulp’ period characterised by H P Lovecraft’s influence; the Gravesian period, in which Leiber takes up Robert Graves’s mythology as laid out in The White Goddess; then the two Jungian periods, the second of which sees Leiber’s writing influenced by Joseph Campbell’s Hero With A Thousand Faces.
Essentially focusing on Leiber’s own psychological development, and his use of female characters in his fiction, it’s a convincing and illuminating look at Leiber’s body of work, which, spanning fantasy, horror and SF as it does, can sometimes feel it needs a unifying narrative like Byfield’s to bring it all together....more
'Taken as a whole, the 1960s saw a greater number of significant and exciting films made in Britain than at any time before or since.' - as Murphy say'Taken as a whole, the 1960s saw a greater number of significant and exciting films made in Britain than at any time before or since.' - as Murphy says in his conclusion. This is a good introduction to 60s British cinema, with chapters on 'Kitchen Sink' and realist film, the critical attitudes of the times, art cinema, the organisation of the industry, 'Swinging London', horror films, crime and spy films, comedy, and how the big (Hollywood) production companies worked in Britain.
Inevitably, with such a large subject, individual films are skimmed over (in his introduction, Murphy apologises for missing out any mention of some key films, directors, and actors), so the emphasis is perhaps slightly more on mentioning films you might not have heard of, or which have been unfairly disparaged, than in mentioning the obvious hits. (There is an appendix listing all the significant events and films, year by year, so those major films are all included there.) I certainly came away with a list of films to see, which is why I picked this book up to start with....more
Sir Christopher Frayling (who provides an excellent introduction and commentary to the BFI’s DVD release of Jack Clayton’s 1961 film The Innocents) prSir Christopher Frayling (who provides an excellent introduction and commentary to the BFI’s DVD release of Jack Clayton’s 1961 film The Innocents) provides an exhaustive guide to the production of one of the best ghost story films ever made. He begins with chapters on Henry James’s novel, The Turn of the Screw, William Archibald’s stage play, then the various stages of script development, first with Archibald, then John Mortimer, then Truman Capote (who was taking a break from writing In Cold Blood at the time). Frayling is thorough, going through the differences in all the script versions, quoting from the drafts and Jack Clayton’s own notes at each stage. It’s pretty much all you’d ever want to know about The Innocents — if not slightly more! These BFI guides can be variable, but this is a solid, scholarly look at the making of the film, not heavy on critical interpretation, but certainly documenting the development of the script and storytelling elements as much as anyone could want....more
New Ways to Kill Your Mother collects some of Colm Tóibín’s biographical essays about writers, including Henry James, W B Yeats, Synge, Beckett, ThomaNew Ways to Kill Your Mother collects some of Colm Tóibín’s biographical essays about writers, including Henry James, W B Yeats, Synge, Beckett, Thomas Mann, Borges, Hart Crane, Tennessee Williams, John Cheever and James Baldwin, focusing (as that attention-grabbing title suggests) on familial relations. And not just maternal ones. The opening essay, which I found the best in the book, “Jane Austen, Henry James and the Death of the Mother” explores the uses of aunts in literature, and surprised me by proving they do in fact have a use. Acting as mothers-who-aren’t-mothers, the aunt has a licence to be either horrible or ineffective as a substitute parent, without seeming as awful as a horrible/ineffective mother would. Aunts, then, are like step mothers in fairy tales - placeholders where mothers should be, allowing the writer a freedom that having a mother as a character wouldn’t allow.
Elsewhere, there are absent fathers — the final essay, “Baldwin and Obama: Men Without Fathers”, points out similarities in the autobiographies of James Baldwin and Barack Obama, starting with how both begin the telling of their life stories with the deaths of their fathers. Meanwhile, W B Yeats’ father — who writes a play late in life and decides that his son ought to come to him for writing advice, now — sounds like he’d make a wonderful comic character, though not a great father, really. The essay on Thomas Mann is more about Mann himself as a father… Ick. Let’s just say that writers as fathers, in this book (John Cheever is another), don’t come across too well.
Tóibín doesn’t draw many overall conclusions about writers’ relations with their families, but certainly presents enough examples to show how profoundly these relationships affect writers and their works. Which I suppose is almost too obvious a thing to say, but is an endlessly fascinating subject, all the same....more
There are plenty of books about the novel, but disappointingly few by actual novelists. Perhaps, if you can do it, you can’t necessarily talk about itThere are plenty of books about the novel, but disappointingly few by actual novelists. Perhaps, if you can do it, you can’t necessarily talk about it, but I think it’s worth listening when novelists — particularly proven ones, like Forster — speak about their craft, even if all you can pick up is scraps.
Which is what I feel about this book. Forster, as a critic, is very good at talking about individual novels or novelists. Insights into Dickens, Austen, Henry James, George Eliot, Dostoevsky and others, are scattered throughout the lectures — always too briefly, but always saying something interesting:
“Dickens’ people are nearly all flat… Nearly every one can be summed up in a sentence, and yet there is this wonderful feeling of human depth. Probably the immense vitality of Dickens causes his characters to vibrate a little, so that they borrow his life and appear to lead one of their own…”
What Forster isn’t so good at, for me, is general statements about the craft of the novel. One reason for this is that, when he makes them, they’re too general and don’t sound nearly as insightful as his specific criticisms; another is that, when he makes them, he often states them in such a vague way that I sometimes was left unsure (even after reading the relevant paragraph two or three times) what exact point he was making. Perhaps, it’s the fact these lectures were given in the mid-1920s, and what he says may since have become general knowledge. His distinction about round and flat characters, for instance, is wonderfully useful:
“The test of a round character is whether it is capable of surprising in a convincing way. If it never surprises, it is flat. If it does not convince, it is flat pretending to be round.”
Forster almost lost me straightaway, though, with his chapter on ‘Story’. Forster is not interested in story. He thinks it appeals to the lowest element in a reader: curiosity. I love a good story, and am as curious as Alice. What makes it worse is that Forster devotes a later chapter to ‘Plot’ (which he does approve of), whose only difference from ‘Story’ is that it includes motivation. Meanwhile, his definition of ‘Fantasy’, in the chapter of that name, includes anything which lies outside Forster’s own day-to-day life. To him, Tristram Shandy is the best of fantasy novels, a definition which would have most modern readers of fantasy scratching their heads. Forster gives a list of things which he thinks make a novel fantasy: “the introduction of a god, ghost, angel, monkey, monster, midget, witch into ordinary life…” Midget? Monkey? (Yet Forster wrote a few good fantasy stories himself, including some SF, ‘The Machine Stops’. I don't recall it featuring a monkey.)
But then there’s the chapters on ‘Prophecy’ and ‘Pattern and Rhythm’. Both were Forster at his most interesting. In the former, he defines a type of novelist whose “theme is the universe, or something universal, but he is not necessarily going to ‘say’ anything about the universe; he proposes to sing, and the strangeness of the song arising in the halls of fiction is bound to give us a shock.” As examples, he gives Moby Dick, The Brothers Karamazov and Wuthering Heights, and proves his point by comparing a passage from George Eliot (religious, but not ‘Prophetic’) with Dostoevsky (religious, and definitely ‘Prophetic’). In ‘Pattern and Rhythm’, he looks at the overall shape and effect of novels, analysing Henry James’s The Ambassadors (it’s got an hour-glass shape) and Proust’s then-unfinished novel sequence. With these two chapters, it feels more like Forster’s saying something worth listening to.
To me, Forster’s look at novels is at times bland, at times deeply insightful. And while there may be more blandness than insight, when the insight does come, it usually proves worth the wait....more
I came to Harold Bloom not as an academic, but as what he (after Dr Johnson and Virginia Woolf) calls a ‘Common Reader’ — not that I think of myself, I came to Harold Bloom not as an academic, but as what he (after Dr Johnson and Virginia Woolf) calls a ‘Common Reader’ — not that I think of myself, with my peculiar reading tastes, as common, but then, what reader does? And I’m not really interested in Bloom’s canonising, but rather in the idea of, as he calls it, ‘confronting greatness’: asking what it is that makes a truly great book great. Bloom’s answer:
‘One breaks into the canon only by aesthetic strength, which is constituted primarily of an amalgam: mastery of figurative language, originality, cognitive power, knowledge, exuberance of diction.’
But above this, he places the wonderful quality of ‘strangeness’: ‘a mode of originality that either cannot be assimilated, or that so assimilates us that we cease to see it as strange.’
Bloom conceives of literature as a sort of Valhalla for great works, which continue to fight for aesthetic supremacy long after the death of their authors. He praises great literature in ways that make me want to re-read all my favourite books, whether they’re in his canon or (as they often aren’t) not. Reading The Western Canon for me, then, is a way of reawakening my own love of reading; it provides a series of poetic metaphors for deepening my appreciation of the books I love. I don’t think by any means that ‘confronting greatness’ is the only reason to read - I prefer a good story, above all - but every so often it’s good to bask in the idea that, throughout the centuries, we human beings have created a handful of works that deserve to be treated as great — deserve to be read deeply and creatively — because it is in their ‘aesthetic strength’ and ‘strangeness’ that we find a picture of what it means to be a human being....more
Maitland visits a forest every month for a year, to get in touch with the woodland and to think about fairy tales. I have to say, I was expecting moreMaitland visits a forest every month for a year, to get in touch with the woodland and to think about fairy tales. I have to say, I was expecting more about fairy tales and less about the forest visits — every chapter did have something to say about fairy tales, but usually it was buried amidst a lot of what seemed to me Sunday-supplement style writing about the visit (the weather on the day, how they reached the forest, etc.), which I tended to skip over. In addition, Maitland rounds off each chapter with a retelling of a fairy tale. Having recently read my way through Grimm, I skipped these, too, as they didn’t seem to be adding much.
Maitland does have some interesting insights into fairy tales, and their connections with forests — her idea that the woodland is peculiar to central European fairy tales is convincing, as are her observations on how forests are treated within the fairy tales — but I think I’d have preferred a single short essay bringing together these insights, rather than this foresty ramble. I suppose I missed the significance of the word ‘gossip’ in the book’s title!...more
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