April-May Miscellany

A bit of recent reading/viewing, &c - none of which is really related to TRoAPW, quite deliberately. 

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Following my own advice, I consume the media of 1950s Britain. The 1952 film The Sound Barrier was directed by David Lean (Brief Encounter, Great Expectations, The Bridge on the River Kwai, Lawrence of Arabia, Dr Zhivago, &c), written by Terrence Rattigan, starred Ralph Richardson, Ann Todd and a young Denholm Elliot and has a soundtrack by Malcolm Arnold. If you hadn't guessed, it's about breaking the Sound Barrier.

Well, it looks good - but you might have guessed that. There's an emphasis on technical expertise, to the point of including the planes used and a number of text pilot advisors in the title credits. It is still fiction, of course, dealing with a fictional British aeroplane manufacturer and his efforts to break the Sound Barrier - at a cost to those around him, not least the test pilots. It isn't perhaps the most harrowing of psychological dramas, but there is a persistent element of tension and peril. Aside from that, there is the background of the Second World War (the test pilots are veterans) and the new excitement of the jet engine, with magnificent cloudscape vistas. 

[Incidentally, I am reminded of a past speculation. If Dune is, facetiously, 'Lawrence of Arabia in space' one might hop between David Lean films: accordingly, what does 'Dune, but drawing from Dr Zhivago instead of Lawrence of Arabia' look like? Well, the notion of Bolshevik Harkonnens squaring off against Fremen Cossacks from armoured trains has obvious appeal. But I'm not sure I know enough about the ecology of the taiga to make give this any real staying power.]

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Dark Benediction is the title of the Gollancz SF Masterworks collection of the short stories of Walter M Miller Jr - best known of A Canticle for Leibowitz.

Behold: the cover.
It does make some remote sense, honest. 

These were largely published in the 1950s, in a variety of places. A number of them have the (expected?) 'Twilight Zone' feel to them, with speculative fiction stories taking place in something very like a mid-twentieth century United States ('I, Dreamer', 'Conditionally Human' and 'You Triflin' Skunk' are among these). Then there are a few post-apocalyptic stories where the destroyed society seems to have resembled in some fashion the then contemporary US: the titular 'Dark Benediction' is among these.  Further out, some stories are absolutely science fiction, dealing with the colonisation of Mars or the spread of Humanity across the Galaxy (see 'Blood Bank' or 'The Big Hunger'). 

The post-apocalyptic and space-faring stories fairly obviously bring the mind to A Canticle for Leibowitz: certainly this is the case with 'Dark Benediction', with the notable presence of a Catholic monastery in a post-pandemic America. A series of practical but rather unlikable protagonists fill Miller's post-apocalpytic stories: this functions at its best in 'Dark Benediction' with an unsettling plague that causes the infected to strongly desire to touch the uninfected (they are still, however, quite conscious and alive: zombies they are not). The response of individuals and groups to the threat of intrusion is perhaps more unpleasant for being a 'cosy catastrophe': no atomic bombs have been let off, and infrastructure is largely intact, if abandoned.  

'Vengeance for Nikolai' is the final story in this collection, initially published in the March 1957 issue of Venture Science Fiction. The tone and content of 'Vengeance' is rather different from the other stories in the collection: the word 'Gonzo' occurs to me. It probably needs to be experienced free of any brief summary I might offer. 

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To Everything A Season is a brand new book detailing life 'in and around a particular village on the edge of the Cambridgeshire fens'. The author is Charles Moseley; it was published by Merlin Unwin - also known for Manual of a Traditional Bacon Curer, A Countryman's Creel and Much ado about Mutton.

Why do I choose to bring it to your attention? It is well-written, to be sure, and engaging - drawing together agriculture, literature, folklore and history. Beyond that, however, it is deeply knit with the natural world of its setting. It is a signal reminder of the thousands of textures and sounds and sights of the countryside, often ill-served by film or video games or the tabletop. I accept the limitations of these mediums and all the shorthand they might use to convey what a book has pages to detail - but one ought to know from what the shorthand is working.

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Fritz Lang's 1931 film M is presumably sufficiently well known as a work from that famous director to need little introduction. I had been geared up to expect something more dreadful and leering - something more in the vein of Nosferatu. The back of the box even describes it as having 'cinema's first serial killer'. Well, maybe. But that's not something to give me any particular chills in a world which has absorbed The Silence of the Lambs and Se7en as cinematic benchmarks.

Of course, that doesn't mean M is not worth seeing. It is interesting observing the streets and shops and office blocks of an early 1930s Germany, with or without a whistling Peter Lorre. I suppose the main effect I get from M is one of mundanity: the serial killer is a round, slightly gormless man. The police forces of the nameless city (which is Berlin in all but name) are neither hyper-effective nor feckless beyond belief. The principal detective is not a Sherlock Holmes-esque mastermind, nor the loose cannon of cliche: he makes relatively few great jumps of deduction, he is physically unimpressive and is quite willing to operate through his subordinates. The criminal unions of the underworld are, well, common thieves, con-men, pickpockets - not suave cat burglars or mobsters in loud suits. Their spokesperson, Der Schränker (the Safecracker, played by Gustaf Gründgens) is unpleasant - but he's just an overbearing tough who dresses to advantage and has some hazy notion of protocol. 

On top of all that, some of it is comic. The mishaps of some of the underworld unions (The rope ladder!), the workings of the Beggars' Guild - the latter is some of the best 'Thieves' Guild' stuff I've seen put to film. Hindsight tempts the viewer to look for allegory - but there's more applicable material than there is obvious parallel. The atmosphere of mob justice, police raids and debates over capital punishment is rather telling, but is nonspecific. 

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The Search for Immortality: Tomb Treasures of Han China is the catalogue of an exhibition that passed my way a few years back (images of which have appeared on this blog before). I opened it up again as a purposeful break from TRoAPW .... and was reminded quite how much of it there was! 

I'm ashamed, really, to try and summarise it all in a few paragraphs. It details the contents of a number of tombs from across the heartland of China (largely from those great stretches of plain between Beijing and Nanjing, around the Yellow and Tangtze Rivers) made for royalty during the Han dynasty - that is to say, contemporary with the late Roman Republic and lasting until after Marcus Aurelius was Emperor, about the time of Septimus Severus. 

Firstly, the craftsmanship of the grave goods is fascinating. Ornaments and utensils alike appear, with ritual or practical functions. Government seals coexist with dagger-axes. Terracotta figures act as musicians or dancers, albeit not life-sized - as compared with the rather more famous Terracotta Army. Jade ornaments furnish the dead with protection in the afterlife: suits of jade squares for the very wealthy, and simpler veils or orifice plugs for the merely wealthy. Not all of this is Chinese in origin: imported luxuries coexist with domestic products (the ornamental belt plaques are one such example: gold with closely entwining animals). And, of course, one recalls that much material may have decayed with time.

Secondly, it is a reminder of the strength of catalogues as a genre. Here are the dissipate elements described and categorised: here is how they come together. I don't suppose an audience with an awareness of, IE, Hot Springs Island or Veins of the Earth needs a reminder of this. All the same, the scale of this was very worth returning to.

Especially as it emphasises the size of China, even at this time. I keep needing to remind myself of the distances and regions involved - and I begin to long for an understanding of that context that doesn't rely upon the abstractions of, well, a Sporcle quiz. Not that I need to know the names of every Han Dynasty commandery, any more than I do the name of every Roman province. Either way, this is one to delve into again.

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Well, chaps, what else should I jolly well be reading?