Gareth L Powell is a British writer I’d not come across before. But the usual rule applies: Stars and Bones was a 99p special, so I bought it.
This struck me as a space opera out of the Scalzi school, which means there’s a universe of FTL travel, a certain amount of fighting and peril, all leavened by snark and wit from down-to-earth characters. Earth was on the brink of nuclear destruction but humanity was saved from itself by a god-like race who can manipulate matter and time. Exiled from Earth, humanity now lives in a vast fleet of ark ships, forbidden from interfering with planetary life ever again.
A scout ship encounters a different kind of alien and things start going badly wrong. It’s left to a second scout ship and its AI and chief navigator to try to rescue the situation.
I found this enjoyable enough. It rocks along, easy to read, not quite at Scalzi levels of entertainment, but all right if you like this sort of thing.
I tried not to dwell too much on pernickety plot details. A Kim Stanley Robinson version of this would go into great detail on the ships’ systems and internal ecologies (as in Aurora); an Adrian Tchaikovsky version would spend hundreds more pages on the alien intelligence. But that would be to detract from the page-turning space adventure this wants to be, with action from the first page to the last. As to why a human civilisation banned from settling on planets would bother with scout ships; or why there would be a security apparatus with authority to threaten dire consequences against a non-cooperative captain is never explained. Some of the characters here are just sketches and some of the viewpoint narrators do a chapter or two and then disappear, which was slightly unsatisfying.
While this tells a story which comes to a conclusion, there is at least one other book in the series (Descendant Machine), though the author’s home page says you can read the books in any order.
First published in 1984, this is something of a classic, the kind of fantasy novel that has transcended its genre and garnered academic attention. It’s the kind of fantasy novel that you think people who don’t read genre fiction should probably read.
Needless to say, I’d never heard of it.
But it popped up as a 99p deal, so into the Kindle it went, and here we are. As older readers will know, I have read a lot of fantasy over the years, but I have mixed feelings about it. I prefer science fiction, but recent trends in SF have left me cold and casting about.
Mythago Wood was not what I was expecting. Completely unexpected, but once you start reading, somehow obvious. I don’t mean obvious as in predictable, but in the sense of, why didn’t anybody think of this before?
A mythago is a myth-image, an entity created out of the human psyche, the collective unconscious of memory and myth. Jungian archetypes, dream creatures, race memory. Mythagos can appear human, or can be animal, vegetable or mineral. They can be buildings, landscapes, characters.
The setting is Ryhope Wood, a small area of primeval woodland in Herefordshire. I remember years ago being told that Highgate Wood in North London is an area of ancient woodland that has somehow survived since the days of the Domesday Book. The idea that something so ancient could still exist in the modern metropolis is amazing to me. The Woodland Trust’s web page about ancient woodland has the following pre-amble:
Home to myth and legend, where folk tales began. It fuelled our ancestors and still houses thousands of species. Ancient woodland has grown and adapted with native wildlife, yet what remains only covers 2.5% of the UK.
The fictional Ryhope Wood is just such a place. It’s in a fairly isolated spot, and can be walked around in less than a day; walking into it is another matter, however. It resists incursion. Follow a path and you find yourself walking in circles, ending up at your starting point. A child’s model boat, floated in on the small stream that meanders through the wood, emerges from it six weeks later.
People disappear.
The protagonist here is war veteran Stephen Huxley, who returns reluctantly from France a year or so after after the 1939–1945 war, in order to help his older brother Christian, who is living alone in Oak Lodge, the family home, with a woman called Guiwenneth. The brothers’ father has died, leaving behind a study full of papers concerning his obsession with the nearby woodland and the people – and animals – who live there. Now it seems that Christian is similarly obsessed with the woods: and Guiwenneth is nowhere to be seen – gone.
The two brothers had themselves encountered mythagos from the woods when they were children, incidents their father had explained away: gypsies, he said. But now the two men have access to his private papers and Christian is convinced something else is going on. The people in the woods are characters from myth and legend: King Arthur, Robin Hood, Guinevere, and others from deeper, older myths.
When Christian disappears into the wood, Stephen begins his own investigation.
All of which is fascinating in itself, but what really sets this book apart is Holdstock’s prose style. He writes with a clarity and elegance that make this a deceptively easy read. Deceptive because the ideas are complex and sophisticated, while the prose is beautiful and clear. And then there are breathtaking passages like this:
‘I am the fish that struggles in the water, swimming towards the great grey rock that marks the deep pool. I am the daughter of the fisher who spears the fish. I am the shadow of the tall white stone where my father lies, the shadow that moves with the day towards the river where the fish swims, towards the forests where the glade of the woodcocks is blue with flowers. I am the rain that makes the hare run, sends the doe to the thicket, stops the fire in the middle of the round house. My enemies are thunder and the beasts of the earth who crawl by night, but I am not afraid. I am the heart of my father, and his father. Bright as iron, swift as arrow, strong as oak. I am the land.’
Such a good book, one that puts you in touch with the ancients, and makes you consider woodland walks in a new light.
I downloaded this as an audiobook on Libby, which is the app that allows you to borrow ebooks and audiobooks using your library membership.
The problem with Libby and audiobooks is that the availability is patchy. Some titles by quite prominent authors are just not available, and those that are have artificial limitations placed on them as to how many people can borrow at once.
Which is how I ended up downloading The Dry, which I’d seen reviews of, but wasn’t sure I’d enjoy. Turns out, it was pretty good, if a little bit formulaic. There’s nothing inherently wrong with genre formulae of course (that’s why we like genres), but sometimes the tropes just make you tired if you aren’t in the mood for them.
Item: cop returns to his home town after decades away and gets a hostile reception. Item: said hostile reception is because of an unresolved Something That Happened A Long Time Ago. Item: current visit is because an old friend (Or Was He?) has died in Mysterious Circumstances.
So that’s the kind of thing, which combined with the Australian setting, just makes you kind of roll your eyes.
But as with all genre pieces, it’s all in the execution, and the execution is good. Aaron Falk, a federal agent specialising in financial crime, returns to his home town for his former best friend’s funeral. The friend has apparently killed his wife and son and then turned the gun on himself in the midst of a catastrophic drought. The whole town is on edge, and then Falk turns up: a man suspected of involvement in the death of a 16-year-old girl 20 years earlier.
Falk stays in a local pub, and endures the hostility of the locals for the sake of his friend’s family, who want him to look into the apparently open and shut case of the murder-suicide. And so he stays a little longer than he intended, encountering old friends and enemies, but also forming a kind of partnership with the local cop, an outsider with no axe to grind.
There is the usual array of stock characters here: the attractive woman who-might-have-been; the embittered family of the dead girl; the hostile neighbours of the murder family; and the town itself – almost dried up and blown away, a spark away from catastrophe.
The Last Thing He Told Me (TV+) A workaday mystery thriller in which Jennifer Garner, her out of Alias, mislays a husband, him out of Game of Thrones, who does a runner, leaving Garner to deal with his bratty kid by his dead first wife. Garner, who plays a WOODTURNER who makes SALAD BOWLS lives in a houseboat that would cost a minimum of $1.5 million. Sure, the husband does something businessy, but then does his runner because something’s up with that. I dunno. It’s all very by-the-numbers, and my biggest problem is that the bratty kid is really bratty and also wanders off randomly, so you kinda want her to get kidnapped already. Thing is, I love Jennifer Garner, and a cameo appearance by her Alias dad Victor Garber gave me happy memories. Three stars, I suppose.
Citadel (Amazon Prime) Amazon have been spending money again, but the result is… average. This is a kind of mashup of The Bourne Identity and The Long Kiss Goodnight without the latter’s witty script and without the former’s charismatic cast. Stanley Tucci is there playing a magnetic spymaster, with charisma-free zone Richard Madden as the memory wiped secret agent whose job it is to retrieve the thingy from the whatsit before the bad guys get to it. Lesley Manville is the moustache-twirling villainous Brit, and the whole thing is like noisy wallpaper. With writers on strike at the moment because they want some career prospects and a better financial deal, I am concerned that Amazon is throwing money at vanity projects that wind up being underwhelming. Wheel of Time was all right, though I don’t know anybody who watched it. The Lord of the Rings thing was a ridiculous waste of everybody’s time (and I don’t know anybody who watched it). And now this. Sheesh.
The Diplomat (Netflix) This was unexpectedly good, for a Netflix show. TV treasure Keri Russell plays a US career diplomat who is usually sent to trouble spots, but unexpectedly lands the role of Ambassador to the UK, a job she takes without having to sit through Congressional hearings or really knowing why she has been given it. Everybody else knows, though: the Big Secret is that she is Being Groomed to take over as Vice President (that’s enough title case). Ridiculously unlikely scenarios ensue, with Russell clashing with her bad boy diplomat husband Rufus Sewell and getting hot under the collar about UK politician David Gyasi, a man who has to keep fighting fires because his boss is Boris Johnson Rory Kinnear. It’s silly, but it’s fun, but it’s silly. And Keri Russell is unmissable, as she was in The Americans. Having said that it’s silly, it is also in its own way frighteningly realistic:
Seems an unlikely scenario: what if the US President was impossibly old (and successor to an idiot), and you were sent to be Ambassador the UK, which has a dangerously incompetent prime minister? Couldn’t ever happen, but it’s entertaining nevertheless.
Silo (TV+) Another show that seems to have had a lot of money thrown at its production design is this latest science fictioner from Apple, which is set in a post-apocalyptic world in which everybody has to live in an enormous underground bunker because the environment outside is poisoned… or is it? There’s nothing original here, but the pieces are put together quite well. Nobody really remembers why they’re there because of an Incident (shades of Richard Paul Russo’s Ship of Fools), but it also seems to be illegal to try to uncover the truth, or to hoard Artefacts of the old world. There’s a secret police force and some surprising early deaths. It’s all right, but I do scratch my head sometimes at the IP that gets picked up and turned to series when there is much better IP out there just waiting to be discovered. Silo is based on something that was originally self-published on Kindle, so it ought to give me hope. Instead it fills me with sadness. Wither Tim Powers, wither Martha Wells, wither Robert Charles Wilson? Repeat to fade.
Drops of God (TV+) Finally, another Apple thing. This one is another of those international co-productions with three languages on the soundtrack (like the impenetrable Liaison — only better). It’s based on a Japanese manga series, and is a left-field story about a Japanese man and a French woman who are pitted against each other in a wine tasting contest in order to inherit the priceless wine collection of the woman’s estranged father (and his mentor), who has died. The problem is, his family absolutely forbid him to participate and she passes out every time alcohol passes her lips due to childhood trauma. So will he defy his family and will she overcome her complete ignorance about wine? Told through a series of flashbacks that slowly make sense of the present, this for me is probably the pick of the bunch here, with the producers coming up with creative ways to visualise the taste of wine. Really enjoying it so far. And though you can see the PLOT TWIST coming down the line, it’s an congenial ride.
I have to say, I hovered over the Goodreads star rating on this, and I’m still torn between giving it three stars (okay if you like this sort of thing) and four stars (quite good). The problem? I am always squeamish and this book in particular (and its various substances) was always going to give me the icks or the squicks. I had been forewarned: so why read it in the first place?
Well, apart from the icky stuff, it’s a fairly straightforward adventure in bookselling (and buying), which is not a bad world to lose yourself in. It’s not exactly “cozy crime” (which is having a bit of a moment) but it is an interesting world of book fairs and first editions. I’m reminded that one of my favourite John Le Carré’s is The Russia House, which starts in such a world. So it’s a kind of fantasy-mystery-adventure story, which on the surface is quite appealing. It’s a decent story and it rocks along, and at least one podcaster I respect recommended it, so.
On the other hand, the particular book being pursued here is a sex magic book, and that’s where it gets icky. I believe I had a character in my novel The Wake Knot respond to the thought of sex magick (with a k) with a simple, ew. But I went in knowing this, and the truth is that those scenes that are likely to prompt squeamishness are few and far between. There is quite a bit of sex in here, but it isn’t sexy, I don’t think. In fact, I don’t think sex in novels is ever sexy.
But ignoring all that stuff there are some structural problems. There is a lot of travelling around, and bumping up against different characters in pursuit of the book. Well, this means it tends towards the Menippean satire, as our protagonist-narrator encounters these characters and their philosophies. But (unlike in a thriller/mystery) there is no doubling back, in the sense that we get what we need (or learn what we need) and then move onto the next. There’s no going back to someone and saying, you lied!
Which is a problem because (slight spoiler ahead) there’s a revelation towards the end that one of these characters murdered somebody. But I completely blanked on the name of the victim, not remembering who they were in the story until a couple of pages later. And then I was like, oh. Well, that should have had more impact, but it didn’t, because I’d completely forgotten about them. Because this is a novel about the pursuit of a book rather than the solving of a murder mystery, it’s hard to care. But at the end, I think you’re supposed to care?
Here’s the set up: one-time novelist Lily Albrecht has been forced to abandon her promising literary career and sell books for a living in order to care for her husband, who has some form of early onset dementia and is completely locked in, requiring round-the-clock care. She’s involved somewhat reluctantly in the world of rare and collectible books. I actually would have liked a bit more of this scene, as I quite like it. But the ruthless plot moves us on. Through another bookseller she learns of a collector who is after an exceedingly rare book of magic(k-k-k), and gets involved because the money at stake will help her in her dire financial situation. But then the other bookseller is killed and Lily finds herself front and centre in an international pursuit of power and sex. The first job is to find out just who it was wanted to buy the book.
Well, you may have spotted in that brief summary that the other bookseller was killed (in a mugging). And yes, I did completely forget about that by the time I reached the end. So a little frown creased my brow and it took me a couple of pages to remember that particular precipitating incident.
So: three stars, or four? I think, in the end, that it was readable without being particularly gripping. There was a fair amount of squick, so I think perhaps three stars. Which, again, means: if you think you might enjoy this, you probably will.
I wrote a while ago about my enjoyment of The Twyford Code by Janice Hallett, which I described as “a properly entertaining, very clever, puzzle box of a book”. So Hallett’s other two books were on my list, and given that I was about to embark on a long drive over easter, I downloaded The Appeal to listen to on my way to France.
Like The Twyford Code, The Appeal is constructed from fragments in epistolary style. Texts, Whatsapp messages, emails, and so on. The blurb says, “One murder. Fifteen suspects” so you have certain expectations. But, unlike a classic detective novel, the novel doesn’t begin with a murder. Two legal interns are tasked with ploughing through a lot of material looking for clues and seeking to exonerate somebody – only we don’t know who. We neither know who the victim is nor who the possibly wrongly convicted murderer is. So that’s the first kind of appeal, or the first meaning of the title.
The background is amateur dramatics: you can already imagine the petty jealousies, frustrations and mind games that go on in such groups. Again, this feeds your expectations. The narrative proper begins with the announcement of the next production, and the series of messages about auditions and rehearsals. As a reader/listener you start trying to work out who is going to get killed, and why. But then there’s a twist, as the other “Appeal” of the title is introduced. It’s a fundraiser… but again, while you might have expectations of what this will be about, Janice Hallett is quite prepared to keep pulling threads. She also has a tendency to cheat a bit, by withholding certain documents until much later in the book. So you’re kept guessing: even if you suspect what’s actually going on with one appeal, you’re never quite sure about what’s happening with the other. Who gets killed, who gets blamed, who really did it — and why?
The audiobook version is especially engaging because the publishers have employed multiple voiceover artists to read the parts. What you’re getting, then, feels more like a 12-hour radio drama than a conventional audiobook.
I enjoyed The Appeal so much that for the journey home, I downloaded The Mysterious Case of the Alperton Angels, a third Janice Hallett audiobook. As with The Appeal and The Twyford Code, the narrative has an epistolary structure. This time, a true crime writer is commissioned to write about an old case in which two teenagers and their baby survive a cult mass suicide. Eighteen years later, the baby is about to come of age, and the author wants to uncover the redacted identities of the survivors, and investigate what really happened. But, there’s a problem: another author is working on a similar book, and there’s a history between them. A rivalry, some anger and bitterness about an event in the past, and therefore an extra urgency to get to “the baby” first.
As with The Appeal, the publishers effectively employ a range of voice actors, and this brings the text to life more dramatically than a single voice would. It also gets around the issue with The Twyford Code, which is that email headers etc can be a bit of a drag to listen to when all read in the same flat voice.
I really loved both of these audiobooks, which makes Janice Hallett three for three as far as I’m concerned. A great way to pass a journey.
The Night Agent (Netflix) is a kind of mid-range drama. The usual criticisms of 2023 television apply. It’s too dark! As I said to a friend, more people would surely complain about this if they weren’t second-screening all the time. It has become a bad joke that modern TV is too dark. I do wonder when in the production process this decision is made. Is it the camera operator? Are they seeing something different through their viewfinder? Or is it happening during the grading and mastering process? In the edit suite? Is someone physically turning up the dark to the maximum? If so, I’d like to know why. The only conclusion you can draw is that a kind of collective stupidity has taken over the entire industry. Why bother spending money on set design and costume when you can just make the screen pitch dark?
As to the show itself, it’s all right. Unattractive square jawed lead actor, fine. You can tell where the budget runs out with some of the minor roles: people who deliver slightly off key performances. You don’t know who to trust, fairly typical. Twists and turns. By episode 6, they’ve run out of story so they throw in a Shocking Moment (which is not a shock) and string it out for four more episodes. I kept watching (or half-watching) till the end, though. Three stars. Which means, all right if you like that kind of thing.
Daisy Jones and the Six (Amazon) ended up being okay. Less dark, for the most part. As I said, the music was a bit average, so it was hard to believe in this supposedly amazing band. And it got repetitive and predictable because of the hoary old rock clichés. I liked the ending, which I’m going to call The Mary McCartney Moment.
Season 3 of Star Trek Picard (Amazon in the UK) is also okay. A lot of fuss concerning the return of the TNG cast. Fine. Whatever. They all look weird, especially the ones who have been under the knife. The plot is the usual fare. Massive threat, super weapon, whatever. O for the days of weird costumes and stories about free love. It’s better than its previous seasons, but of course the lighting budget has been slashed since the Original Series days. Because I’m not very engaged with it (see what I did there?), I have missed most of the Easter Eggs. Good. People should stop it with the fan service.
Talking of fan service, The Last of Us (Now) was… okay. Not as good as fans of the game thought, but watchable enough. Too dark, but that goes without saying.
The best thing* on Now TV right now is, of course, The Rookie, which is a network cop show with its heart in the right place. I actually look forward to this more than anything else on TV at the moment. The Rookie: Feds is less successful, but watchable enough. Nathan Fillion should get an award for his services to mainstream TV.
Extrapolations (TV+) is just plain bad, I’m afraid. It wants to say something about climate disaster, but it does so by trying to make us care about the wrong things. Florida is sinking? Well, good. And a synagogue is under threat? Shrug. Same reaction to all places of worship: don’t give a shit. And it’s all so very disastrous, climate-wise, that you just end up throwing your hands up. For example, an episode all about how they’re lying to the last sperm whale about there being any other whales left alive, is so completely depressing you end up feeling as suicidal as the whale. And, with all of this stuff, what am I supposed to do about it? Pretending that individuals with their small changes in lifestyle can make one iota of difference when the 1% are plundering the planet. Stop building big fucking cars etc.
Ted Lasso is back too, for its third and probably final season. All pleasant and correct. Still watchable, not no longer the surprise it was in season one, so it’s just okay now.
*No, I won’t be watching Succession. Frankly, the media’s obsession with this show is all about their bubble, and the outsized influence of the moustache twirling villain Murdoch. As with all these shows about horrible rich people, I don’t need it. I already hate rich people. And as a columnist the the Guardian points out, these narratives about how miserable rich people are seem to function as a kind of safety valve for the misery they put the rest of us through. Instead of watching shows in which actors pretend to be unhappy rich people, we should try to make actual rich people as unhappy as possible.
There seems to have been a rash of science fiction books featuring octopuses just lately, with at least one nominated for a Nebula (The Mountain in the Sea by Ray Nayler). Not sure I can see the appeal, myself.
I could just about cope with the uplifted spiders in Children of Time, Adrian Tchaikovsky‘s far future space opera about the scattered remnants of humanity and what became of them. But I waited a long time before getting around to the second in the series, Children of Ruin.
And now the uplifted spiders and their Human friends are exploring the galaxy and come across a system where humans tried to settle and failed, leaving a chaotic legacy behind in the form of uplifted octopuses and… something else.
And it’s at this point that I check out of the series and lose interest. It might not have been so bad, but this book is so very, very long (576 print pages) and quite honestly, there just is not 576 pages worth of plot. So it gets very repetitive and becomes a massive drag. It takes a good couple of hundred pages to set everything up, but by this time I was bored with it.
I read it to the end out of sheer stubbornness, since I’d read so far that to turn back would have been as tedious as going on. But by the end I was completely disenchanted with this series, and I’ll skip the last one (Children of Memory), even though it comes in at a mere 496 pages.
I wouldn’t mind the length if it was packed full of plot and I cared about the protagonists, but somehow the vast scale (in both space and time) of this is just off-putting, and neither the spiders nor the octopuses are particularly interesting to me.
So I’m avoiding all the mind how you go jokes and the so farewell then headlines. I wonder how many people are even aware of E J Thribb? I suppose if you work in the medja.
I’ve been thinking about Endeavour. It was so very good. I said ages ago that it was better than Morse, and I think it would be a harsh critic who wouldn’t acknowledge it so. As I wrote recently, Morse itself seems a bit weird now, more of a sketch than a fully realised artwork.
But that last episode? In fact the whole of the last series? It was good, and welcome, but… well. Don’t read on if you have not seen the final three episodes.
Before I start a word on length. Look away now if you don’t like thinking how everything is a little worse now than it used to be. Old man alert!
Episodes of Endeavour are 10 minutes shorter than episodes of Morse, but they fit in the same time slot. Yes, there are now 10 minutes more adverts than there were in the 80s and 90s. And as anyone who has watched recent ITV or Channel 4 will know, there are fewer adverts, shown more often, so you don’t even get variety. All the adverts are for river cruises and funerals, as far as I can make out.
Luckily, I’ve been subscribing to ITVX so I can avoid the ad breaks while watching Paris-Nice highlights and episodes of Endeavour. I did watch the first of the season live, but will not make that mistake again.
So the show is better but the experience is worse, is what I’m saying. And then there were the last three episodes.
First of all, let’s talk retcon. I think Endeavour has fallen victim to retroactive continuity. This didn’t feel like Thursday’s past coming back to haunt him so much as, how can we create a situation whereby Morse never speaks of him again? So levers were pulled, and furniture was moved, and it all felt a little creaky. So his brother didn’t lose all his money but pretended to so that the gangsters could hold something over Thursday should they ever need to? What? It doesn’t make sense. It would make more sense if his brother had given him a return-on-investment that turned out in the fullness of time to be dirty money. But no, because they couldn’t go back that far.
So then there’s the COINCIDENCE KLAXON of the dead biker being the missing boy from the children’s home, only with a different name, yadda yadda. The 19th rule of Pixar storytelling has some thoughts about coincidence, and so do I. Although this coincidence didn’t get Thursday or Morse out of trouble, it certainly solved a problem for the writers. There was this kid, and he went away and changed his name and he came back to Oxford of all places because…?
Things fall apart.
But I did like the plotlines of the penultimate two episodes, the murder-of-the-week stories. Because the second episode took aim at the £20 note burners of the Bullingdon Club, and the third created a killer who was basically a Brexit Bigot from 50 years ago, murdering people simply for having opinions he didn’t like. So it was like The Nasty Party writ large.
They may not be Nazis*, but they are nasty.
Which brings us to the finale and the falling out. I would have bought guilt as a reason for Morse’s silence. If Morse’s actions had got, say, Thursday and Joan both killed, it would explain his silence (guilt) and Chief Superintendent Strange’s antipathy towards Morse in Morse.
But the showrunners didn’t quite have the gumption to kill off Thursday, and they married Joan off to Strange, which might explain why Morse hates Strange, but not the other way around. They teased a death for Thursday (in the same spot that Morse died, which is cheesy), but they didn’t go through with it.
Instead, they had Thursday be the murderer of the biker, and Morse knew it and confronted him about it and… nothing. Actually, the falling out wasn’t even a proper falling out. They parted as friends. Sure, Thursday was going to make himself scarce, but there was no sense in which Morse was so thoroughly disillusioned with him that he could no longer bear to speak his name.
Nope. Not buying it.
As for the gun. As for the discharge of a fire arm in a church yard, off camera, well, what? It was all a dream? A suicide deferred? I don’t get it, and I don’t think anybody else does either. And don’t bother reading any of those “ending explained” articles. I suspect they’re written by AIs and they explain nothing. Ever.
In the end, I loved it, except for the bits that were put in as fan service and the retconning in an attempt to explain Morse’s silence. Why not have him actually turn Thursday in for murder? That would be a classic detective move. To paraphrase Dashiell Hammett:
When someone’s son is killed you’re supposed to do something about it. It doesn’t make any difference what you thought of him. He was somebody’s son and you’re supposed to do something about it. It’s bad business to let the killer get away with it. It’s bad all around-bad for the organisation, bad for every detective everywhere.
The Maltese Falcon
So it seems to me that would have been the way to go. It doesn’t matter what the fans think. The character has to be true to himself. And if Morse had arrested Thursday, it would have been a shocker, but in character. And it would have explained his ongoing silence on the subject. And Strange’s attitude to him.
I’ll finish on a positive. Because I did love the show. The whole cast was brilliant, but I must say a special word for Anton Lesser. I fucking love Anton Lesser. And in that last episode, when he said his farewell to the squad, talking about what a privilege it had been etc., I absolutely welled up. Fifteen words, by my count. Fifteen words is all he needed, and I was wrecked.
The new (and final) season of Endeavour prompted a brief subscription to ITVX so I can watch without suffering the torture of ad breaks, which are not only frequent and repetitive, but cause buffering in the stream. BUFFERING IN THE STREAM, I tell you.
So I watched some old Morse, back to the beginning in the 4:3 standard def late 1980s. So weird! Television has come a long way. John Thaw’s portrayal of the character is all grumpy bluster, a mere sketch compared to Shaun Evans as Endeavour. And the framing of 4:3 feels claustrophobic, an effect doubled and redoubled by directorial choices: scenes shot from behind a screen or barrier, through a window, doorway, and so on. On top of this, a lot of the editing feels abrupt, almost arbitrary, with scenes finishing before they quite seem done.
And what is most notable in those early Morse episodes, of course, was his terrible habit of being fatally involved with a woman who turns out to be a suspect. I feel that the eyeroll emoji was invented to facilitate reactions to this.
What else is on? There’s Liaison ( TV+), which is British-French co-production thing about terror(yawn)ists and hack(yawn)ers and a compromised intelligence agent keeping sec(yawn)rets from her Significant Other and some rogue French agent running around duffing people up. I’ve no idea what’s happening.
Then there’s Shrinking ( TV+), with Jason Segel and Harrison Ford, with Vanessa Williams and Luke Tennie. It wants to be the new Ted Lasso, and it has its moments, but really its just property porn. It’s interesting seeing Harrison Ford doing a bit of light comedy, and I’m watching it, but it’s not very memorable.
Meanwhile over on Amazon, we’ve got The Consultant, which is one of those doesn’t-know-what-it-is shows. The biggest question hanging over it is, how did this get made? Amazon lists its genres as “comedy, suspense, drama”, and there’s your trouble. It doesn’t know what it is. It’s certainly not funny, and substitutes a kind of crass nastiness for humour, along with a bunch of characters working in the tech industry who are all terrible. It’s Amazon reverting to type, basically, because they are the streaming network which has no taste.
Also on Amazon, we have the first three episodes of Daisy Jones and the Six, based on the best-selling novel. This is moderately entertaining, a tale of the music industry in the 70s in the same vein as Almost Famous (good), and Grace of My Heart (also good) with some elements of HBO’s Vinyl (not good). But there’s a simple problem with this kind of thing, which the TV series Nashville addressed head-on: for this potentially great Fleetwood Mac type band to be convincing, you need some convincingly good songs (and performances). So far, the songs in the show have been underwhelming, on the dull side, B-sides at best.
Then there’s the question of how great this band is supposed to be. So far, not very convincing. Partly, this is because there’s a lot of focus on the front man (and his opposite number, who for most of the first three episodes has yet to encounter the band), whereas when it comes to truly great bands, the backline are just as important. Fleetwood Mac, after all, are named after their rhythm section. So you don’t get much of a sense that this is a good band.
Then there’s the way the show tries to dramatise the process of writing songs. I feel like Macca’s conjuring of “Get Back” in Get Back is now the baseline for this kind of thing. Which is before you get to the bit where Daisy Jones joins them in the recording studio and they start arguing about which set of lyrics they’re using. LOL.
It’s watchable enough but as fascinating as we all find the stories that the music industry throws up, there is a sense that it’s always the same (old) story. I wonder about musicians, as they start ingesting too many drugs and too much alcohol: do they see themselves ploughing the same old furrow? The drink, the drugs, the womanising, the oversized egos, the moustaches. Is there anything new to say about all this?
McMinn & Cheese 