I’ve decided to re-read a few of my favourite books.
When I read it in the 1990s I thought that Kolymsky Heights was one of
the best adventure thrillers I’d ever read.
A captive scientist in a secret research station deep in Siberia smuggles a message to an Oxford professor he knew earlier in his life. The CIA send Jimmy Porter into the post-Soviet wilderness to infiltrate the station. Porter is a Canadian-Indian (now more wokely called a "native Canadian"), a gifted linguist and survival expert. Getting him into Siberia in the guise of an “indigenous Russian” takes up two thirds of the narrative. What’s going on at the secret establishment has echoes of the X-Files. Getting him out with this world-changing secret is another challenge.
Lionel Davidson vividly recreates the Siberian permafrost and the people who live there (it’s where gold and other minerals are mined in huge quantities). This is a story like no other, bone-chilling in its setting and nerve-shredding in its tension. After twenty-five years I still rate it in my all-time top ten thrillers – maybe in my top five.
Another episode in the upstairs/downstairs soap-opera life of the Crawley family, their heirs, their spouses and their friends – and, especially cherished, their servants.
We’ve moved on a year or so from last episode. Tom Branson has married Lucy, Imelda Staunton’s heiress daughter. Lady Mary’s car-crazy husband is away on a rally, leaving her to develop a crush on the director (Hugh Dancy looking cuter and less fraught than he was in Hannibal) who’s filming a historical (almost hysterical) movie at Downton (the fee will restore the leaky roof). Mary will also have a key role when the movie goes from Silent to Talkie. The film crew brings new romance into the life of Barrow, the gay butler in a very anti-gay era.
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| Maggie Smith as Duchess Violet |
How wonderfully all the cast slip back into their familiar (and much-loved) roles after a gap of two years or more. Dame Maggie, of course, dominates her every scene. Hugh Bonneville is given reasons to cry and he does tearful as believably as he does starchy. Mary and Edith are adorable as always. Mr Molesley gets to save another day.
Plenty of people pooh-pooh Downton and its fans. I don’t watch any of the British or Aussie soaps, but I wouldn’t miss an instalment of this. There’s talk of a third movie. Bring it on!
This is not (not quite) the Les and Edna show; this is the ‘Making Of’ show, with Humphries talking about his early life in Melbourne and the ‘conceptions’ of Dame Edna as a send-up Australian housewife and Sir Les as a drunken Events Director who got promoted to Cultural Attaché. These two long ago took on lives of their own and are now much-loved figures on the global celebrity circuit.
Overall, the evening was a joyous reunion with Edna and Les – in hilarious video clips, including Edna’s naughty invasion of Charles and Camilla’s box at the the Royal Variety Show in 2013 (www.youtube.com/watch?v=1r3S5UKP7ME).
The Barry Humphries show is touring. Don’t miss it if it’s anywhere near you. Newsflash: we are promised another ‘Farewell Tour’ next year. Edna may take as long to leave the stage as that earlier Australian diva, Dame Joan Sutherland!
This is a collection of ten short plays, designed to
be performed as mini-operas. I watched several of them, played but not sung, on
Zoom last year. They each encapsulate a chapter of gay history, revisited or re-imagined.
All of them are clever and interesting. They are all good. A few of them are
outstanding. My absolute favourite is the first one, Two Queens, set in 1900, in which Queen Victoria visits Oscar Wilde
on his deathbed in Paris. Her Majesty is given liberty to borrow some of
Oscar’s most famous lines!
Wilde (or his ghost) pops up in some of the later dramas, affirming his role as the “patron saint” of gay liberation. EM Forster, Siegfried Sassoon. Noel Coward – many iconic gay figures of the century are here, revisited or re-imagined. Radclyffe Hall supplies, rather earnestly, the L in LGBT. Ivor Novello, sentenced to prison for fiddling petrol coupons during WW2, shares a cell with a psychotic gangster. The Jeremy Thorpe scandal is re-interpreted with Norman Scott’s dogs given voices and a key role! There’s an episode in Weimar Berlin that features Gerald Hamilton, said to be the inspiration for Christopher Isherwood’s Mr Norris; the play is a splendid ‘companion piece’ to Cabaret; I’d love to hear it sung.
Peter Scott-Presland has risen splendidly to the challenge of giving historical characters an ironic and incisive new script (to sing!). A Gay Century is a towering achievement. And Volume Two is due out soon.
A former detective, now a doctor, Kate Green goes to
Brighton to take up a locum post, only to find the friend she was to stay with
has been brutally murdered. With the police keen to write off Jaqueline’s death
as a suicide, Kate turns detective again. Her investigation uncovers a web of
corruption involving drug distribu-tion and the trafficking of foreign girls
into prostitution. There are more killings.
Peter James’s 17-year series featuring Inspector Roy Grace has already made Brighton & Hove the ‘murder capital’ of south-east England! Christine Mustchin looks set to offer Mr James some strong competition. A sequel to After Jaq is promised. Ms Mustchin writes a lean elegant prose and builds her story to a thrilling climax.
Two good reasons to see this. The title – it’s a
movie about a dog. And Channing Tatum, one of the most likeable as well as one
of the most attractive of Hollywood stars.
Tatum plays an Afghanistan war veteran recovering from traumatic injuries who is assigned to escort army dog Lulu (a Belgian breed similar to German Shepherd) on her final mission. Trained to sniff out and attack terrorists, Lulu is unstable after all she’s been through and is to be put down after Channing takes her to the funeral of her former handler.
Needless to say, on the long road journey to the funeral Channing and Lulu are going to bond and meet some weirdoes. To say more risks spoilers. This is a less mawkish movie than A Dog’s Purpose (which I loved, btw), but Lulu is adorable despite her forays into viciousness (three dogs are credited with playing her) and Tatum too is (very) adorable, in his way. See it.
The three protagonists in William Boyd’s novel
are linked by being in Brighton in the summer of 1968 while a movie is filmed.
Elfrida, whose philandering husband is directing the picture, is trying to start
a new novel about the last day in the life of Virginia Woolf (who went into a
river not far from Brighton). Talbot, the film’s harassed co-producer, fears
that his partner is trying to freeze him out; he also has mild urges to venture
down new sexual paths. Anny, the movie’s self-obsessed American star, is
juggling two lovers and having to deal with an ex-husband on the FBI’s Most Wanted
list.
William Boyd
The principal character in Hillary Clinton’s
literary debut is – can you believe it? – a female US Secretary of State. With
terrorist bus bombings in three European cities and a clear and present danger
of outrages in the US, Ellen Adams, newly appointed to the new administration
of President Douglas Williams, goes on the diplomatic offensive, jetting to
Kabul, Tehran and Moscow to meet leaders who may help to defuse the situation.
She is handicapped by hard-right ‘moles’ in Washington who are in league with
those - a global group - orchestrating the outrages. It’s very gung-ho, very Jason
Bourne; Ms Adams is frequently in the firing line, from fisticuffs in the
Oval Office to shoot-ups in caves in the mountains of Baluchistan.
President Williams has a potty mouth which calls Richard Nixon to mind more than the current incumbent. His predecessor, Eric Dunn, presided over “four years of chaos” and now lives in kingly splendor in Florida – hmmm. Other world figures, up to and including Iran’s Supreme Leader, are lightly (very lightly) fictionalized. Russia’s President Ivanov was famously photographed shirtless on a horse!
Pedro Almodovar is the maestro of the modern Women’s
Picture, and Parallel Mothers is emphatically that. Two women give birth
to their babies in a Madrid hospital. Ana (Milena Smit) is the teenage daughter
of an actress who is only interested in her career. Janis (Penelope Cruz) is a
fashion photographer and the mistress of a man who isn’t free to marry her. Ana
and Janis’s lives and destinies are irrevocably bound by something that happens
in the hospital.
If that sounds like a soap-opera story – well, it is, and a well-worked one. Almodovar’s gift is to take this trite situation and give it a glossy sheen that makes it seem almost fresh. All the cast take their roles seriously. Penelope Cruz is the best of them; on screen she has an incandescence that reminds me of Sophia Loren’s early films.
There’s a background story in which Janis’s lover is trying to get permission to excavate the grave of some villagers savagely killed in the early years of the Civil War. I rather wish that this had been given more screen time. The final scene of this movie is nothing less than magnificent.
With Covid restrictions in place and the
“insurrection” in the post-Election Capitol, the latest case for night-shift
LAPD detective Renee Ballard and retired cop Harry Bosch is about as on-the-button
as you can get. A murder on New Year’s Eve has a ballistic link to an unsolved ten-year-old case of Harry’s. The pair are hamstrung by lazy
and inept colleagues/superiors, a recurring theme in Michael Connelly’s books –
and presumably a factor in real-world police work.
Ballard is also investigating an ongoing serial rape case – a creepy brace of rapists called the “Midnight Men”. Both cases require dogged detective work and interviews that occasionally reveal a tiny clue to move the team forward. Connelly writes the best dialogue in current crime fiction, which gives an edge – a “zing” – to all this routine stuff. As he always does, he ratchets up the tension to a nail-biting finale. Nobody does it better in Police Department thrillers.
A professional assassin (presidentially named Tom Jefferson) is hired by mobster Sam Giancana (who famously shared a girlfriend with JFK) to murder Fidel Castro, so that Cuba can revert to its previous Mob-dominated money-spinning status. But there are other pressures on Jefferson, and he diverts his attention to a plot to remove Kennedy before the inauguration.
“Georgetown lay on his soul like a dead weight.” Philip Kerr, as we know from his WW2 and Cold War novels, has a neat way with words. His extended dialogue scenes reminded me of Robert Ludlum at his most prolix, but the assassination theme pulls the reader through the occasional slow patch. As with The Day of the Jackal, you think the end won’t spring any surprises – but it does!
Most conspiracy buffs believe that Cosa Nostra did play a key role in the events in Dallas in 1963; Oliver Stone’s movie JFK included this and several of the other scenarios in a mash-up of the conspiracy to end all conspiracies. The Shot offers one more tense, imaginative chapter to the Mythology of “Camelot”.
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| Hugh Dancy, Mads Mikkelsen & Laurence Fishburne |
The credits tell us this is “based on characters from Red Dragon by Thomas Harris”, but the “Tooth Fairy”, the family-slayer from that book, doesn’t appear till the last few episodes of Series Three. The first thirty-plus hours introduce other killers, other crimes – and, of course, Hannibal whose crimes are sometimes attributed to others.
The ill-fated Florence detective and Mason Verger (and
his sister) (from Harris’s third book) are featured, and there are scenes
augmented from Hannibal Rising, Book Four – the “prequel”. Conspicuously
absent is Clarice Starling and the whole storyline from Silence of the Lambs.
Clarice is replaced by some new female characters, including Gillan Anderson as
a shrink who is close to Hannibal and also close to psychosis herself.
The big liberty taken in this version is that Hannibal (Mads Mikkelsen) is working with Will Graham (Hugh Dancy) and Jack Crawford (Laurence Fishburne) at the FBI as a consultant; he’s also Will’s psychotherapist. We, the viewers, are shown his killer/cannibal side, but it takes a while for the others to catch on to the viper in their bosom. Will Graham bonds with Hannibal and learns what happens when the moth gets too close to the flame.
Production values are high and the cast, down to the supporting players, are all on top form. Mikkelsen’s Hannibal is a lot creepier than Anthony Hopkins’s near-pantomime baddie. The screenwriters have pushed the envelope way beyond the Tooth Fairy (and even the absent Buffalo Bill from Silence of the Lambs) to introduce their own bevy of serial slayers. Bryan Fuller is credited as creator/producer, so I guess this gore-fest is what he set out to achieve. One killer in the first series turns bodies and body parts into totem poles. This I found genuinely nauseating. This show takes us close to torture porn, of which we see increasing amounts on TV and in the cinema. I worry that this kind of thing gives nourishment to already sick minds.
Yes, I found the whole 39 episodes relentlessly compelling – apart from a few longueurs (Dancy’s breakdown is over-extended and Anderson’s character becomes tiresome). But I think it’s time we reappraised the current definition of what is classed as Suitable Viewing.
Dinner at Hannibal's. Who's on the menu?
I wasn’t going to bother with this, since The
Crown and all those documentaries have given us an overdose of Diana
and the Princes, but Kristen Stewart has received such rave write-ups I thought
I’d give it a go.
It’s a blistering performance that blows all the other versions of Diana out of the water. During three days over Christmas in Sandringham when her sons are about 10 and 8, Diana’s bulimia escalates into a full-blown breakdown. She has visions of Anne Boleyn, whose life as a royal bride famously didn’t end well.
Apart from the young princes and a starchy equerry played by a cadaverous-looking Timothy Spall, Stewart gets pretty well all the screen time. HMQ and Charles are almost background extras in this one-woman show. Sally Hawkins has a touching turn as a dresser with whom Diana is able to let her hair down.
This is very much a ‘fantasia’ on the life of the People’s Princess. Worth seeing? Hmm, maybe wait till it’s on free-to-view.
Resuming my trawl through yesteryear gay fiction
with this ‘classic’ from 1963, John Rechy’s chronicle – which we assume to be
autobiographical – of a few months in the life of a nameless hustler haunting
the cruising zones of New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago and Mardi
Gras New Orleans. It seems a bit dated today, but it’s one of the seminal books
in the literary gay canon.
Rechy sets the tone on the opening page: “One-night sex and cigarette smoke and rooms squashed in by loneliness.” Every other chapter explores the life and mindset of a fellow hustler or one of the punters (“scores”), those men who are part predator and part prey. There is some humour, especially in the full-on Attitude of the camper gays and drag queens – the most extravagant of these are Miss Destiny, the self-crowned Queen of L.A.’s Pershing Square, and Chi-Chi, a mixed-up Muscle Mary in New Orleans. But for the most part the tone is unremittingly bleak. Sylvia, the bar-owner haunted by a guilty secret, is given more depth than many of the scores.
The narrator portrays himself as the macho street
kid who’s only doing it for money but occasionally, with another hustler or one
of the scores, he almost feels the tug of involvement. But that tug has to be
resisted, because it would undermine his conviction that he isn’t really a fag.
These are some of the book’s most revealing scenes. He never admits to love and
only rarely to desire. Desperation is what drives the denizens of the Cities of
Night onto “the lonely, crowded, electric
streets.”
John Rechy
John Rechy creates a syntax of his own, routinely
omitting the apostrophes in words like “isnt”
and “dont”. Fragmented paragraphs bristle
with dashes and ellipses (...). Past and present tenses are randomly mixed. He
sandwiches words together to create a vivid new vocabulary: “nightworld”, “malehustler”, “sexhungry”.
The hallucinatory writing recalls Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs, so much
so that I wonder if either of them contributed to the edit. The fractured
narrative becomes repetitive, but there’s no denying the powerful impact of
this nightmarish journey through the Gay Underworld. “We’re trying to swim in a river made for drowning.”
the original 1960s cover
This is not an erotic novel. The sex between hustler and score is rarely described and never detailed. Rechy’s second novel – Numbers – and its successors were a lot more explicit, and he abandoned the zonked-out Beat-poetry style for the pared-down prose of Harold Robbins or Mickey Spillane.
Reading City of Night in the 1960s, it seemed exotically different and daring. London’s gay scene was a pale echo of New York’s; Piccadilly and Leicester Square never quite had the lurid tawdriness of 42nd Street or Times Square. A few pages from the end Rechy seems to foresee the rich harvest the Grim Reaper will gather from this relentlessly promiscuous community two decades later: “death lurking prematurely in a threatening black-out”. In 1963 John Rechy was a kind of “Pied Piper” figure, and as we know, the Piper – one way or another – has to be paid.
I’m a couple of years late reading this novel, which is surely set to become a modern classic. Aban-doned by her mother and her siblings, Kya Clark grows up in a shack in the North Carolina marshes with only her brutal alcoholic father for company until even he disappears. Scorned by almost all the townspeople, she gives up on school after just one day. A local boy teaches her to read; they both become experts on the flora and fauna of the swamp and the ocean. When the boy leaves to go to college, Kya replaces him in her affections with a rich-kid lothario who we know from the beginning is destined to die under mysterious circumstances.
Delia Owens brings the marshes and the creatures that live there vividly to life. She has a wonderful way with words: ‘Barkley Cove served its religion hard-boiled and deep fried.’ Inevitably, Where the Crawdads Sing brings echoes of other great writers from the Deep South, notably Harper Lee and Truman Capote. The rustic courtroom scenes have all the drama and tension of To Kill a Mockingbird.
More than once this heartbreaking story of love and loss brought tears to my eyes. The ending is one that will stay with you forever. This is without doubt one of the finest novels this century is likely to produce.
Two five-star reviews I garnered during my US Blog Tour with Gay Book Promotions this week:
Eighteen-year-old Juliet Armstrong takes a job with
MI5 in 1940, typing up tedious transcriptions of the monitored conversations of
Nazi sympathizers. She also infiltrates their ranks as a ‘fifth columnist’. It
takes her a while to realize that one of her team is a double agent and even
longer to do something about it. The operation leads, more or less accidentally,
to two murders.
A decade later, Juliet is a junior producer with children’s radio at the BBC. An anonymous letter threatens consequences from past events. As more of that past is revealed, Transcription acquires increasing hallmarks of a spy thriller, although the author’s sprightly prose means that comedy overtones accompany even death and burials. “They were at a loose end without a funeral tea to go to. Poor Joan didn’t seem entirely dead without a glass of sherry and a slice of Dundee cake to send her across the Styx.”
As in Atkinson’s previous novels, the writing is crisp and witty, often aphoristic, with pleasing echoes of the late great Muriel Spark and even Alan Bennett. The ending – and a fascinating Author’s Note – provides a splendid surprise and a resonance with one of history’s greatest spy scandals. Kate Atkinson is without doubt one of our finest current writers.
Newhaven author David Gee is in print with Lillian And The Italians,
published by The Conrad Press, Canterbury at £9.99 paperback, £3.99 Kindle,
available from Amazon and bookshops – a book about second chances.
David Gee is the pen-name of David
Helsdon, aged 78. He says: “I set out to write a novel in which a widow gets a
second bite of the cherry.
“Searching for her wayward son Andrew
in the summer of 1966, Lillian Rutherford, a 50-year-old widow from Hastings,
goes to Venice, where she meets the ex-gigolo who has shared the last four
years of Andrew’s life. His revelations about Andrew’s bisexuality shock
her.
“Going on to Amalfi, she meets Prince
Massimo Monfalcone, whose playboy son has disappeared with Andrew.
“Massimo distracts Lillian with his
life story: his first wife was murdered in a Sicilian blood-feud; his second
wife killed herself because of his infidelity. As they wait for news of their
sons, a bond grows between Lillian and the prince. A different world – a
different life – opens up for her. Is she ready for this?
“The book will, I hope, appeal to women
of all ages. Lillian learns in Venice that her son has had male as well as
female lovers, so I hope this will draw in LGBT readers. Prince Massimo’s life
includes 50 years of Mafia history, so maybe fans of The Godfather –
and movie producers! – will be attracted.
“Lillian and the Italians is
a book for women who worry that their lives will flatline after their children
– or their husbands – leave home.
“I promised my mother years ago that I
would write a novel in which an English widow finds romance and adventure in
Italy. Lillian’s girlhood and a late-term miscarriage are taken from my
mother’s life story, although she was widowed at an earlier age and fate did
not bring her a Sicilian prince; Alzheimer’s took her down a different road.
Lillian and the Italians is the life she should have had.
“My mother accompanied me on some of my
research trips to Venice, Amalfi and Sicily. The first draft of the book was
largely written on location, in cafes and bars and sitting on church steps.
“I started it in 1976 but then my job
took me overseas and I didn’t finish it until the 1990s. I’ve had to overcome a
surprising amount of resistance from editors and literary agents to a book with
a heroine aged fifty; they prefer a book with a sexy young bimbo!
“I’ve started a follow-on novel in
which Lillian’s son’s life intersects with a hotel owner from Hastings in Spain
in 1968, the year of student protests in Europe and anti-war protests in the
US. Hopefully it will soon be possible to fly to Spain for some location
research. For now I’m relying on memories of my first visit to Benidorm in the
1960s when Benidorm had had an unfinished promenade and very little highrise –
not the Benidorm we know today.”
This link will take you to the full
article online:
https://www.hastingsobserver.co.uk/arts-and-culture/books/east-sussex-author-pens-the-life-he-wished-his-mother-had-led-3267700
