A Decent Standard of Manners
Both daughters have said they miss checking in here nightly. I’ve quite enjoyed the freedom from the daily blog, but am happy to record some doings.
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I first started on Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of TIme in 2016. It is a difficult read at times because of the voice of the narrator, Nicholas Jenkins. Jenkins is a decent enough man, though not especially distinguished. The books are his observations on his life and the characters that come and go in it. For the most part, though not entirely, these are the middle and upper-middle classes who are largely in a state of decline and fall through the twentieth century. Jenkins’s voice is somewhat dull, and his recollections heavy with subclauses and sub-subclauses and digressions, all of which make him something of a prolix narrator, and that, I suspect, is why many make a start and give up on the series (and why I put it aside for a while).
I’ve taken it in fits and starts, but I’m now on book ten of the sequence–Books Do Furnish A Room and enjoying it. I thought the three books dealing with WW2 particularly good, Jenkins’s voice changing to a slightly more clipped and direct manner as befits his rise from subaltern in a Welsh Regiment to major in an obscure backroom post in London.
Jenkins himself is endlessly problematic: his function is to be the observer and, though the books are written first person, we don’t ever really get close to him. It’s something of a writing cliché, but, through the eyes and voice of Jenkins, Powell shows rather than tells and in doing so allows us only occasional glimpses of Jenkins’s true feelings. However, beneath the prolix syntax and the curiously unengaging narrator, lies a series of character portraits that can be very funny (Wodehouse was a fan) and unexpectedly moving.
The novels set post WW2 have a different voice again, rather as if Jenkins is reverting to a pre-war persona that no longer quite fits, while the appalling Kenneth Widmerpool, who made his way to full Colonel through his mastery of bureaucratic manoeuvres and connivances in Whitehall, has become a Labour MP without ever running his colours up an ideological staff. I’ve met his type.
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I’ve been watching Loki, which I’ve found entertaining and fun. It’s about the only TV I have watched though, except football.
In similar Marvel vein, I watched Black Widow, which is a decent film within the Marvel bubble, though not quite the triumph I’ve seen people proclaiming it to be. Back in 2017 (Conservative but not Entirely Unfun) I wrote here
My touchstone for superhero movies remains The Incredibles, which was pitch-perfect, although it benefits from being animated. The best of the live-action crop, for me, is Logan, which succeeds as a fine super-hero movie by dint of being a fine movie by any standard, rather in the way Jessica Jones was streets ahead of the TV equivalents. Logan also, and notably, largely avoids big set up CGI fests and concentrates on character and personal tragedy.
You might think it unfair of me to contrast Wonder Woman with Logan, as they are very different movies. But that is also my point. Wonder Woman is a good superhero movie; Logan dared to be something else.
Since then we’ve had the excellent Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse as well.
Black Widow explicitly invokes the ghost of Roger Moore-era James Bond and is entertaining in that respect. However Black Widow is at its best when focusing on character and at it’s weakest when Ray Winstone’s General Dreykov monologues in best Bond-villain style about his dastardly plan and our heroines set about arranging his demise. As with many Marvel productions, it is a good film, but there’s an even better one struggling to get out.
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I’ve been working away behind the scenes on a couple of projects and can now say that I plan to have a collection of linked short stories, Coyote In The Corner, published later this year in time for Christmas, in ebook and print on demand paperback. The linking elements in the stories grew from wondering how vampires would react to climate change and subsequent loss of habitat (badly, as it turns out). More on this nearer the time.
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