Blogcritics Author: Gautam Patel

Announcement: Short-content feeds

Phillip Winn — Sun, 26 Aug 2007 12:00:00 EDT

Sunday, August 26, 2007, marks the switch of all Blogcritics.org article feeds from full-content to short-content. This is the result of several converging factors, and is unfortunately a permanent decision (as permanent as any decision can be on the web, that is). We are aware of all of the reasons that this is a Bad Idea, and we are aware that some of you will be quite upset about having to click on something to read the free content, and we're sorry. Unfortunately, despite great effort, full-content feeds are not currently economically viable. Two other factors are involved: full-content feeds have resulted in an unprecedented level of content theft, with BC content appearing on many websites, usually spam sites, without attribution or permission. This duplicate content causes a cascading set of problems, not the least of which is that search engines generally aren't favorable to duplicate content, and don't always guess correctly. Finally, our RSS advertising partner is strongly in favor of short-content feeds. We hope that you'll continue to subscribe to BC via RSS, and when an article grabs your eye, it's only a click away, still free on the BC website. Thank you for your understanding.

Mind Games with Dennis Lehane

Gautam Patel — Fri, 23 Jul 2004 09:53:21 EDT

With Mystic River Lehane catapulted himself to the top of the thriller psychological and mind-games genre. It must have been a very hard act to follow. With Shutter Island, Lehane almost pulls off the ultimate writer’s coup of going one better. Almost, but not quite; but it is still an extraordinary thriller, well above the median in the genre.In the summer of 1954, Teddy Daniels and his partner, Chuck Aule, US Marshall’s are asked to track a female inmate who has, apparently, escaped from a Hospital for the Criminally Insane. The escape seems impossible: the hospital is on Shutter Island, separated by miles of sea and cragged cliffs and buffs from anywhere. Solando was barefoot. The room was locked. There were guards at all exit points. And there is no evidence of her anywhere.Why was Solanda incarcerated at all? Apparently, she killed her own children (shades of Medea?) and now lives in her own dream world in the Berkshires, treating all around her as postmen, policemen and other seemingly ordinary denizens of a seemingly ordinary life.There’s nothing ordinary about the hospital, or the island itself. In fact, everything is just a little bit off-kilter, just a shade too extraordinary. About a third of the way through, we find that this is true of Daniels himself — his motives for being there at all are not what we believed. There is definitely something extremely sinister going on behind the scenes at the hospital. Solanda leaves a code, apparent gibberish; but Daniels unravels it and with that unravelling comes the unravelling of his own persona. What really is going on here? Is this some top-secret installation that is permitted to experiment on patients with new drugs and surgical procedures? The two Marshalls are mystified by the stonewalling from the hospital staff: no, they can’t see some records. No, they can’t look at some logs. Everything seems shrouded in mystery: codes; missing records of a recent inmate; the inaccessibility of “Ward C”, spoken of only elliptically and in hushed tones, covertly; a lighthouse that apparently treats sewage, yet is surrounded by an electrified fence and guards.A hurricane hits the island. Communication goes down, all of it. Now even the ferry back to the mainland is out of the question. Daniels and Aule are stuck here and, it would seem, being slowly driven mad.Lehane has an uncanny ear for dialogue and conversation. It’s not just accurate. He actually uses to define characters, moods and relationship and to move his plot along. Particularly good is the exchange between Daniels and the hospital director: we are left with several tantalizing glimpses. Does the director have a Nazi past (he “hits his consonants a tad hard”)? Is he some master of the ultimate mind-game?Similarly, the relationship between Daniels and Aule actually evolves and unfolds mostly through conversation. We learn that Daniels lost his wife in a tragic fire; that Aule is being hounded because of his relationship with a Japanese American woman.Lehane uses several well-known set-pieces but, to my mind, succeeds in preventing them from becoming mere trite contrivances. The storm sequence, for example, is stunning and yet it’s been done to death (perhaps from Shakespeare’s The Tempest, King Lear, Macbeth or even before). It’s a full-blown hurricane and Daniels is out there on his own, uprooted trees flying past. When it comes to building atmosphere and tension, it just doesn’t get better. There’s a creepiness in the whole set-up that somehows seems to seep deeper and deeper; you’re hooked and you’re chilled. You know, too, that clues are being flung at you and scattered around — but which is the clue and which the red herring?This is the ultimate mind-game. There’s enough horror and tension here to satiate the most blood thirsty and yet there’s no gun play, no bullets whanging around and the body count is next to zero. Much of this might have been contrived in other hands, but Lehane deals his cards deftly — dropping just enough to keep the reader off-balance while he sinks his hook in deeper. Even the title is a giveaway you realize only too late: why Shutter Island? Is this the mind’s shutter? Or one in a camera that catches discrete, disjointed images?The denouement is stunning in itself but, finally, slightly disappointing. Not very many writers in the genre can sustain such a high note of mesmerizing horror and tension. Thomas Harris did it, once, with The Silence of the Lambs and, I thought, with Hannibal, but there are plenty of people who would disagree with that assessment. The difference is that Harris created a single monster and allowed him to sprawl, with the utmost depravity, indulging his every exquisite obscenity, over several books. While also playing mind-games, Harris throws in a more than generous serving of bloodiness, especially in Hannibal which lacks the subtlety of Lambs, almost as if Harris is saying well, look, see how well I can do this, too. Sequence after sequence in Hannibal scales new heights of grotesquery: being eaten alive by wild pigs or boars, raised for just that to the sound of blood curdling screaming; a man who skins his own face under the ‘gentle’ persuasion of the good Dr Lecter Hannibal; the doctor’s dissection (live, of course) in a church or museum of a cop who gets too close; and the truly extraordinary finale that seems to me to redefine obscenity: when Hannibal serves up a gourmet meal of brain, prepared absolutely fresh, except that it’s human brain and he is performing a lobotomy even as he cooks. I believe this is one of the reasons Jodie Foster refused to do the film and even Riddley Scott knocked it off and substituted it with an altogether weaker self-mutilation — a sort of self-sacrificial offering that was supposed to accentuate Hannibal’s finer sensibilities but only succeeded in weakening the entire structure.This is perhaps easier to do than what Lehane sets out to achieve. After all, the sheer shock value of a Harrisian set up can drive you through far enough. It’s much more difficult to put a dampener on the book and still lift it out of the ordinary. Lehane very nearly pulls it off, and misses only narrowly. I’m not quite sure why. It’s shocking enough, in its own way, but not, I think, adequately ambiguous. There’s a good ten pages or more in which the reader is allowed to acclimatize and there follows a sense of inevitability. This is thin line, certainly, a delicate balance between mere contrivance and plausibility. Lehane seems anxious to avoid the former but, in the bargain, might just have compromised the book, ever so slightly. But this is perhaps just cavilling, and not reason enough to skip the book.Musings of a suist in mufti on books, music and film at Bibliophage; Gravity Denied - The Hidden Paw’s Blog at mcavity.com

Mid-forties lawyer in Bombay, India, passionate about books, music, film, food and wine.

Eat to Live

Gautam Patel — Sun, 18 Jul 2004 14:18:13 EDT

I have just had the somewhat dubious privilege of reading yet another diet book — this one called “Eat to Live” by Joel Fuhrman, MD. The reviews on Amazon are glowing. Most of them say it is a life-changing book.They’re right. This book will change your life — for the worse. It is absolutely impossible to follow Fuhrman’s edicts for a lifetime. Six weeks after you start, you will be thinner (bound to happen), and then, as you go back to a normal lifestyle, you’ll balloon again. Welcome back, yo-yo ma. There is just no way you can follow this forever — and this is the same criticism the good doctor levels against Barry Sears of “The Zone” fameFor anyone passionate about food and cooking, this book is pure poison. Following it will make you feel wretched, and will turn you into a thoroughly unpleasant human being — depressed, angry, distressed, stressed, curmudgeonly, cranky, irritable and a complete social retard. Imagine living like this: no wine, no drink, no soda, no chocolate, no dessert, no ice-cream, no cheese, no meat, no butter, no dried fruits, no bread, no pasta, no pizza, no popcorn, no rice, no wheat. Why live at all if you have to live like this?Fuhrman is obsessed by aging and death but I really don’t see the point of living to be 200 if every day of those two centuries is to be spent in such misery. Better to live fully and die happy and contented than to force such deprivation on yourself. The book makes no allowance for human frailities, needs, wants, desires or the simple fact that it is now impossible to undo (let alone in six weeks) over fifty years of “bad” eating habits.Also, I’ve learned never to trust an author who propounds his cause principally by attacking his rival theorists. Fuhrman goes for the jugular when it comes to Atkins, Sears et al. He debunks them all and, in exchange, offers his own theories, one of them being that olive oil is bad for you and raises your bad cholesterol because it is, after all, oil. To support this argument he cites an example of Crete saying that the people there are now fatter than before because they’re eating more meat, etc etc and less vegetables and fruits. There’s nothing to support this. Not a study cited to show any change in the dietary habits of the hapless denizens of Crete, nothing to show that what he says is even generally true. We’re just to take Fuhrman’s word for it. Thank you, no. You only have to look around at Italy, France, Germany and other European countries to understand why. It’s not the olive oil, stupid; it’s the refined food and the lack of exercise.Much of what he says is blindingly obvious but is presented in pseudo-scientific fashion — that fibre is good for you (who says no?), for example. But that can’t be at the cost of protein or anything else. The rest of his argument is pure pap — imagine a life of eating salad, vegetables, restricted nuts and fruit day in and day out. What would you do? Stay at home? Get a divorce? Lose your friends?Fuhrman misses two vital points. No amount of dieting is going to result in permanent weight loss. That can only come from regular exercise combined with a sensible diet. And a sensible diet is one you can live with, not one that forces you to live without. Avoid this book like the plague. If you do start the program, allow me to flash forward about eight weeks and say, “Sorry, but I told you so.”And incidentally, who are these nonentities who crank out these books? Just having an MD surely doesn’t qualify you to unleash your pet theories on an unsuspecting public. These books are actually dangerous and should carry a warning by the Surgeon-General. If the books were official documents by some trusted, public agency, backed by studies and data, yes, well, we might accept that. But what is the average Joe supposed to make of this mess: Atkins says eat meat and fat, cut back on the carbs. Ditto Sears. Agatston says much the same, but eat the right carbs and don’t eat just any kind of fat, watch the glycemic index (sounds at least arguable). Along comes Fuhrman and he says no meat, no fat, just fibre. I think these guys are specially appointed to drive ordinary people mad and I wonder why; is there a glut of vacancies in lunatic asylums around the world? There's a plug in the foreword by one Mehmet Oz (who dat?) and this guy says “If you give this diet your complete commitment, there is no question in my mind that it will work for you.”. Well, golly, gee whiz, whaddya know and who could’ve guessed. But isn’t that true of any diet? The point, of course, is missed again, or probably deliberately skipped — this just is not a diet to which you could ever give your complete commitment in the first place.Musings of a suist in mufti on books, music and film at Bibliophage; Gravity Denied - The Hidden Paw’s Blog at mcavity.com

Mid-forties lawyer in Bombay, India, passionate about books, music, film, food and wine.

Wilde At Heart

Gautam Patel — Sun, 18 Jul 2004 11:47:58 EDT

Holland is Oscar Wilde’s grandson and, with John Mortimer, in this astonishing book he shows us the enfant terrible (or perhaps by then the eminence grise) of London’s literary circle battling, albeit unwittingly, for his very life. The book contains the entire, unexpurgated tanscript — previous versions were heavily censored.When John Sholto Douglas, the Marquess of Queensberry, publicly accused Wilde of being a homosexual, Wilde — ill-advisedly as it turned out — brought a libel case against him. It was without the doubt the most sensational case of its time and contained all the elements of a racy potboiler — intrigue, scandal, dangerous liaisons and, ultimately, tragedy.The infamous love affair between Wilde and Lord Alfred “Bosie” Douglas, the Marquess’ son, flourished clandestinely but was doomed the moment it became public — and it did so at Wilde’s own hands.On 18 February 1895, the Marquess sent a note to Wilde at the Albemarle Club, addressing it to “Oscar Wilde, posing as a somdomite” (sic). Blinded by rage, deceived by his infatuation and actively encouraged by Bosie Douglas, Wilde issued notice to the Marquess claiming damages for libel.It proved to be a tragic mistake. Within days, Wilde went from being adored to reviled by Victorian London, the literary lion turning to accursed cur, in what was the biggest scandal of its time.The fall from grace was quick and deadly. Wilde lost everything. He lost the libel action and was prosecuted and incarcerated in Reading jail (where he wrote The Ballad of Reading Gaol). Insolvency followed and he fled to Paris, abandoning his family, which he never saw again.Holland is a well-known researcher, scholar and archivist and he has unearthed the original transcript of the Wilde trial. The book contains the unexpurgated record of a case, the details of which, in 1895, London’s Central Criminal Court Sessions Papers said “are unfit for publication.” Holland’s introduction is both poignant and perceptive, masterly in its own right.There were actually three trials of Oscar Wilde. It began with his criminal charge of libel against the Marquess, prosecuted on Wilde’s behalf by the legendary Edward Clarke. Despite advice from his peers (including George Bernard Shaw), Wilde persisted with the charge. The Marquess was represented by Edward Carson, a rival of Wilde from college days. When Carson began questioning Wilde on his relationships with younger men, Wilde moved from discomfiture to a state of near breakdown. The next day, he withdrew his case.The Marquess countered, getting a warrant issued for Wilde’s arrest, on the basis of the statements of several young men proposed to have been called as witnesses for the defence in the earlier case. Wilde was arrested and stood trial. The proscutor, Charles Gill, another classmate of Wilde’s from Oxford, was determined to prove the charges. However, the jury was deadlocked on all but one of the 25 charges and Wilde got bail and a temporary reprieve. A few weeks later, the criminal charge was retried and Wilde convicted.From a purely literary perspective, perhaps the most astounding exchange between Gill and Wilde takes place when Gill, perhaps hoping for something elementary, asks Wilde, “What is 'The Love that dare not speak its name?’”?Wilde’s response is worth quoting in full: “‘The Love that dare not speak its name’ in this century is such a great affection of an elder for a younger man as there was between David and Jonathan, such as Plato made the very basis of his philosophy, and such as you find in the sonnets of Michelangelo and Shakespeare. It is that deep, spiritual affection that is as pure as it is perfect. It dictates and pervades great works of art like those of Shakespeare and Michelangelo, and those two letters of mine, such as they are. It is in this century misunderstood, so much misunderstood that it may be described as the "Love that dare not speak its name," and on account of it I am placed where I am now. It is beautiful, it is fine, it is the noblest form of affection. There is nothing unnatural about it. It is intellectual, and it repeatedly exists between an elder and a younger man, when the elder man has intellect, and the younger man has all the joy, hope and glamour of life before him. That it should be so the world does not understand. The world mocks at it and sometimes puts one in the pillory for it.” The relentless cross-examination and the record of the trial, presented by Holland complete and uncensored, is not only devastating but highlights the fatal cleft between literary license and flourish and forensic exactitude. Under the brutal onslaught of the latter with its relentless probing for a nugget here and a piece there, with which to build the whole, the literary cause falters and ultimately perishes.“Perhaps he was too clever for his own good”; “hoist by his own petard”; “too clever by half” — these thoughts are unavoidable as one goes through the transcript. In the dock stands the foppish Wilde, confident in his wit and his mastery of the mot juste, his epigrams, able to ‘strike an attitude’ on demand. The prosecutor, Charles Gill, is, in contrast, pedestrian, plodding and utterly dogged. There is much thrust-and-parry here, cat-and-mouse games, Gill biding his time and evaluating every opening. Then comes the definitive moment, when Wilde, too clever for his own good, blithely responds to Gill’s question if he kissed that boy. “No, he was far too ugly,” says Wilde — and seals his fate.This exchange is, of course, well-known. But what Holland’s book shows is that Wilde was only arrogant and cocky in the first case, his own libel action. As that deflated, he lost his hubris and was soon reduced to whingeing and appealing for help to his own Counsel and even the judge. Gill managed to rattle him much earlier.The book is astonishingly vivid and has a powerful dramatic balance to it. The entire era is brought alive and it is almost a sense of despair that we watch Wilde literally talk himself into jail and exile.Musings of a suist in mufti on books, music and film at Bibliophage; Gravity Denied - The Hidden Paw’s Blog at mcavity.com

Mid-forties lawyer in Bombay, India, passionate about books, music, film, food and wine.

Mongrels All

Gautam Patel — Mon, 12 Apr 2004 23:26:13 EDT

GODS, MONGRELS & DEMONSBy Angus CalderAngus Calder's thesis, summarized on the dust jacket flap, is that the weird deserve centre-stage because these creatures are the zeitgeist of our world and, quite independently, are inherently interesting. He argues that they may even be more telling than better-known entities.Calder's choice of characters isn't just odd or screwball-funny; it's truly bizarre. Billie Holiday rubs shoulders with the Hindu elephant-headed god, Ganesha, and with the Devil himself. There's also Billy the Kid, Annie Besant, Ludwig Wittgenstein and an assortment of others. These aren't just weirdos. Some of them are, today, pretty mainstream - Holiday, Wittgenstein, Joan of Arc, Queen Victoria. Why include them?People are odd, some more than others; it's as simple as that. We are all products of multiple influences, often conflicting, but each of which makes us what we are. Every influence has its own potential. This makes every person unique. Some, in whom the influences are more pronounced, are more eccentric than others and it is in these people that we glimpse reflections of the "potentialities, both comic and tragic, of human nature". This is what fascinates Calder and it is difficult to disagree when he says that "mongrelism is our common lot" and that "we are all mongrels". There is no reason to exclude deities from this procession, either; they are, after all, to a greater or lesser extent, projections of human wants, desires, needs and beliefs and it is in them that the eccentricities can be allowed to run riot without fear of confinement to a padded cell. How else could one explain such a bizarre pantheon? Of course, if oddness is the overarching criterion for selection, the result is bound to be lopsided and Calder quickly acknowledges this and apologises for it. I think the mea culpa is unnecessary. No one could really expect consistency or completeness in as subjective a book as this and, indeed, the sheer eccentricity of the selection only emphasizes Calder's thesis. Structurally, the book is uncompromising. The entries are arranged alphabetically by surname, but there is no table of contents. You have to either read it through or know what you're looking for. The index, though it exists, is singularly (and unabashedly) unhelpful. "I hope that if you are frustrated in some particular search you will nevertheless be intrigued by oddities and interconnections and might pursue them back into the text, where you will, I hope find instruction, amusement, or indeed both at once," says Calder and that pretty much sums up his entire approach. In fact, there isn't any definable consistency to the book as, indeed, there shouldn't be - Calder's selection is itself mongrel and the result of whatever or whoever seems to have caught his fancy. These are not authorised biographies, or even potted biographies. These are essays that limn Calder's abaxial perception of foibles. Calder doesn't look so much at the personalities - many of the entries are obscure non-entities - as at their eccentricities. This is unlike most biographies or reference texts which take prominent persons and incidentally may (or may not) cover their idiosyncrasies. Calder entirely inverts this approach by choosing the quirk and then examining the persona behind it. Take, for instance, the piece on Babe Ruth, a figure on whom there is surely a surfeit of material. Calder's interest in him springs first from the legendary called-shot home run in the 1932 World Series between the New York Yankees and the Chicago Cubs. Did he really call that shot by pointing his bat to the bleachers? Calder seems to argue that perhaps this doesn't matter for all it did was add to the sheen and allure of a figure who was already an icon, not just in the sport, but for the nation, as a "surrogate for hope" and a "redeemer" when the nation needed one in a time of depression, organised crime and cynicism. It is this, and the bundle of Babe Ruth's own personality - drinker, womaniser, setter of impossible records - that makes him a true mongrel. There is no one quirk that marks an individual apart or worthy of Calder's notice. His gaze is directed, rather, to people of many parts, the sum of which exceeds themselves. Thus, Calder includes Bill Tilden and Henri Cochet in tennis but not Connors, Arthur Ashe, McEnroe or Borg; the celebrity chef Alexis Soyer; the writer B Traven; Herbert Ironmonger and Gregor MacGregor in cricket and so on. Clearly, the selection is not just idiosyncratic, it is personally quirky; Calder chooses the ones that are appealing to him, and it is this whole-hearted subjectivity that gives the book it's appeal. In his piece on MacGregor, for instance, Calder writes:"Which brings me to the reason why MacGregor is in this book. Firstly, while a very great deal of cricket has been played in Lowland Scotland for a couple of centuries, we have produced damn few top-class heroes, and amongst these only MacGregor could be classed as 'legendary'. Furthermore, I kept wicket for years myself, at 'good club' second eleven level, and had my days of success. The courage of MacGregor fascinates me - because, perhaps even with cut hands, he 'stood up' to Sammy Woods' bowling."The book makes compelling reading. Calder writes with his tongue set very firmly in his cheek and is irrepressibly and delightfully irreverent, especially when he treads on hallowed ground. Yet, he can write with intense feeling - the pieces on Billie Holiday and Lester Young are tragic masterpieces. At a personal level, I was taken by the surprising number of entries connected with India (Ganesha, Kali, Victoria, Annie Besant, Shaikh Adam, Mirza Sheikh I'tesamuddin), jazz (Lester Young, Billie Holiday) and movies (Hedy Lamarr, Merle Oberon). That's not to suggest that there's any particular slant to the book, because there isn't. As eccentric books go, this can't be bettered.Reviews and more at mcavity.com; Book, music and film reviews at Books, etc.

Mid-forties lawyer in Bombay, India, passionate about books, music, film, food and wine.

Mark Haddon: indifferent, at best

Gautam Patel — Mon, 15 Mar 2004 03:37:32 EST

Generally, I find I like what the book reviewers of The Economist and the New York Times like. Not so with the TLS, which I find thin or the New York Review of Books which is so densely high-brow that I can use it only seldom.So when Jay McInerney wrote a rave review in the New York Times of Mark Haddon's "The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time", I rushed out for a hardback. This has got to be good, I thought. For the first time, I felt wronged. Haddon's book is nowhere as great as McInerney makes out. He reads far too much into a book so slight. Is it politically incorrect to dislike a book with an autistic child at its centre? Haddon's book is gimmicky, repetitive and tedious. Ostensibly a journal by Christopher Boone, an autistic fifteen-year-old in Swindon, England, who starts 'detecting' after he finds a neigbour's dog skewered in the front yard, the book rapidly degenerates into a banal narrative of a child from a broken home. His autism is little more than contrivance to elevate the mundane. Haddon's ear for dialogue is virtually non-existent and his characters are wooden. Christopher's father is the most implausible: alternately violent in language (there's enough use of fuck to make the book inappropriate reading for any teen or pre-teen) and disconcertingly caring (he gently asks Christopher to move to another room while he builds some shelves), he remains throughout quite undefinable. This is a huge weakness because Christopher's relationship with his father takes a complete U-turn towards the latter third of the book. Since the father is an enigma, this change in their relationship is inexplicable. There's a repetitiveness to his conduct, too, which makes him robotic. The other central character in the book is a teacher in Christopher's school. Of her, we learn nothing. The third major player is, of course, Christopher's mother, who makes a clumsily contrived entrance towards the end of the book. The plot is so thin that the book is unlikely to be spoiled for anyone who knows it in advance: Christopher's 'care-giver' is his father. His mother is apparently dead, or so Christopher is led to believe. Christopher finds his neighbour's dog impaled on a pitchfork in front of his house. Whodunnit? Christopher sets off to find out. In the bargain, he makes a solitary trip to London to find his mother and then the book sort of turns in on itself and begins to spill its emotional guts as it moves inexorably towards a conveniently neat conclusion. The book irritates. Haddon's attempt to make Christopher awkwardly likeable only makes him precious. Arguably, Haddon is unfair to autistic children. His book bursts with stereotypes: about selfish, violent behaviour (how is that any different from about 99.99% of mankind, I wonder?); an unusual felicity with things scientific and mathematical (quite incorrect, actually; I believe many autistic children tend to high skills in other areas, e.g., fiction); an inability to deal with others; a lack of fear of violent behaviour in others, and so on. This is pretty routine stuff. Haddon covers it well with several devices: Christopher's endearing character, his seemingly profound insights into books and fiction, his grasp of science and maths and, of course, the feel-good ending. For example, when Christopher writes, he often capitalizes unexpectedly. He begins Detecting. You read this and, instinctively, you say, "how sweet!" You are Charmed. This is just Too Easy. I am not suggesting that Haddon should have written something more hefty or that the book is bad. It isn't, at least not in comparison to the endless rubbish in print nowadays. But it's certainly very, very far from the profundity that it is made out to be by McInerney and others. Reviews and more at mcavity.com; Book, music and film reviews at Books, etc.

Mid-forties lawyer in Bombay, India, passionate about books, music, film, food and wine.

Two disappointments from Dan Brown

Gautam Patel — Sun, 14 Mar 2004 11:33:59 EST

Perhaps I ought to have paid more attention to "The Da Vinci Code". It was such an irresistibly delightful lark that I didn't look very closely at the language. Certainly, nothing dreadful jumped out and whacked you in the face. This isn't true, however, of "Deception Point" or "Digital Fortress". Like "Da Vinci Code", they're silly and slight, the kind of thing you carry on a long plane journey, but at least "The Da Vinci Code" was clever, even though it's theories are nothing but a well-known con, as an excellent article in the New York Times shows.These two books by Dan Brown don't have the élan of "The Da Vinci Code". They are just contrived and affected. Worse, the writing is truly terrible. In "Deception Point", we get phrases like "wrought with failure". Shouldn't that be fraught or plagued or beset or dogged? But wrought? What hath Brown wrought?The real beauty, though, is this: "Despite having ascended to the most powerful political office in the world, President Zachary Herney was average in height, with a slender build and narrow shoulders."I didn't realize that becoming a President gave you wall-to-wall muscles. Or that you needed to be a block of walking concrete to get the Presidency. I thought Arnie was an aberration. How very perspicacious of Brown to note, years ahead, that pumping iron is the siné-qua-non of presidential or gubernatorial aspirations.But what I really disliked about both books is their deliberate dumbing-down of their protagonists. This isn't a concession to the reader at all; it's talking down to the reader, and it's humiliating. In "Digital Fortress", for instance, Susan Fletcher is supposed to be a very highly educated, blindingly intelligent mathematician working in code-breaking. She's not just a pretty face. She is a Brainy Person. So how is it that she has no Latin at all? Hale nodded thoughtfully. "Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?"Susan looked puzzled."It's Latin," Hale said. "From Satires of Juvenal. It means 'Who will guard the guards?'""I don't get it," Susan said. "'Who will guard the guards?'"Oh, come on, Mr Brown. We realize you were bothered that many of your readers wouldn't know the prhase, but did you have to turn your mathematician into a dimwit to explain it? Surely she would know, with her fancy degree and all? And the dilemma that confronts Susan Fletcher is, in the world of computers and even more acutely in the world of the Internet, as old as the hills. Anyone working in code-breaking and snooping knows that policing the police is a fundamental conflict in information technology regulation. It can't be a first for any code-breaker working for a top-secret US agency.On the whole, "Digital Fortress" works better than "Deception Point". In the former, the world is under threat (naturally) because a renegade code-breaker threatens to release into the public domain an encryption of a kind never seen before. This will jeopardize the work of an US agency which constantly monitors global information flow. Along the way, Brown takes a swipe at the EFF, portraying it as a bunch of misguided zealots. That the EFF is actually fighting a rear-guard action to protect citizens' rights against state-sponsored invasion of their privacy and that this is something to be supported totally escapes Brown. He sees anarchy as the only alternative to state spying. Anyway, the story races on, with a secret ring (the Tolkien influence) being chased down in Spain while havoc is unleashed in the US. It's all exciting stuff with wonderful echoes of "The Matrix" films: towards the end, as the 'shields' start to go down, the 'sharks' and the 'snakes' start busting through the agency's firewalls, all vividly projected on their screens. In contrast, "Deception Point" is dull, uninspired and hopelessly contrived. Here, we have a Presidential race on our hands. The challenger is brash, arrogant and anti-NASA. The incumbent (he of the slender build and narrow shoulders) is determinedly NASA prone and fixated on the idea that there is intelligent life elsewhere in the Universe. Which, as someone said, is very likely given that none of it has tried to contact us yet. The director of NASA, in a wild attempt to shore up the present administration, plants a meteorite in a Polar ice-cap and claims that embedded in it is a huge prawn or some such, proof of extraterrestrial life or, at any rate, an alternate food supply. Cracking open this hoax is Rachel Sexton, daughter of aforementioned challenger. Her involvement in the whole thing is doubtful throughout and even Brown does not seem fully convinced: he tries to explain it repeatedly with diminishing success in each round. This is a book in which Brown ties himself in knots. In his desperation to add twists and turns, he jettisons the plausible completely and we have the most absurd situations piling on top of each other. Escaping from an ice-floe by banging on it so that the sonar of a nuclear sub conveniently cruising nearby hears it. A gunfight on a rig with a helicopter gunship above and hungry sharks below. Incompetents from Delta Force who can't seem to accomplish the simplest termination. We get just about everything except credibility and, after a point, that's really tiresome. At the end of both books, of course, the threats are neutralized, all is well with the world and the American Way of Life is preserved intacta.Incidentally, has anyone noted the link between "The Da Vinci Code" and the "The Matrix"? In the second part of "The Matrix" trilogy, there is a character called The Merovingian. Everybody in the film is called 'The' something or the other: The Architect, The Keymaker, The Oracle, The One -- this is possibly the most over-articled film of all time. But it's possible that the Wachowski Duo read the same material as Dan Brown. One of the theories in "The Da Vinci Code", and in "Holy Blood, Holy Grail" (by Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh and Henry Lincoln, a best-seller of the 1980's) on which the Dan Brown book is based, is that Mary Magdalene was Jesus's wife. Also, she was pregnant when he was (allegedly; no real proof of this, it seems) crucified. She fled to France and became the figurative chalice, or Holy Grail, in which Christ's blood was preserved. Their descendants married with the locals, to conceal their identity and eventually founded a dynasty of Frankish kings who, being lineal descendants of the Christ, apparently had the healing touch and were called -- you guessed it -- the Merovingians.Reviews and more at mcavity.com; Book, music and film reviews at Books, etc.

Mid-forties lawyer in Bombay, India, passionate about books, music, film, food and wine.

Books on books

Gautam Patel — Sat, 13 Mar 2004 11:42:32 EST

Lynn Truss's "Eats, Shoots and Leaves" turned out to be an utterly delightful discovery. It was a journey into a land I love -- punctuation. The lady is endearingly nutty: she once picketed the movie Two Weeks Notice with an apostrophe on a stick, wanting to bring the apostrophe back into the title, after Weeks. But it is full of deep insights and Truss moves with unerring instinct through treacherous territory. Her comments on why we need punctuation at all; how the Internet has damaged language ("it's not writing, or even typing; it's just sending") and how punctuation is actually critical not just to reading and writing but to basic communication are sharp and accurate. She takes a good, hard swipe at the modern trend of self-publishing, so easy with the Internet (bloggers, beware!) and she's actually right. Some of the comments and customer reviews at Amazon, for instance, are truly hideous, full of typos, badly punctuated and not proofed at all.Finally began flipping through Richard Hendel's "On Book Design". What a marvellous book it is, and so superbly produced! In just a few minutes of skimming, I learned so much. He seems to prefer a Garamond family font (Galliard, Bodoni, Bookman) for print, and I must say I agree entirely: it's gentle, easy on the eye, flows smoothly and is totally unobtrusive. He uses some wonderful typography for his titles and sidebars, too, and the leading is just right for each of these. It's sad that so few pay any attention to this.And then there's that wretched, wretched book by Mortimer Adler, "How to Read a Book". Without doubt, it's the most absurd and over-rated book on the subject. It takes all the magic and pleasure out of reading and reduces it to an oppressive act of bureaucratic nit-picking. Adler is a pedant and an auto-didact - and has probably never enjoyed a book in his life. No place for the emotive, visceral response here, for atmosphere or mood or plot or empathy. Instead, we are exhorted to squiggle all over our books (imagine!). I can understand the odd underlying or sidemark, but Adler would have us make an index at the back, a précis in the front and use at least five types of marks throughout. This is not just a conceit -- to show the person who picks it up next that you have read it with such care, that you are so much brighter than him - but it is also selfish, cruel and inconsiderate. No one wants to read a book that is marred, tortured, tormented and violated like this. Above all, books are about sharing -- or the author wouldn't have written it in the first place, would he? Nor would you have bought it. Sharing good books between friends is a sure sign of quiet amity and respect. This, of course, never occurs to Adler who evidently doesn't give a fig about book design, white space or the sheer pleasure of turning smooth, creamy new pages, of smelling the binding and the spine. I can see him now, 'reading a book', thumb and two fingers tracing the lines for his eyes, making notes in the margin, notes on the endpapers, notes on the frontispiece and front papers, on the title page (which he says is wasted space), in fact just about everywhere and even on loose sheets of paper (what does he do with these notes, I wonder?), but never once smiling or feeling his pulse race or breath come short. He's too busy, I guess, 'reading' the book. Having said that, I must confess that my copy of "Eats, Shoots and Leaves" is hopelessly marred and quite useless for anyone else. I have dozens of markings and notes all over the book, but I really couldn't help it. That book warrants a second and even a third reading. Full of insights and sharp observations, all set in an irresistibly wacky narrative that engages history, literature, technology and poetry, Truss's book (I trust she approves of the apostrophe here) is not just amusing and entertaining. It is an eye-opener. She explains why punctuation is necessary, how it was invented (contrived might be a better word) and then gives us wonderful examples of the carnage that follows when language is badly punctuated, or not punctuated at all. I loved the one about the "pickled herring merchant": nasty, that, casting aspersions on his drinking habits, when you really meant "pickled-herring merchant". What she says very early on, though, is not just true but, sadly, too often overlooked -- that punctuation is a courtesy designed to help readers to understand without stumbling. "It is the stitching of language." If only the customers who post reviews at Amazon would understand that.Reviews and more at mcavity.com; Book, music and film reviews at Books, etc.

Mid-forties lawyer in Bombay, India, passionate about books, music, film, food and wine.

Just because you're paranoid ...

Gautam Patel — Mon, 1 Mar 2004 00:08:55 EST

What a disappointment! I was very happy with Norton's Sytemworks 2003 - it worked really smoothly and transparently. My subscription was ending so I thought I'd upgrade to 2004. BIG mistake. It completely gummed up my otherwise zippy system. Everything slowed to a crawl, from start up down even to ordinary text editing (and I'm not even talking about Word which terrifies everyone and his dog). I have no idea what NSW2004 was doing, but I'd type something and the cursor was in some sort of time warp, about three centuries behind. Navigation through a document was even worse: click click click click the damned thing was still stuck and then would zoom off to some other place. Apparently this was because NSW (specifically the Antivirus bit of it) was busy checking something or the other while I was working! The guys at Norton must understand one thing: too much paranoia just increases inefficiency. If you're going to spend all your time checking for viruses, you don't get work done. It's that simple. A security software that doubles the time you need you finish a document isn't good software engineering; it's vanity and stupidity. If you must design antivirus software for morons -- the kind who still open attachments from unknown people or .exe, .pif and .scr files -- then at least say so. Norton for Dummies or something. The pro edition surely should be meant for people who know what they're about and don't make that kind of mistake. That's why it's a "pro" edition, oui? And that's why there are so many 'options' n'est-çe pas?Good security software leaps in when it's needed. It's not meant to be restless like Macbeth's ghost. This one is constantly working the hard disk. It assumes that the user is a totally dumb ass and therefore needs Norton's ferocious chastity belt; so what if his work goes down the tube? After all, it's the virus that counts, not the work, right? Wrong. Avoid this like the plague. Stick with 2003. And I just HATE the activation thing. I've been religiously buying their products and I find this totally demeaning. To the crew at Norton: get a life, ladies and here's a gratuitous heads-up -- sit someone down and tell him/her to trawl the net for the online customer reviews.Reviews and more at mcavity.com; Book, music and film reviews at Books, etc.

Mid-forties lawyer in Bombay, India, passionate about books, music, film, food and wine.

Thank you John Frankenheimer: Path To War

Gautam Patel — Sun, 29 Feb 2004 12:59:41 EST

The peculiar thing about John Frankenheimer's work is that it is consistently good. That's not something one can say about most directors working today. I hope this isn't a completely odious comparison, but take John Woo. He made the astonishing The Killer in Hong Kong, his last before he migrated to what is now Schwarzennegeria where he made Hard Target and then the breathtakingly conceived and brilliantly executed Face Off. Everything else has been disappointing, including especially Broken Arrow and, I'm sorry to say, Mission Impossible:II, though I must admit to having found something of quality in the very heavily flawed Windtalkers. Having said that, I must confess that I have been totally Woo-ed and am now hopelessly addicted to everything Woo-lly in cinema; I watch his films repeatedly and can never seem to get enough of his action sequences. All that double-handed gunplay, the backs-to-dividing wall-banter-while-we-reload, the Mexican stand-offs with hammers clicking on empty chambers, the slow motion step through a white dove taking flight, the gun kicked up and caught and fired in a spin -- yes, yes, I watch it all, again and again. But ultimately all that action, superbly choreographed and balletic, is only a contrivance and nothing more. Increasingly, his films are like some glossy ramp models: Great bodies, no soul; just the cosmetics.Vacuity is not something of which one can accuse Frankenheimer. He, too, can pull off tremendous action sequences (the entire car chase in Ronin), but his action is quieter, less in-your-face and far less contrived. I've always held his 1965 B&W The Train to be a complete masterpiece in the action/thriller/war genre. He's made several films since, and having seen most (not all), I'd be hard to put to point to one that I didn't actually like or which didn't leave me with something for later. Even The General's Daughter, arguably a weaker film but only in comparison to his own other work, still holds its own in terms of dramatic tension.Recently I stumbled on Path to War, a film he made for HBO and which seems to have been largely ignored, for reasons I am quite unable to fathom. It's not even seriously reviewed at Rotten Tomatoes and many of the other movie review sites don't even mention it.That's a shame, because this is a very fine film. Frankenheimer takes a subject that, in the hands of a lesser director, could have gone in one of only two directions: A pseudo-documentary made from a predetermined perspective (Oliver Stone), or an outright war film (too many contenders). Instead, Frankenheimer breaks completely new ground. He's dealing with Vietnam in the LBJ days, pre-Nixon, post-Kennedy. That was possibly the most difficult period of the Vietnam war when things could have gone either way. In 1963, at the end of the Kennedy administration, Vietnam was at a turning point. By the time Nixon came in, America had made its choice and was too heavily committed to allow for any quick or easy resolution. That road, that path to war, was chosen in the time of the Johnson administration. It was a tragic and terrible mistake that cost far too much for far too little. Other things, too, equally became casualties of the war: LBJ's magnificent dream of a 'Great Society', which might have changed the face of the world we live in, was in complete shambles and quickly forgotten. LBJ was a man much misunderstood by his own times and by immediate history. It is only now that we are seeing a more considered re-evaluation of the man, his concerns, motivations and priorities. In the dubyaspeak regime, they assume even greater importance; and comparisons between McNamara and Rumsfield might lead to terrifying conclusions. Was Lyndon Johnson misled? It can't be easy being the Chief Executive of the United States of America (unless you're George W. Bush in which case everything is neatly black or white and nothing between) and Vietnam presented what was probably the most distressing of questions before that administration. Johnson was undoubtedly a most astute statesman. His political play in resolving burning race issues is perhaps an object example of how a determined leader with complete clarity of vision and true breadth of mind can outflank his strongest opponents (in this case George Wallace). Though ending racial inequality and establishing affirmative action was just one of the several issues on LBJ's front burner, Vietnam overshadowed them all. Much that is of lasting value even today, or is now firmly entrenched in the American polity, was the work of two or three Presidents of the 20th Century, FDR and LBJ being perhaps the most important. It is therefore not just sad or tragic to see the Bush administration's attempts at systematicaly dismantling environmental safeguards, economic and fiscal equity measures and even that most fundamental of all freedoms, the freedom of choice; it is without doubt a fatal blow to the future of mankind. This is crucial. The achivements of the great Presidents of the United States had an impact well beyond America's territorial boundaries. America became, under them and after them, the lodestar to follow and the yardstick by which other regimes were measured and found wanting. In a sense, this became a self-fulfilling prophecy: Those who did not adopt the American standard, or at least attempt to, became the 'enemy'. The tirade against communism is but the most startling instance. Later Presidents were cautious in deploying this argument too prominently on the world stage. 9/11 and Iraq has changed all that, for the worse. The world will never be the same again and neither will the United States of America. What is happening today is a rank betrayal of ideals that Lyndon Johnson, among others, strived and struggled to integrate into the reality of 'the American Dream'. Frankenheimer sees this clearly. His film is a calm, dispassionate and studied attempt to understand the man and, perhaps, come to terms with some of the decisions that were taken during his tenure. Frankenheimer does not 'do' the war at all. He remains in the White House with just the occasional documentary footage from Vietnam. There are no scenes of war, no graphic violence and not despite this but because of it, the film is both and chilling. Was this really the way we were? How did that come to pass?The film is long, at over 2.5 hours but you don't sense it once. Michael Gambon turns in the performance of a lifetime, certainly one that should have got him an Oscar. Alec Baldwin is an appropriately plump McNamara, a sleek-headed man such as those who sleep o'nights. Donald Sutherland's Clark Clifford had me perplexed at first but he played his character with his usual dexterity, slowly fleshing him out. This film is just not to be missed.Path to War. Directed by John Frankenheimer * Michael Gambon, Donald Sutherland, Alec Baldwin. HBO Films.Postscript: Ten minutes after I began watching the film, my 11 year-old daughter came in and sat with me. I expected she'd watch a bit, get bored, and leave. She sat through the whole of it, totally engrossed. She'd ask me questions now and then and we paused while I explained what little I know. It was pretty much a potted history of the Vietnam war. To work a historical theme, without graphic visuals and yet to be able to hold even one that young and at such an enormous physical remove in time and place (we live in Bombay, India) -- I can't think of a better commendation. Thank you and salud, John Frankenheimer.Reviews and more at mcavity.com; Book, music and film reviews at Books, etc.

Mid-forties lawyer in Bombay, India, passionate about books, music, film, food and wine.

Kill Bill Vol 1

Gautam Patel — Thu, 26 Feb 2004 23:01:40 EST

Evidently there are degrees of violence. There is the sleep-wrecking, mind-numbing, stomach-churning, vomit-inducing violence of In Hell (Van Damme and other specimens) or Con Air. And there is the Tarantino brand of violence. Tarantino does extreme violence, but he does it with unparalleled élan and a singularity of beyond-the-box-office purpose. The result is magnificent: at one level, a beast under the hood with enormous raw power and wildly exaggerated style -- a Bugatti. But there's a whole lot more if you only care to look. The CCs ("carping critics") who find the film 'hollow' and 'shallow' have of course totally missed the point. They also say much the same about Robert Rodriguez, and they're wrong there too.Perhaps the title of Rodriguez' latest, Once Upon a Time in Mexico, should tell the CC's something. Remember Sergio Leone? The guy behind Once Upon a Time in the West, now a cult classic, when released widely regarded as B-grade trash? He also made the lush, rivetting Once Upon a Time in America with that incredible performance by James Woods (incidentally a favourite -- see him steal the show in the otherwise trashyThe Specialist in which Rod Steiger makes a complete ass of himself playing a mafia don).So when QT goes for broke with the violence what is he doing or saying, really? The simplistic answer is that he's 'paying homage' to the King of B-Grade movies, Leone. But that's just too facile. He's doing more than that. He's showing us the emptiness of, say, the Wachowski duo, with their balletic but increasingly absurd action sequences in the 'Matrix' trilogy. He's telling us that, in his view, violence is one of the natural states of human existence and that revenge ('a dish best served cold') is peculiar to humans and, like cutlery, is what separates us from animals. Finally, he says that if you strip away the social morés, you're left with something primal, compelling, bewitching -- and perfectly understandable. That's the point. Does any viewer go away feeling he didn't understand the compulsions that drove QT's characters in KBV1? He may not like their portrayal, but didn't he believe? There are those who say they didn't 'sympathise' or 'empathise' with any character. Get a life, ladies. You weren't meant to. No more than you were meant to in 'Pulp Fiction'. These are not your friendly neighbourhood characters. They are the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad (or didn't you get that)? That's the second thing QT does. He takes comic book characters (see the anime in the film) and shows us that the nexus between art and reality isn't tangential or tenuous. It exists, and the grim terrors of life reflect in the horrors that art shows us. Perhaps this is stretching it but as I see it every single work of art with any horror, terror or grief in it, from Munch through Picasso to Copolla, has been solidly relatable to a reality. A hundred years from now, they won't be watching GWTW or the Sound of Music to understand their past. They'll watch Pulp Fiction. Reservoir Dogs. Kill Bill.Reviews and more at mcavity.com; Book, music and film reviews at Books, etc.Do drop by.

Mid-forties lawyer in Bombay, India, passionate about books, music, film, food and wine.