Author: Antenna

As the wind blows, you must strive to live

This is my review of Wind Rises – Double Play [Blu-ray + DVD] [Cardboard Slipcase ].

This “final” animated cartoon from the revered Japanese master Hayao Miyazaki is by turns visually striking, shocking, humorous and moving, providing an insider’s insight into Japanese culture and history in the period leading up to World War Two. It is loosely based on the life of the designer of Zero fighter planes, Jiro Horikoshi, who was determined to match Western technical expertise, but appalled by the devastation of war: he was fascinated by the birdlike speed and beauty of flight, and in the process turned a blind eye to the destructive power of bombs until it was too late. Like other geniuses whose skills have been harnessed for evil ends, it was perhaps too much to expect him not to pursue his research.

In a touch of magic realism, the young Horikoshi meets in his dreams the earlier pioneering Italian aeronautical designer Gianni Caproni, who acts as his mentor and inspiration. There are breathtaking images of a major earthquake with the ensuing fire that destroyed much of Tokyo in the early 1920s, fanciful ideas of planes, developed through painstaking research into real prototypes, and the beauty of the green countryside with sudden bursts of rain and wind.

Although long, this film is completely absorbing, as the director’s fertile imagination keeps one feasting on each scene before it vanishes. Above all, it provides a more sympathetic appreciation of the chain of events which dragged Japan into the war which destroyed it for a while, and enables one to perceive the Japanese of that time as people with real emotions and aspirations. As one watches the progress in developing planes, there lurks in the background the knowledge of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki disasters to come. Yet, the film contrives to end on a constructive note: “Le vent se lève et il faut tenter de vivre”.

⭐⭐⭐⭐ 4 Stars


Wind Rises – Double Play [Blu-ray + DVD] [Cardboard Slipcase ]

“Replacing an identitarian object with a real presentation of generic power”

This is my review of The Rebirth of History: Times of Riots and Uprisings by Alain Badiou.

Attracted by the apparent brevity of "The rebirth of history" (119 pages), I was interested in reading an analysis of recent uprisings such as the Arab Spring by the famous French political philosopher Badiou. I understand his desire to adopt an academic approach, and was prepared to rise to the intellectual challenge of grasping his ideas. This was made harder by what I found to be a very tortuous style, although this may have suffered in translation.

Badiou cannot be blamed for wishing to be one of the first in the field to comment on the Egyptian uprising which triggered such optimism in the early days of Tahrir Square and the fall of Mubarak. His conviction that this is a clear example of the rebirth of history has suffered a setback from the re-establishment of a repressive military regime, but it is still too early to judge the longer term outcome of the Arab Spring. However, I came to the conclusion that the essence of Badiou's thoughts on riots as such could have been summarised in an essay. He also complicates his case by straying into the vast and complex topics of nation states, communism and liberalism, citing the books he has already written on these.

He makes some interesting observations, such as that contemporary capitalism has all the features of traditional capitalism as described by Marx although he did not live to see it: concentration of capital in the hands of the global "gangsters of finance"; government leaders of all persuasions reduced to the role of "capital executives". Another example is Badiou's definition of "intervallic periods" following the collapse of a significant new "Idea" e.g. 1980-2011 when classic capitalism revived because communism had failed which he compares with 1815-50 when dissatisfaction with the French Revolution led to a revival of monarchism.

In essence, I understood him to say is that a mass uprising of a diverse group of people, although they may only be a numerical minority, occupying a clear site, may generate the enthusiasm and energy necessary to force change, improving the lot of those neglected or oppressed by the state. He remains an idealist, arguing that, in such a riot, it is enough "to want to want" subordinating "the results of action to the value of the intellectual activity itself".

My basic problem with Badiou is that I find him over-theoretical and unrealistic. He enabled me to understand better what is meant by "the withering of the state" and the rejection of representative democracy as a form of exploitation. However, his thesis that a viable, peaceful society could emerge through the power of the "Idea" taking root – his language is quasi-religious at times – seems woolly and Utopian, a luxury for an academic in his Parisian ivory tower.

⭐⭐⭐ 3 Stars

The Rebirth of History: Times of Riots and Uprisings

Soon to be neither national nor healthy?

This is my review of This May Hurt A Bit (NHB Modern Plays) by Stella Feehily.

This very topical play is a savage indictment of the UK Coalition’s reorganisation of the NHS. To regular followers of the media, the main attacks will come as no surprise: costly, top-down, cynical sell-off of services without a mandate from voters, handing over to profiteering private, often foreign companies, failing to ensure that provision is adequate and worst of all, sacrificing the post-war vision of a free service based on need, unique and revolutionary in its day.

The drama pricks our consciences with an opening polemic from Nye Bevan, then moves on to a kind of “Yes Minister” scene, in which a Sir Humphry clone gives David Cameron the form of words to fob of criticism of the proposed Act.

It is soon clear that this play is a series of sketches, with surreal touches as when Nye Bevan and Churchill gatecrash a family reunion to argue over how best to manage a health service collapsing beneath the unforeseen demands of a rapidy ageing population, or when a budgie called “Maggie” begins to talk like Margaret Thatcher.

Requiring a high level of performance, this play is by turns funny and poignant, but the polemical stance is often heavy-handed. The criticism of PFIs is devastating, but in the main the assault is too earnest and didactic, rather than subtly dramatic. Despite the inclusion of a pro-reform consultant, and stereotyped Republican American medic and his English wife who only see the faults in the NHS, there is insufficient coverage of alternative points of view with arguments to counter them effectively.

The work seems likely to date quite fast.

⭐⭐⭐ 3 Stars

This May Hurt A Bit (NHB Modern Plays)

Spice of life

This is my review of The Lunchbox [DVD].

I had not heard of Mumbai’s labour intensive dabbawallah system for delivering to men at work the lunch boxes often prepared by their loving wives, but a recent trip to India had made me aware of the noisy, polluted, gridlocked chaos of its urban streets. In this tale, lonely housewife Ila finds that her delicious lunches, intended to rekindle the ardour of her neglectful, workaholic husband, are somehow reaching the desk of an equally lonely insurance claims clerk on the brink of retirement. Their ensuing correspondence, made more frank and poignant by the fact that they have never met, explores both the pathos and the potential simple joys of daily life. In the process, we see and learn a good deal about life in modern India, which, beneath the film’s many comical moments seems rather sad: men grow old strap-hanging to work on overcrowded public transport, and those in work seem to have to work too hard for relatively little. Are such pleasures as mouth-watering food and colourful wedding celebrations enough to compensate for this?

Some of the plotting is a little unconvincing, but the impression of Indian life is authentic. Ritesh Batra, the director, was wise to steer clear of Bollywood romance in favour of a slower paced, lower key but moving and thoughtful film, which despite moments of sadness leaves the audience feeling positive.

⭐⭐⭐⭐ 4 Stars


The Lunchbox [DVD]

Too far out and not drowning

This is my review of Loss of Innocence by Davi Patterson,Richard North Patterson.

In a break from his tense courtroom scenes and alpha male political dramas, the author makes an effective stab at writing from the female viewpoint, even if his women in the America of 1968 are still under the influence of a benign but controlling WASP patriarch.

A bright young graduate, Whitney Dane chooses too lightly the conventional path of devoting herself to husband and children. Only muted warning bells suggest to her that fiancé Peter is a little too compliant, accepting from her father Charles a job in high finance that does not really suit him, acquiescing to string-pulling, again by Charles, to avoid the Vietnam draft. Charles even gives the couple an upmarket flat in New York as their future home, stifling any desire to find their own place. In sharp contrast to all this, the assassination of Bobbie Kennedy, following so soon on that of JFK and Martin Luther King, shocks Whitney into a more questioning line of thought. She is therefore ripe to fall under the influence of Ben Blaine, an unconventional young man from a different class who encourages her to think for herself.

This book will resonate with those old enough to remember 1968, but non-Americans and those under sixty-five would probably appreciate an appendix or two to explain the background politics, in particular of the Democrats divided over Vietnam.

It grated on me a little that all the main characters seem to be born wealthy and privileged or achieve these attributes in due course. Perhaps this is because the successful and well-connected author simply does not know about ordinary people.

Another slight weakness for me is the device of book-ending the main story between scenes of "I want to tell you a story" and "So this is how it worked out afterwards". In this case, we see Whitney in her sixties, encountering a younger woman who was Ben's last lover. I found the opening section rather trite, and the conclusion dotted i's and crossed t's too explicitly, leaving little to the imagination. This approach may have been used because the novel is a prequel (to a book I have not read) and is intended as part of a trilogy which effectively makes the whole into a kind of soap opera.

North Patterson is a seasoned producer of bestsellers. He knows how to write a page-turner with a strong, pacy plot, a well-judged ending (of the main story), engaging dialogues and sharp insights. The descriptions of sailing and of Martha's Vineyard are very vivid, although I know nothing about either. Yet, some passages cry out for rigorous editing to give a leaner and more edgy style rather than one that too often seems stilted or overblown.

⭐⭐⭐⭐ 4 Stars

Loss of Innocence

Automatic assumptions

This is my review of The Expendable Man by Dorothy B. Hughes.

Hugh Densmore, a young American doctor on his way to his niece's wedding in Phoenix feels obliged, against his better judgement, to pick up a teenage hitchhiker. Who knows what will befall her if he does not? She proves both an unpleasant liar and a pathetic object of pity. When local newspapers report the discovery of a young girl's body in a canal, Hugh is convinced it belongs to the hitchhiker, and that the police will soon be knocking on his door. He is fatalistic, yet also determined not to spoil the wedding and to prove his innocence.

It is not until more than fifty pages in that the author delivers a master stroke by revealing a piece of information that stopped me in my tracks. Not only does it explain Hugh's previous almost paranoid fears, but completely alters the reader's perception of the situation. I was forced to look back to see if I had misread some details, but it was clear that I had made certain assumptions and was potentially as guilty of misjudgements as some of the characters in the book.

This book is partly a psychological crime thriller in which every step is developed in forensic detail. It is also a study of life in the western states of America in the early 1960s – the baking afternoon heat and traffic jams of Phoenix, the "startling growth" of the suburbs, the abrupt change from surfaced roads to rough tracks through the semi-desert landscape of "troglodyte rocks and spire cacti". Although Dorothy Hughes can be a little shaky on the flowering of romance, she is excellent on landscapes, cold starry nights and the burgeoning fast food culture as well as deeper issues in a world of racial prejudice and criminalisation of abortion.

The sustained sense of menace and very evident risk of Densmore being unjustly ruined, combined with occasional suspicions that he may go free at the end yet turn out to be a villain after all, make this a page turner. With so much suspense, it is perhaps inevitable that the final climax is a somewhat underwhelming, but overall this gripping tale deserves its recent revival. It stands the test of time as one of the best crime novels which everyone who enjoys this genre should read.

⭐⭐⭐⭐ 4 Stars

The Expendable Man

Automatic assumptions

This is my review of The Expendable Man (New York Review Books Classics) by Dorothy B Hughes.

Hugh Densmore, a young American doctor on his way to his niece's wedding in Phoenix feels obliged, against his better judgement, to pick up a teenage hitchhiker. Who knows what will befall her if he does not? She proves to be both an unpleasant liar and a pathetic object of pity. When local newspapers report the discovery of a young girl's body in a canal, Hugh is convinced it belongs to the hitchhiker, and that the police will soon be knocking on his door. He is fatalistic, yet also determined not to spoil the wedding and to prove his innocence.

It is not until more than fifty pages in that the author delivers a master stroke by revealing a piece of information that stopped me in my tracks. Not only does it explain Hugh's previous almost paranoid fears, but completely alters the reader's perception of the situation. I was forced to look back to see if I had misread some details, but it was clear that I had made certain assumptions and was potentially as guilty of misjudgements as some of the characters in the book.

This book is partly a psychological crime thriller in which every step is developed in forensic detail. It is also a study of life in the western states of America in the early 1960s – the baking afternoon heat and traffic jams of Phoenix, the "startling growth" of the suburbs, the abrupt change from surfaced roads to rough tracks through the semi-desert landscape of "troglodyte rocks and spire cacti". Although Dorothy Hughes can be a little shaky on the flowering of romance, she is excellent on landscapes, cold starry nights and the burgeoning fast food culture as well as deeper issues in a world of racial prejudice and criminalisation of abortion.

The sustained sense of menace and very evident risk of Densmore being unjustly ruined, combined with occasional suspicions that he may go free at the end yet turn out to be a villain after all, make this a page turner. With so much suspense, it is perhaps inevitable that the final climax is a somewhat underwhelming, but overall this gripping tale deserves its recent revival. It stands the test of time as one of the best crime novels which everyone who enjoys this genre should read.

⭐⭐⭐⭐ 4 Stars

The Expendable Man (New York Review Books Classics)

Let this cup pass

This is my review of Calvary [DVD] [2014].

On the bleakly beautiful coast of Sligo, Father Lavelle ministers to his eccentric flock of sinners with compassion leavened by dry wit, and tolerates his blinkered sidekick. A widower and former alcoholic, Lavelle is no unworldly paragon of virtue. In the opening scene, a disembodied voice in the confessional box calmly announces the intention of killing him on the beach the following Sunday, not in spite of but because of the fact that Lavelle is essentially a good man. This will be some kind of confused way of obtaining closure for childhood abuse at the hands of another priest. How should Lavelle respond to this threat?

The film follows the course of Lavelle's life for the following week with an element of "whodunnit" in advance. Can we guess the identity of the would-be assassin? This is not really the point, which is whether, in modern fractured and increasingly secular Ireland, the sacrifice or "Calvary" of a Catholic priest can have any meaning. By turns satirical and serious, and overall quite original, the film is patchily successful – some characters are too caricatured and the dialogue is at times somewhat contrived, as in the case of the local police chief's grotesquely camp and sinister lover – or that's what I took him to be.

The one small detail which grated on me was a local corrupt banker's apparent ownership of Holbein's painting "The Ambassadors", which everyone knows to be in the National Gallery, London – I accept this may have been intended as a touch of humour. Overall, the film is worth watching, although it takes a period of reflection to form a judgement on the ending. The musical soundtrack is also good.

⭐⭐⭐⭐ 4 Stars

Calvary [DVD] [2014]

Light shed

This is my review of Zennor in Darkness by Helen Dunmore.

Having read Helen Dunmore's spare and brilliant novel "Lies" focused on a shell-shocked young Cornishman in the aftermath of World War 1, I was interested in comparing it with her début novel published twenty years earlier, "Zennor in Darkness". Set in 1917, this describes how the tentacles of war have reached into rural Cornwall, with teenage boys conscripted from remote farmhouses, and cottage windows darkened with blackout curtains to deflect the German U-boats venturing near the coast to prey on British supply ships.

Since the author is also a poet, it is perhaps not surprising that "Zennor in Darkness" has a touch of Under Milk Wood with its array of local characters. The two who emerge most sharply in the foreground are at least to some extent outsiders: young would-be artist Clare Coyne, whose genteel Catholic father stayed on in Zennor after his wife's premature death, and the author D.H.Lawrence, who hoped in vain to find a refuge in Cornwall from the public outrage over his attacks on the war, and his marriage to Frieda, a German who had abandoned her husband and children to be with him.

The present tense which seems to have annoyed some reviewers did not trouble me at all. I hardly noticed it, and think that in fact it creates an increased sense of immediacy, and awareness of what each character is observing and feeling. However, the novel is clearly less taut and polished than "Lies". Several scenes, such as the opening chapter with three girls sunbathing on the beach is too rambling, with a confusion at times as to who is talking or who the identity of the main character – I thought at first it was Clare's cousin Hannah. There also seemed to be a bewildering excess of names to cope with at first. The writing sometimes seems over-intense.

This is a slow burning novel, a stream of impressions and thoughts. It conveys as far as I can tell a powerful and evocative sense of the Cornish landscape and the ambiance of a tightknit, closed community. Dunmore is also good at portraying relationships between people, their shifting emotions, misunderstandings and mutual criticism despite strong empathy, even love. Although in the main uneventful, requiring the reader to take time and savour the originality and beauty of Dunmore's prose, the novel shifts into a higher gear for the final third to reach a convincing conclusion.

⭐⭐⭐⭐ 4 Stars

Zennor in Darkness

When doing harm is unavoidable

This is my review of Do No Harm: Stories of Life, Death and Brain Surgery by Henry Marsh.

"The idea that emotions and reason, that memories, dreams and reflections should consist of jelly is simply too strange to understand… Yet..if I stray into what neurosurgeons call eloquent brain, I will be faced with a damaged and disabled patient."

It is this kind of honesty that makes Henry Marsh's memoirs so compelling, overriding the initial concern that I might be reading the book solely out of a kind of ghoulish voyeurism. Henry Marsh was clearly drawn to this field by the challenge and element of danger, akin to what drives people to climb mountains. He describes with great clarity and insight the sense of shame when what should be a straightforward operation goes wrong, perhaps through a moment of hubris or distraction, but it could also be because one has given a more junior colleague the practice he needs in order to improve, or just bad luck, a sudden haemorrhage for no obvious reason. On the other hand, inexperience – or memories of a recent disaster- may make a surgeon over-cautious as regards something as simple as trying to adjust the clip on an aneurism.

Marsh patiently explains various medical conditions, mainly tumours, in terms a layman can grasp. I found it hard to read more than about three chapters at a time, not because the book is depressing – Marsh manages to weave in a surprising amount of humour – but because the experiences of many of his patients seemed to demand a certain amount of respectful reflection before rushing on to the next trauma.

Marsh reserves his bile for hospital management and government targets or cuts. He may be a bit of a dinosaur in some respects, but makes his case very convincingly. The 48 hour Working Time Directive causes more frequent shift changes so that staff often do not know the condition of patients they are treating as well as they used to. Bureaucratic rules enforced by junior staff no longer so in awe of consultants and senior surgeons often mean that patients have to wait longer for operations, and suffer more often the stress of last minute postponements. He condemns Private Finance Initiative (PFI) schemes as a "very expensive way of building second rate public buildings" which "some would consider to be an economic crime, although nobody is to be held responsible for it."

If anything, this book has eroded my confidence in the NHS as a whole, but has made me more understanding of the surgeon's dilemma. Often, he really does not know whether on balance it is better to operate or not. As regards patient consent, the percentage risk of death from the operation may equal that of eventually dying from a tumour, but if one survives the former, there is the incalculable benefit of peace of mind. Even such an eminent surgeon as Marsh may have to face charges of indefensible error, say for delay in diagnosing an infection: "it was painfully clear, as I had always known – that the case could not be defended… The final bill…was for six million" to settle it. One is left thankful that there are people with the courage and motivation to persevere in this complex medical field.

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ 5 Stars

Do No Harm: Stories of Life, Death and Brain Surgery