Been reading Tim Winton's early novel Shallows. Been wondering about the impact of being a copper's son - how it affects your childhood and how much it has impacted the content of his writing.
In terms of Shallows - I tried this haiku about it:
Tim is deeply suspicious
of small towns, especially
Ones where men hunt whales.
More later.
Thursday, September 18, 2008
Sunday, September 7, 2008
In Burgess
“What d’ya reckon ‘In Burgess’ would be like?” In Burgess… I was in the queue at the Sun cinema to go see In Bruges. I looked around to see who it was who was asking the question. I wanted to say “It’s Bruges (pronounced Brooooje) actually” but this isn’t correct either. It’s only pronounced like this in the English speaking world. If you are really “in Bruges”, I think I recall the pronunciation as “Broogger”. It’s a complicated thing. It’s a thing which you can so easily get wrong and something which becomes a marker of who you are and where you’ve been.
Which is sort of what the film is about. The two main characters are trying to lay low in the tourist-filled medieval town of Bruges in Belgium because one of them, Ray, has done something really horrible. They both do horrible things for a living but one character, Ken, is more accustomed to the personal impacts of his chosen career as a hired killer.
We follow Ray and Ken around the medieval churches as Ray tries to come to terms with what he has done. Paintings of medieval views of purgatory and of the last day on earth form the backdrop for both men. Is it possible to find redemption when you have committed an evil act? What’s the place of hell and heaven? What happens if you’re only a little bit bad? The director counter-balances the scenes of medieval Europe with a sort of modern, sometimes comic nastiness. We meet a young drug dealer and her skinhead boyfriend. A guns dealer who works out of a cornucopia of antiques and fine arts. A cocaine sniffing dwarf and his Dutch prostitute. Modern life looks pretty dissolute. There’s a film within a film construct enables the film to include a large number of people dressed in fantasy costumes with animal masks or animal heads; these people appear and reappear at the periphery like a version of a bachannale gone wrong. The only ‘normal’ person we meet is the owner of the hotel where Ray and Kenny stay. She provides a kind of moral pivot for the range of strange activities around her.
And in a funny way, the two bad men do as well. The film explores notions of honour, integrity and loyalty through the two main characters and supporting actor Ralph Fiennes. The difficult choices made by all three characters stem from the strict moral codes which they were born into. It feels strange using the term “moral codes” to describe their thinking but all three have clear ideas about good and evil and about how you treat people which are as much a moral code as mine and maybe not too far away; it’s just that I am not in the habit of killing people. So it’s sort of interesting to position this type of Sopranos thinking in Bruges, with its facade of medieval trappings.
It’s not a great film but not a terrible one either. There is some great, laugh out loud comic dialogue. The shoot-out scenes need work. One reviewer called it “Mr. McDonagh’s modest bag of tricks”. He’s right. The film doesn't quite work because Bruges is not a place of brooding medieval nastiness but a more sterile and tidy tourist town. It needed to be set in a slightly edgier place, maby St Petersburg; a place which combines tourism and a dark Russian underbelly(by all accounts, I haven't been there).
But I liked being back in Bruges. I spent some time in Bruges about 15 years ago. I remembered chocolate shops, extreme tidiness and fruit-flavoured beer. It was a tourist construct; full of shops for the well-heeled and opportunities for culture. I hadn’t remembered any of the churches and so, when I re-read my dairy of the trip last night, I wasn’t surprised to see the phrase “I am sick of churches”. I bet we didn’t go into any of them. We did go into a tower where a lot of the film action takes place; I have written “We climbed lots of stairs because there is supposed to be a great view but the 70-odd people in front of us at the top made it difficult to appreciate.” We went on two excellent tours; one on bikes around the city and out into the countryside and a whole day bus tour to explore World War 1 battle sites which was a highlight of our time in Europe. We stayed in a smelly youth hostel outside of the beautiful old town and bought expensive but divine chocolates. We felt like outsiders because all of the old city felt like a construct. And because it was expensive. Just as the two hit men feel like outsiders. But not my friend in cinema queue who doesn't know what she doesn't know and therefore doesn't know about her outsiderness (if that's a word).
In Bruges, we rested. We had not quite enough money to really enjoy everything. We learnt how to pronounce Bruges…But we might have been in Burgess…
Which is sort of what the film is about. The two main characters are trying to lay low in the tourist-filled medieval town of Bruges in Belgium because one of them, Ray, has done something really horrible. They both do horrible things for a living but one character, Ken, is more accustomed to the personal impacts of his chosen career as a hired killer.
We follow Ray and Ken around the medieval churches as Ray tries to come to terms with what he has done. Paintings of medieval views of purgatory and of the last day on earth form the backdrop for both men. Is it possible to find redemption when you have committed an evil act? What’s the place of hell and heaven? What happens if you’re only a little bit bad? The director counter-balances the scenes of medieval Europe with a sort of modern, sometimes comic nastiness. We meet a young drug dealer and her skinhead boyfriend. A guns dealer who works out of a cornucopia of antiques and fine arts. A cocaine sniffing dwarf and his Dutch prostitute. Modern life looks pretty dissolute. There’s a film within a film construct enables the film to include a large number of people dressed in fantasy costumes with animal masks or animal heads; these people appear and reappear at the periphery like a version of a bachannale gone wrong. The only ‘normal’ person we meet is the owner of the hotel where Ray and Kenny stay. She provides a kind of moral pivot for the range of strange activities around her.
And in a funny way, the two bad men do as well. The film explores notions of honour, integrity and loyalty through the two main characters and supporting actor Ralph Fiennes. The difficult choices made by all three characters stem from the strict moral codes which they were born into. It feels strange using the term “moral codes” to describe their thinking but all three have clear ideas about good and evil and about how you treat people which are as much a moral code as mine and maybe not too far away; it’s just that I am not in the habit of killing people. So it’s sort of interesting to position this type of Sopranos thinking in Bruges, with its facade of medieval trappings.
It’s not a great film but not a terrible one either. There is some great, laugh out loud comic dialogue. The shoot-out scenes need work. One reviewer called it “Mr. McDonagh’s modest bag of tricks”. He’s right. The film doesn't quite work because Bruges is not a place of brooding medieval nastiness but a more sterile and tidy tourist town. It needed to be set in a slightly edgier place, maby St Petersburg; a place which combines tourism and a dark Russian underbelly(by all accounts, I haven't been there).
But I liked being back in Bruges. I spent some time in Bruges about 15 years ago. I remembered chocolate shops, extreme tidiness and fruit-flavoured beer. It was a tourist construct; full of shops for the well-heeled and opportunities for culture. I hadn’t remembered any of the churches and so, when I re-read my dairy of the trip last night, I wasn’t surprised to see the phrase “I am sick of churches”. I bet we didn’t go into any of them. We did go into a tower where a lot of the film action takes place; I have written “We climbed lots of stairs because there is supposed to be a great view but the 70-odd people in front of us at the top made it difficult to appreciate.” We went on two excellent tours; one on bikes around the city and out into the countryside and a whole day bus tour to explore World War 1 battle sites which was a highlight of our time in Europe. We stayed in a smelly youth hostel outside of the beautiful old town and bought expensive but divine chocolates. We felt like outsiders because all of the old city felt like a construct. And because it was expensive. Just as the two hit men feel like outsiders. But not my friend in cinema queue who doesn't know what she doesn't know and therefore doesn't know about her outsiderness (if that's a word).
In Bruges, we rested. We had not quite enough money to really enjoy everything. We learnt how to pronounce Bruges…But we might have been in Burgess…
Monday, September 1, 2008
Netherland Part 11
Spring is coming to Melbourne and with it the great treat it is to sit outside in the sun and read for a few hours. On Friday I finished Netherland in the back garden with the jasmine about to go gangbusters and the cat lurking, a bit scared of the new crop of stray cats that have suddenly appeared with the warmer weather.
As I said in an earlier post, I loved going to bed to read this book. It’s set in the context of 9/11 in New York and a lot of reviewers have fixated on this but it seems to me that the novel is as much or more about the micro – about narrator Hans van den Broek and the wake up call that occurs in his life. In that way, 9/11 is a kind of large metaphor. How it works is this; after 9/11. Hans’ wife Rachel takes herself and their baby back to her country of birth, England. It has freaked her out; she doesn’t feel safe. Hans is left behind, renting an expensive apartment in the famous old Chelsea Hotel. “Over half the rooms were occupied by longterm residents who by their furtiveness and ornamental diversity reminded me of the population of the aquarium I’d kept as a child.” It’s appropriate for him to be living in this sort of zoo; he is totally disconnected from his environment, family and sense of what is important.
I think women love stories about hapless men like this. Hans does futures predictions for the money market so even his job is totally disconnected from any sort of reality. I just wanted him to get himself sorted. In reality, I am not attracted to haplessness at all – I seem to like competent men who can do practical things. Hans would be extremely annoying.
He is the archetypal outsider. He is Dutch but has lived in London and now New York. He has no living family. He plays cricket which has got to be an outsider’s game in the Netherlands as it is America. His presence in the novel is matched by another outsider, Chuck Ramkissoon who is from Trinidad. He is a businessman who dabbles in dodgy deals as well as providing kosher sushi to the residents of Long Island. Chuck subscribes to the American dream – If you build it, they will come. He’s full of schemes. And subscribes to the mythology of cricket – we meet him when he intervenes when a gun is brandished at a cricket match with a lecture about the civilising impact of cricket.
And while the novel spends some time on cricket, it is really about family and identity. One of the most moving scenes in the novel is when Hans stalks his far-away son and wife via Google Earth, tracking down to the roof line of their house, searching for signs of life; signs that he was part of their life and signs of their abandonment of him. We can be increasingly in pixilated contact with anyone but how do we really make contact or have intimacy? Which is the real story of the book. For the greater part of the book, Hans has more contact with Chuck than with anyone else in his life. It’s a novel about a man finding out what is important. Let me give an example of how he writes about this:
The novel is also about identity. The title reminds us that this area of the United States was originally called New Netherland. Wikipedia says that “New Netherland has left a profoundly enduring legacy on both American cultural and political life. Perhaps most significant was the impact of cultural and religious tolerance which led to a wealth of diversity in New Amsterdam.” The attack on 9/11 is partly about the politics of identity, about demonisation, about marginalisation. About being outsiders. Young disconnected men.
Hans is a global citizen; the anchors of family are gone, he can work anywhere. Information and culture have been globalised. In an interview, the author, who has Irish and Turkish heritage, who grew up in the Netherlands and Britain, who works in New York said that half way through writing it, he realised that the plot is the same as The Great Gatsby. He said that it’s about “...saying goodbye to Gatsby, Gatsby lived in an America which no longer exists”. It pays homage to the great tradition in American novels and political life – the dream. And thinking about the language used around the current US elections, the notion of the American dream is still so potent. If it were a tag cloud, it would be huge. For both Obama and McCain. Its worth looking at the American cover of the book - a pastoral idyll and comparing it with the one I bought. They tell very different stories. On my cover, there is a cropped image of someone, probably male, skating. It may be on thin ice or it may reference the more nostalgic parts of Hans' childhood. It's edgy and energetic in a way that the US cover is not.
Finally the writing. Dwight Garner, writing for the International Herald Tribune says that O’Neill is “incapable of composing a boring sentence or thinking an uninteresting thought,...(e.g.)he's writing about dating ("We courted in the style preferred by the English: alcoholically")”. Like me he really loved the book but O'Neill's style won’t be for everyone. “But here's what "Netherland" surely is: the wittiest, angriest, most exacting and most desolate work of fiction we've yet had about life in New York and London after the World Trade Center fell.”
Another columnist, Sean O'Hagen, has written an interesting article about the novel and its fascination with cricket - it's worth reading it just for his list of great novels which are about sport. He says it recalls "John Updike's paeans to basketball that run like an elegy for lost youth, and lost Americal innocence, through his epic series of Rabbit novels." It made me remember the great passsages in Couples; the Sunday afternoon basketball matches where everything seems to be at stake in a way that it NEVER would be for Hans. Where is his testosterone?
For me, it’s about the desolation of life, of relationship, of work which has no meaning or value. Desolation in Nether nether land…
And finally, to amuse myself before I went to sleep, I made a haiku - seems a bit naff to include it here but hey - it's my blog.
As I said in an earlier post, I loved going to bed to read this book. It’s set in the context of 9/11 in New York and a lot of reviewers have fixated on this but it seems to me that the novel is as much or more about the micro – about narrator Hans van den Broek and the wake up call that occurs in his life. In that way, 9/11 is a kind of large metaphor. How it works is this; after 9/11. Hans’ wife Rachel takes herself and their baby back to her country of birth, England. It has freaked her out; she doesn’t feel safe. Hans is left behind, renting an expensive apartment in the famous old Chelsea Hotel. “Over half the rooms were occupied by longterm residents who by their furtiveness and ornamental diversity reminded me of the population of the aquarium I’d kept as a child.” It’s appropriate for him to be living in this sort of zoo; he is totally disconnected from his environment, family and sense of what is important.
I think women love stories about hapless men like this. Hans does futures predictions for the money market so even his job is totally disconnected from any sort of reality. I just wanted him to get himself sorted. In reality, I am not attracted to haplessness at all – I seem to like competent men who can do practical things. Hans would be extremely annoying.
He is the archetypal outsider. He is Dutch but has lived in London and now New York. He has no living family. He plays cricket which has got to be an outsider’s game in the Netherlands as it is America. His presence in the novel is matched by another outsider, Chuck Ramkissoon who is from Trinidad. He is a businessman who dabbles in dodgy deals as well as providing kosher sushi to the residents of Long Island. Chuck subscribes to the American dream – If you build it, they will come. He’s full of schemes. And subscribes to the mythology of cricket – we meet him when he intervenes when a gun is brandished at a cricket match with a lecture about the civilising impact of cricket.
And while the novel spends some time on cricket, it is really about family and identity. One of the most moving scenes in the novel is when Hans stalks his far-away son and wife via Google Earth, tracking down to the roof line of their house, searching for signs of life; signs that he was part of their life and signs of their abandonment of him. We can be increasingly in pixilated contact with anyone but how do we really make contact or have intimacy? Which is the real story of the book. For the greater part of the book, Hans has more contact with Chuck than with anyone else in his life. It’s a novel about a man finding out what is important. Let me give an example of how he writes about this:
“…our dealings, however unusual and close, were the dealings of businessman. My ease with this state of affairs no doubt reveals a shortcoming on my part, but its the same quality that enables me to thrive at work, where so many of the brisk, tough, successful men I meet are secretly sick to their stomachs about their quarterlies, are being eaten alive by bosses and clients and all-seeing wives and judgemental offspring, and are, in sum, desperate to be taken at face value and very happy to reciprocate the courtesy. This chronic and I think, peculiarly male strain of humiliation explains the slight affection which bonds so many of us, but such affection depends on a certain reserve. Chuck observed the code, and so did I; neither pressed the other on delicate subjects.” (p158)
The novel is also about identity. The title reminds us that this area of the United States was originally called New Netherland. Wikipedia says that “New Netherland has left a profoundly enduring legacy on both American cultural and political life. Perhaps most significant was the impact of cultural and religious tolerance which led to a wealth of diversity in New Amsterdam.” The attack on 9/11 is partly about the politics of identity, about demonisation, about marginalisation. About being outsiders. Young disconnected men.
Hans is a global citizen; the anchors of family are gone, he can work anywhere. Information and culture have been globalised. In an interview, the author, who has Irish and Turkish heritage, who grew up in the Netherlands and Britain, who works in New York said that half way through writing it, he realised that the plot is the same as The Great Gatsby. He said that it’s about “...saying goodbye to Gatsby, Gatsby lived in an America which no longer exists”. It pays homage to the great tradition in American novels and political life – the dream. And thinking about the language used around the current US elections, the notion of the American dream is still so potent. If it were a tag cloud, it would be huge. For both Obama and McCain. Its worth looking at the American cover of the book - a pastoral idyll and comparing it with the one I bought. They tell very different stories. On my cover, there is a cropped image of someone, probably male, skating. It may be on thin ice or it may reference the more nostalgic parts of Hans' childhood. It's edgy and energetic in a way that the US cover is not.
Finally the writing. Dwight Garner, writing for the International Herald Tribune says that O’Neill is “incapable of composing a boring sentence or thinking an uninteresting thought,...(e.g.)he's writing about dating ("We courted in the style preferred by the English: alcoholically")”. Like me he really loved the book but O'Neill's style won’t be for everyone. “But here's what "Netherland" surely is: the wittiest, angriest, most exacting and most desolate work of fiction we've yet had about life in New York and London after the World Trade Center fell.”
Another columnist, Sean O'Hagen, has written an interesting article about the novel and its fascination with cricket - it's worth reading it just for his list of great novels which are about sport. He says it recalls "John Updike's paeans to basketball that run like an elegy for lost youth, and lost Americal innocence, through his epic series of Rabbit novels." It made me remember the great passsages in Couples; the Sunday afternoon basketball matches where everything seems to be at stake in a way that it NEVER would be for Hans. Where is his testosterone?
For me, it’s about the desolation of life, of relationship, of work which has no meaning or value. Desolation in Nether nether land…
And finally, to amuse myself before I went to sleep, I made a haiku - seems a bit naff to include it here but hey - it's my blog.
Post 9/11
Hans foolishly substituted
Cricket for marriage.
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