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6000 pages reading reviews

6000 Pages 2011, The Straw Men – Michael Marshall (pages 9520-10015)

(May as well get this out there now too)

After enjoying Killer Move so much I started reading The Straw Men as the next but one book. M. had raved about it to me years ago but I’d always avoided it due to potential gore, violence etc but having read Killer Move I figured I could handle it. Unfortunately it was the book I was reading when I went home to see my dad after his heart attack (he’s still fine btw) and somehow that created bad associations for me so I abandoned it and didn’t start again until a couple of weeks ago.

The Straw Men follows three story lines initially. There’s the latest victim of a serial killer known as The Upright Man, a teenage girl he has abducted and, if true to form, will kill within a few days unless someone can stop him. There’s the story of Ward Hopkins ex-CIA and ex-various other similar careers who returns home to deal with his parents death in a car accident only to find that things are not quite as they had appeared. Finally there’s the shadowy, possibly mythical organisation known as ‘The Straw Men’. Who exactly they are, what their aims are and how they plan to fulfil them ends up connecting the other two story lines.

This is another excellent thriller from Michael Marshall. I didn’t enjoy it quite as much as Killer Move but it’s still very good. In particular the plot is very clever, the way things join up, the way Hopkins for instance figures out something about his parents by the state they’d left their home in (which to all the world looks normal) was smart and satisfying if you like that kind of thing. Also the plot rattles along as you’d expect but still with enough space for characterisation and relationship. There are some tough moments violence wise, a little worse than Killer Move in my opinion (though still not up to David Peace gruesome). One of the worst was a description of what unedited news footage of a terrorist attack would look like. I think that affected me because I know that such footage exists.

I feel like I have to justify why I didn’t quite enjoy it as much as Killer Move. It’s M.’s favourite Michael Marshall book (her favourite ever book is his Only Forward written as Michael Marshall Smith). Anyway I think the reasons I preferred the later book are as follows:

  • I was slightly spoiled – partly by some indirect remarks of M.’s which I correctly deduced plot points from, but mostly by reading the blurb on the back of the next book in this series. If you plan to read this book stay away from The Lonely Dead (or The Upright Man in the US) as it mentions the big reveal on the back cover.
  • I preferred the hero of Killer Move. Hopkins was fine. He was sympathetic, clever and very competent. But he was also a little bit of a stereotype, the ex-military/cop/security services guy investigating some dangerous mystery. Bill Moore, as I said at the time was an ordinary annoying man thrown into a gradually more complicated and dangerous situation. Also Bill had a wife he loved and Ward was alone (in that sense, he had a friend/colleague).
  • One of the characters disses Buffy in the first few pages – ok mostly kidding about this. (mostly!)

Having said all that if I’d read it first and not known anything about it maybe I’d have preferred it. Either way it’s still a great read.

8/10 – another great crime thriller from MM(S).

One oddity worth mentioning. I read the ebook of this (as I do with most new purchases now) and the story ends, there’s a section of ‘Acknowledgements’ (thanks to …) and then a section which in the table of contents is called “ebook extra”. Thinking this was like a dvd extra, deleted scene if you will, I thought I could see why it wasn’t in the original. This was a kind of coda explaining more clearly what had happened and how various characters ended up – most of which you could infer from what had gone before.

Except that it was in the original. It came immediately after what I had thought of as the final chapter. The acknowledgements came after that. weird.

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6000 pages book reading reviews

6000 Pages 2011, Wild Abandon – Joe Dunthorne (pages 9216-9519)

With less than two weeks of 2011 left I’m uncomfortably aware that I’m behind on reviews. Which isn’t a problem in some ways (more time to read) but it will delay when I can set out the conditions for the 2012 challenge etc. Anyhow…

I chose Wild Abandon to read by a slightly circuitous route. I’d enjoyed the film Submarine which was from Joe Dunthorne’s earlier novel. Rather than read it – though I was tempted – I thought it might be more fun to read something where I didn’t know the story.

Wild Abandon is the story of a commune and the family that forms the core of it. Both the commune and the family seem to be falling apart. Don and Freya’s marriage is showing signs of strain whilst their daughter Kate just wants to be normal and pass her exams. Albert, the son is pretty well adjusted – apart from his conviction that the world is going to end.

Wild Abandon was an easy and enjoyable read. It’s funny without being laugh-out-loud hilarious – though there were moments when a joke landed particularly well. It’s more the subtle character humour of well-observed small interactions between characters. Particularly the way Don reacts to those around him. He’s somehow turned from an idealistic purposeful leader to a bit of a pompous prat. His relationship with the older commune member Patrick who he patronises mercilessly was very much in this vein.

If I have a criticism it’s that the plot was a little more complicated than it needed to be. There was perhaps one too many coming or going in the comings and goings of people who’d decided to leave, then stay or vice-versa with the commune.

It does have a very effective and noticeably cinematic final scene which I enjoyed.

7/10 – more a gentle freeing than a wild abandonment.

(Now I’m only one book behind on reviews but hopefully by the time I go to bed tonight I’ll be back up to two!)

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6000 pages reading reviews

6000 Pages 2011, Girlfriend in a Coma – Douglas Coupland (pages 8935-9215)

Here’s a book I haven’t read for a long time, not long after it was published in fact (a year or two). That being the case I’m not going to attempt to keep spoilers out of the review of a book that’s nearing 15 years old. Fair warning.

Girlfriend in a Coma is I suppose a ‘millenial’ novel, whatever that is. OK I know what it is, or what I mean by it. It’s a novel that came out as 2000 loomed and it deals with fears about the state of the world and the possible end of it.

It begins with a couple of 17 year-olds, Richard and Karen, who’ve just made love for the first time and are about to go to a party. It’s 1979 and Karen is about to go to sleep for a very very long time. She is the ‘girlfriend’ of the title.

The book is in three sections. The first deals with Karen going into a coma and it then tracks Richard and her other close friends through their lives for the next 17 years. The second section deals with the period from when Karen wakes up to an apocalypse of sorts. It’s a very gentle, serene apocalypse where people simply fall asleep and fail to wake up until Karen and her friends are the only ones left living. The final section of the book follows this group for a few weeks about a year later seeing how they’ve adapted to the end of the world.

I remember liking this book a lot when I read it in 1999/2000ish. I liked seeing how Richard’s life developed, how he aged during the 17 years of Karen’s coma. I also felt like Karen when she awoke had some interesting insights into how people were – how they were so proud of how efficient technology was but she didn’t feel things were better and that everyone had no time for anything but work. I tired a little of the post-apocalyptic stuff because it was  a bit odd and I didn’t know what to make of it. But – this is how I recall it – it wasn’t overly long compared to the book as a whole.

Memory’s a funny thing. It’s been nearly as long since I read it since the gap between Karen going into her coma and awakening. Like Richard I looked back but wasn’t able to quite put myself into the mind of my former self.

Firstly I was surprised how short the first section was. I had remembered it as going on for most of the book but it’s a third if that. The bits of insight about growing older were there but they were literally the couple of clever sentences that I’d remembered anyway.

The second section also finished sooner than I remembered. The best parts of that were the dynamics of Karen awakening and the logistics of her getting to talk, walk and live again; the insights she had on seeing the new world appear as if, to her, overnight; and the setting up, playing out of the end of the world stuff.

Still when we reached the third section I couldn’t recall enough stuff to fill the 70-odd pages that remain, so this section did feel like it dragged more. I also realised that what I had taken as a basically realistic what-if type story that gets a bit weird towards the end, was always something of a parable and so some of the more sureal, fantastical elements fit into that.

I’m glad I re-read it, I didn’t enjoy it as much this time around but it was still worth the time.

7/10 – interesting and entertaining not to put you, or your girlfriend, into a coma.

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6000 pages reading reviews

6000 Pages 2011, The Necropolis Railway – Andrew Martin (pages 8704-8934)

The Necropolis Railway was a book I bought in a second hand bookshop on a whim a few weeks ago. It’s a murder mystery set on the turn of the 20th century steam railways. Specifically it concerns the Necropolis Railway of the title. This was a real thing which was set up during the mid-19th century as a way of dealing with the overcrowding in central London cemeteries by moving funerals and burials to a large graveyard outside London. The transport to do this was the Necropolis Railway.

This book is set in the winter of 1903 when Jim Stringer, a humble porter from Yorkshire moves to London having accepted the offer of a job as an engine cleaner working for the London Necropolis Company. This he hopes is the start of a career path leading to becoming a driver being the pinnacle of achievement in his view. However almost from the start he comes up against hostility from the other men working on the railway. He also discovers that there have been a number of mysterious apparently accidental deaths. Further intrigue, and deaths follow and he finds himself investigating what he’s now sure is a series of murders.

The thing I should say straight away is that I’m not particularly a steam train fan. Martin clearly is and that’s OK. One of the delights of reading is to put yourself in the head of someone who thinks differently to you, likes things you don’t etc. However I had thought that I’d learn something as I went along but Martin pretty much assumes you know an awful lot of the technology, as well as some of the period details. My policy these days with books is to plough on and assume it will all become clear. This is a book where I might have benefited from pausing to check Wikipedia every now and then. Or perhaps not, I got the gist.

I can’t comment on the accuracy of the period feel but I can say that it was recognisably different from the modern day. So that awful thing of 21st century people projected back into historical contexts that you sometimes see wasn’t a problem here.

The plot trundles along quite well. I found it a little slow to start but it picks up about a third of the way in. The romantic interest when it turned up was well done I thought. Again, different to modern eyes but not a cliche either. The murder mystery plot was pretty good though I guessed most of the reason behind the killings. There did seem to be a lot of explanation in the last couple of pages which left it feeling like the next book (there’s a series of these) might continue the story, but from what I gather despite having the same hero it’s its own story.

7/10 – not enough of a steam buff to really love this but had fun anyway.

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6000 pages reading reviews

6000 Pages 2011, A Fisherman of the Inland Sea – Ursula K. Le Guin (pages 8490-8703)

Some time around the middle of the year I started reading collections of short stories as a break from lengthier books. I’ve still got a few on the go but this is one I both started and finished this year[1].

I’d never read any Le Guin before but was aware of her reputation and had thought about reading one of her more famous novels. However I decided this would be a better way to discover if I liked her style or not.

There’s a range of stories here, all except one in a SciFi or Fantasy vein. A couple are little more than jokes. There’s one that’s a parable about gender roles. The final three – including the one the collection takes its name from – all take place in a connected universe. This irked me slightly whilst reading the first one. I like things to be self-contained. When the world is already alien and you’re having to learn about new technology, races, cultures and planets it seems to annoy me when some of that is not relevant to the current story. However I do acknowledge that this is a quirk of mine and in other contexts I don’t expect stories stripped down to just the essential for the current narrative.

I enjoyed these stories although it seems my favourites were the ones, according to the introduction that Le Guin was least happy with herself, or saw as less substantial. In particular the parable one, The Rock that Changed Things, she felt was a little too on the nose and preachy. I also enjoyed the jokes. The others contained things that were a little strange. Sometimes strange and beautiful, sometimes just odd.

She’s clearly a gifted writer but I don’t think I’ll go back to her for a while.

6/10 – Probably most enjoyable if you’re already a fan.

[1]Which leads to a dilemma about whether I ‘count’ the others if I finish them next year.
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6000 pages reading reviews

6000 Pages 2011, 11.22.63 – Stephen King (pages 7637 – 8489)

After I read Under the Dome earlier in the year I said to myself that I probably wouldn’t read another Stephen King novel. However I heard about this on Newsnight Review and was seduced by the concept and by the generally favourable comments on the writing. Also buoyed by my latest burst of enthusiasm for reading I didn’t feel intimidated by the length so I thought why not?

11.22.63 is a novel that centres around the assassination of John F. Kennedy on that date. However it’s a work of fiction and science fiction at that. A man who owns a diner in 2011 discovers in his store-room a kind of portal, what he calls a ‘rabbit-hole’ referring to Alice in Wonderland, that you can step through and be back in 1958. He convinces a friend of his, a school-teacher to go through the rabbit-hole, live in the past and then attempt to prevent the shooting of JFK.

I said that this was a science fiction book but as with Under the Dome King has a story he wants to tell and a way of setting it up which he cursorily describes – the time-travel is largely the later. It’s noteworthy that he chose not a time machine which could be targeted at a particular time but a naturally occurring (though presumably rare) phenomenon which a fixed exit point in time – September 9th 1958. This is worth pointing out because King makes it impossible for his hero to do anything other than spend 5 years in the past in order to achieve his goal. So really there are a few things this book could be/is about:

  • time-travel and its consequences, inherent paradoxes etc
  • what everyday life was like in late ’50s/early ’60s America
  • the events leading up to the assassination, and in particular the movements of one Lee Harvey Oswald
  • an alternate history story of what the world would have been like if the assassination attempt had failed.

And 11.22.63 covers all of these to a greater or lesser extent. However I think it’s fair to say if you’re more interested in the time-travel specifics or the alternate history than say Oswald and the 60s then you may not enjoy this book.

As it was I enjoyed it more than Under the Dome but still felt it was a little long. The book is split into sections and in the first there is a fair bit about the rabbit-hole, how it works and whether it’s possible to change the past at all (it is but “the past is obdurate” we discover). Then there’s the central section which involves the main trip back to 1958 and the following 5 years. This itself is split between a story of our protagonist actually living in the past – where he lives, the job he does, friends he makes, the woman he loves – and his attempts to track Oswald and gather the information he needs to stop him. The former I enjoyed, the later was over-developed in my opinion. I realise King has done lots of research and read lots of books but I really don’t need most of that information.

Of course these two stories inevitably come together and climax at the date in question.

I feel like there’s a really good 500-page novel in here. I’d cut a lot of the Oswald background details. I’d also trim down the story of how they prove that the past is changeable – which is almost a novel in itself. At 853 pages it tested my patience but I still came out enjoying it overall.

A couple of stray points. It’s noteworthy that whilst the hero is 35 in 2011 a sense of nostalgia pervades some of the descriptions of the past (like how wonderful the root beer tastes) and I think that’s because King was 11 in 1958. Also there are some references to other King novels – this is something he does apparently, I remember M. telling me that there are references in Under the Dome to characters in The Stand. Here the descriptions of the town of Derry, as if the place itself had some sort of supernatural malevolence, confused me slightly. Apparently if I’d read other works by King I’d’ve got the reference.

Finally worth pointing out, because it’s easy to forget and I did, that although there’s not much violence in the book when it does appear it’s pretty graphic. I was reading it wondering if it was strictly necessary then remembered I was reading an author best known for horror fiction.

Anyway – long book, long review, time to stop.

7/10 – a bit of a slog but worth it.

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6000 pages reading reviews

6000 Pages 2011, The Big Sleep – Raymond Chandler (pages 7365 – 7636)

There’s a phenomenon that occurs when someone experiences for the first time an incredibly influential piece of culture having already consumed many many examples of things that were influenced by it – you can be a little underwhelmed and feel that it appears derivative when in fact it’s the inspiration of things that seem more original. My experience of The Big Sleep was a little like that. Worse I have second hand parody versions in another medium playing in my head as I read. What I’m recognising as similar is probably the dialogue from Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid, Play it Again Sam or even Who Killed Roger Rabbit. I don’t think I can imagine never having heard all those echoes but I’ll try to not judge the book on them in this review.

The Big Sleep is a crime novel in which a private detective Phillip Marlowe is employed by a dying rich old man to look into the apparent blackmail of one of his two adult daughters. The case starts off seeming simple but a couple of dead bodies later and things become more complicated. How much you like this book will probably depend on how much you like Marlowe. Fortunately I found him tougher but sympathetic, more so than perhaps the snippets pf movie portrayals might have led me to believe. I think that’s partly because you have that inner monologue and because he’s cheeky and funny and ultimately humane. How can you not love someone who can come out with this, for instance?

…there was a broad stained-glass panel showing a knight in dark armour rescuing a lady who was tied to a tree and didn’t have any clothes on but some very long and convenient hair. The knight had pushed the vizor of his helmet back to be sociable, and he was fiddling with the knots of the ropes that tied the lady to the tree and not getting anywhere. I stood there and thought that if I lived in the house, I would sooner or later have to climb up there and help him. He didn’t seem to be really trying.

I did enjoy this book although the plot got a little too convoluted for my failing short-term memory at one point but fortunately it was just a few pages after that that Chandler put in a big exposition scene that explained everything so far. Unfortunately one of the parodies I’ve mentioned above contains a scene with enough superficial similarity to this story that I guessed the ending, however that was not a major problem and I might well have guessed it any way. It was relatively short (I’m currently reading a Stephen King!) but it packed a lot into that and didn’t outstay its welcome. I read it in an edition that includes two other Marlowe novels – The Long Goodbye and Farewell My Lovely and I will probably read them at some point.

7/10 – enjoy the original and try to ignore the many copies.

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6000 pages reading reviews

6000 Pages 2011, Punchbag – Robert Llewellyn (pages 6961-7364)

OK, so I’m both pleased and nervous to be doing this review. Let’s deal with the pleased bit first. This is the one of a rare group that I’m calling “Bus-ticket Books”. That’s because I have a few books that I bought back in the late nineties and, as was my custom in those days, read on the bus every day into work. I have at least a couple of these that I never finished at the time and still have the bus-ticket bookmark. OK, I can only think of two that actually have the tickets, this is one and The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick which I read a few years ago. I didn’t blog about it except in passing (“what the hell was that about?” being the sum total of my review). Nevertheless I rather like the fact that a) I still have this little random artifact of a decade or so ago and that b) I actually have finally finished the book concerned.

Now the nervous bit: I want to review this book but I want to sidestep as much as I can getting too much into the issue(s) that it’s clearly about. Not because they’re not worth discussing or I haven’t got anything to say about them but just so this post stays at a reasonable length. I guess we’ll see.

Punchbag is about something called Full-Force Self Defence. What’s that? Well let me explain with an anecdote from the book that I presume is at least based on a real case: a female black-belt karate champion was brutally raped in her own home. When she was attacked, despite having the skills to defeat her attacker she freezes. The reason being, so the theory goes, that she’s never been trained to use these skills for real – she’s used to hitting and kicking thin air or pulling punches with partners or very controlled circumstances. So this new form of self defence is based on getting a man in a padded suit to attack women who are then taught how to defend themselves using ‘full force’ i.e. not holding anything back.

So, the novel follows a few characters but the main one is Nick who is a London based bouncer who becomes the first British “padded assailant” when a Californian company that run these classes decides to open a branch in the UK. What we get in this book is an exploration of so many different attitudes and aspects of male-female relationships, violence, feminism, sexuality – and Llewellyn certainly doesn’t shy away from any of these areas. In fact if anything he throws too much in at the risk of over-complicating the plot.

So I think Llewellyn walks a line here between a novel that is clearly issue-led and an extended piece of propaganda. I think he walks very close to that line, crosses it a couple of times but overall it is still a novel, it has a story, with characters who have their own motivations and drives. However there was atendency in this book that worried me whilst I was reading it – the fact that whilst he allows his characters to have all shades of different, including very unpleasant and un-PC opinion, ultimately the main characters seem to always revert to a the “proper” attitude and not always with any discernable reason other than the passing of some time.

He also doesn’t shy away from asking questions about this form of self defence. Is it encouraging women to be overly violent? Could they perhaps be being given a false sense of security? Is it an over-reaction or form of vigilantism? (A man in the book is hospitalised over what, in the individual incident, was a relatively minor form of harrassment.) It’s good that he doesn’t try to answer these questions definitively but I think we sort of know where his sympathies lie.

Judged as a book I did like it. I particularly liked getting inside the head of Nick where we were allowed to experience a range of thoughts and emotions including some “unacceptable” ones which whilst unpleasant are real and without which the characterisation would have felt false. I also think if you wanted to raise the issues of male-female violence then this is a book that makes you think.

7/10 – thought-provoking, sometime uncomfortable and ultimately enjoyable read.

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6000 pages reading reviews

6000 Pages 2011, Falling Sideways – Tom Holt (pages 6590-6960)

Frogs eh? Frogs are hilarious aren’t they? I mean you’re probably giggling already because I’ve written the word ‘frogs’ in the first two (now three!) sentences. Plus look! there’s one in the picture.

No?

OK. Let’s start again and I’ll try to restrain the sarcasm.

After enjoying Expecting Someone Taller again I thought about the possibility of reading another Tom Holt. As I said I read Taller back when it came out and the next two after that. I didn’t enjoy those as much and decided he was not for me and stuck with Pratchett. I was vaguely aware that he was still steadily producing books but was a little aghast to discover quite how many – 30 in fact. So I was spoilt for choice.

Browsing through Goodreads and Amazon at the reviews and descriptions I came across Falling Sideways from 2002 which seemed quirky and obviously had a romantic element which is probably the main thing I enjoyed about Taller. So frog on the cover notwithstanding I took a chance.

(btw in case you’re wondering I didn’t decide to read two Tom Holts in a row. After Taller I started another book, which I stalled on so I switched to Falling Sideways as a lighter read. I will go back to that book after I finish the book I started after Falling.)

It’s funny that I started reading this book during what should have been Nanowrimo (I mean it still is but not for me, not any more) because it reads like a bad cliche of what a Nano novel is like – like someone sat down and just wrote and every time they ran out of ideas or hit a plot wall they just wrote themselves out of it by inventing something strange and bizarre no matter how inconsistent or convoluted.

Of course it can’t have been a Nano novel because a) I don’t think it was going in 2002 (if it was it wasn’t an internet phenomenon yet) and b) Holt was a published author with a dozen and a half books under his belt already. So maybe he had a deadline, or maybe he just wanted to try freewheeling or maybe he really really thought it was a different and better way to go. (For all I know this is typical of his later books and his fans love it).

I’m getting ahead of myself, what’s it about?

David Perkins is a single, early 30s computer nerd who lives alone and works from home. And he is head over heels in unrequited love with a beautiful woman. The only problem is she died 400 years ago and he’s actually in love with a painting. However, never fear because after purchasing a lock of her hair for a ridiculous sum at an auction he pays a visit to “Honest John’s House of Clones”… and a madcap adventure ensues involving clones, gods, intergalactic space travel and frogs, lots of frogs.

The big problem with Falling Sideways is that the basic structure is this – a little bit of setup, some running around with people being chased and fearing for their life/safety/freedom then a pause with a long expository conversation explaining how everything you know so far fits together THEN repeat but when you get to the next exposition reveal how most of the earlier explanation wasn’t what you thought it was because it was a) not real and b) an attempt to manipulate the characters into a particular position or frame of mind (as in “you had to think you were on a spaceship and in danger of alien vivisection so that you’d do so-and-so”). Once or twice this would be fine. When this has happened four or five times and you’re only 2/3rds of the way through the book you realise that this is the book’s thing, its theme or motif if I were being charitable.

Normally when I start to feel I’m losing the plot with a book I worry because I feel it’s up to me to keep up. I’ll check back to earlier sections and try to figure it out. Here I knew it was all just part of the ride and in any case trying to understand the current situation was pointless when some major part of it would turn out to have been unreal or not what it appeared to be.

So yes it had plausibility issues down in the details of the story – the idea that a clone would inherit the memories of its progenitor for example – but you know me, these sorts of things don’t usually worry me, though a little techno-babble explanation to cover it would have been nice. However it’s at the grand scale that it lost me. I didn’t really care enough about the characters – didn’t really get a chance to know them that well – and there were amusing lines but I didn’t find most of the running around sections funny. It was an easy read and so it added to my page count relatively painlessly, that’s a plus I guess.

Actually I will just mention one plausibility detail thing. David’s attitude and behaviour towards computers is wrong. I speak as a real-life Tech Support person of many years standing. David comes across as a non-technical computer user’s view of a computer expert. Yes we are just as frustrated and annoyed by these things when they go wrong, but what looks like random thrashing around and changing things til it works actually isn’t. We narrow down the problem – not printing? is the cable plugged in? is it all applications or just this one that won’t print? has it never actually worked or did it only start happening after you installed that new toolbar? – so even if we can’t tell you precisely why it went wrong every time we know why we did what we did at each stage.

It’s like on House or one of those other Doctor shows – you look at the evidence, come up with a theory and treat based on that, if it doesn’t work you take the outcome as further evidence, run tests maybe and make a new theory. Of course being computers and not human bodies it’s usually less messy. But the principle is very similar. In particular things like if the patient has a fever then you know treatments that will reduce a fever even if you don’t know yet what caused it.

OK, sorry, that rant got away from me a bit. To be fair David’s no worse than a lot of computer people portrayals in fiction, and better than a lot. Still it’s a sign of how disengaged I was that I was able to worry about this stuff.

5/10 – a fun read IF you find frogs inherently funny.

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reviews TV

A Fairy Tale of TV: Grimm and Once Upon A Time

So two of the new TV shows are based on a similar concept – fairy tale characters in the real world. I’ve watched the first two episodes of both Grimm and Once Upon A Time so here’s my thoughts.

Once Upon A Time

The premise of Once[1] is that Snow White and Prince Charming had a daughter but that during the birth the Wicked Queen cursed the entire kindgom so that they, and all the other characters, were exiled to our world. Not only that but they don’t remember who they are. They now all live in a small town in Maine called StoryBrooke[2] where “time has stopped” meaning that the characters haven’t and don’t age.

Meanwhile they did manage to “save” their new-born daughter by shoving her in a magical wardrobe at the last minute. This sent her through to this world too but since she was on her own and not part of the curse she grew up naturally. (How growing up alone, in a series of foster homes, rather than being in a frankly rather cosy looking little town with the benefit of eternal youth counts as being “saved” looks dubious, never mind).

She herself had a child which she gave up for adoption at the age of 18. Ten years later she’s working as a bail bondsperson and her son turns up on her doorstop. He’s carrying a book of stories and wants her to go back with him to StoryBrooke to break the spell. She plays the hardbitten, cynical city girl but she does at least take him home to his adopted mum who just happens to be the Wicked Queen aka the Mayor of StoryBrooke.

And thus the adventure begins.

I actually did enjoy quite a lot of Once. Jennifer Morrison in particular was good in the Emma Swan (Snow White’s daughter) role. I liked the real world sections most. However they inter-cut these with flashbacks to life in the fairy tale realm. To say these are played straight is an understatement. They are taken so seriously that it undermines any drama in the other sections. They do try to pull off the Buffy trick of playing the weird and wonderful as if it’s perfectly normal for those involved and showing how it feels. However it fails partly because the execution is too on the nose. There’s almost no (deliberate) humour.

Also, by the second episode the main storyline seemed to have developed into a showdown between the Birth Mother and the Adopted Mother (Foretold Breaker-of-Curse and Evil Queen). It suddenly hit me as these two powerful women were squaring off against each other that I was watching Dynasty with fairy tale trimmings and I found it hard to take seriously after that. Certainly not as seriously as they apparently want me to.

Grimm

I watched both Once episodes before watching Grimm and was left with a feeling that whilst intrigued there was something missing. I was also aware that Grimm had received slightly less favourable reviews (going off IMDB and AV Club ratings). So I was pleasantly surprised about 20mins into the pilot how engaged I was.

The set up is much more familiar. Basically the Brother Grimm were actually monster hunters and their stories were written as warnings. They have passed down a legacy of fighting these monsters – who look human most of the time through their descendants and the turn has now come of a young cop in Portland. He’s started seeing weird things when he looks too closely at certain people’s faces and then he gets called out on what looks like an animal attack but becomes clear is a murder. A young woman jogging through the forest in her red hoodie was torn apart by some sort of big bad w… you get the idea.

So in the same way that Angel and a bunch of other shows have done what is basically a police procedural with a supernatural twist, here the twist is fairy tale. But the twist isn’t really that much of a twist so far. Yes our hero has to learn about the various beasties, and he can use his “sight” ability to identify them but so far he’s dispatched them with good old fisticuffs and firearms. And in the first episode the killer happens to be a monster but it’s shot like he is a serial killer of the kind you’d see on Dexter. The fact that he ‘wolfs out’ briefly during the final fight doesn’t add a lot.

I think what I was reacting to in those first minutes of the pilot was how efficiently done the setting up was – following the victim, perky soundtrack, intriguing details, sudden surprise attack. However it soon settled into a familiar groove and whether it actually was clunky or I was just too used to it, it suffered from the fact that I could tick elements off a list. When the “good” wolf character turns up he lightens the mood with some self-aware, self-deprecating humour[3] but I immediately feel like he’s put there to be a source of exposition for our hero to pick up back story. Sure enough in episode two when a new monster appears on the scene, Nick (our lead) pops around to Eddie’s (good wolf) house for some playful banter and an info-dump on the new adversary’s MO.

The nicest thing I can say about Grimm is that it’s very competently done and if you like procedurals this isn’t a bad one.

Which One Wins?

I knew watching these two shows that I really only have time in my life for one of them on an on-going basis, if that, and so part of the process was to decide which was better and which to commit to.

Well despite both being about as good in different ways, the answer is probably neither. I have enough anxiety about all the books, TV shows and movies I haven’t read or watched. I have bookshelves, kindles and hard disks full of the stuff, much of it destined to remain unseen by me. I’m not sure either of these passes the “I just gotta see it” test to make me want to make time for it.

Having said that I’m bailing on Grimm right away (good but too predictable) but I may watch another episode or two of Once to see if it picks up.

[1]I shall be referring to it as “Once” for brevity rather than OUAT which I have seen used elsewhere but is frankly ugly
[2]Yes really!
[3]David Greenwalt, one of the creators of Grimm, worked on both Buffy and Angel and it shows, albeit in a pale reflection kind of way.