Catching up on Classics

Just finished reading Treasure Island, for the first time ever. I knew the outline of the story, so I may have seen the Disney movie way back in the fifties (but don't really remember it) and I may have read a Classics Illustrated comic version of it when I was a child, but as for the book, I've never opened it before. The only reason I've read it now is that someone wrote about it in an article I read - an article I can't put my finger on again now - and it struck me that Treasure Island would do nicely as something to read, even more so as there was a free version of it on Kindle.

The book is surprisingly grim and violent. Deaths abound from beginning to end as the various pirates associated with the treasure are disposed of one by one by other pirates intent on being the last man standing, so it seems. It's much worse than one of those TV series in which a bunch of seemingly random people are killed off in order to make it more difficult for the detective to figure out whodunnit.

And even Jim Hawkins, the young hero (Stevenson isn't particular about his age, though he's often called a 'boy') kills at least one of the pirates. Hawkins tells most of the story, and this aspect of the book is very well done...until Stevenson, out of the blue, interrupts his narration with one by Doctor Livesey. Naughty Stevenson, I can hear all those contemporary writing gurus saying. It does come as a bit of a shock, and only lasts for a few chapters before Hawkins takes up the tale again. Was it necessary? I suppose so, since Livesey gives us information Jim can't possibly know.

Stevenson's writing is superbly stylish. There's a great deal of atmosphere, the discussions of ships' tackle is convincing, and the Island is vividly drawn. The characters are nicely delineated, especially the more well-to-do ones such as Squire Trelawney and the Doctor, and Captain Smollett. Long John Silver is of course a character who's larger than the book, almost, and some of the other pirates have their peculiarities both of mannerism and speech.

And the names are great: apart from those mentioned above, the names stick in the mind. In fact, as each one appeared, I thought, Yes, I remember this one. Remember it from what? Classics Illustrated? Blind Pew and Israel Hands and Ben Gun and the like.

Well, this year so far I've managed to catch up on The Three Musketeers as well as Treasure Island. I'm onto Peter Pan next, another one I've never read. Must be a year for classics...not necessarily illustrated.

Goodreads - one thing lacking

I've been involved with Goodreads.com for some time, but I've only really got into it properly in the last year. It seems to be a huge site in terms of people involved, and there's certainly a huge amount of interaction. Plus the Goodreads staff are very helpful and quick off the mark.

Only one thing is lacking, I feel. And that's a way of recording the books you didn't finish in a year. I made a category on my own page for books I'd given up on and ones I'd put aside for the moment, but since Goodreads continues to categorise them as books you're still reading it's a bit confusing.

I keep track separately of the books I read on a file on my computer - have been doing this for nearly a decade in a consistent fashion - and I make a note about the ones I didn't finish with some comments about why I didn't finish them. Sometimes you can get a good way through a book before you abandon it, so there's a degree of effort put into books you don't finally enjoy.

I got Mary Poppins out of the library a couple of days ago, but only got halfway through it before abandoning it. I'd never read this children's book, regarded as a classic, and my interest was piqued after seeing the movie Saving Mr Banks, which is about the making of Mary Poppins into a movie. In the movie, P L Travers (as she called herself - Travers was in fact her father's first name) argues forthrightly for the book to be made into the film she wants to see. It wasn't, but as my wife noted this morning, perhaps her arguing about so many details actually made it a much better film than either she or Disney could have imagined.

But the curious thing I found when reading the book was that the movie is actually a much better work. The book, disappointingly to me, is merely a series of episodes. There's little development of character, no plot, no reason why Mary Poppins comes into the Banks family's life with her random use of magic, and when I looked at the last chapter, nothing seemed to have moved forward.

Now plainly the book is written to be read to children of a fairly young age, and for them plot and characterization isn't quite such an essential. But Disney and co took all the disparate elements and made a movie that has a point, has a degree of plot (Mr Banks comes into his own far more than he does in the book, something that helped Travers deal with her own alcoholic father, it seems) and has much more fully-formed characters. Furthermore the movie is charming, a great musical and only marginally too long: the laughing sequence, where everyone has tea under the ceiling is too extended for me, personally. Julie Andrews is proper and prim, but brings a warmth to the character of Mary Poppins that the book's version definitely lacks. Michael and Jane (the best drawn characters in the book) are adorable, and Mr and Mrs Banks have plenty to do in the story instead of being merely 'parents' as they are in the book. Dick van Dyke's character barely appears in the book - he's only in one chapter. (Travers hated even the idea of van Dyke being in the movie, apparently.) Furthermore he isn't a chimney sweep, but his magical picnic with Mary is one of the highlights of the movie, with the animated penguins, which were supposedly one of the sorest points on Travers' side.

Saving Mr Banks may take Travers and Disney's relationship somewhat fancifully, but it does bring to light not only Travers' unhappy childhood, but also her miserable and self-centred adulthood. As the Wikipedia entry notes: According to her grandchildren, Travers "died loving no one and with no one loving her." A sad line to have in your obituary, particularly when you delighted so many readers for decades, and have managed to live to nearly a hundred. 

Catch up on some movies

We've watched three movies on DVD over the last week or so that have been worth noting.

Let me put in a plug for our local library while I'm at it: they provide DVDs at $2.00 a pop for a week, and $2.00 a pop for TV series, which you can have for a fortnight. I wanted to catch up on the first series of Broadchurch the other day, because I'd missed some episodes. In the end we got it from a video store, and it cost $10.00. I found it in the library yesterday as one of the 'top of the picks' at $4.00, and I could have had it longer...  It's a great service, and we've made some really interesting discoveries as a result, even watching two entire series of DVDs in Italian: Inspector Montalbano was one of them. And then we went on to learn Italian as well...but that's another story.

First up on the movie front was Last Passenger. It's about a small group of people who get left on a train that's refusing to stop - the driver turns out to be someone, they think, who wants to commit suicide in a spectacular way. Dougray Scott and Kara Tointon star, and do a good job. The whole film takes place on the train and for the most part maintains its sense of tension. There are a few spots where things could have moved along a bit, and the plot probably doesn't want to be investigated too strongly, but overall this was a nicely tense ride. There's an affecting performance from the seven-year-old boy, Joshua Kaynama, a little boy caught up in a situation he doesn't understand and who's asked to do the impossible at one point.

The second movie was much more sure of its pacing: the tension barely let up for a moment, even when there were conversations between various baddies. This was 7 Boxes, a film made in Paraguay, which apparently isn't well-known for top quality movies; in fact several of the cast seem to have started their film careers in this movie (!)

It's about a young man whose job is wheelbarrowing purchases for customers in a market. (The wheelbarrow isn't your garden model but a long flat thing that obviously takes muscle to handle.) These wheelbarrow boys have to compete with each other to get the work, and it's tough. When the boy, Victor (Celso Franco) gets an opportunity to take seven boxes 'around the block' for some devious characters, he jumps at it, because it's going to be very well paid. The boxes of course contain something much worse than he imagines, a nasty fellow-barrow boy has been shunted out of the job by accident and wants to get it back, and those sending the boxes on their way have got things considerably tangled, much to their horror. The piece is well plotted, and all the elements keep crossing and intercrossing until there's a violent climax in which Victor almost dies.

In spite of the tension and violence there's quite a bit of humour, lots of fun with cellphones changing hands, a nice bickering relationship between Victor and Liz (Lali Gonzalez) his know-all friend who obviously thinks girls can do anything, and all manner of other enjoyable details. This movie also takes place in a fairly confined area: small in South American terms, anyway. Everything happens in a huge (and I mean huge) market area, a market that seems to go on in a maze for miles in every direction.

The last movie was Saving Mr Banks. Emma Thompson and Tom Hanks star, Hanks playing a generous second fiddle to Thompson's wonderfully arrogant performance. Thompson is P L Travers, the creator of the Mary Poppins stories. Her books are sacrosanct and the idea that Walt Disney (Hanks) should make one of his awful animated movies out of them appals her. She's been holding out for twenty years, but now she's starting to need the money, and is finally persuaded to go to Los Angeles and meet Disney, and see if she can agree to anything. There's almost nothing she wants to agree to, which makes it difficult for the Hollywood people, but in the end...well, you can imagine the end because you know Mary Poppins got made and was one of Disney's most successful films ever.

Interwoven with the modern story (set in 1961) is Travers' childhood. She had an imaginative father of Irish stock, in Australia, but he was an alcoholic, and for all his intentions to keep his promises, seldom could. In spite of this Travers, as a child, adored him, and shared his wonderful fairytale view of the world. Her childhood is a tragedy, in fact, and this has affected her adulthood, so that in spite of writing a wonderful set of stories she has become a bitter old woman. Perhaps she wasn't quite as difficult as the filmmakers make her out to be, but she was certainly opinionated, and the 'family' (the Banks family in the book, and Poppins herself) were extremely precious to her.

It's a classic Hollywood movie in the old style, with a cast of great actors (Colin Farrell plays the relatively small part of the father, and Rachel Griffiths makes a brief appearance as an aunt who obviously was in part a model for Mary Poppins). Very enjoyable, and emotional.

Getting sidetracked

While I was thinking about the matter of wholesale printing just now, I though how strange it is that while books are increasingly appearing in digital form, junk mail is just increasing, full stop. I guess there's a digital equivalent of junk mail - it appears in borders and columns and banners on our web pages, for starters, and is surprisingly easy to ignore.  But the curious thing I can't quite get my head around is why junk mail on paper should be increasing.  Is it because the long-established form of advertising is at a crisis point, and when crises arrive, the lemmings often start heading off in the wrong direction - like over the cliff.  The equivalent in junk mail terms is that instead of there being less junk mail there's more than ever.

At a tangent, for a moment, it must be pointed out that lemmings are much maligned in terms of being a species that jumps over cliffs.  Somewhere in the recesses of my mind I had the thought that it was a myth that lemmings commit mass suicide, and a bit of quick checking on the Net confirms that, on the whole, it is.  Many lemmings live too far away from the sea, for one thing, to go hiving off committing hari-kari as a group.  Those that do live near water are perfectly capable of surviving in it - they're very good swimmers, apparently.  The reason they swarm to a region that's not their home area, is because food becomes scarce when there's a large increase in the population; the tribe splits and numbers of them go somewhere else to live.  Makes sense.

Seemingly the Walt Disney 'documentary' White Wilderness in which lemmings were seen diving off cliffs, and which may be an important source of much misinformation about lemmings, was faked.  White Wilderness was one of the Disney True-Life Adventure series, which, rather than showing reality, often misdirected viewers by mocking up scenes that had more effect than the real thing would have.  (We see the same thing in reality TV these days.) The trivia section of imdb.com on this film, states: This picture was filmed in Alberta, Canada, which is not a native habitat for lemmings. They were imported from Manitoba for use in the film, and were purchased from Inuit children by the filmmakers. The Arctic rodents were placed on a snow-covered turntable and filmed from various angles to produce a "migration" sequence; afterwords, the helpless creatures were transported to a cliff overlooking a river and herded into the water. The entire sequence was faked using a handful of lemmings deceptively photographed to create the illusion of a large herd of migrating creatures. 

Now I don't know who wrote this, so it can't necessarily be taken as gospel, but you can find more information about it on the Wikipedia article,where there's some background to the discovery that something underhanded had taken place in the filming.  Further information about it can be found on the Wikipedia article on Lemmings, in which we learn that Disney and co weren't the only ones perpetuating the myth of lemming mass suicide.

This is all a bit of a sidetrack from printing and junk mail, but like so many of my blog posts, one thing leads to another and often the 'another' is a bit more interesting.  How many other nature documentaries are faked in some way?  How often is the urbane voice of David Attenborough telling us something that in fact isn't what we're seeing at all?  (See the paragraph about Attenborough towards the end of this article.)  I watched a nature film not long ago in which the narrator (it wasn't DA, for a change) insisted that some particular thing happened because evolution had decided that it should; and if it isn't evolution doing some mythical decision-making, then it's the species itself deciding that life as it is isn't good for the long haul and somehow making its physical features change. The fact that this isn't science at all but speculation is never mentioned: we all know that Evolution is the answer to everything so just throw it in whenever you want it to be the convenient explanation.

See, I'm getting sidetracked again...onto a hobby horse.

Photo courtesy of Sunday Mercury Net, where there's an interesting and positive article about lemmings.