Exit Music

While we were touring around over the last couple of weeks, I dropped into a few secondhand bookshops (and one or two new book shops, as well).  In Picton, if I remember correctly, I found a very good secondhand bookshop and a proprietor happy to talk at length if I'd so desired.  He had a copy of Ian Rankin's Exit Music, originally intended to the the last in the Rebus series.  We had this on CD, but I'd never listened to it, so I got the trade paperback he had in stock.

Having just read the most recent Rebus book, Standing in Another Man's Grave, in which Rebus, although officially retired, is in no way devoid of his usual energy and insight, it was a bit odd to go back a step and see him preparing for imminent retirement.  Like the latest book, hinges on a huge red herring, though in saying that, the red herring here is actually a vital part of how the book works itself out, rather more so than in the most recent story.

In the first chapter the body of a Russian poet is found on the street in Edinburgh, and everyone who appears in the story - and I mean everyone - is in some way involved with this man, from politicians to small time crooks, from drug addicts to pushers, from academics to bankers.  Not a soul is outside the ever-widening circle of people who are affected.  It's so well written it would easily have made a fitting climax to the Rebus series, and Rebus himself is in fine form - ageing  but not old; sarcastic but witty, anti-authoritarian yet endeavouring to train the younger police officers to respect the right channels.  He knows from his own career how difficult it is to go against the flow.

There's a lot of warmth in this book; more than in some of the Rebus stories.  There's minimal violence - apart from the murder(s) obviously - though the arch villain Big Ger Cafferty comes a bit of a cropper, much to Rebus' annoyance (!)  It's the sort of cropper that could see Cafferty die before he pays his dues.  Rebus would much prefer that he's put behind bars legitimately.

Perhaps, having read the two most recent Rebus titles back to front, I should continue in the same vein, and read through the series again, in reverse!

Two comedies

I thought Weleda was the name of a flower, but it turns out to be a brand name for a line of health products.  These products are sold worldwide, even in New Zealand, but I've never heard of them.  Plainly all that advertising has been wasted on me, guys!

Equally, in the last two days I've watched a couple of movies that were also completely unfamiliar to me.  One is Italian, the other French (though most of the cast is Russian, and the first half of the film takes place in Moscow).

The Italian one would have to be the most lightweight movie I've seen in a long time.  It's called Pranzo di Ferragosto, has its director (Gianni di Gregorio) in the leading role as Gianni, a fifty-something bachelor who lives at home with his mum, drinks a lot of wine, seldom pays his bills and in general seems a bit of a waster.   Ferragosto is a major Italian holiday, and dates back two millennia.  Pranzo is merely a word for dinner, or lunch.   Because Gianni is in debt he finds himself having to look after three old ladies for the holiday as a kind of barter system for not paying his bills to his landlord and his doctor.   Along with the mother, the women take over, in the nicest quietest gentlest way, and if Gianni thought he had enough to do with placating his mother, he soon finds four women are more than quadruple the problem.   There's almost no story apart from that: the old women discover each other as friends and confidantes, Gianni runs round feeding them a lot and trying to get them off to bed (rather like adolescents) and in the end everyone comes out happy - or at least a little happier.

The four women in the cast are all non-professionals, and do a lovely job of conveying the four very different women in the story.  Not that 'lovely' is the word to apply to the actress, Valeria di Franciscis, who plays Gianni's Mum.  With a hideous wig that barely balances on her head, and a face covered in enormous dark spots, and strongly indented wrinkles and lines, and scarlet lipstick across thin lips, she must be one of the ugliest actresses ever to be seen in the movies.  But that's what old age does to people: makes them a lot less pleasant to look at than they were when young.  The other three women are a good deal less ugly, though they have almost as many lines and wrinkles.  

Mélanie Laurent

There are a lot of older people in the French film too - The Concert.  Because it concerns people who are no longer in the prime of life, age is something of a factor, though not quite to the extent it is in the Italian movie.  The Concert is about a once-famous Russian conductor now reduced to working as a cleaner in the Bolshoi Theatre.  This was the result of him having a number of Jews in his former orchestra and not being willing to give them up in order to further his own career.  As a result of a fax slip-up, he decides to persuade the former members of his orchestra to reform and take a trip to Paris where (supposedly) they've been invited to perform in lieu of the LA Orchestra, who've had to drop out.  With some difficulty he collects together the musicians from all sorts of reduced circumstances, as well as taking on as manager the very man who interrupted his last concert all those years ago, and made a laughing stock of him. 


In spite of that outline of the story, this is actually (for most of the film) a comedy - in fact it verges on farce at times.  The characters are all larger than life and some are drawn with very broad strokes.  The only truly serious character in the film is the young violin soloist (played by the gorgeous Mélanie Laurent) - her past and the loss of her parents haunts her somewhat, and she turns out to be part of the reason behind the mad trip to Paris.  Laurent has the unenviable task of 'playing' the Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto (in a reduced version) at the end of the movie: this would have to be one of the best simulations of violin playing I've seen in a movie.  


There's a large cast that works well together, wonderful music and the most interesting subtitles I've ever seen.  Several of the Russians have to speak French during the movie, but their French is obviously a bit less than perfect, and this is reflected hilariously in the subtitles.  


Of the two movies, I wouldn't greatly recommend the Italian one, unless you're content just to take it as it is: a piece of fluff with a minimal message about old age.  The French one won't be to everyone's taste either - it doesn't entirely seem to know whether it's a comedy or a farce or even a drama, but still manages to pull itself off.  Nevertheless, as an evening's entertainment, it has a number of good points, not least the wide-ranging music.  

Sorting out the world

Just something quirky that my son showed me the other night.

It's well known that the maps of the world we usually see are distorted, with the Northern hemisphere countries being out of proportion to their actual size. (Here's a map that gives a better indication of relative sizes.) But what's really intriguing is that the map of Africa (the whole continent) comfortably swallows up countries that we normally think of as huge: the US, China, and India.

Population size doesn't equate to land size, which is why, as I was told yesterday, the Chinese invaded India back in the 50s/60s (sorry, not just sure of the date), in order to have more space. If they'd really wanted space, they should have shifted some of their population to Africa. The Africans might not have even noticed. Or to central Australia. No one would have noticed if they'd been quiet about it.

Anyway, here's where to find the map of Africa with China, India, the US, Great Britain, and all of Europe laid over it.

Russia doesn't fit, because, in spite of our general thinking, Russia has the largest land mass of any country, with Canada in second place - even though it's almost half the size. The US comes next (although it's in 4th place on this page) with China in the actual fourth place. Brazil and Australia follow.

There we go. Got the world sorted out at last.

A Russian flying boat/sea plane/something or other

After I wrote the last post, my cousin, who's presently in Jersey in the UK, wrote and gave me a couple of links to videos of the Ekranoplan KM Caspian Sea Monster. I'd never heard of this seaplane before. It's not a pretty-looking thing, I must say; quite clunky, in fact. And it seems....large - a real monster. The comments on the first video provide some background, although, like so many comments on You Tube, it's hard to pick which commenters actually know something and which are just guessing their way through.

The video below is about 11 minutes - and the commentary is in Russian, so you have to guess what's being said about it. There's an intriguing moment about six minutes in when the thing lands on the sea then slides up onto the sand.

One Two Three

A couple of posts ago I wrote about Billy Wilder's movie, Sunset Blvd. Last night I watched another in the Wilder 'canon,' the oddball comedy, One Two Three (from 1961). Perhaps now mostly remembered (if remembered at all) because it was James Cagney's last movie for around 17 years, it's a hectic, wild, loud, annoying farce, that seems to play at full bore for all of its running time.

For the cast it must have been better than a bottle of fat burning pills - all of them are required to take their scenes at a breathless pace, and Cagney does his part at full throttle, not only sending his own earlier screen roles up once or twice but being sent up by other characters as well. It would be interesting to see it again in a cinema with a full audience of people already a little merry. In a living room watching it on the telly, it just doesn't hit the mark any more in spite of everyone's best intentions. There are plenty of jokes, lots of comings and goings in the plot, lots of mild satire (perhaps milder now than it was at the time), stereotype Russians/Communists and militaristic/Germans - and yes, even a few laugh-out-loud moments. But compare it to the rich humour of Some Like it Hot and you have to wonder if this is the same author/director at work here.

Horst Buchholz, who first appeared in a movie at the age of 19 and was still working up till the year before he died (2003) has a lot of fun with his over-the-top Communist youth, and Pamela Tiffin plays the dizzy Southern belle who's madly in love with him. The rest of the cast are a mixed bag of American, German and multi-European actors.

The most intriguing thing about the movie is how they persuaded Coca-Cola to allow itself to be sent up as well as everything else. The company plays an integral part in the plot - although it's mana is completely undermined in the last shot.

Two extracts from Finding Sanctuary

Finding Sanctuary is by Abbot Christopher Jamison.

In February 2004 BBC Television broadcast a programme entitled 'What the World Thinks of God.' As part of their research they commissioned Bradford University's Peace Studies Department to carry out an audit of wars over the last hundred years, with specific reference to the role of religion in causing those wars. Looking back at history, they analysed the actual mechanisms by which religion might case war and found several possible ways in which this occurs. These mechanisms might be the promise of salvation to those who fought the infidel, or the intention of religious leaders to seize holy places - both key factors in the medieval crusades. Or they might be the desire ot convert the enemy, as in the wars of the Reformation.

The researchers then analysed the thirty-two wars of the twentieth century. Their conclusions were that only three had a significant religious element. They considered the Israeli-Arab wars, for example, to be wars of nationalism and liberation of territory (and I would ad that the same is true of the Irish wars and conflicts). They noted that the current campaign being waged by Arab terror groups is largely about political order in the Arab countries, especially the presence of foreigners there. These groups use the language of religion, but the use of religious language to justify terrorism is disowned by mainstream religious leaders.

Political leaders use differences in confessional faith as a way of mobilising support for political wars, and it is mainly in this way that religion becomes a factor in war. Furthermore, the main wars of the century (the two world wars, the Russian civil war leading to Stalin's regime, the Chinese civil war leading to Mao's regime) claimed seventy-five percent of all casualties of war in the twentieth century: they killed 150 million people. None of them is attributable to religion. The recent conflicts in which religion has played a significant role have killed only one per cent of the number of victims of secular wars.

This study provides evidence that religion is not a major reason for war in modern times. But the two great moments of violent religious conflict in Europe, the Crusades and the Reformation, have cast a long shadow over the popular mind, so that even though there have been no truly religious wars for many centuries, even intelligent commentators still insists that religion causes wars. The reality, however, is that in the modern world it is governments, and not religions, that cause wars. (pp 165-6 Weidenfeld and Nicolson edition 2006)

And on another tack entirely:

I offer a final story from the desert fathers and mothers. A young monk once went to see his superior: 'Father, ' he said, 'I must leave the monastery because I clearly do not have a vocation to be a monk.' When the older monk asked why, the younger monk replied: 'In spite of daily resolutions to be good-tempered, chaste and sober, I keep on sinning. So I feel I am not suited to the monastic life.' The older monk looked at him with love and said: 'Brother, the monastic life is this: I rise up and I fall down, I rise up and I fall down, I rise up and I fall down.' The young monk stayed and persevered. (pg 172 ibid)

And in spite of the title of this post, one more:

You may be wondering whether such an approach to scripture is only for monks, so I offer you this thought from St John Chrysostom, the great fourth-century Archbishop of Constantinople. "'I am not,' you will say, 'one of the monks, but I have both a wife and children, and the care of a household.' This is what has ruined everything, your thinking that the reading of scripture is for monks only, when you need it more than they do. Those who are placed in the world, and who received wounds every day, have the most need of medicine." (pg 66 ibid)

People's Train & the Consciousness Plague

About three days ago I finished a book I've been struggling my way through for what seems like weeks (but probably isn't). It's one I had to review for the Otago Daily Times, and I did my best to like it, but pretty much failed, as you can see from what will be the review when they publish it.

The writer is Tom (sometimes Thomas) Keneally, perhaps most famous for Schindler's List, the book that inspired the film of the same name. (Actually the book was originally called Schindler's Ark, but you won't find new editions of it with that name now.)

I've read other books by Keneally, one set in Australia and to do with priests and priesthood, and another set in the Antarctic, about explorers there who see someone from Scott's party who should have been dead long since. (It's also a murder mystery of sorts.) I enjoyed both of these.

But this latest book, The People's Train, has structural problems, or perhaps just narrative problems. It's told by two narrators: one takes up about 250 pages, the other the rest of the book. The first, a Russian exile living in Brisbane at the beginning of the 20th century, is a man focused so much on socialism and the revolution that he seems unable to connect with people, even though he has a kind of charisma about him. Unfortunately this makes him a very dull storyteller. Not that there isn't 'story' to tell; it's just somehow his approach to it is dull.

The second narrator, whom we've already met in the first part of the book, is a 30-something Australian journalist, with a taste for adventure. He joins the Russian when the latter returns to Russia in the days leading up to the Ten Days that Shook the World, and tells things from his viewpoint. However, he hero-worships the Russian, to a degree, and takes on board all the socialist/Marxist stuff that's spouted to him - spouted from every quarter. 'These Russians can certainly orate' he notes, after one particular day on which they rave on hour after hour.

The reader, for better or worse, seldom hears any of the discussions. They're all reported at secondhand. This may be a good thing. Politics isn't my greatest joy, and discussions of politics even less so. Innumerable other events are reported, however, from the grim to the violent to the vicious. Yet they're all seen through a kind of objective window, as though neither the Russian or the reporter can feel any real emotion about them. Keneally somehow manages to keep us at a distance throughout the book, and we rarely feel anything for the Russian, or even for the other characters as they struggle through difficult and tumultuous times. Only in the very last pages, when one of the characters attempts to rape a woman and is stopped by the Russian and the reporter, do we have any sense of outrage. Perhaps Keneally knows that the huge events are just too huge, and has to bring the horrors down to a personal level. Yet he's done this throughout the book, and for me, very little of it affected me.

Perhaps I've become tuned out to the emotions that are portrayed here. Or perhaps something about the book just didn't take hold and nothing it could do would please me...!

On the other hand, I happened to come across Paul Levinson's The Consciousness Plague at the library while looking in the sci-fi section for something else. Levinson's book can hardly be called sci-fi, except in the most loose sense. It's far more a detective story, with a lot of scientific stuff thrown in - the main character is a forensics man. It has two 'mysteries' on hand. The first is why people are starting to lose patches of their memory after taking a new flu antibiotic; the second is why a number of young ladies have been murdered over a period of six months or so.

The murders occupy quite a bit of the book and cross over with the scientific stuff, but for me that part of the story was left at something of a loose end. Probably as a result of reading too fast (and having too many names to keep track of) I wasn't sure that the murder side of things got thoroughly solved. On the other hand, the issue with the bacteria that's affecting people's memories is possibly the more interesting part of the story, and whether it's scientific or baloney it comes across as very well.

Perhaps the strangest thing about reading this book is that it's so close to the hype that's surrounded swine flu...

How not to throw the discus

Four days without rain or overcast skies or freezing winds. Real live sunshine. We’re beginning to feel human again.
While we were watching the movie, Serenity, last night at a friend’s place, our host was recording some of the Olympic Games on his HDD. (It’s something we can do too on our machine, although we haven’t actually done it yet.) Anyway, amongst the various things that we picked up on after the movie was finished, were some of the Decathlon events: the hurdles and the discus throwing.
A couple of odd things stood out. In one of the hurdles heats, one of the contestants leapt up with all the others to race, and then stopped, and did nothing more, while the other hurdlers ran on. No explanation from the commentators – he was just ignored, as though he’d never been in the race to begin with.
And then, as we were watching the discus, we pondered on how easy it would be for someone throwing the thing to miss the opening and send it crashing into the nets. And immediately one did! A gentleman by the name of Roman Šebrle, who was the top man in the Decathlon discus. How frustrating for such a thing to slip from an athlete’s fingers. Our host reckoned it was because Roman had spat on the discus before he threw it!
I didn’t know Šebrle as a name, so I kept hearing it as Roman Chevrolet, which seemed to be how the announcers were saying it. Crikey, what a romantic sounding name – it’s the sort of name you give to a hero in a romantic novel!
We also watched a bit of the Russian/American volleyball game. I think if you added up the amount of time they spend playing and the amount of time they spend hugging each other, the latter would come out on top easily. The game is played in a pretty boring fashion, really, with massive serves that almost invariably cause nothing else to happen in that volley. When they do actually all get to chase the ball around, it's over in seconds.
I watched the table tennis the other night: at least in that game they get on with it, and while some of the rallies may be very short, a good number have some action in them. I don't know who the two guys were, but one was a tall Scandinavian and the other a Chinese from China or Hong Kong. The Scandinavian wiped the floor with the Chinese, which apparently wasn't supposed to happen.
And one other thing we caught up on: the women's Taekwondo. There was a New Zealand girl in this, and she and her opponent spent so much time hopping back and forth from foot to foot and never actually doing more than sizing up the opposition that the referee had to keep stepping in and reminding them they were supposed to be fighting - and giving them penalties for not doing so. Not one of the highlights.