The Mousening

I just spent the last half hour in solemn confrontation with a mouse in my kitchen. It began with a rustling on the counter; I ran into the kitchen in time to see him scurry behind the toaster oven. "I CAN SEE YOU!" I accused at high volume, to his great alarm, "YOU SHOULD KNOW THAT I CAN SEE YOU RIGHT NOW."

That is when I decided to video-conference D in for the rest of the mouse battle.

"Ok," I said to him, when he asked what was going on and what he was looking at, "I've trapped a mouse behind the toaster oven, using the Tardis cookie jar as a blockade. So unless this mouse is a Time Lord, there's no way he's getting away."

I think our mouse might be a Time Lord.

I also quickly came to regret bringing my own backseat mouse-trapper to the battlefield. D  kept asking why I wasn't using a box with a stick tied to a string, as I erected increasingly elaborate Rube Goldberg contraptions.

Here's how the confrontation ended from D's POV:

D: "Why don't you fasten those two cookie racks together with a twistie tie?"

Sycorax Pine: "I don't know whether I have a twistie tie. Let me just see whether there's one in... AAAH!!!! AAAAH!!! AAAAAAAAAH!!!!!" The video feed shudders with in a clatter of baking tools and hideous screams.

D: "What's happening? What am I looking at? Why am I talking to our food processor now?"

SP: "I CAN SEE YOU! I CAN TOTALLY SEE YOU!"

D: "Where is he? What happened?"

SP: "Behind the dish drainer. Look, little friend, I just want to humanely trap you and take you outside so I don't have to call the exterminator to kill you. Can't we come to some sort of understanding?"

Mouse Time Lord: [!!!]

D: "I THOUGHT YOU HAD HIM TRAPPED. HOW DID HE GET OVER BY THE DISH RACK?"

SP: "Look, if you aren't in the trenches, you don't know what it's like."


Later...
SP: "Do you approve of the account of the mouse battle I posted online?"

D: "Yes, but you are still leaving out a crucial part of the story."

SP: "That I was outwitted by a mouse?"

D: "That the mouse didn't escape via a TIME MACHINE, but rather through a weakness in your defenses. It's like being a Time Lord, but even more like just walking through an open door."

I concede nothing. 


Farfara
October 27, 2012

The Vivid, the Gothic, the Spiderporcine: Thief of Shadows

Winter Makepeace: what a name. I would object on the grounds of generic overexuberance (let's not forget that his sisters go by the similarly abstemious names Temperance and Silence, and one of them ran off with a semi-reformed ne'er-do-well named Lazarus), if I hadn't just come across three separate, apparently devout ancestors named "Love" (each after her grandmother) in my genealogical explorations.  Three Loves amidst a sea of Margarets.  That's my kind of naming.

In this fourth in Elizabeth Hoyt's Maiden Lane series, the ascetic Winter Makepeace, overseer of a foundling's home in down-at-the-heels St. Giles, is by night the Thief of Shadows, a super-hero avant la lettre called the Ghost of St. Giles, who wanders the streets defending the disenfranchised and forgotten.  Quite early in the novel he finds himself at the tender mercies of Lady Isabel Beckinhall, who is working very hard to convince the world of how scintillating her surface is, and how very little lies beneath it.  The romance that unfolds after she rescues the Ghost from a rampaging mob, all without ever removing his mask is nice enough - the lovers are likable, and the skepticism about the rapaciousness of an aristocratic economy is welcome in a historical romance - but nothing feels particularly wrenching or revelatory. Isabel in particular never really gets off the ground for me as a character: although she's kind and realistically self-questioning, her various characteristics don't ultimately congeal into a coherent personality.  Winter's does to a greater extent, because he is the more unusual persona, but the problems which lend conflict to the romance (having to do with his self-denying tendency to devote himself fully to any task he takes up, whether it be superheroic scurrying about on rooftops, running a children's home, or caring for a family) are all too easily solved when love (sweet clarifying love) helpfully reshuffles his priorities.  I wish that unusual characters like Winter would maintain their distinctiveness (in his case, his chilly austerity) when and after they fall in love, rather than thawing into a rather generic heroic suaveness and confidence.  My favorite scenes with both Winter and Isabel were those in which they were uncertain: it's their prickliness that drew me in, not how polished and dashing they could be.

The gothic genre (to which this book only lightly belongs) has developed a reputation for drawing its personalities in broad, bravura strokes, but I'm not sure a really skillful evocation of the genre should  should mean half-hearted characterization as much as it means dynamic environmental tension.  These characters were psychologized (and likable) but they weren't vivid.  And in the gothic mode, everything should be vivid.

Stray notes:

• The editor in me feels honor-bound to point out that there are some infelicities (as they say) in the writing here: sporadic and awkward archaisms, unnecessary interjections of "telling," etc.  It's fairly rare, but I'd like to have seen these ironed out.  Know that this also isn't a piece of decorous realism: if you are seeking a painstaking evocation of historical social mores, go elsewhere.  Hoyt's more interested in building a warm affection between her characters (which she does deftly in all of her novels that I've read), and they routinely find themselves in situations that defy the period's standards of social decency. 
• Speaking of which, there's one scene of rather explicit banter about how hard Winter and Isabel like their mattresses - all par for the course, except that they are having this conversation over the head of Isabel's young ward, who finally asks why they are speaking of riding their mattresses when they should be sleeping in them.  Honestly, now, I thought, thinning my lips schoolmarmishly: there's a time and a place, people. Innuendo is decreasingly sexy as you add children to its audience. Am I approaching withered old stick status, or is this icky?
• For a time, it seemed like the plot was settling into a too-familiar, "Will she guess his secret identity?  Will she be torn between attraction to two men who are in fact the same person? What does it mean to be jealous of yourself?" territory, but Hoyt blessedly avoids getting too tangled in this (because her heroine isn't an idiot).  It's possible that in this section, I may have found myself repeatedly humming the "Spiderpig" theme. I admit nothing. 
• A whole crowd of hurrahs (and some spoilers, for the wary) for a novel which contains both an unashamedly untouched hero and a portrayal of infertility that doesn't end with love as the magical cure. More like this, please.

Thief of Shadows (2012)

Elizabeth Hoyt 

5.5/10

(Galley) 

[Note: This was my first experiment with reviewing a book from NetGalley, and I'm torn about how to negotiate the ethics (and legalities) of indicating the source of books I've received from publishers/authors rather than from libraries/purchase. I'd like just to be able to tag them as galleys, but tags in my blog template are only searchable, not always visible. In future, I'll mark these books as "Galley," "ARC," or "Publisher-provided" in the ratings section of a post, and do my utmost to ensure that the free nature of the text doesn't affect my the nature or tone of my reviews.]


Saturday, Septemeber 15, 2012
Farfara

Lost Spirits and Formal Sporrans: The Angels' Share (AFF)

And the Atlantic Film Festival begins, with this frolic of a fairy tale about whisky and redemption, a sort of SIDEWAYS that, in place of neurotic, pretentious, SoCal yuppie wine geeks, gives us scarred, working-class, Glaswegian ex-cons. Which, to me, makes it about a million times more charming.

It's not a deep film, and it's a resolutely sentimental one, but it left me in an awfully good mood.  Ken Loach draws his main characters with his wonted decency and detail, although tangential characters sometimes descend into the sort of caricature that left me with the uneasy feeling that if the film had been set in London instead of Glasgow, it might have starred Hugh Grant.  (One character is so profoundly foolish that even his companions can't quite believe it.)  A large portion of the film dances at the edge of neorealist inaudibility, or perhaps muttered incomprehensibility, and to be honest these were my favorite sections: this film could do with a bit more muddiness, a bit more obscurity in its moral message.  I loved The Angels' Share best when it seemed not to care what we thought, or whether we were even keeping up.

What saves it from utter didacticism as a tale of the last big score that allows a fundamentally decent man to escape the trap of criminality and violence is the performance of Paul Brannigan as handsome, scarred Robbie (and, needless to say, the way Loach patiently frames that performance).  Robbie's just been told by a judge that he's had his last chance, and only gotten it because of the stabilizing influence of a girlfriend who's just about to make him a father for the first time: when next he finds himself in trouble, he's going to prison, and probably for some time.  Brannigan's Robbie is fiercely smart and mutely shameful; he discovers an unusual perceptiveness to the nuances of whiskey, a drink he never cared for before, but despairs of ever getting a legitimate job when the violence of his past is written in sharp cuts on his face.  In every scene, his eyes show his ambition warring with his despair and regret, like a doppler map of coming weather.  I was half in love with him myself by the film's end.  (Wait, am I not supposed to admit that?)

The film's title, like everything else about it, is both squirmingly earnest and defiantly evocative.  The angels' share is the percentage of spirit that evaporates every year from the stored whiskey: it represents what is lost, but also what is offered up.  It is the spirit of generosity and the poetics of pragmatism, and it emerges as a social metaphor for those who've been written off.  I found myself warming to the title the more I thought about it, even in its final, most literal invocation.

"Everything about this film screams Nova Scotia," said the festival programmer to us as we took our seats, "It's set in Glasgow; it's about people turning their lives around; and, you know, stealing booze."

Sure enough, when our Dogsberrying group of misfits make their way to the Highlands in kilts, and "I'm gonna be (500 miles)" started up, a not insignificant portion of the audience (including me, and not just because I was expecting the Doctor to show up) sang along in clear, broad Scottish accents.

On the other hand, this is the sort of film which rousingly plays the Proclaimers as kilted Glaswegians seek out legendary whiskey in the Highlands. You've been forewarned.

 The Angels' Share

dir. Ken Loach (2012)

6.5/10

  

Here, share in my good mood:

And now, a personal tangent:

At the film, I had a revelation. When D  moves to Nova Scotia, I'm getting him a kilt to celebrate. My mom and I agree that he will rock it. (And the best part: it will be a major victory in his ongoing war on pants.) Now I just had to find out what my mother's family tartan is.

There followed this series of manic midnight messages to D in Hawai'i, who was having an unusually frantic day on set and probably did not appreciate a thousand questions about how he would look in a skirt: 

"Ugh: apparently we are lumped in with the MacLennans, a clan with a singularly hideous tartan (What's that whirring, thumping sound? Is it my ancestors spinning in their collective Presbyterian graves in Glasgow and Northern Ireland?)."

["Hmmm," wrote my sister-in-law after examining the MacLennan tartan, "not sure who decided that green, teal and red should all go together."

"Ancient clan warriors," I replied, "who'd been up all night drinking and painting themselves with woad. Never trust the color-sense of a woad-covered man."] 


"I'm tied down to it," I went on to the unresponsive D, "but I don't think you should be. I think instead I'm going to get you a plaid from one of the clans represented by characters in the Scottish play. Unless you indicate a favorite, I'm leaning towards MacDuff. (Although I really think you would look best in MacDonald. But we can't totally throw signification and association out the window and declare your allegiance to a Haligonian bridge, for God's sake. That way lies madness.)"

[Silence.]

"Do you prefer your sporran in muskrat, badger, or leather? Or shall we go the full Canadian with beaver? Too on the nose (so to speak) for a crotch accessory?"
[No answer from D.  Odd. Clearly he needs some local context.]
"This wins the prize for Canadian non-story of the summer. It honestly reads like an Onion article:

The Halifax artist donned a kilt last October and has since decided that he prefers it over pants.

“You don’t feel so confined or something,” says King, 40.

Pants for men in the Western world seem to be pretty much the norm in modern times, but for most of history, it wasn’t. Even Romans thought pants were for barbarians.... He wants to wear the kilt “because it is a more authentic type of clothing or something and has a history to it.”"

[Crickets.]

"Do I detect an ominous silence from D?" my mother interjects, "I mean, you can lead a man to a kilt, but ..."

And he doesn't even know yet that this kilt (even without the [everyday] sporran, the socks, the matching tartan things that hold up your socks, the dress sporran, the ceremonial knife, and the Jacobite jacket) is going to cost as much as a mortgage payment. Shhh. No one tell him.


Saturday, September 15, 2012
Farfara