The Feel Good Book Of The Year

Manhunt by Peter L Bergen doesn't really have any scoops or offer us anything new about the hunt for Osama Bin Laden, but it is still a compelling, thorough and fast paced read. Bergen knows what he is talking about and got access to the White House, the CIA and joint special forces command. As a CNN reporter Bergen met Bin Laden in the 90's and because of his close relationship with the Pakistanis he was the only western journalist who was allowed to visit Bin Laden's compound in Abbotabad before it was demolished.
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Bergen isn't in the business of apportioning blame for 9/11 and Bin Laden's escape at Tora Bora in December 2001, but I am. According to Bergen on August 6th 2001 President Bush was told by the CIA that Bin Laden was determined to strike the US. Bush's national security team led by Condoleeza Rice had previously been informed that Al Qaeda was desperate to hijack planes on US soil. After the August 6th briefing Bush did nothing. He issued no executive orders and did not raise the security level at US airports. Bush listened to the briefing and spent the rest of the day "clearing brush" at his ranch in Crawford, Texas. What was odd about this is that on a previously aired episode of The West Wing President Bartlett was faced with a similar threat and took an entire episode to decide what to do about it. Bush and Rice however didn't give this terrifying information a moments thought. 
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At Tora Bora the guilty men were General Tommy Franks and Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld who refused to let commanders on the ground insert US Army Rangers or Marines to prevent Bin Laden slipping through the net. Rumsfeld was fixated on maintaining a small US footprint in Afghanistan and at the crucial Battle for Tora Bora where Bin Laden escaped there were actually more Western reporters in the region than US soldiers. Iraq was one of Rumsfeld's fatal obsessions and on the day Bin Laden escaped "Rummy" was having General Franks rework a Pentagon invasion plan. Bergen makes the point that the Iraq adventure was a severe drain on the resources of the CIA and the special forces and that by the time President Obama came to power the entire Bin Laden unit was only about two dozen operatives strong. Morale was low and leads were few. President Obama dramatically increased the CIA's Bin Laden unit and tripled the number of drone strikes on the Pakistani tribal areas that devastated the upper echelons of Al Qaeda from 2009 - 2011. 
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The rest of the story is well known. The CIA followed Bin Laden's courier to the compound in Abbotabad and after a few months trying to gather intelligence a raid was recommended to the President. Vice President Biden and Secretary of Defense Gates both thought the raid was a terrible idea but the majority of Obama's national security team felt it was the right call. Bergen did not interview the SEALs involved in the raid so his account of Operation Neptune's Spear has nothing substantially new to add to the stuff that's already out there. According to his youngest wife, Bin Laden spent much of his six years at Abbotabad watching old videos of himself, reading Noam Chomsky and writing maudlin poetry. His last words were "don't turn the light on." (The rather more successful German poet Goethe's last words were "more light, more light...") 
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I listened to Manhunt as a Random House audiobook and although I enjoyed it I have to say that I think it was a mistake for the narrator to try to impersonate Presidents Bush and Obama and his Pakistani, Afghan and Arabic accents were unintentionally hilarious (they sounded like Peter Sellars in the Goon Show). I also wonder if Bergen hasn't gotten too close to his sources in Pakistan. He completely lets the Pakistanis off the hook and insists that no one in Pakistan knew that Bin Laden was in their country which seems prima facie unlikely. That aside, Manhunt is a pretty good audiobook and it has a nice happy ending with the vain, solipsistic, deluded mass murderer cowering in his room for fifteen minutes and then getting shot in the eye. 

The Swimmer As Hero

(a post from the blog's infancy)
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I had never heard of Charles Sprawson's Haunts of the Black Masseur - The Swimmer as Hero until I read a review of the book by JG Ballard in an essay collection. Ballard endorsed it so strongly that I ordered it immediately from Amazon.com. It is a cultural and literary history of swimming through the ages, enlived by Mr Sprawson's own swimming exploits: learning to swim as a boy in India, bathing at Pliny's house in Como, dodging Russian tankers as he attempts the Hellespont, lounging in the pools of Hollywood. Sprawson is one of those people who have read everything and he must have dozens of notebooks full of swimming references which he generously doles out for our amusement in lovely, streamlined prose. Byron gets his own chapter as do the Romans, Greeks and German romantics and many likely and unlikely figures in between. The book is charmingly illustrated and bound. It would be flawless but for the fact that it lacks an index. Though published by the small University of Minnesota Press it has been continually in print since 1993; so I would urge U Minn to hire an indexer for the next printing and if they don't Mr Sprawson should jump to Penguin or NYRB who would, I'm sure, love to have him on their lists. Charles Sprawson's interview with the BBC is miraculously still available here.

Accents In Game Of Thrones Part 2

Rose Leslie as the stroppy Man City supporter, Ygritte

For the last few weeks as John Snow has headed north over the wall I've been thinking that we were finally going to hear some Scottish accents on Game of Thrones but we haven't. You'd think the people over the wall (a Westeros equivalent of Hadrian's wall between England and Scotland) would have a different accent than the ones south of it and when they cast Rose Leslie, who is Scottish to play Ygritte, I expected that finally we were going to hear some Highland vowel sounds. But instead of that they've asked Leslie to do a Manchester/Lancashire accent which she does brilliantly but even so its a little bit of a let down. There are at least half a dozen Scottish actors in Game of Thrones and four or five Irish actors but so far all the accents on the snow are English or quasi English (Yes I'm looking at you Peter Dinklage). There's a couple of very mild accidental Irish accents (Littlefinger and Catelyn Stark) but everyone else either speaks home counties or with a Lancashire/Yorkshire northern accent. Game of Thrones is filmed in Belfast and previously I've expressed some disappointment not to hear a single Belfast accent anywhere near the show. They've filmed in Magheramorne where my grandmother's from and at Red Hall in Ballycarry where I used to play when I was a kid. They've also filmed up in the Glens of Antrim and down in Strangford, areas I know really well and I can tell you that all those places have distinct, old fashioned very interesting accents. Maybe give an extra a line or two? 
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The week before last we did get a hint of Geordie which was nice but really the casting people should be less conservative and let the native Irish, Scottish and Welsh actors use their own voices. Americans could handle Welsh accents or Scottish ones or Ulster or even Brummie. And it beggars belief that in a continent 1000 miles from top to bottom you would only hear two different accents. 
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This guy can do six different Scottish accents (and he forgot 
Glasgow). His Belfast is ok but his Boston and Maine are beyond terrible. Incidentally on a good day I can do 7 different Northern Ireland accents: Derry, Larne, Carrick, Ballymena and 3 Belfast accents: South Belfast/Malone Road, Scary West Belfast & Camp Julian Simmons Style West Belfast.  

Sherlock: A Dissent

Smaug and Bilbo

The new season of Sherlock has been running on PBS so I thought I'd repost my - very mild - dissent about the show from last year... 
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By all accounts Sherlock has been a huge success. It's been a ratings hit in the UK, it's been sold to 150 countries, the newspaper critics have been universally supine (here in Australia the critics all love it) and an American version has even been sold to CBS starring Johnny Lee Miller (the very first Mr Angelina Jolie) as Holmes. If you’ve been avoiding all forms of media for the last year I should explain that the show is an update of the Sherlock Holmes stories that takes place in contemporary London in a parallel universe where Holmes, Watson and presumably Arthur Conan Doyle never existed. Co-conceived and written by Stephen Moffatt of Dr Who fame, it stars Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman, both of whom will also feature in the upcoming Hobbit from Peter Jackson. While the casting is great, the direction slick and there is real "chemistry" between the lead actors I do have a few qualms with Sherlock and these are to do with the writing.

All writers have little tics that they carry around with them, some good, some not so good. Moffatt is a brainy guy (the power station gag in episode 1 was great and all the sly references to old Holmes stories are wonderful) but one of Moffatt's tics is to make everything really dark, really early. The first season of Sherlock was incredibly violent for what is essentially a rather fluffy mystery show. We saw the torture of old people and children and in the last episode of the season dozens of people died in a bomb explosion. I guess Moffatt thinks that if he kills a lot of people it somehow ups the ante. It doesn't. It’s an old saw of mystery writing that whenever you’re stuck over a plot you either kill someone or have someone burst into a room holding a revolver. When Moffatt gets stuck he kills loads of people. But it's better and purer to be more economical with your deaths and some of the best mysteries ever written or put on TV have no killing at all. Mass murder may be a sign of the times but it is not a good sign.

My second problem with Sherlock is that the "mysteries" themselves are all a bit rubbish. In the last season a serial killing taxi driver got people to take a poison pill "simply by talking to them." That sounds good doesn't it? Maybe, you're thinking, he did a number on their mind like Hannibal Lecter did with Miggs in Silence of the Lambs.  No such luck. When the denouement came we discovered that he got people to take the poison by pointing a gun at them and ordering them to do it. All the mysteries in Sherlock seem to resolve like that. Nice little premise, crap mystery. In the first episode of season 2 we even had a man who got killed by a plastic boomerang that came back and hit him in the head while he was distracted. A good writer always gives you a clue as to how to solve the mystery. Our clue was this: "the hiker had recently travelled abroad." By that we were supposed to deduce that he had gone to Australia, bought one of those cheap plastic boomerangs and by a miracle the boomerang he had thrown had come back and killed him. When in the history of the world has a boomerang ever come back to anyone? And where was this boomerang? Well it had conveniently "washed downstream" even though this incident had taken place in a field. It may sound like I'm going to town on this, but a boomerang? Really?  

My third problem with the writing in Sherlock is that Holmes doesn't actually solve any of the mysteries by deduction but rather by a kind of magic. He not only sees things that others don't but things that other people can't. He's not a scientist or an investigator he's a magician. In the clunky old Holmes stories the reader has a chance of hitting upon the solution before Holmes does but in the BBC series the viewer can't possibly do it because we can't do magic. This is cheating and it's not cool.

I think Stephen Moffatt is aware of his shortcomings. Designing a really good closed room mystery takes patience and skill, in fact designing any really good mystery takes a deep awareness of the mystery genre and a working knowledge of hundreds of books. If you don't have that, a good way of deceiving the viewer is to throw a lot of stuff up there on the screen. Instead of one well thought out mystery you chuck up a dozen (again, as in the premiere episode of season 2). This is another classic writer's (and magician's trick) and it's called misdirection. You blind the reader, punter or viewer with so much stuff they don't realise what's going on.

So why has Sherlock gotten such great reviews? Well it's actually a pretty good programme. And good acting, good direction and a fantastic cast can mask a lot of defects. But more importantly, I think the reviews have been so stellar because the guys who write the TV review columns for the national papers are not close viewers (with one or two honourable exceptions). TV is the most democratic of media and TV critics strive to be populist. I understand that but still they should be sensitive to good and bad genre tropes and they should point them out even in a superior series like Sherlock.  

On Being Excluded From The Conversation

Rachel Seiffert, gasp!, went to Glasgow and,
gasp!, talked to a Rangers supporter

I was listening to Radio 4's Start The Week at the gym yesterday and I was already in a bad mood because I was at the gym but then Rachel Seiffert came on and started talking about the new novel she's writing about Orangemen in Glasgow. I'm no fan of the Orange Order but the condescending tone of Radio 4's panel disgusted me and reminded me of the bad old days when talking heads from London and New York would attempt to define Northern Ireland's various tribes with their own preconceived and wildly inaccurate notions. Seiffert said "I actually got to know some Orangemen" and gave a little gasp and a laugh as if she'd actually got to know some New Guinean headhunters or members of the Waffen SS. Everyone on the panel giggled with her. Oh how brave you must have been, darling, to do this daring anthropological research in such a strange barbarous land. Start The Week would never have invited someone actually from Glasgow to talk about the weird, scary milieu of Glasgow's Orange Lodges and Rangers fandom because they might have been able to explain and gave a human face to a culture which literary London abhores. No if anyone is going to talk about Glasgow's Orange Lodges it should be a nice lady from Hampstead or Islington who is brave enough to meet the beastly fellows face to face. Also on the show were two Scotsmen, Andrew Marr and Iain Banks, but both of them of course towed the party line: Orangemen from Glasgow are beyond the pale and people who support Glasgow Rangers are nothing but vulgar scumbags and savages. (The cool and trendy people of Scotland have always been Celtic supporters.) Banks talked about how even as a precocious little child he had deplored the 12th of July parades as nothing but unbridled racism but he did concede that it was possible that some of the Orangemen "might be ok." 
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Now, like I say, I am no fan of the Orange Order. There is no place in the twenty first century for a sectarian organisation that trumpets its Protestant identity. Nobody under 30 cares whether you're Protestant, Catholic, Sikh, Hindu or whatever. Hopefully this is not a newsflash to anyone, but, you know, there is no God, and anyone who is still hung up on the Reformation is a wacko. The Orange Order are completely misguided to base their ethos on religion and, trust me, the UDA are not an awesome bunch of guys. But they (the Orange Order) are onto something when they stress the linkages between Ireland and Scotland. Ireland and Scotland are only fifteen miles apart. Just like Sarah Palin I could see Scotland from the bedroom of my house in Carrickfergus and of course it was from the Irish-Scottish kingdom of Dalriada that Scotland came to be born. Scotti, actually means Irishman, and until King Macbeth all Scottish Kings spoke Irish in their Court. The Stone of Scone is from Ireland and it was Irish monks who brought reading, writing and the Christian religion to the Picts. So I think its fair enough celebrate that aspect of the culture and maybe someday Start The Week will invite an articulate Glasgwegian or Belfastman to give voice to that point of view, but don't hold your breath...
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If this post has utterly baffled you, you're probably from America. This Wikipedia entry might explain things a little. 

The Coen Brothers Rated

Looks like there is going to be no Coen Brothers film this year. I don't know what has happened to the filming of Michael Chabon's Yiddish Policeman's Union, which sounded awesome, but which may have slipped into development hell...for the moment we'll have to be content with Michael Chabon's screenplay for, er, John Carter of Mars. Ahem. The next official Coen Brothers flick on IMDB is Inside Llewyn Davis about a Dylanesque folksinger and which wont come out until next year. 

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I've been a fan of the Coen Brothers since high school when I caught Blood Simple at the Queens Film Theatre in Belfast, and I've seen every one since; here therefore is my attempt at a rating of their filmography in the standard A,B,C,D,E,F format. A is a classic. B is very good. C is good. D and E are sometimes watchable. F is basically unwatchable. And remember this is just, like, my opinion, man...


1984 Blood Simple B  
1987 Raising Arizona A
1990 Miller's Crossing A 
1991 Barton Fink  A
1994 The Hudsucker Proxy E
1996 Fargo A
1998 The Big Lebowski A
2000 O Brother, Where Art Thou? E
2001 The Man Who Wasn't There  F
2003 Intolerable Cruelty  F
2004 The Ladykillers  F
2007 No Country for Old Men B
2008 Burn After Reading  D
2009 A Serious Man C
2010 True Grit B

Is there a pattern here? Yeah I think so. If you were to draw a Venn diagram with John Turturro, Steve Buscemi and John Goodman as the sets then the intersection of these sets usually represents the higher rated films. Inside Llewyn Davis stars John Goodman but also Justin Timberlake so make of that what you will. The Coens have also rewritten the cheesy 60's film Gambit and that will be out in the autumn with a different director. 

The Getaway

A book by Jim Thompson, a script by Walter Hill, directed by Sam Peckinpah and starring Steve McQueen and Allie McGraw. That's some combination. In truth this film is a bit patchy (I could have done without the Sally Struthers subplot) but when it works it's really fantastic. The action scenes are better than anything you'll see in contemporary cinema because there's no CGI, the chemistry between McQ and McG is palpable and especially in the opening scenes Peckinpah is very ambitious with his film-making. Enjoy.

Enid Blyton

Enid Blyton's most notorious book. Not racist at all
say her defenders, just good old fashioned fun. 

Some time ago we were given a bundle of books including The Naughtiest Girl In School Again by Enid Blyton whom I had read as a kid but who was effectively destroyed in my mind forever by The Comic Strip Presents: Five Go Mad In Dorset which came out when I had just left primary school. Enid Blyton however is still quite popular in England and very popular here in Australia. Last night, hunting around for something to read to my daughter Sophie before bed I grabbed TNGISA. It begins with a recapitulation of the adventures of The Naughiest Girl In School where, apparently, the young heroine, Elizabeth, is sent off to boarding school at a tender age but is so upset by the experience of leaving home and missing her mummy that she decides to become the naughiest girl in school and get expelled. This sounds like a pretty good strategy and a nice tool for exposing the perverse cruelty of the English boarding school system, but unfortunately at the end of book 1, it seems that, rather like at the end of 1984, Elizabeth comes back not a rebel but a zealous convert to the system. This passage sent chills down my spine: 

Elizabeth had told her mother all about the Whyteleafe School. It was a school for boys and girls together, and the children ruled themselves, and were seldom punished by the masters or the mistresses.  Every week a big school Meeting was held, and all the children had to attend. The head boy and girl were the Judges, and twelves monitors, chosen by the children themselves were the Jury. Any grumbles or complaints had to be brought to the Meeting, and if any child had behaved wrongly, the children themselves thought out a suitable punishment. Poor Elizabeth had suffered badly at the weekly meetings, for she had been so naughty and disobedient and broken every rule in the school.

I'm not sure if this was written before or after Lord of the Flies but as any educator will tell you, children are often far more tyranical and cruel to their fellows than their teachers. But poor little brainwashed Elizabeth accepts and loves this inverted system with its kangaroo courts and summary justice. She feels sorry for the common children who don't get the privilege of being sent away to such a wonderful place as Whyteleafe. 
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In a way the Harry Potter stories are simply a modern update of this rather vulgar idea. That is, the idea of the special child, separated from the dull, common herd and sent away from their parents to a place where they will face trials and tribulations but will ultimately come out steely and strong and ready to rule the lesser breeds of the Empire the Muggles. I'm afraid I couldn't really stomach much more of The Naughtiest Girl Again so I don't know how it turns out, but I can't imagine a denouement where Elizabeth burns the school down or drives the pupils to open revolt like Lindsay Anderson's terrific If (which would have made an awesome ending for the Potter series too). 

Awake

A few months ago I read a long piece about the TV show Awake in the New Yorker which proclaimed it as the future of network television. I did not find the piece particularly convincing and I was somewhat alarmed to discover that Awake was written by the man who wrote the misconceived Mel Gibson vehicle The Beaver. The premise of the show is this: A homicide detective awakes from a car accident to discover that his life has been split into two realities. In one he and his wife survived the accident, in the other he and his son lived. In one reality he is grieving for his dead wife, in the other he's grieving for his dead son. The protagonist played by Jason Isaacs returns to work and in each episode he attempts to solve two murders, one in each reality. One of the realities is either a dream or a hallucination or maybe there is some kind of weird conspiracy going on. This is not that original an idea as the gimmick is almost identical to the gimmick they pulled on Life On Mars and Life On Mars didn't work in the end because they never really thought through the arc of their story. (Life on Mars and its sequel Ashes to Ashes had two separate endings, neither of which really made any sense at all. The American version of Life On Mars had a third ending which didn't make sense either.) 
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In a way there is no point talking about Awake at all because it is certain to be cancelled by NBC in the next few weeks. Pace the New Yorker the critical reviews have been mixed and the ratings have been disastrous. But before Awake disappears forever into TV hell I decided to watch the pilot episode on iTunes. 
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Ok so what did I think? Well the first thing to say is that this is not a show that should have been made on network TV. 40 minutes is not long enough to hit the story points of a conspiracy and to solve two different police procedurals. It would be tough to do all this in an hour on HBO but on NBC each homicide investigation gets about 15 minutes tops of screen time which is less even than on Law and Order. Everything feels very rushed and not in a good way. On the plus side I liked Jason Isaacs in the lead and the supporting cast was ok if a bit lacking in charisma. There are two therapists in the two realities, one of whom tries to nurture Isaacs, while the other is more confrontational and I really liked this idea. As I say I felt the stories were all a bit too hasty and I also wonder if it was a good idea to go this dark this early on Awake which begins with an Elizabeth Smart style rape and abduction of a child. 
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There was one clever moment on Awake that really got my attention however and that was when Isaacs was talking to his therapist and wondering if his reality was all a dream. She considers this, goes to the web and prints out a copy of the US Constitution and asks him to read a piece of it at random. He reads an obscure passage and then the therapist asks him how its possible that he could gain knowledge of something he had never read before in a dream. In dreams you can't acquire new information you can only process information you already had. I enjoyed this scene very much because I've had exactly the same experience in my dreams.  When I've been suspicious in my dream that I was actually in a dream I've tried to read books that I know I haven't actually read and every single time the incongruity has woken me up. I know this isn't a dream that I'm having right now because with a couple of clicks I can go to Project Gutenburg and read a page or two of the Encyclopedia of Needlework or the Castle of Otranto books I'm pretty sure I have never read before (of course I can't be metaphysically certain). I thought that Jason Isaacs would immediately raise this issue with the more confrontational therapist in the other reality but (at least in the pilot episode) he did not. Maybe this has been solved already in the episodes I havent seen but if not I hope that NBC gives the creators of Awake a few weeks notice before they pull the plug so that they can come up with a plausible solution for this nice epistemological conundrum.

The Thick Of It

BBC America finally decided to show the controversial BBC political sitcom The Thick Of It last week. They were so scared of creating offense that they put it on at midnight, which is ok, but then they did the unthinkable - they bleeped out all the swearing. The whole point of The Thick of It is that it has some of the best and most creative swearing that we've seen in the English language since Chaucer. The team behind The Thick of It has a new show on HBO called Veep but the reason Veep is such a crashing bore is because white Americans dont really curse with the verve of Brits or Micks and crucially Veep lacks Malcolm, the Prime Minister's sweary terrifying Scots enforcer, the star of both seasons of The Thick of It and the film In The Loop. S3E1 of The Thick Of It, unbleeped, below: 

Are There 10 Aussie Books To Read Before You Die?

The ABC1 TV programme First Tuesday Book Club is having a vote to pick the "10 Australian books to read before you die". The titles that they have come up with so far make me think that Australia seems to punch a little under its weight in terms of literature. Unlike Brits (but like Americans) Aussies do not enjoy hearing criticisms of their country, even in such trivial spheres as culture and sport. Australia is a wonderful place, with friendly, open, tolerant people; it also has a fantastic overseas reputation and there is no nation in the world that hates Australia (even Kiwis are secret Aussiephiles judging from the number of them who emigrate here every year) but the bitter truth is that Australia has produced very few Earth shattering writers, mainly because, I think, Australians are too busy out enjoying themselves to sit in a dark room and produce great art. 
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When you look at some of the literature nominees over at the First Tuesday Book Club site you'll see what I'm talking about. Clive James's memoirs? The Slap? Bryce Courtenay? Tim Winton? Seriously is that the best you can do, Australia? I wonder how many people have actually read Picnic At Hanging Rock (including the bizarre final chapter?) Compare Australian literature to, say, oh, I don't know, Irish literature, an island that has a quarter of Australia's population and is a hundredth its size you'll see what I'm talking about. Who is the Australian James Joyce? Or Oscar Wilde? Or Samuel Beckett? Or George Bernard Shaw? Is Les Murray really in the same league as Seamus Heaney or WB Yeats? Where indeed is the Aussie Flann O'Brien or Sheridan or Sean O'Casey, Goldsmith or Swift? And if you think its only fair to talk about the twentieth century when Australia became a country, well in that time period Ireland has had 4 Nobel Prize winners in literature (not including Joyce), Australia has had 1. I don't want to go overboard with this; I do like Peter Carey (even though he went to uber snooty Geelong Grammar), Clive James, Eva Hornung, Alexis Wright and David Malouf, but my four favourite Australian books havent even made the ABC list so far. They are Monkey Grip by Helen Garner, about a divorced mother trying to make ends meet in a low rent Bohemian Melbourne; Tracks by Robyn Davidson, an almost unknown travel masterpiece; The Collected Poems of Peter Porter and The Lamb Enters The Dreaming by Robert Kenny, a history of the Christian missions to the Aboriginals in northern Victoria. 
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I'm not trying to upset my Australian friends with this post, as I pointed out Australia is a great place to live and raise a family, and I will say this for Australian literature, at least its better than Aussie pop music. 

Triumph of the Fanboys

Pauline Kael awaits buried in a mountain
and will come back to us in our time of
greatest need. We'll forgive her what
she said about Shoah

When a film like The Avengers gets a 97% fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes you know the culture has effectively surrendered. And surrendered to the worst people in the world: 13 year old boys. The Avengers is a terrible movie: clunky and unfunny and oh so dull but Empire loves it, Peter Travers raves about it and even dear old Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian is afraid to speak against it, lest they think he's a fuddy duddy or something. The only major critic who (I've found) is brave enough to appear unhip and castigate the thing as a childish mess is Karina Longworth who is fighting the good fight over at The Village Voice. Here's a typical review from The Boston Globe, money quote "there is nothing to dislike in this movie".
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The thing is I'm a geek too. I know my Star Wars and my Marvel heroes. I can debate Alan Moore or 2000AD or Sandman with the best of them. I've watched the 2 hour review of Phantom Menace on Redlettermedia and I think the best sitcom of the last decade was Spaced. A non geek can read Blood Meridian and think of John Ford, a geek will obsess over the scene where the Judge makes gunpowder just like Kirk does in the classic Trek ep. Arena; so I'll match my nerd credentials against anyone, but crucially I don't think nerdom is all there is. I'm excited by a movie like Fish Tank or a play like Jerusalem or a book like The Art of Fielding. You know, grown up stuff. 
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I predict that when the final Christian Bale Batman film comes out the critics will lie supine before Christopher Nolan's "genius", but you shouldn't listen to them and get taken in by another awful, boring low IQ comic book movie. The reviewers are either too emotionally retarded and cinematically illiterate to know what a good film consists of or too cowardly to tell the truth about what they're seeing. After believeing the reviews of The Avengers and walking out of that shitefest on toast all I can do is to urge you not to listen to the slavish, boot licking reviews for the flick. The Avengers is not a film for adults. It's a film for teenage boys and those unaccustomed to wit or the deep end of the swimming pool. Joss Whedon is not a good director, and you know what, while we're at it, Christopher Nolan is not a good director either.
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Will the adults ever revolt and demand grown up fare in the multiplexes as well as in the arthouses? I doubt it. It's socially acceptable to be a 45 year old 13 year old. Look at the trajectory of Quentin Tarantino's career. After he made Pulp Fiction and Jackie Brown everyone thought he was going to make grown up films from then on, but since then he has gone back to making flicks for 13 year olds and of course they have been hugely profitable. 
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A few critics still look back to the early 70's and say hey how come we don't make movies like that anymore, but they are lone voices crying in the wilderness and no doubt soon they too will be coopted by the 13 year old boy bodysnatchers.

Where I Got The Idea For Sirens

When I used to do book readings I would invariably get asked the question "where do your ideas come from?" to which I almost always had no convincing answer. Where do ideas come from? The subconscious? Dreams? I don't know for sure. For me it's often been the case that the ideas for my books have come as a particular mental image. Dead I Well May Be began as a memory of waiting at the 1-9 Subway Stop at 125th Street and Broadway on one of those humid July NYC days. The Bloomsday Dead began while I was walking the dog back from Blackhead Cliff to my sister Diane's house. (That was a book where I wrote the last chapter first and gradually worked my way back to the beginning.) For The Cold Cold Ground the book came all at once with this line and this mental image: "Arcs of gasoline fire under the crescent moon."  
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I Hear The Sirens In The Street began back in 1983 or 1984 when I was visiting HMS Caroline, my dad's Royal Navy Reserve ship that was anchored permanently in Belfast. Caroline was a venerable vessel that had taken part in the Battle of Jutland, but what impressed me on that particular morning was the sight of hundreds of DeLorean sports cars parked at the Belfast docks waiting to be shipped out to God knows where. The ailing DeLorean car factory had recently closed and John DeLorean himself had been arrested by the FBI for attempted cocaine smuggling, cocaine which he was hoping to sell to the IRA in attempt to get the factory going again. 
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I began walking among the rows of DeLoreans and to my amazement when I tried one of the door handles the gullwinged door opened. I looked inside the DeLorean and was immediately impressed by the left hand drive, the small aircraft like dashboard and the smell of newness and modern-ness. Checking for a non existent security guard I got inside the car and closed the door. I sat there for about two minutes playing with the steering wheel and the peculiar automatic transmission then quickly got out again before I was discovered. I learned later that most of the cars in that parking lot were sold as scrap or for parts which was a shame because in 1985 Back To The Future was released and DeLoreans became prized collectors items. 
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Anyway the idea for I Hear The Sirens In The Street almost certainly came from my memory of sitting in that DeLorean back in 1983/4, a memory that has been knocking around in my brain for the last couple of decades, looking for a way to express itself. 

I Hear The Sirens In The Street

I finally figured out how the "pages" feature on blogger works (or at least I think I have) so I've uploaded the first four chapters of I Hear The Sirens In The Street, here. This is still a work in progress so the book may change considerably before its appearance in January. (I've already completely cut the chapter which appears as the teaser at the end of The Cold Cold Ground.) But at the very least this will give you a pretty good idea where the novel is headed. You may want to read these chapters on the screen here or you could cut and paste them into a word file and print them out at your convenience, it's totally up to you, but I always prefer to read the paper version. I've included a permanent link to the Sirens "page" on the right hand side of the blog and I may add a few chapters here and there as the book progresses. Anyway, I hope you like it and comments are always appreciated. 

Has Peter Jackson Screwed Up The Hobbit?

In my opinion 3D cinema is a busted flush. It's pretty hard to enjoy a 3D movie if you wear glasses or have red green colour blindness (a surprisingly large minority of the population have some form of colour blindness) or indeed if you don't want that feeling of nausea you get from rapid editing and cutting of a moving 3D image (which of course doesn't happen in the real world). It was with some dismay then that I learned that Peter Jackson was filming The Hobbit in 3D. 
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Jackson is well aware that 3D films look darker than they should (because of the silly glasses you have to wear) so he has had the sets for The Hobbit overlit and painted in more garish colours than he did for Lord of the Rings. Even more radically The Hobbit has been filmed at 48 frames per second (or HFR: "high-frame-rate") -- twice the rate of the usual 24 frames per second.
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So what does this new Hobbit look like? Well...not so fantastic. 10 minutes of footage were shown at CinemaCon and apparently the audience was not impressed. This is what Peter Sciretta from SlashFilm.com thought:  
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The change from 24 frames per second to 48 frames per second is HUGE. It completely changes what every image looks like, the movements, the tone, everything is different. It looked like a made for television BBC movie. It looked like when you turn your LCD television to the 120 hertz up-conversion setting. It looked uncompromisingly real — so much so that it looked fake. More noticeable in the footage was the make-up, the sets, the costumes. Hobbiton and Middle Earth didn’t feel like a different universe, it felt like a special effect, a film set with actors in costumes. It looked like behind the scenes footage.

The movement of the actors looked… strange. Almost as if the performances had been partly sped up. But the dialogue matched the movement of the lips, so it wasn’t an effect of speed-ramping. It didn’t look cinematic. Not at all, even with a top filmmaker like Peter Jackson at the helm. “This is the future of cinema,” I wondered? But it wasn’t just me — almost everyone I talked to, almost every conversation I overheard while leaving the presentation, all centered around how it didn’t look good..

Sciretta is understating some of the audience reaction. Many people openly said that "The Hobbit looked like shit" and some critics said that it was a "disaster." I've been waiting for The Hobbit movie since I read the book when I was 10 years old. I was pretty excited about this project when I heard Guillermo Del Toro was going to direct but PJ makes me nervous (he hasn't made a good film since 2002) and 3D ruins everything. The fanboys are going to go see this movie no matter what and its effectively critic proof; but I'll bet some of the more thoughtful producers are regretting the decision to force out Del Toro who would have resisted 48fps and probably 3D too and who could have turned this material into something amazing.

McKinty and Doyle For The Win!

McKinty and Doyle is not alas a 70's themed cop show. No, Gerard Doyle in fact is the guy who narrates most of my audiobooks, but he's also a very talented actor who could do a 70's cop show if he wanted. Ger has won several awards for his work on my stuff including Audible's Best Mystery of 2011 (for Falling Glass) and the Audie Award for Best Mystery or Thriller of 2007 (for The Dead Yard). Most of this I'm sure is down to Doyle's dry, impeccable narration...Anyway the partnership of McKinty and Doyle has just picked up another prize from AudioFile Magazine, winning an Earphones Award for the audio version of The Cold Cold Ground. I couldn't be more chuffed. This is the review of TCCG in April's AudioFile magazine: 
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THE COLD, COLD GROUND 
Adrian McKinty...No question, THE COLD, COLD GROUND is an exciting launch for what is sure to be an anticipated crime series. Great detective stories are built on three key elements—setting, story, and protagonist—and this one deploys each one magnificently. The setting—Northern Ireland in 1981, during the hunger strikes—is portrayed with frightening detail. The clever story evolves slowly as plot points are pinned to cultural biases that transcend “The Troubles”—for example, homosexuality and unwed motherhood. Police detective Sean Duffy wins us over chapter by chapter with his tenacity, his swaggering, witty dialogue, and his record collection—he spins The Velvet Underground when in need of a lift. The audiobook exceeds all expectations because of narrator Gerard Doyle. His storytelling is understated, and his dialect work is remarkable. This is the ninth collaboration between author and narrator, and this team totally rocks. R.W.S. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award  AudioFile 2012, Portland, Maine [Published: APRIL 2012] 

TransAtlantic

It isn't very often that I will point you, faithful readers, in the direction of a story that I've read in the New Yorker. New Yorker fiction is too trendy for my tastes. Alice Monro excepted I find the stories all a bit up themselves. Even languid, ironic detachment gets boring and metafictional narratives just don't do it for me. When the story is told straight it's usually about very rich, white, upper middle class Manhattanites or Brooklynites who simply get on my nerves. As a consequence its not very often these days that I'll finish a fiction piece in the New Yorker. 
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An interesting exception occurred in the latest issue of the magazine which managed to wing its way to my letter box in Australia. It was a story by the great Irish writer Colum McCann who won the National Book Award with his terrific novel Let The Great World Spin. The story is called TransAtlantic and is about the very first aeroplane flight across the Atlantic by two Royal Flying Corps aviators Alcock and Brown. Yes you heard me right. Charles Lindbergh was not the first person to fly non stop across the Atlantic. Nor the second, nor the third or the fourth. Americans don't believe me when I tell them this because somehow old Nazi loving Lindbergh convinced the world that it was important to fly across the Atlantic alone. (As if Neil Armstrong's achievement is any less important because he had a couple of friends with him). Alcock and Brown are still famous in Ireland and no visit to Clifden is complete without a trip to the bog where they touched down/crashed after their amazing non stop flight.  
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Colum McCann's story about this flight is a throwback to the era when people would buy the Saturday Evening Post and Colliers and The New Yorker just to read the short fiction. It's chatty, exciting, economical, old fashioned, with some lovely turns of phrase. I really loved it and I'd like you to read it too. Unfortunately because of the all the New Yorker's firewalls I can't extract it or link to it here, but you can read it in the library (its the April 9th issue) or listen to Colum McCann reading it himself, here. 

Jerusalem by Jez Butterworth

It's not very fair to review a play on the basis of reading it rather than seeing it performed but this was my only option since Jez Butterworth's Jerusalem has only run on the West End and Broadway and I don't know if it'll make it to Australia anytime soon. I've been hearing a lot about Jerusalem for a while  now so last week I finally thought that I would read the text rather than not have any access to it at all. 
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The first thing to say is that it's a pretty funny piece and with actors doing these lines on stage I can only imagine that it would he hilarious. The story is quite straightforward. It's St. George's Day 2009. Johnny Byron is a "gyppo" who lives in the woods and gets by by dealing speed and marijuana to the surprising array of people in the local village who need a little help to get them through the day. He lives in a caravan that has been the subject of an eviction order by the local council and throughout the morning and afternoon (the day also of the local fair) many of Johnny's friends and relations come by to sponge off him, threaten him, hassle him and warn him that the council is serious this time. Johnny Byron is a self mythologising, Falstaffian antihero and his mate Ginger is a funny and worthwhile sidekick. The supporting characters are in the best traditions of Pinter and Beckett depending on which of the two you find more amusing (for me its Beckett). Jerusalem has an array of tones veering from the romantic and melancholy to the downright silly and although I'm not entirely sure it holds completely together, it mostly does. The beginning of the play was my favourite bit, reading like an extended Pete and Dud sketch complete with "I had that Cheryl Cole in me bed last night" which I imagine had the audience in stitches. It gets more serious towards the end bringing in elements as diverse as Walter Scott, Thomas Hardy and Roald Dahl.
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Jerusalem is a million miles from the traditional British "well made" play and that's a good thing. It is a bawdy, profane, profound work of art that celebrates a notion of Englishness that the English have generally been too diffident and embarrassed to talk about. If you can catch a performance of this somewhere you should go see it and failing that you can probably get the play from your local library and give it a read instead.  

Samuel Smith's Taddy Porter

April is the one month of the year when the weather in both the northern and southern hemispheres is pretty temperate. April is often one of the rainiest months of the year too, which is why April is the perfect time of year to drink porter. Until lager took over after World War 2 porter was the drink of the masses in the British Isles. A lot of people drank stout in Ireland, bitter in England and cider in the South West of England but porter was that thing that could be got anywhere. Flann O'Brien famously said that "a pint of plain (porter) is your only man" and Flann O'Brien was wrong about nothing (except perhaps the fact that The Third Policeman is indeed a work of genius).  
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There are lots of great porters out there and the form is making something of a resurgence in the United States. Eric Asimov did a wonderful piece in the New York Times about the new American porters, here.  His favourite (certainly not mine) is the Speakeasy Payback Porter from S.F. but there are other more drinkable brews on his list. Asimov also explains what a porter actually is which I don't have the patience to do here.
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A porter which can be got just about anywhere is Taddy Porter from the Samuel Smith brewery in Yorkshire. They've been brewing bitter and porter since 1758 and they know what they are doing. To me this is an exceptional drink and I've never had a bad one. It's velvety with a rich, full satisfying mouth. There are malt notes, chocolate notes and a plummy oaky aftertaste. It pours as dark as night, has a barley, caramelly smell and like all really good porters it is not over carbonated. If Illegal Pete's Big Potato burrito is my comfort food of choice this is my comfort beer at this time of year. 

Fish Tank

To really enjoy Fish Tank (2009) its best to know nothing at all about the film save the general context and milieu. However most of the reviews on Rotten Tomatoes contain major spoilers. (Roger Ebert's 4 star review gives away 90% of the film.) I'll just say that it's about a 15 year old girl who lives with her little sister and her 32 year old mother in a high rise housing estate in Essex. It's a State of England movie of the type that they don't really make anymore. This is not nice, safe, heritage cinema and clips from this flick aren't likely to be shown at the opening ceremonies of the Olympic games, which is a real shame because Fish Tank is a wonderful film and the best thing British cinema has done in years. Visual, affecting, emotional and beautiful, this is grown up cinema, amazingly shot, without music, with a hand-held camera in natural light, much of it during the golden hour. Fish Tank doesn't feel minimalist or experimental: the story is far too gripping for that. And its a million miles away from the horrible upper middle class phoniness of Notting Hill or Four Weddings And A Funeral or the Harry Potter films. This is England the way she is now not the way she used to be in the time of EM Forster or Jane Austen. This is life for many many people, the kind of people whose stories don't get told in films that aren't dull witted genre pieces. On the basis of this one picture I can tell that Andrea Arnold, the director, is an incredible talent and Katie Jarvis is a charismatic and powerful leading actress. According to BoxOfficeMojo almost no one saw Fish Tank despite the fact that it won BAFTAs and a Special Jury Prize at Cannes. It was ignored completely by the Oscars whereas the cheesy heritage cinema special The Kings Speech won Best Picture. This tells you everything you need to know about the value of an Oscar and nothing about Fish Tank. 
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Anyway do yourself a favour and rent it. Just 1) don't complain if its too rough for you (you have been - obliquely - warned) and 2) dont spend twenty minutes fiddling about with the aspect ratio (like me) cos I think its supposed to look like that. 
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When you're done with the movie (and only when you're done) check out David Denby's review, here, Roger Ebert's review, here, and Peter Bradshaw's review, here.   

A Game Of Thrones Investigation

Magheramorne Quarry became the Great Wall of Westeros through CGI

(A post from last summer)
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I've done a little investigation into the filming locations for Game Of Thrones and it turns out that the Great Wall and Castle Black were  outdoor sets filmed at a disused quarry in Magheramorne. My grandmother was from Magheramorne, a village of about 50 people, near Larne. In fact the scenes along the Great Wall were shot in the quarry about thirty yards from my grandmother's house. It's not very snowy in Magheramorne and making snow would cost a fortune so I assume the snow and ice were put in later by CGI. My father used to work in the quarry itself when it was the Blue Circle Cement Works and I've been in it dozens of times. It's a credit to the set designers that they could have have envisaged this dramatic (and rather dangerous) location as the Great Wall of Westeros. 
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Before I came home I didn't think Game of Thrones had had much of an impact in Northern Ireland. It still hasn't been shown here but a lot of people know about it and have been affected by the production. My nephew Patrick went up for an extra and my brother's wife Dytania also was asked if she could appear as a background player. Ger Brennan's brother did make it into the show and I've read many enthusiastic pieces about GOT in the local papers. Filming GOT has been a very good thing for Northern Ireland which is still in recovery from three decades of low level civil war. 
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And hey I don't want to seem like I'm bandwagon jumping but I set a trilogy of young adult novels on Muck Island (The Lighthouse Trilogy) which is less than a mile away from the Game of Thrones Wall Set on Magheramorne. George RR Martin's books and mine are very different but we both share a love of classic Tolkien fantasy and apparently now we've both spent time in Magheramorne.
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My little brother and I went to investigate The Game of Thrones set which has a fence around it. You can see much of Castle Black covered in tarp and even what looks like the hand pulley elevator up the wall face. The security fence is easily climbable but I wouldn't recommend it, especially at night where the quarry hole appears suddenly in front of you and is a ten story drop to a hard limestone floor. If you want to take pictures the best place is from Mill Bay across Larne Lough on Islandmagee. 

JK Rowling's Crime Novel

The book world is, apparently, abuzz with the news that JK Rowling's first adult book is going to be a crime novel called The Casual Vacancy. This is how the Guardian broke the news:
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The Casual Vacancy, perhaps the most hotly anticipated book of the year, will be published on 27 September and is set in a small town called Pagford, described by her new publisher Little, Brown as an English idyll "with a cobbled market square and an ancient abbey". The story is set in motion by the unexpected demise of Barry Fairweather, a stalwart of the town's parish council who dies in his early forties. Pagford's chocolate-box façade hides a town riven with strife, and the struggle to replace Fairweather "becomes the catalyst for the biggest war the town has yet seen", with "teenagers at war with their parents, wives at war with their husbands, teachers at war with their pupils," the publisher said. 
As the election to find his replacement unleashes "passion, duplicity and unexpected revelations", the novel puts Pagford's rivalries under the microscope. There had been speculation that Rowling might be entering the genre of hard-boiled Edinburgh crime fiction after discovering that her editor, David Shelley, counts Dennis Lehane, Val McDermid, Carl Hiaasen and Mark Billingham among his authors.
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I don't know about you but this is not the novel I'm most anticipating this year (that would probably be the new Iain M Banks culture book) but I'm certainly not going to diss this work before it comes out. It does however seem very Barchester Towers to me and I have to say that Trollope's shoes are big shoes to fill. I'm also alarmed that Ms Rowling still thinks names like Fairweather are a good idea. I wonder if the villains will have names like Slimeweasel and Grindstone. Silly give the game away names are fine in childrens books but we expect better in the crime fiction world. I wonder too if the cliche of the English village with sinister goings on underneath wasn't already exploded by Agatha Christie circa 1925. In fact this trope had become so worn out by 1932 (!) that Stella Gibbons was able to parody it in her excellent novel Cold Comfort Farm. It's also the plot of pretty much every Barbara Pym book and the trope even got the Hollywood treatment in Hot Fuzz. Anyway we shall see. I will await her book and give it a fair review. I wont however be tugging my forelock just because Rowling is the most powerful author in the book business.

I Tweet Therefore I am

For the last few weeks I've been experimenting with twitter. I've been wondering if you can be on twitter but not actually own a mobile phone. Well so far its working out ok for me... If you want to check me out on twitter I'm at @unitedirishman. 

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Why @unitedirishman? Well someone had already taken @adrianmckinty and @adrian-mckinty which was nice of them, but that's ok. No one had taken @unitedirishman and the United Irishmen were bad ass warrior poets such as James Orr, Wolfe Tone, Henry Joy McCracken and William Orr who was hanged in Carrickfergus in 1797. The United Irishmen as I'm sure you are aware were non sectarian rebels who wanted to unite Protestant and Catholic under one banner. They were the last best hope for Ireland and they failed. And everyone loves a noble failure don't they? 

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Anyway, getting sidetracked here, just wanted to let you know that I'm on twitter and you can follow me if you want. (There's a button over on the right hand side). I've been using twitter as a kind of microblogging site rather than as a place to discuss what I'm having for breakfast or other bullshit like that. Ciao. 

The City And The City

China Mieville's The City And The City may be the most original crime novel I've read since Declan Burke's Absolute Zero Cool or possibly all the way back to James Ellroy's American Tabloid. It won the 2010 Hugo Award in a tie with Paolo Bacigalupi's excellent The Windup Girl. It also won the Arthur C. Clarke award and was nominated for the Nebula. It was ignored by the all mainstream crime awards, which is a bit odd (and embarrassing provincial of them) because at heart the book is basically a noir detective story. I was impressed by The City And The City's technical prowess and literary ambitions; Mieville has done a great job taking a new slant on a rather staid and somewhat moribund genre.  
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The book is set in Eastern Europe in the cities of Beszel and Ul Qoma, which are actually adjoining city states somewhere close to Romania and Hungary. A different language is spoken in each city and they are culturally and economically distinct. Fracture lines run through the cities and initially one thinks of East and West Berlin or possibly Buda and Pest; but what makes Beszel and Ul Qoma so interesting is that they actually share much of the same topography. Streets that exist Ul Qoma exist also in Beszel, but travel from one city to the other is utterly forbidden. From a very young age children are trained to "unsee" vehicles and people who are living in the other city. This sounds weird and it takes a while to completely buy into it, but Mieville does convince you that this bizarre state of affairs could work. Mieville has been inspired by the work of Kafka and especially Bruno Schulz and that's no bad thing in a noir. 
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The novel begins when Inspector Borlu is called upon to investigate the murder of a young woman in Beszel. He quickly discovers that her body has been transported to the crime scene from the neighbouring city of Ul Qoma and this raises all kinds of difficulties. Crossing the "border" from one city to city is the most serious crime of all in the two cities and once proof of an encroachment becomes manifest the mysterious entity Breach spirits the breachee away to God knows where. The investigation takes Borlu into the forbidden world of Ul Qoma and there the fun really begins as we begin to see conspiracies within conspiracies and the possibility of a mythical third hidden city know as Ocriny. Borlu remains a bit of a cipher throughout but this fits squarely into an old school noir trope and I didn't mind that at all. I loved the scenes with Borlu in Ul Qoma looking across to his home city of Beszel, trying to unsee familiar shops and people and realising just how strange this all was. I won't reveal any more of the plot, suffice to say that although there are no real surprises the third act of the novel is still satisfying within the predictable Kafkaesque conventions of such a narrative. 
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China Mieville is very much the new Iain Banks, comfortable writing in various genres but with a background in science fiction. Like Banks he is prolific. I've read four of his books, two of them very good (Perdido Street Station, The City And The City) and two of them not so brilliant. It probably would have been better for Banks if he had slowed down a little and this might be a good idea for Mieville too. He shouldn't listen to his editors at Macmillan who are only interested in volume, instead he should take his foot off the gas and really relax into one project for the next year or two - I think it would be worth it as I believe he has the potential to join Zadie Smith and David Mitchell as one of the finest of the new generation of English novelists. 

The Cold Cold Ground

This isn't the cover. This was just me messing around on, er, Paintbox
and trying to come up with a Chip Kidd style image...

Great review of The Cold Cold Ground in Sunday's Irish Independent. What's odd is that the Irish Independent already reviewed the book back in January and loved it then too. But I'm certainly not complaining. Here's the thoughtful, careful review by the intelligent and well read Hilary White (below) and honestly if you haven't got Cold Cold Ground by now there's pretty much nothing I or the critics can say to convince you is there?
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The Cold Cold Ground
Adrian McKinty
The Hunger Strikes and subsequent rioting after the death of Bobby Sands in 1981 have been pored over by academics and psychologists, but the arts seemed to lag when it came to making a vocal examination.
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Steve McQueen's 2008 film Hunger was a landmark, asking many questions about the mucky fatalism of the strikers but also how they were driven there. The Cold, Cold Ground is the twelfth novel by migrant Irish writer Adrian McKinty, and it uses that chapter of the Troubles as a backdrop, quickening an otherwise genre work into something that sizzles with ambient dread.
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McKinty's other chief tool is Detective Sergeant Sean Duffy. A finely hewn protagonist, Duffy is a Catholic copper living in a Protestant Carrickfergus neighbourhood. Catholic RUC officers never went down particularly favourably with either side of the sectarian divide, and if Duffy seems analytical and highly aware of his surroundings, it's because he has to be.
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He is witty, cultured and erudite, but our author understands that character flaws are needed in the DNA of any good crime hero. Duffy is thus a functioning alcoholic and weed smoker, is prone to objectifying the women he encounters and shows one or two moments of bemusing insecurity. If you want your reader to take a character to heart, this is how to do it.
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When the bodies of two homosexuals turn up with little clues left near their cadavers, Duffy is suspicious. A serial killer operating in Troubles-ravaged Belfast? You don't bring an apple to an orchard. It is "too gothic for Ulster" and besides, if you happened to find that you were indeed a psychopath, there was a range of tooled-up zealots in the "alphabet soup" of paramilitaries to fall in with. Meanwhile, his gut is also telling him that the apparent suicide of the missing wife of a hunger striker is somehow connected to all this. Red herring cameos are made by Gerry Adams and homophobic Unionist firebrand George Seawright. Duffy's brain itches furiously. He over-thinks the clues and traces left by the killer, which disrupts that part of us that wants to work it out for ourselves. Sometimes a blunt wallop can work just as well as an explosion where finales are concerned. In the perversely hate-filled era in which the tale is set, it is perhaps the only way McKinty could wind things up and still maintain his story's vital sense of place.
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Tropes are tropes for good reason. The important crime-fiction ones are present and accounted for here -- a serial killer who purposely leaves clues, a cop who's on to him, procedural and forensic nitty-gritty. Yet McKinty can startle with bouts of lyrical scene-setting that could only come from the fingertips of someone who grew up in the environment. He tells us of "arcs of gasoline fire under the crescent moon... The scarlet whoosh of Molotovs intersecting with exacting surfaces. Helicopters everywhere: their spotlights finding one another like lovers in the Afterlife". He educates us about shopkeepers boarding-up their windows when a riot was due, or the ritual of paramilitaries leaving a silver 'Judas coin' by the corpse of a bumped-off informant. Your reviewer was born the year The Cold, Cold Ground (a Tom Waits' lyric, by the way) is set in, and such passages work better at painting a picture than any episode of Reeling In The Years.
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McKinty had always intended for this to be the first part of a trilogy about Duffy. He has said that his flawed hero will go on to visit the 1984 Maze Prison escape, the US and the DeLorean car company. It's probably safe to say that Irish crime fiction's current purple patch won't be fading any time soon.

Game Of Thrones S2E1, S2E2, Mad Men S5E2

Lena Headey's good but Peter Dinklage steals the show as usual

It's been 12 years since I read A Clash of Kings which is the second book in George RR Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire sequence. I have only vague memories of that novel but Game of Thrones S2E1 surprisingly brought a lot of those memories from the depths of goodness knows where. The episode begins in the aftermath of Eddard Stark's death as various houses jockey for power in Westeros. The episode nicely captured many of the diverse strands of the novel and brought us up to date with the characters from Game of Thrones. As usual Peter Dinklage stole every scene he was in and in fact, if you'll notice, he's been given top billing. From what I remember of Clash we get to know even more characters than were in GOT and the civil war on Westeros becomes even more complicated. I don't know how the TV series is going to cope with all this without shortchanging some of the actors or compressing some of action.  
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Anyway S2E1 was all about scene setting and recapitulation and it did it pretty well. We got some nice Northern Irish landscapes in S2E1: several different Ulster forests, a piece of beach that looked a bit like Whitepark Bay and snowy volcanic vistas that definitely were not Ireland and must have been Iceland. E2 established a few more characters and laid the seeds for a bit of a story that I do remember about Greyjoy. It was nice to see Richard O'Brien popping up as Greyjoy's dad. Plenty of T&A in episode 2 for the pervy TV reviewers complaining about the lack of it in E1. Good use of British regional accents too in these episodes: as well as Yorkshire we got Geordieland, Welsh, Scottish, mild Ulster and soft Irish, as well as Peter Dinklage's dodgy home counties voice.  
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Not much happened in the two episodes but the strands of future conflict were definitely laid. GOT S2E1 B+ S2E2 B
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Regarding Mad Men E2, like the blogger in the New York Times, I too was surprised to see them go the Frasier route with January Jones's pregnancy. We already had someone close to Don die of cancer so it would have been bathos to give Betty cancer too. There was therefore zero dramatic tension and the lameness of the storyline readily became apparent. I have a feeling that the writers on Mad Men dislike January Jones as a person so they've been thinking up ways to humiliate the character. Maybe. Mad Men S5 E2 C-

Two Minds About The Titanic

Harland and Wolff 1911 (The Titanic is the ship in the background)

For many years my father worked in Harland and Wolff, the shipyard that built the Titanic. He worked as a welder and boiler maker and in those days you learned on the job from master welders and riveters, who in turn had learned their trade from the men who had gone before. This was a tradition of craft engineering and apprenticeships that went all the way back to the Titanic and indeed all the way back to the first ships H&W built in the nineteenth century. Later my sister Lorna too worked at Harland and Wolff. Many people I knew worked there until the great and terrible shipyard closures of the 70's and 80's when Glasgow, Liverpool and Belfast lost tens of thousands of skilled workers. It was a hell of a thing to build a ship and watch it get launched by a VIP and then do its sea trials out in Belfast Lough. All that, like I say, is gone now. H&W still exists as a company but its few hundred workers are employed building turbines for offshore wind farms. 
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Like the Troubles, for many years the Titanic was something Belfast was very good about not talking about. Not talking about things is something Ulstermen do better than anyone else in the world and the Titanic disaster stirred uneasy feelings in the blood. There was I suspect a feeling of collective guilt about building the ship that cost so many lives in - still - one of the worst maritime disasters in history. Guilt and shame will close many a mouth. But although not talking about the Titanic was probably a bad thing, in recent years the city fathers in Belfast have gone too far the other way. In the aftermath of James Cameron's successful movie and the looming hundredth anniversary of the disaster, a whole district of East Belfast has been renamed The Titanic Quarter, Titanic tours are being run, an interactive museum caters to the kiddies, interior parts of the ship have been reconstructed etc. etc. Now we're very much in celebration mode about the vessel and an old Belfast joke "well, she was ok, when she left us" has been recycled of late. 
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If there is no middle way available, I think I would prefer the former diffident approach rather than this rather vulgar celebratory stance. The RMS Titanic was a cock up of enormous proportions and there is plenty of blame to go round. The ship was going too fast in iceberg infested seas, the bulkheads and pumps were insufficient to deal with a gash in the hull that size, there were not enough lifeboats for all the passengers and crew. Sinking in calm seas, at night, with a ship within fifty miles, its a scandal that so many people drowned or died of hypothermia. All those engineering failures, all that pointless death. Despite what the Belfast Tourist Board says I do not think this is something we should be proud of at all. If you want to learn about a Harland and Wolff ship with an honourable past I would suggest skipping the Titanic stuff and instead visit HMS Belfast anchored in the Thames as a permanent museum to D-Day and the great warships of WW2. 

My 10 Favourite Westerns

Call me crazy, but I would have gone with Grace Kelly in the cart

I've blogged this list before but it's changed a bit in the last two years. (There's a  new entry at number 9.) This is not the list you'll see at Empire Magazine or at the AFI or whatever. You wont find Winchester 73 or Red River on here as these are my 10 personal favourites.

10. Dead Man. Jim Jarmusch's alternative western with Johnny Depp, Gary Farmer and a brilliant Crispin Glover. (Actually isn't Crispin Glover always brilliant?)

9. Meeks Cutoff. Kelly Reichardt's minimalist, feminist western starring Michelle Williams. No one saw this and its certainly not for everyone, but I think its a hypnotically brilliant tale of a bunch of settlers lost on the Oregon trail.

8. High Noon. Carl Foreman's screenplay, Grace Kelly's close ups, the badge in the dirt, the action playing out in real time. If you don't like this film, I'm sorry, I just don't know who you are anymore.

7. The Searchers. Just about the only John Wayne film I can enjoy these days. Funny, dark, broody and beautiful. John Ford at the top of his game.

6. Paris, Texas. A guy is wandering in the desert. He has amnesia. The good news is that he was married to Nastassia Kinski. The bad news is that he tied her to a fridge and she set their trailer home on fire. His mission is to ride into town, bring mother and son together, ride out of town. BTW, there is no safety zone, apparently.

5. Unforgiven. Clint's mission is to ride into town, kill a couple of dudes, and, er, ride out of town. It all goes to hell and then it rains. David Peoples wrote the script, Richard Harris stole the show. Gene Hackman was pretty good too.

4. Blazing Saddles. Richard Pryor was the unsung hero here and with him in it this might have been the greatest comedy of all time. Still there's the beans, the Nazis, the governor, Maddy Khan. What a flick. 1974 was some kind of Wunderjahr for Mel Brooks and then, alas, zilch.

3. For a Few Dollars More. Best of the spaghetti three. They laugh, they cry, they shoot each other's hats. . .Then the wonderful Gian Maria Volontè breaks out of jail, robs the bank at El Paso and after that it's all: laaah, laaah, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, dada, dah, dah, laaah, laaah, la, la, la, la, la, la, laaah etc.

2. The Wild Bunch. Sam Peckinpah says that this is what happens when men go down to Mexico. When I went down to Mexico I did some nice snorkeling and drank margheritas but when MEN go down there, they machine gun entire armies of baddies. In slow motion. Brilliant.

1. Blood Meridian. They havent actually made this film yet but the movie of it in my head is awesome.