Booked Out

A vast arrangement of flowers including foxy lilies and other glories in the window, and another on the mantlepiece, and in the back room, all luxuriant, then on up the stairs … I shall never forget them. Or Harold’s expression. A mixture of excitement, triumph and laughter. It transpired he asked the flower lady from Grosvenor House and commissioned them. ‘Is it for a party?’ she asked. ‘No it’s for Sunday night.’

In 1975 Harold Pinter met Antonia Fraser. They were both in their mid forties and both in long term marriages; Fraser to a Conservative MP and Pinter to the actress Vivien Merchant. Must You Go is an account, mostly gathered from Fraser’s diaries, of more than thirty happy years they spent together. For any reader interested in Pinter the artist, I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend Michael Billington’s excellent biography instead, but this is nevertheless a very good at at times very moving book.

Unlike Billington’s portrait, which drew attention for revealing Pinter’s long affair with Joan Bakewell, Must You Go doesn’t set out to spill any beans on the great man. In fact we can only really gather things from what is left out of the story, for example the abandonment and eventual decline of Merchant and Pinter’s estrangement from his son. Neither receive too much attention here, with Fraser keeping her distance from the people he chose to leave behind. There’s more emphasis on his lifelong friendships, which included Robert Shaw, Simon Gray and Samuel Beckett, and his new extended family (Fraser had six children from her first marriage).

It could also be argued that by the time Pinter had met Fraser he had already made his most artistic achievements, with his best works The Birthday Party, The Caretaker and The Homecoming already established as masterpieces. Perhaps happiness dulled his creative edge, and although he continued writing (Betrayal appeared in the early 80s) he did increasingly concentrate on poetry. And as the years march on, Pinter’s passion for politics begins to take prominence. Much of the book chronicles ugly moments in history; IRA bombs in London, The Rushdie affair (Salman Rushdie visits the Pinters under armed protection at the height of the Fatwa) and the Iraq war. Fraser is frank about their own shifting politics; Pinter voted conservative in 1979, SDP in a subsequent election and then finally Labour. In 1982, surprisingly, he supported the Falklands War.

Must You Go alludes to Antonia Fraser and Harold Pinter’s very first meeting, and these are the first words he ever said to her. The phrase echoes through the book right until the end, and the closing diary entries recall an increasingly frail Pinter and he battled cancer. It’s a very intimate portrait of a fascinating man who enjoyed life as much as he could. In 2007, very sick, he appeared onstage for a short run in Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape, relishing again the joy of an actor that he had originally discovered at sixteen. Around the same time he accepted the Nobel Prize for literature, and enjoyed a revival of The Birthday Party. Busy until the end, his inevitable passing in 2008 was still a shock.

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In the early 70s Hammer Films attempted to expand their horizons, deciding that the usual formula of Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee Frankenstein and Dracula vehicles was becoming somewhat tired. One of the solutions was to produce features set in the present day and to introduce younger stars. In 1972 the double bill of Fear in the Night and Straight on Till Morning was released. The latter film starred Rita Tushingham and newcomer Shane Briant, who despite going on to star in several Hammer features is now sadly little remembered. The move to replace Cushing and Lee mostly failed, with Hammer becoming increasingly directionless. The studio lost their appeal as the 70s trudged on, with Straight on Till Morning being one of only a few artistic triumphs.

Along with Ralph Bates, Shane Briant was groomed as Hammer’s new leading man at the time, and although leading rather well in Captain Cronos – Vampire Hunter he is possibly most effective in Straight on Till Morning. Here he plays a rather deranged young man (Peter) who is slowly revealed as a very dangerous killer. Both Briant and Tushingham are excellent in this film.

Brenda (Tushingham) is a northern girl who tells her mother she is pregnant (although she isn’t) and leaves Liverpool for London intent on finding a partner to father a child. An odd decision, but she’s an odd character and let’s be frank here; this is a weird film. Brenda decides to engineer an encounter with Peter by the impulsive means of stealing his dog one evening and then returning it to him the next day. It works. The two embark on a rather offbeat relationship, based partly on some kind of homage to Peter and Wendy in Peter Pan, although this is never explored thoroughly.

Peter Collinson (The Italian Job) directs his only film for Hammer, and the approach comes across at times as an attempt to emulate the Roeg/Cammell partnership of Performance in the film’s erratic and jarring editing technique. Attempts at being art cinema largely fail, although Collinson proves himself as the most versatile of directors. Along with Fear in the Night, Straight on Till Morning was first considered as a tv movie and it does pre-empt the later Hammer House of Horror series for ITV which also effectively used a modern setting for its small screen chillers.

Striaght on Till Morning also reminds of both the films of Pete Walker and of Alfred Hitchcock’s London set Frenzy. But unlike Walker (and even the 1972 Hitchcock) Collinson doesn’t rely on the permissiveness of 70s cinema to sneak in an extra does of sex and violence. Straight on Till Morning plays by the rulebook of suggestion – there is next to no blood spilt on camera although this still results in one of the most shocking films of that decade. This is partly due to the excellent acting and the dark ending, which is one of the tensest on camera.

James Bolam and Tom Bell appear in supporting roles, but their presence is so slight it seems their careers were at a low ebb at the time. It’s Briant and Tushingham’s film. Indeed, Hammer appear to be deliberately avoiding the inclusion of the recognisable supporting cast that usually kept their features bouyant. But never mind, the leads are enough to keep this one afloat. Rita Tushingham is a performer I’ve always felt uncomfortable with but in this film she is superb, almost parodying her ugly duckling persona of the previous decade. I last saw her in the Joe Meek biopic Telstar. Shane Briant still works consistently, although its tricky to name anything notable he’s done in recent years. Peter Collinson didn’t really direct anything more of worth and died in 1980. Straight on Till Morning is glaringly 70s British cinema, and the disturbingly frank shock factor of this film has undoubtedly kept it from television showings and let it sink into undeserved obscurity. A pity.

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Attempting to review Avatar is a somewhat pointless exercise. The film achieves what it sets out to do; namely becoming a piece of cinema that shows off its great expense whilst – mostly – also being an example of supreme entertainment. And, although I don’t particularly go along with the view that 3D is the future of film, it does push movie making further than its ever been pushed before.

My eleven year old daughter gave Avatar nine out of ten, subtracting a point for the overblown and tiresome battle scenes that occupy the last part of the film. For the same reason I will give it eight out of ten, deducting two points for each of the headache tablets I had to take afterwards. It’s at the end of the film that James Cameron lets himself down, reverting to type as the gung-ho director of The Terminator and Aliens. This violent streak is personified by the gun-toting (and cigar chomping, although I may have imagined that), muscly, military baddie Colonel Quaritch. Quaritch (played by Stephen Lang, who doesn’t unflex a muscle throughout the film) is the kind of kick-ass macho man who makes Rambo look rather shy and withdrawn. At one point he leads the attack on the aliens in the film with the words “we will fight terror – with terror”. I laughed, but nobody else did in our 300 strong audience. Which is worrying.

It’s a shame that aspects of Avatar are easy to mock because at times it is a great movie. The attention to detail of the alien planet Pandora is breathtaking. The sounds, the plantlife, the animals and monsters, the sheer size and depth of the gigantic forests. This is helped by the 3D element, although the films shows a painstaking care in imagining a very different world to our own. Into this is thrust Jake Sully (Sam Worthington), a disabled marine who “becomes” one of the aliens, the Navi, for short periods by way of linking with a genetically bred Navi or “avatar”. This sets the film up rather cleverly, with Jake switching between the real world of familiar Cameron claustrophobic army space-bases (Sigourney Weaver also features to make you feel at home) and the almost dreamlike world of Pandora.

Waking when the Navi sleep, Jake records an increasingly bleak video diary where reality shrinks and the wonder of the alien world remains vivid to him. Sadly, Cameron doesn’t really explore the dream element as much as he could have done. Early in the film, Lang tells the new recruits that they’re “not in Kansas anymore”, although the reference to The Wizard of Oz is probably only a coincidence. Avatar also reminds of the lesser known The Fountain, which used the form of the tree for more symbolic purposes, but Cameron has a plot to get on with, where the human interest in Pandora is made very clear and the two species and worlds clash in a very ugly way. Although Avatar is generally a sci-fi Western (think Dances With Wolves in space), with the Navi the Indians facing genocide by Lang’s Cowboys, the Cowboys in this case are mining the Indians out of existence, with a valuable mineral that will save the dying Earth sitting right within snatching distance.

Like many a Western where the outsider is accepted by the Indians, Avatar features the typical series of initiation ceremonies. But this being alien territory, Cameron uses his imagination to great effect. Pandora is a nauseatingly vertiginous planet, with Jake racing across narrow and entwining sky-high branches to keep up with his new friends. At one point he has to tame a ferocious dragon-like creature (after first entering a particularly inaccessible region of floating mountains). The film takes an inevitable path, however, with Jake eventually leading the Navi into battle against the humans, led by Lang. Lang becomes the almost indestructible baddie typical of modern cinema, escaping all sorts of close shaves before he meets a particularly fitting and personal ending. And then there’s the obligatory robotic exo-skeleton he uses, reminding again of Aliens and now de rigeur in sci-fi (last seen to great effect in District 9).

I enjoyed it, but as I said above it made my head hurt. At getting on for three hours there’s too much 3D, CGI and branches, endless trees and branches. But Cameron’s anti-American message is interesting. Yes, the Yanks lose! Also interesting will be just how many of the film’s audience get the message.

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Mike Carey’s Felix Castor is currently dominating my bedside table. After completing The Devil You Know and Vicious Circle I am now making good progress with Dead Men’s Boots. To come are the fourth and fifth in the series, Thicker Than Water and The Naming of the Beasts.

Carey is an odd writer. At times his prose is extremely atmospheric and effective, but he often sinks into lazy and almost woeful writing. The fault is possibly the sheer weight of what he is attempting to achieve; very lengthy novels produced at regular intervals, where quality sometimes, but not always, suffers from the dictates of pace. Perhaps also Carey doesn’t have much faith in himself as a writer of quality. He is simply content to produce popular, or even pulp, fiction.

At over five hundred pages, Dead Men’s Boots does at times feel overlong. For a reader dedicated enough to reach the series as far as this third instalment it’s possible that Carey doesn’t need to fill in on as much as the background story as he does. Both Castor’s history and the stories of his associates are explained quite fully in both Vicious Circle and Dead Men’s Boots. Castor in an exorcist, discovering his talent at an early age when he had to rid himself of his dead sister’s ghost. He works in an alternative London, one intricately detailed to resemble the real capital but one also populated with a variety of horrors. Ghosts, zombies and loup gorous, demonic werewolf type creatures. He is joined by a series of recurring characters. Nicky is a zombie who has to keep his body chilled to avoid decomposition. He also enjoys a glass of wed wine but only to sniff, his digestive system long shut down. Juliet is a demon who preys on sexual lust, although since the close of The Devil you Know has become less of a threat and more of an ally to Castor. She’s also living in a single sex relationship with one of the supporting cast of Vicious Circle. Then there’s Rafi, a man possessed and incarcerated, whose plight haunts the background of the series.

Vicious Circle featured several interconnected stories, something Carey is revealing himself the master of. A missing ghost, a haunted church, both were extremely believable threads for a fantasy novel. In Dead Men’s Boots he appears more ambitious, and introduces several tales in parallel. The Rafi story continues, and Castor and his exorcist peers are tormented by a mysterious band of exorcist bashers. In the foreground however is Castor and Juliet’s investigation of a brutal murder. A man is convicted of the crime but was it really him? Or perhaps the ghost of a dead American criminal? Carey takes his characters beyond their usual setting with Castor and Juliet travelling to the US.

With five novels in three years, Mike Carey has created a successful franchise that, with a little tidying around the edges, will no doubt make the transfer to film or television that it’s crying out to do. However, in the Twilight soaked climate that also finds room for Being Human and True Blood it’s difficult to see how this would really be worthwhile. What Carey really needs to do is hone in his writing talent to produce a leaner piece of work that is content to stay on the page and not reveal itself as a wannabee screenplay. Somebody needs to give him a push, just a little one, for him to realise that he could be a quality author.

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