The only element of any real interest in Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug is the question “What went wrong?” and even that is a pretty dull question because the answer is clear enough: the money people wrapped their fingers around the neck of this movie and strangled it to death.
By saying this, I am not trying to absolve Jackson of his responsibility. He signed the contract, cashed the check, and put his name on the film.
But Jackson was faced with formidable challenges in making Smaug. The biggest challenge was how to manage the legacy brand that he had created through Lord of the Rings, in which the safest route to profit was to deliver basically the same goods in basically the same package, even if those goods had grown a bit stale (ie, the preferred approach of the money people).
Jackson also had to keep his eye on the huge non-English-speaking and/or non-Western audiences for The Desolation of Smaug, since spectacle translates more easily than dialogue, and since special effects are less likely to cause cultural offense than stories or characters.
Jackson decided (or was asked) to pad out a book that would have potentially made one good film into three movies, with a total running time pushing eight hours. And while we’re at it, let’s note Smaug is the middle of the three films, with no natural beginning or end to help give shape to the story.
But with all that said, I’m surprised by how badly Jackson flubbed Smaug considering how well he managed the earlier Lord of the Rings films, in which he balanced character with action, drove the story through both internal and external conflicts, and gave shape to the overall plot.
The Desolation of Smaug is a plodding, tedious, frantic mess. I think the main culprit is the decision to expand the book’s story rather than edit it down. All the padding – particularly filming events that occur off the page in the book – destroys whatever dynamic tension the story arc in the Desolation of Smaug might have achieved and gives us a jumbled collection of scenes instead.
These scenes are not driven by situation, since the situations in Smaug are so many and so various that the connections among them quickly become lost; and these scenes are certainly not driven by character or emotion, which means the talents of at least two very good actors – Martin Freeman as Bilbo and Ian McKellan as Gandalf – go entirely to waste, with what moments of real human feeling they sometimes find soon swept away in the general noise and hubbub.
The result is a whole-movie version of what happens when actors find themselves stuck in a play that really doesn’t work. They fall back on acting bigger, louder, faster to cover up a lack of sense.
In the case of Smaug, this bigger-louder-faster extends to the action sequences and special effects, which are fine as far as they go, but they turn the film into just a roller-coaster ride: viscerally thrilling at times but empty of meaning.
I don’t have a problem with entertainment being entertainment, and businesses working to cash in big by selling to big audiences, but films don’t have to be as desultory as The Hobbit is to earn money for their investors. Joss Whedon’s The Avengers demonstrated that last year. Peter Jackson proved it with his Lord of the Rings movies. Entertainment can excel as high craft, without aspiring to or needing to achieve the goals of art. Craft is a worthy goal. Unfortunately, Smaug isn’t craft. It’s crap.
“The Littlest Angel” is a great book. Not because it is actually great as in “very good.” But because it combines a deep (and I would say offensively manipulative) sentimentality with a deeply subversive take on Christian theology which makes it a genuinely strange book pretending to be merely a nice one.
I’ll give you my reasons why I think this in a moment. But first, in case you don’t know the story, here is the set-up.
“The Littlest Angel” is a children’s story written in 1946 by Charles Tazewell which follows heaven’s littlest angel, who can’t sing on key or arrive on time or keep his halo on straight or fly without tumbling through the air.
One day, he’s summoned to speak with the Understanding Angel and the Littlest Angel explains there was nothing for a small angel to do in heaven and he was homesick for earth. The Understanding Angel asks “what would make him most happy in Paradise” and the Littlest Angel asks for a box he’d left under his bed at home. He’s given the box and the Littlest Angel becomes a model citizen of heaven.
Sometime later, God announces that Jesus would soon be born in Bethlehem and every angel in heaven prepares a gift. After thinking and thinking, the Littlest Angel decides what the infant Jesus would like best is his box from home. The Littlest Angel gives his gift proudly, but grows ashamed of the “small, rough, unsightly box” filled with “useless things” compared to “all those other glorious gifts” just as God reaches out his hand to the box.
It is at this point in the story that I begin crying. Every single damn time.
Well, I don’t actually cry. I just become physically unable to speak. Which was a problem when I was supposed to be reading “The Littlest Angel” to my children. It went like this:
Younger son: “Mommy! Daddy’s making those funny faces and not reading the story.”
Wife [walking into the room]: “Again?”
Me: “Just finish the book and leave me alone.”
So what is in the box? Tazewell tells us …
A butterfly with golden wings, captured one bright summer day on the hills above Jerusalem, and a sky-blue egg from a bird’s nest in the olive tree that stood to shade his mother’s kitchen door. Yes, and two white stones, found on a muddy river bank, where he and his friends had played like small brown beavers, and, at the bottom of the box, a limp, tooth-marked leather strap, once worn as a collar by his mongrel dog, who had died as he had lived, in absolute and infinite devotion.
Then “The Littlest Angel” gets very particular, by which I mean it flirts with heresy, because Tazewell has God say this about the box:
This small box pleases Me most. Its contents are of the Earth and of men, and My Son is born to be King of both. These are the things My Son, too, will know and love and cherish and then, regretful, will leave behind Him.
What I like about the story is that Tazewell suggests with the contents of the Littlest Angel’s box that the glories of life, consciousness, and creation are expressed mostly fully in the smallest things. Then Tazewell says explicitly God values these things; and not only values them, but states his son Jesus will regret leaving them behind as the Littlest Angel did.
Normally, we understand the purpose of the incarnation of Christ to be the redemption of sin through Jesus’ sacrifice on the cross, motivated by his and his father’s love for humanity, and the earth a poor miserable place compared with heaven. In Tazewell’s story, the emphasis is on the incarnation as an act of radical empathy, with Jesus embracing the suffering AND the joy of human life, and sin shuffled off to one side, which frankly is where I think it belongs. Original sin has always struck me as the equivalent of God breaking our legs so sometime later he could claim credit for resetting the bones.
All this sounds good enough, but the problems with “The Littlest Angel” are larger than its virtues. First, we have the issue that the pathos of the story is founded on the death of a child, which is difficult to manage without making the reader feel cheaply manipulated, and this is exactly what Tazewell does. I do feel manipulated and the fact that Tazewell’s manipulation works on me only increases my resentment.
Second, “The Littlest Angel” is a frequently toxic combination of the cloying and the fascist – which is to say it is sentimental. Sentimentality is a big cartoonish emotion, equally useful in provoking copious weeping or torch-lit rallies, and sweetishly easy to gobble down.
Think of sentimentality as a big piece of Coca Cola cake (search the recipe, it’s delicious) versus the beef steak, wheat berries, bitter greens, and red wine of the real thing.
“The Littlest Angel” is lousy with sentimentality as I think you can tell from the way Tazewell describes the contents of the box. And it gets worse in the Children’s Press, Chicago copy I have which features the 1962 illustrations by Sergio Leone (same name, not the film director). Check out the little guy:
He’s an avatar of Aryan cuteness in blue footie pajamas which is particularly galling since Tazewell tells us the Littlest Angel died in Jerusalem before the birth of Christ. Do you think there were a lot of radiantly blond, blue-eyed little tykes running around Jerusalem in footie pajamas circa 10 BCE? You do? Okay, I won’t argue, but you clearly have come to the wrong shop.
Also while we are at it, not to be overly picky, but if the Littlest Angel died before Christ’s incarnation on earth — and we know he did because the gift of which the Littlest Angel is ashamed is for the baby Jesus — then what the hell (excuse my language) is the Littlest Angel doing in heaven? Because he ain’t supposed to be there. If you accept that salvation is achieved through Christ alone, and Jesus’ sacrifice redeemed us from and only Jesus’ sacrifice could redeem us from Original Sin, then the Littlest Angel should be burning in hell fire. At least that explains why the Littlest Angel doesn’t have any relatives to keep him company in heaven. They are all in the other place.
Now where was I? Oh yes. Somewhere in “The Littlest Angel” is a story worth telling. Maybe I’ll take a whack at a revisionist version some day. Or maybe I’ll just it tuck away for when my children have children and let them decide what they think of it for themselves. In either case, I’m keeping my copy.
If the task of the fantasy novel is to create an engaging new world and tell an absorbing story in it, then Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere delivers the goods just fine. If it is do more than these, then Neverwhere comes up a bit short.
Neverwhere is primarily the story of Richard Mayhew, a pleasant but vague financial analyst in the modern City of London (or “London Above”), and the Lady Door, a member of the aristocracy of “London Below” which is a realm of fantastical or historic persons and places below the city tied together by the London Underground.
Richard finds Door lying injured on a city street and is soon drawn into her desperate attempt to flee the killers who murdered the rest of her family while simultaneously seeking to understand the reason why her family was murdered.
Along the way, we’re introduced to a satisfying number of delights. These include the murderous Misters Croup and Vandemar, a Dickensian pair straight out of nightmare; the Floating Market where all the contending citizens of London Below gather under a general truce to plot, trade, and revel; a large group of colorful supporting players; and the angel Islington who is still mourning its failure to save the people of Atlantis from destruction.
Gaiman’s invention is not endless, however. His plot has just enough twists to keep the story in pleasant motion. Gaiman often reaches for the word or phrase you’d expect, to the extent that I was often completing his sentences in my mind as he did on the page. His Angel Islington and Richard’s snobby rich girlfriend come straight from central casting. And at best, his characters have just enough distinct qualities to be sufficient for the story – which is to say they have two.
So the young lady Door is waif-like yet resolute. The Marquis de Carabras is amoral but scrupulous in the paying of his debts. The Black Friars are kind but a touch sinister. Most particularly, and not successfully, Richard Mayhew is hapless and heroic.
Mayhew is mostly paralyzed by fear and protected by the other characters out of pity, except for a few moments when he rises to a challenge that has defeated scores of men and women from London Below over the course of centuries. One challenge is the dread “ordeal” and the other is the great “Beast of London” which lurks in a labyrinth. Neither of these victories seems probable and Gaiman makes them less so by frequently playing Mayhew’s character for laughs.
This gets at my two disappointments with Neverwhere, which I had expected to like better based on Neil Gaiman’s reputation. The first is that none of the characters were sufficiently developed that I could feel an emotion toward them and so feel that something was at stake while reading Neverwhere; and what should be at stake in reading is our hearts. Mine was never engaged.
Secondly, what binds a fictional world together and makes it breathe, whether it is utterly fantastical or obsessively mundane, is its emotional tone: how the author feels about the world he or she has created. I don’t think Gaiman ever decided how he felt. Instead, he has the ha-ha mostly feckless Richard Mayhew stumbling around a story that is threatening and apocalyptic. This makes Neverwhere entertaining for sure. But it doesn’t make it anything more.
The 2012 BBC “Hollow Crown” production of Henry IV, Part 1 is the perfect public television adaptation of Shakespeare. It is superbly acted and directed, cleanly written, and briskly paced, without offering large innovations in staging or interpretation.
These kinds of productions of Shakespeare largely succeed or fail on the quality of the acting, and Eyre’s four core players deliver the goods in aplenty. Joe Armstrong’s Hotspur lives up to his name without the one-note shouting the role makes all too easy. Simon Russell Beale is superb as a panting Falstaff stripped by age of his vitality. Tom Hiddleston mines gold from a core of sadness in his appealing Prince Hal. And the incomparable Jeremy Iron combines his delectable trademark world weariness with a relish for power as King Henry IV, convincing us we are watching a man who would seize, and keep, his crown at any price.
Richard Eyre’s understanding of the relationships between the characters is as good as his actors. Henry IV, Part 1 is a play of fathers and sons, or more accurately mismatched fathers and sons, with Eyre’s screenplay and direction emphasizing how much Henry IV believes Hotspur would make a better Prince of Wales than his own son – even saying as much to Prince Hal’s face. And yet, there is a foundation of love and respect between the two men which eases their reconciliation.
Eyre’s Falstaff is even more interesting. Falstaff’s behavior has always been objectively ugly: he is a drunkard, a liar, and a thief who will do anything to promote his own self interest regardless of the consequences to other people.
But Falstaff is usually played as a person who successfully hides his ugliness behind his enormous wit and affability as well as his genuine affection for Prince Hal. With Beale’s Falstaff, the ugliness shines through and we are left in doubt of his real affection for Prince Hal in every scene except one, when Falstaff asks Harry to “banish not him thy Harry’s company: banish plump Jack, and banish all the world.”
Harry does and will, of course. Harry often treats Falstaff with contempt and that Beale’s Falstaff is contemptible makes Harry’s rejection of him, and of the tavern life, easier to understand and accept. But not completely.
My major problem with Henry IV, Part 1 has always been Prince Hal’s sudden – I would say extremely sudden – transformation from antic to earnest. Shakespeare has Hal explain it this way:
So, when this loose behavior I throw off
And pay the debt I never promised,
By how much better than my word I am,
By so much shall I falsify men’s hopes;
And like bright metal on a sullen ground,
My reformation, glittering o’er my fault,
Shall show more goodly and attract more eyes
Than that which hath no foil to set it off.
I’ll so offend, to make offence a skill;
Redeeming time when men think least I will.
But I’ve always found this explanation perverse, and particular, and not very convincing, and more, disappointing because Shakespeare is a master of ambiguous characterization and this piece of exposition ain’t.
I like the idea much better that a young man, born to rule and expected to rule, might wish to hide from the role he ultimately can’t refuse, and that this would explain his behavior, and make him more sympathetic.
Hiddleston’s sad Prince Hal reaches toward this explanation. His Harry is not antic and then earnest, but instead there is an earnestness beneath the antics that makes his performance particularly moving.
The “Hollow Crown” production of Henry IV, Part 1 zips along at a clean two hours and gives you a sense of the whole play while allowing each scene to breathe. Eyre does not make an effort to approach the play on terms other than its own. There are no striking modern parallels or contemporary topical relevance slapped on the drama. Instead, Eyre trusts – and trusts right – that a genius author, good actors, and the enduring universality of human nature are all the justification the performance needs.
Henry IV, Part 1’s production design, sets, and costumes will strike the modern non-specialist historian eye as consistent with how England in 1403 might well have looked, except for the smart, beautifully tailored leather jacket Hiddleston wears. (Tom gets to keep his movie star locks rather than submitting to the punishment of a bowl cut too.)
Those who have Branagh’s 1989 film version of Henry V fixed in their memory will find the Boars-Head Tavern a familiar place and Eyre’s Battle of Shrewsbury a close copy of Branagh’s Agincourt, except for the snow. But these are quibbles. This film is a fine achievement and well worth watching.
Des McAnuff’s 2010 Stratford Shakespeare Festival production of The Tempest starring Christopher Plummer is less like a violent storm at sea than a warm spring shower that freshens the flowers.
Plummer delivers a pleasing, avuncular Prospero who is mostly good company and who finds the most comedy in the banished Duke of Milan’s lines. This allows Miranda (Trish Lindstrom) to be funnier, too; and the lightness extends through the whole production, especially into the exquisite and hilarious clowning of Trinculo (Bruce Dow) and Stephano (Geraint Wyn Davies).
These choices cause several problems, however. A post-anger Prospero, who has already chosen forgiveness over vengeance, drains the play of much of its drama. It also makes the character of Prospero make less sense. Prospero is a benevolent bully, and Shakespeare gives you plenty of examples of both benevolence and bullying throughout the play. When McAnuff underplays the bullying, it leaves the viewer feeling something is a little off.
This feeling is intensified by the casting of a white-skinned and red-haired Miranda, an African Caliban (Dion Johnstone), and an Indonesian Ariel (Julyana Soelistyo). I’m not a huge fan of “critique of colonialism” productions of The Tempest, but I can see their point, and McAnuff seems to have gone out of his way to emphasize the critique and then dismiss it.
On the plus side, Plummer is a delight throughout the production and gets to stretch his wings at the end of The Tempest, when he is renouncing his powers. The emotion of these scenes is intensified by the fact Plummer was 80 at the time, so that the actor and the role merged.
Finally, this is a filmed stage play, but it is a play filmed with great care. You never lose the sense you are watching a play, performed before a live audience, but at the same time you don’t feel that the camera work has been inhibited by the constraints of the theater’s physical space.
Overall, I liked this production of The Tempest and encourage you to seek it out. It is currently available on Netflix in the States.
On Thursday, the journal Science published a study (Reading Literary Fiction Improves Theory of Mind) that found people scored better on tests measuring empathy, social perceptiveness, and emotional intelligence after they had read literary fiction than after they had read popular fiction or rigorous non-fiction.
This result cheered members of the literary community and confirmed an idea that I’ve long argued using anecdotal evidence, which is one of the most important functions of literature is to strengthen emotional intelligence.
This function also explains why literature is the only art included in core educational curriculums. The ability to accurately read the feelings of other people is perhaps the most essential skill for living in social groups, and living in well functioning social groups is one of our key adaptations as a species.
So all this is good news — which I greeted with considerable apprehension and unease.
Part of my unease comes from having observed that people who read literature don’t go about the business of becoming better people as often as they go about the business of bragging how they are better people because they read literature.
The Science study is likely to encourage the bragging folks to keep bragging about their exceptionalism; and exceptionalism is fundamentally at odds with the work of empathy, because exceptionalism encourages you to see yourself as different from others while empathy encourages you to see yourself as the same.
The Science study is also likely to reinforce certain class divisions that run right through the middle of literary reading, in which appreciation for literature is used to signal your membership in a high economic status group (ie, rich people read Shakespeare) or in a high social status group (ie, Bohemians read difficult or experimental fiction).
The use of literature as a signal of status is particularly pernicious because it actively works against the whole purpose of reading books, which is … reading books.
Instead, the status-signal readers are interested in reading “classes” of books. They read “literary” fiction not “genre” fiction or “popular” fiction, and so they look for books that conform in obvious and expected ways to these classes, in order to embrace them or reject them — even before they read them (if they ever read them).
In this world, “literary” is a synonym for “quality” and “genre” a synonym for “trash”. The problem with this is that a great deal of tedious, uninspired, self-important, plodding work is praised and a great deal of inspired, insightful, subversive work is ignored.
Now telling the difference between the two can be fiendishly difficult, especially because a truly original book is often indistinguishable from a hot mess on first encounter.
But it is the encounter that is essential: the active, engaged conversation between book and reader.
If the results of the Science study encourage more of this, all to the good. If the study just encourages more sniffing at cocktails parties, then the world will roll on much the same as before.
Less than a week after it was released, Grand Theft Auto 5 has earned more than $1 billion in sales and reignited the debate about its rampant violence. The news coverage of the game’s more appalling details strikes me — a person whose reaction to the typical video game controller is confusion and boredom — as disturbing.
But my bigger question is this: What makes the violence in Grand Theft Auto 5 different from the violence in other works of the imagination?
For example, Breaking Bad is a cultural phenomenon which has millions of Americans rooting for a man who cooks meth, manipulates his friends and family, kills adults as well as a child, and is in possession of a machine gun which is likely to figure in the show’s finale.
Macbeth is a monument of English literature which draws audiences of refinement and taste to watch the slaughter of kings, friends, innocent women and children, and soldiers while somehow persuading them to suspend judgment of the man who is the agent of all this slaughter.
I suppose the great difference among these works, if you can establish the difference, is that Grand Theft Auto 5 celebrates violence for the purposes of entertainment, while Breaking Bad and Macbeth explore the nature of violence to demonstrate its consequences.
The point of the video game is to be a criminal and win, or at least escape any consequences for your bad behavior. Macbeth, of course, doesn’t escape consequences in the Scottish play. And we are guessing that Walter White, who already exists in a self-created hell, is likely to suffer more before the show finishes at the end of the month.
But I’m not entirely persuaded by this argument I’ve just made. Part of my doubt is that I’m not sure you can demonstrate that the violence in Grand Theft Auto 5 is of a different kind than Shakespeare’s.
Defenders of the game claim that it is a satire, which would turn the game into social commentary, although social commentary on the level of Brett Ellis’ American Psycho perhaps.
At this point, then, we are required to decide if Grand Theft Auto 5 is a satire done in good faith (ie, “we’re serious about our message”) or bad faith (ie, “we’re pornographers looking to protect our revenue”). And making that judgment is about as slippery a task as a critic could assign himself or herself without helpful emails provided by Edward Snowden.
I’m also not persuaded because of this question: Would Grand Theft Auto 5 or Breaking Bad or Macbeth be as popular as they are WITHOUT violence?
For example, would you really want to watch a play in which Mr. and Mrs. Macbeth talk about their frustrations with their lives and careers, while playing the polite host to King Duncan and making sure he likes the brie and that his room is comfortable? Not really.
The violence is an essential part of Macbeth‘s appeal: appealing, I think, to the dark impulses the human race all feels but which we as social animals need to suppress. These impulses also need an outlet however, and imaginary violence is a much better outlet than actual violence. Grand Theft Auto 5 is a more direct outlet than Macbeth, but this only makes it different in degree. Not different in kind.
The twenty novels in Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey-Maturin series are the greatest sustained work of English-language fiction written in the 20th century for the high craft of their characters, story lines, language, and themes, for the breadth of their erudition, and for the sheer stamina of O’Brian’s invention.
The series follows Jack Aubrey, a fighting captain in the British Navy, and his particular friend, Stephen Maturin, naturalist, naval surgeon, and intelligence officer, as they fight in the Napoleonic wars as well as the War of 1812.
The series begins with superlative novels that include the books in my best of O’Brian list below. Then, like the happiest of long-running marriages, the Aubrey-Maturin novels take a modest step down to the level of very good indeed; with my metaphorical marriage encompassing not only Jack and Stephen’s monumental friendship, but more importantly, the great devotion of O’Brian and his readers to each other.
I’ve listed my six personal favorites, ranked in order of admiration, with notes and some spoilers. (I’ve included a complete list of the Aubrey-Maturin novels below these reviews for convenience.)
#1 Post Captain (1972)
Patrick O’Brian’s magnificent sophomore work is the crown jewel of the series. The novel begins with O’Brian in full Jane Austen mode, following a young Jack Aubrey with prize money in his pocket and time on his hands because of an unfortunate lull in the Napoleonic wars, as he pursues his eventual wife, Sophie Williams.
Soon, fighting breaks out again but more significantly, Jack and Stephen’s friendship breaks down over a second woman (Stephen’s eventual wife, Diana Villiers) and they challenge each other to a duel. This is the only time in the series when the enduring friendship between the Aubrey and Maturin is shaken, and it makes for some of the most difficult and moving reading in the novels.
In Post Captain, O’Brian’s skill at writing complex, lucid, and compelling battle scenes emerges in all its glory, as does his humor, most especially when Jack is forced to escape suddenly hostile French territory by disguising himself as a dancing bear.
Unlike many of the later novels in the Aubrey-Maturin series, which don’t end as much as they simply stop, Post Captain concludes with a bang.
O’Brian places Jack in command of one of the four British ships that famously captured a Spanish treasure fleet bringing gold back from the New World to finance Spain’s entry into the war against England. Stephen, in his emerging role as an indispensable intelligence officer for the British, gathers the information that makes the capture possible.
#2 HMS Surprise (1973)
In HMS Surprise, the pace is faster, the action more exciting, the stakes higher, and the plot architecture tighter than in Post Captain, which it immediately follows in the series’ sequence.
For my money, HMS Surprise features the best set-piece in the entire series: Jack’s brilliant and daring rescue of Stephen, who has been captured as a spy by the French and is being tortured in the town of Port Mahon on one of the Balearic Islands. This is also the moment when the friendship between Jack and Stephen becomes stronger than death, and so the great and enduring heart of the Aubrey-Maturin novels begins to beat.
In HMS Surprise, both Jack and Stephen face down significant rivals. For Jack, it is the French Admiral Linois, who defeated him in the series’ first book, Master and Commander. For Stephen, it is a new contender for Diana’s affections, who he challenges to a duel that leads to another of the series’ most famous sequences, in which Stephen performs surgery on himself.
Finally, HMS Surprise launches two more of the novels’ great elements. The first is the theme of marriage’s problematic nature, as Jack looks forward to bliss with Sophie in the book’s final lines (Jack predicts the future will be “pure paradise”). The second is exotic locales. India features prominently in HMS Surprise, and future novels will take Jack and Stephen all around the world.
#3 The Fortune of War (1979)
Jack and Stephen are equal as friends, but Jack is more often the agent of action in the novels, partially because he is the captain of the frigates on which Stephen serves and partially because his appalling bad judgment in nearly every aspect of his life except as frigate captain is always getting him into trouble.
The Fortune of War is the single book in the Aubrey-Maturin series that truly belongs to Stephen. In it, he and Jack have been captured by the Americans during the war of 1812. Both are taken to Boston, where a severely wounded Jack is held prisoner, but Stephen walks about with considerable freedom, since the Americans believe him to be just a naval surgeon rather than a British agent.
French agents, also in Boston, know better however, and they engage Stephen in a deadly game of cat and mouse which transforms The Fortune of War into the series’ only true spy-thriller. Thrown in the mix are Diana Villiers, that brilliant complicator of Stephen’s life, and a hair’s breadth escape that wraps up the novel nicely.
Also in The Fortune of War, O’Brian brings the double nature of Stephen Maturin into sharp focus. In the novels to this point, we’ve known Stephen as an accomplished naturalist, a committed physician, and a talented spy – but only had hints of his deadly ruthlessness. Here, Stephen kills without hesitation or regret when driven by circumstances, and O’Brian creates another contrast with his great friend, Jack Aubrey.
Jack as a naval officer is personally responsible for far more deaths than Stephen, but Jack cheerfully regards war as the world’s greatest professional sport. The rewards are immense, the rules complicated and subtle, losing often deadly, but the players feel little actual animosity for their opponents as long as they adhere to the laws of the game. In Stephen’s war, there are no rules, the killing is vicious and personal, and grudges extend beyond declarations of peace. Another way to say it, of the two men, it is Stephen who has the soul of a killer.
#4 The Far Side of the World (1984)
As the Aubrey-Maturin series progresses, the plots of the books become less discrete and the arcs of the stories flatten; so the novels transform into one continuous narrative that blossoms with asides, digressions, false starts, storms and accidents, sudden reversals, changes of mission caused by the whims of Jack’s superiors or shifting geopolitics, and the messy complexity of the characters most of all.
The Far Side of the World is a particularly rich example of these qualities. In the novel, Jack is sent in the HMS Surprise to prevent an American frigate from attacking British whalers in the South Seas, and almost nothing goes right. He is significantly delayed by a lightning storm off the coast of Brazil that damages his ship and requires significant repairs, which allows the Americans to slip into the Pacific and strike the whalers. Later, a typhoon nearly wreaks Jack’s frigate and destroys the American ship for him. The crew is unhappy with an aging, incompetent midshipman who they believe is back luck. Stephen is entangled in political intrigue while reveling in his opportunities to collect scientific specimens. And much more.
There is something existential in all this chaos, and without suggesting that O’Brian intended to write a philosophical novel – he has entirely too much sense and talent as an artist to bother with such stuff – the total vision of The Far Side of the World delivers exactly that.
#5 Desolation Island (1978)
If The Far Side of the World flirted with existentialism, Desolation Islands walks right up to this dreary philosophy and gives it a big wet kiss.
Jack accepts the command of the Leopard, an aging ship barely fit to navigate the English Channel, in a mission to transport prisoners to Australia. These prisoners attack and murder some of their guards. The ship is stuck in the doldrums and battered by storms. An epidemic kills most of the prisoners and much of the crew. The Leopard is chased and nearly destroyed by a vastly more powerful Dutch ship of the line. An iceberg damages the Leopard so severely that Jack makes a desperate landing on Desolation Island (one of many in the world at that time) where they are at risk of being marooned permanently.
DesolationIsland contains two of my favorite extended set pieces. The first is the Dutch ship’s pursuit of the Leopard, which takes place in the Roaring Forties, where the waves are mountainous and O’Brian’s powers of description are superb. The second is the crew’s extended stay on the cold, bleak island of the novel’s title – which Stephen regards as a natural philosopher’s paradise he is in no hurry to leave. This is an example of O’Brian’s humor, of course. But it also suggests that joy and wonder can be found any place, if you just know how to look for it.
#6 Master and Commander (1970)
Master and Commander is a fine introduction to the series – especially for readers coming new to the books – a solidly constructed and well written story, and a remarkable demonstration of how fully formed O’Brian’s fictional vision was from its first pages.
We meet Aubrey and Maturin as they meet for the first time, both destitute on shore in Port Mahon and looking to go to sea for different reasons. We follow them through a set of missions as Aubrey takes advantage of his opportunities to attack French ships in actions that might earn him promotion and fill his pockets with prize money. At the same time, we are introduced to a wide range of characters O’Brian brings to convincing and vivid life, and to the world of the British Navy during the Napoleonic wars, which he makes equally vivid and convincing. Master and Commander has a clear narrative arc and a satisfying conclusion, in contrast to many of the series’ later novels.
The book reveals the depth and breadth of O’Brian’s interests, including in history, music, natural philosophy, the complexities of human beings and human societies, and the enormous practical difficulties of sailing and fighting naval ships during the early 1800s which O’Brian describes in detail, based on the Admiralty papers of the Public Records Office and other sources. One of the great pleasures of the series is this practical detail. O’Brian is an extraordinary procedural novelist, whose only English-language rival in the twentieth century is John Le Carre. Both elevate their genre novels into the realm of literature, which is what most great writers do.
Complete List of the 20 Aubrey-Maturin Novels in Order
Master and Commander (1970)
Post Captain (1972)
HMS Surprise (1973)
The Mauritius Command (1977)
Desolation Island (1978)
The Fortune of War (1979)
The Surgeon’s Mate (1980)
The Ionian Mission (1981)
Treason’s Harbour (1983)
The Far Side of the World (1984)
The Reverse of the Medal (1986)
The Letter of Marque (1988)
The Thirteen Gun Salute (1989)
The Nutmeg of Consolation (1991)
Clarissa Oakes or The Truelove (1992)
The Wine-Dark Sea (1993)
The Commodore (1995)
The Yellow Admiral (1996)
The Hundred Days (1998)
Blue at the Mizzen (1999)
Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World (The Movie)
The film Master and Commander is a triumphant adaptation of Patrick O’Brian’s novels. It’s brilliantly co-written and directed by Peter Weir, who manages the story, action, and characters with equal skill. It features superb performances from Russell Crowe as Jack Aubrey and Paul Bettany as Stephen Maturin, with able support from a strong cast. The movie is filled with details from the novels without losing focus or momentum. Its cinematography, production design, and special effects are utterly convincing. Weir makes you believe in the characters and the world they inhabit. Viewers who know Weir’s other great war film, Gallipoli, will recognize how he looks at the costs and consequences of war in Master and Commander as he did in this earlier movie.
One criticism you could make of the movie is that it does not make concessions to viewers who have not read the books. The movie places general audiences within a fully realized world, filled with unfamiliar characters, situations, and elements, and requires them to work while they watch the film. I don’t expect this will be a problem for people who have found their way to this blog post, however.
Criticism of the movie from O’Brian fans is another matter and follows two themes. The first is that Weir does not see the characters, stories, or themes the way they see them (which is wrong). The second is that Weir did not film their favorite books or did not include their favorite characters or situations (which is also wrong).
Making a film based on a twenty-novel series requires selection. This is unavoidable and Weir tells us which novels he chose in the movie’s title. Weir emphasizes the action elements of the novels rather than Stephen’s work as a spy, or the relationships with Sophie and Diana, or the politics, intrigue, and bureaucracy of the Royal Navy, or significant historical events because – again – he has to choose, because cinema is well suited to action stories, and because it’s easier to get financing for an adventure film than a period drama.
That said, Master and Commander gives the unmistakable impression of being exactly the film Weir wanted to make. Those who disagree with his choices are free to make their own movies. I look forward to watching them when they do.
Glossary of Nautical Terms
The Gunroom of the HMS Surprise site has a good glossary of nautical terms that come from the “Dictionary of Sea Terms” by R.H. Dana Jr., author of “Two Years Before the Mast.” These are particularly useful to new readers of the O’Brian series but helpful to everyone.
Nautical Terms That Have Become Idiomatic
Idioms are phrases whose “figurative meaning is different from the literal meaning,” as the The Oxford companion to the English language nicely puts it. The OED online says idioms are “a group of words established by usage as having a meaning not deducible from those of the individual words (e.g. over the moon, see the light).”
Once you start reading Patrick O’Brian, you begin to realize just how may idioms in English derive from sailing ships. For example, a “loose cannon” is a wild unpredictable person liable to cause harm. This idiom comes from the guns of sailing ships which were mounted on wheeled carriages that absorbed the recoil and allowed the gun to be drawn inside the vessel for reloading. The guns and their carriages could easily weigh 3,000 pounds, and they were secured by heavy ropes. When a gun and its carriage got loose from its ropes, it could roll all over the deck from the motion of the ship injuring or killing men. Worse, the gun could plunge down a hatch and straight through the bottom of the hull, causing the ship to rapidly sink. The CrewSeekers website has an excellent list of idioms that come from sailing ships.
Tacking and Wearing a Sailing Ship
O’Brian describes the mechanics of sailing his ships in detail. This video of the Star of India shows what’s involved in tacking and wearing a sailing ship. In both tacking and wearing, the crew puts the ship about so the wind is shifted from one side of the vessel to the other. In tacking, the bow of the ship is turned through the wind. In wearing, the stern of the ship is turned. Tacking is the more difficult maneuver because the crew is turning the ship into the wind while wearing involves turning the ship downwind.
There are two fundamental questions for contemporary readers of Dante’s Inferno translated into English. The first is “What should we make of the story?” assuming we don’t want to pull on our scholar’s togs and get all 1300 CE. The second is “How should we judge our experience of the language?” considering Dante is famously difficult to translate.
I’ll address both questions within the context of Clive James’ new translation of Inferno published as part of The Divine Comedy earlier this year.
What the Hell is Up with Hell?
As you doubtless know if you bothered to click through to this post, the Inferno follows Dante Alighieri, a Florentine Italian born in the 13th century who has lost his way in middle age as he travels through hell accompanied by the poet Virgil in search of (ultimately) God’s love or, as it may be, the hottest platonic one-night stand in all of literary history with his dead and now angelic crush-for-eternity, Beatrice.
Dante’s excellent adventure will take him through Purgatory and finally to Heaven, but first he has to get past hell; and hell is a horrible place to live, although it is unbeatable as a destination if you are tourist, which is essentially what Dante is.
As a fictitious world – and since I am a liberal Christian, I am going to posit hell does not exist – Dante’s Inferno is an unparalleled feat of imagination. Hogwarts may be more fey and witty, Middle Earth may be more thoroughly worked out (though maybe not since Dante drags all of Italy and much of 1300 Europe into his poem). But for sheer originality and ummph-um-pa-pa, nothing comes close to Dante’s hell.
Nothing comes close to the Inferno in the category of high-class torture porn, either. And torture porn is something this monument of world literature doubtlessly is. Dante the poet, rather than Dante the character in the poem, revels in the sufferings he has dreamed up and canto after canto delivers stand-out horrifying and/or disgusting examples of the concept of “poetic justice”.
Hell is supposed to be the expression of divine retribution. Why then does it often feel closer to bloody-minded titillation? This question is probably familiar to anyone who has seen the frescos in medieval Italian churches or Albrecht Dürer‘s gorgeous engravings of the Inferno, but it is worth repeating.
Then there is the issue of just what kind of sins get you into hell and how much shit these sins get you into once you are there.
Dante’s hell starts off sensibly enough. We begin with the virtuous pagans: you were good guys, but you didn’t know Christ so sorry, you’re screwed. Then sins of appetite or emotion that follow along with many of the seven deadly ones: lust, gluttony, and wrath for example. Then heresy. We know medieval Christians were particular about people disagreeing with them, even on the small stuff, so okay fine, we’ll give Dante a pass on heresy. Then violence in the seventh circle – we’re right with you D, we definitely don’t like violence.
But then we get to the eighth circle of hell, where the fraudulent are punished, and here the head scratching of modern humanist readers begins.
Because the eighth circle is filled with panderers, flatterers, astrologists, simoniacs, corrupt politicians, thieves, counterfeiters – while Attila the Hun is rumored to be floating around a whole circle above.
How is it exactly that a guy who raped and killed his way across the Eastern and Western Roman Empires for twenty years is considered a little less bad than someone who made a living out of telling a dull king he was brilliant or proclaiming that since the moon was in the seventh house, now is a propitious moment to make the moves on your lady friend?
And speaking of rape, where are the rapists? Mixed in with the violent I guess, but they don’t merit a mention to all appearances. Where are those that hate? In the eighth circle, the only ones that truly deserve to be there by modern lights are the Sowers of Discord. Traitors are in the ninth and last circle, with Satan in the center of it all.
Dante Loves Him Some Dante
Another particular feature of the Inferno is just how highly Dante thinks of himself. It starts with the foundational premise of the whole Divine Comedy, namely that Beatrice in heaven has persuaded God to give Dante some special help.
Now I know God is all-knowing and all-powerful and his love has no bounds, etcetera; but there are plenty of people in heaven who have friends on earth, and God seems to have issued exactly one golden ticket for exactly one special tour of his magical damnation plus salvation factory, and that ticket went to you, Dante. And you didn’t even need to buy a Wonka Bar to get it.
Then there is the remarkable early canto where poets like Homer, Horace, and Ovid welcome Dante as a colleague and equal. Now I’m not saying they are wrong. Dante is their equal. But – dude – you write yourself into a scene where great dead poets of antiquity say you’re the bomb, and then you get all choked up and grateful about it? I ain’t buying.
It almost seems petty to note, beside these examples, that Dante the character also makes a habit in hell of telling various suffering souls he can make or break their reputations back on earth if they don’t play nice and answer his questions. Apparently, being God’s special project and an immortal poet ain’t enough for D. He has to make sure people know he’s the world’s best PR flak, too.
There’s also the whole Dante-Virgil bromance, or maybe it’s more accurate to call it a major man-crush Dante has on Virgil; and also the Dante getting to decide who goes to hell thing; but I will let these slide because other commentators have noted them and because I believe I might now be trying your patience with this line of criticism. If not my flipness.
The Clive James’ Translation of Dante’s Inferno
I should say before I go forward, offering small praise for great achievements, that Dante consistently writes scenes that are convincingly felt; that many of these scenes are compelling without understanding the background of the characters involved (but not always); and that the Inferno has incredible momentum – it reads fast and short, even with the volume of detail and people it contains.
This is especially remarkable considering that James’ translation of the Inferno is substantially longer than the original because he has woven into his work many explanations about characters and stories which Dante’s readers would not have required and which other translators typically place in footnotes.
I find this an odd choice because it is for just such information that God first invented footnotes and more recently, the tablet computer. I can’t blame James for ignoring this second invention, since he says he began work long before the iPad and Kindle Fire were invented; but these devices render the need for extensive notes obsolete. Honestly, most folks who are going to buy a copy of The Divine Comedy likely own mobile computers and can sit comfortably in bed with both James’ book and their tablet. I did. Worked beautifully.
As for James’ translation, I think it is as good as you can expect from the impossible task of translating Dante into English.
It’s not simply Dante’s famous ABA BCB terza rima that makes him difficult. English translators with any sense at all avoid it, and James uses an ABAB scheme and iambic pentameter with an AA rhyme at the end of each canto instead.
It’s also that Dante is justly celebrated for the vividness, precision, compactness, and music of his poetry. The little time I spent with a side by side translation of Dante makes me admire anyone brave enough to try it.
James is brave enough and often succeeds beautifully. You’ll find many sequences of lines where you’ll forget you are reading a translation or rhyming poetry at all.
But then, inevitably, you’ll also find lines where syntax or word choice (and so sense) are distorted to fit the poem’s scheme as well as filler words, stuck in to keep the pentameter or jury-rig a rhyme. This pops up during moments when, for example, Dante might ask a question and Virgil says before answering it, “You ask me so I’ll tell you.”
But I’ll apologize to James because these feel like quibbles, and offer what I hope is a compliment instead: your Inferno was so good it made me eager to read Purgatorio. I’ll let you all know how it went when I’m done.
Since I am perpetually behind all trends in popular culture, I am just now discovering that Vince Gilligan’s Breaking Bad is as purely addictive as the crystal meth his anti-hero Walter White cooks on the show.
I’m also just discovering how Breaking Bad has so magnificently balanced its “entertaining” and “serious” elements, which is another way of saying – broadly – that it has succeeded as a narrative built on character and situation as well as a narrative based on plot.
Before I get around to solving the problem of how I’m going to watch Season Six when I don’t have cable, let me throw a few semi-organized thoughts at you.
Breaking Bad Season Five: Addicted to Story
All stories are driven by conflict. And to vastly over-simplify matters, these conflicts fall into two broad categories: interior conflicts, which tend to emphasize character, and exterior conflicts, which tend to emphasize plot.
In its early seasons, Breaking Bad placed greater emphasis on internal conflict. Walt is a high school chemistry teacher driven to cook crystal meth because he fears he will die of lung cancer and leave his family penniless; and while the mechanics of working in the drug business are explored, more time is devoted to the conflicts Walt’s illness and the lies he tells to hid his business cause in his family, and then to conflicts Walt’s wife’s discovery of his profession cause in their marriage.
This balance begins to shift in Season 3 as Walt’s involvement in the drug business deepens, and he is increasingly threatened by other criminals and by law enforcement agents. The latter half of season four delivers a rush of pure narrative delight as Walt scrambles to kill his former business partner, before he kills Walt and his family; and the story barrels into the shows of Season Five with Walt declaring he wants to build his own drug “empire”.
It would be hard to over-praise Breaking Bad for how beautifully it manages its story, like a thoroughbred running the best race of its life, hitting all the beats, managing the minor cliffhangers of a commercial break and the larger cliffhangers of each episode’s conclusion.
Add to this “the mob meets MacGyver” elements, as Walt applies his Mr. Science skills to eliminate one threat after another. And top it off with a question: how does Vince Gilligan make story lines that sound ridiculous when you describe them to your wife so convincing and affecting on screen?
Walter White: Lured by Vanity, Enthralled by Winning
One answer is Bryan Cranston’s Walter White, who Vince Gilligan describes as a person who begins as Mr. Chips and who ends as Scarface, but who I think is much more interesting than Scarface.
Walt doesn’t really want money, although he begins cooking meth as a way to pay his medical bills and provide money for his family after his death. What Walt really wants is agency and recognition.
This becomes evident fairly early in the show, because Walt quickly makes enough money to take care of his family, but he is more concerned about his image as a nice but feckless and impoverished cancer-stricken dweeb than by the practical problem of how he is going to launder a half million dollars in cash.
Walt craves success then, and even more importantly, the recognition and respect that come with success. This is one of the reasons he keeps getting lured back into the drug business, because only there is his success – as the well-paid maker of the world’s best crystal meth – recognized.
It is also in this world that Walt’s intelligence and (as it turns out) decisiveness is acknowledged. He’s driven in part by desperation. He has to kill his business associates before they kill him. He has to elude the DEA. But the more often he wins, the more he likes it and the more he doesn’t stop to count the bodies that are piling up on route to his next victory.
Only when his wife shows him the pile of money he’s amassed, literally as big as a Mini Cooper, that he retires – right at the end of season five. What was Walt chasing? What were all those deaths worth?
We’ve Been Seduced by the Monster Who Is Walter White
This is a popular opinion and it’s true. Walt is a monster. The list of murders he’s committed prove it. So why are we on his side?
Part of the answer is that Walt wants what most people want: to be self-sufficient and respected. Part is that we humans are social animals who chaff at the restraints our societies put on us even as we embrace them, and stories about criminals or seducers or other people who break the rules are a safe way to dream away our frustrations with society’s restraints.
But a greater part of the answer is perhaps the loveliest fact in all narrative art. The social purpose of story and character, the moral purpose of literature – regardless of medium – is to teaches us empathy.
Story asks us to inhabit the lives and experiences of the characters on which it turns its powers, and to understand them, even if we don’t like them – even if in the end we are right to condemn them. Macbeth, Milton’s Satan, Humbert Humbert, Walter White.
It’s a great paradox of narrative art that rooting for bad guys can make us better people. But it can. At least when the bad guys are creations as brilliant as Walter White.
The only element of any real interest in Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug is the question “What went wrong?” and even that is a pretty dull question because the answer is clear enough: the money people wrapped their fingers around the neck of this movie and strangled it to death.
Peter Galen Massey 