And in other news...

I've been trying to get a little ahead on my term's reading, mostly for my NZ Lit class. So far this has meant Man Alone by John Mulgan and The Bone People by Keri Hulme. Now, Man Alone was apparently a landmark book that is supposed to have influenced subsequent New Zealand writers and it's bleak, and dour, and dark. In fact, a quote on the back by C K Stead agrees with me: "It's rare, dour, sober truthfulness enacts a phase in our national history and catches certain truths about our national identity." I found this a bit depressing actually, because I got to thinking and realised that most of the books by New Zealand writers that I'd read are very bleak: things like Robin Hyde's Nor The Years Condemn, Philip Mann's Pioneers and Wulf's Yarn, even children's books like the O series of Maurice Gee, Take The Long Path by Joan De Hamel and Margaret Mahy's young adult novels (her kids books are silly and fun, but for teenagers she expects more). In fact, the only NZ written books for which I can't pin the label 'bleak and dour' are Hugh Cook's sprawling fantasy novels.
Is New Zealand as a nation really that depressed? Our movies (The Piano, River Queen, The Navigators, Whale Rider) certainly seems to imply so. Our music, with a happy core of Split Enz, Crowded House, Dave Dobbyn and Stellar*, seems to imply not. What's with that? Is this all just an erroneous impression gained from too small a random sample? Anyway, I'm about half way through The Bone People and I'm enjoying it a lot. It's very bleak and dark (but of course) but has lost the dourness. There's a lot of interesting texture in various characters' obsession with food, or the sea, or the colours of semi-precious stones, and how can one not like a main character whose favourite obscenity is "Shit and apricocks". I'm liking it a lot, and wondering what the hell the ending is going to be. There will be more on my theory of whether or not New Zealanders are essentially depressed later, when I've had time to digest more of the books on the course.

I've also been watching three TV adaptions of Dorothy L. Sayers novels, Strong Poison, Have His Carcase and Gaudy Night, courtesy of the lovely Debbie Cowen, who lent them to me. I found watching the first, Strong Poison, to be a little bit jarring at first - I know all three books very well, and had formed my own mental images of what all the characters were like, which no actor/director/scriptwriter can ever match. Having said that, their performances were all true to the books, it's just the nature of interesting characters that they take life in people's heads, and everyone's take on them is different. By the second mini-series, Have His Carcase, the dissonance wasn't so bad, and it was easier to watch and enjoy on its own merits.
I found the entire series to be a fascinating lesson in scriptwriting and adaptation, just watching how story lines were compressed, clues were simplified, more scenes were added in order to Show not Tell, entertaining scenes and characters were sadly (although necessarily) jettisoned if their payload of clue or characterisation could be shifted elsewhere. While not being able to explore anything as deeply, the scriptwriters were all trying hard to retain the feel of the books, and it was interesting how some iconic lines got shifted onto different characters, and served slightly different purposes, yet still made the cut. While Strong Poison, which is a fairly simple book, survived this process of simplification quite well, the other two are much meatier works - both long and complicated, Have His Carcase for its detective puzzle, and Gaudy Night for its characterisation. Of these two, Have His Carcase was, in my opinion, more successful. The criminals made stupider mistakes, and the detectives got luckier, but the essential parts of the story still happened in more or less the right shape. Gaudy Night didn't cope so well, just because there was so much other stuff in there, intense character development, statements on the value of work, musings on women's education and in all, I don't think they quite managed to skip over the gaps of what had been taken out quite so well. This is not to say that I didn't like them, because I liked all three adaptations a lot, but I found it interesting to make the comparison.
(And my, but the actor playing Lord Peter, Edward Petherbridge, had such a lovely voice...) I also wish they'd dramatised The Nine Tailors as well. While it doesn't fit into the Harriet Vane story arc, the fens and the bells and the flood were fantastically memorable images that I think would have filmed very well.

Gaudy Night

I've lately been rereading Gaudy Night by Dorothy L. Sayers, which is a lovely book for many reasons, including interesting characters, beautiful prose, a detailed description of Oxford life in 1935, and being a detective story that can be taking seriously by literature professors who happen to like detective stories. It also has little gems like these:

"Hard-boiled or soft-boiled?"
"Hard, I think."
This question had no reference to Dr. Threep's politics or economics, but only to his shirt-front. Harriet and the Dean had begun to collect shirt-fronts. Miss Chilperic's "young man" had started the collection. He was extremely tall and thin and rather hollow-chested; by way of emphasising this latter defect, he always wore a soft pleated dress-shirt, which made him look (according to the Dean) like the scooped-out rind of a melon. By way of contrast, there had been an eminent and ample professor of chemisty - a visitor from another university - who had turned up in a front of intense rigidity, which stood out before him like the chest of a pouter pidgeon, bulging out of all control and displaying a large area of the parent shirt at either side. A third variety of shirt fairly common among the learned was that which escaped from the centre stud and gaped in the middle; and one never-to-be-forgotten happy day a popular poet had arrived to give a lecture on his methods of composition and the future of poetry, whereby, at every gesticulation (and he had used a great many) his waistcoat had leapt in the air, allowing a line of shirt, adorned with a little tab, to peep out, rabbit-like, over the waistline of the confining trouser. On this occasion, Harriet and the Dean had disgraced themselves badly.

Sayers, Dorothy L, Gaudy Night, (London: Hodder and Stoughton), 1970, p256.

Commonplace Book...

I just read a poem that Dorothy Sayers wrote about being thankful which I rather liked. (This was written early on in WWII when a lot of material goods were becoming scarce.)

I need not shiver in silk stockings; -
I had a hunch about wool before it was rationed;
Now I have knitted myself woollen stockings
That come a long way up.
They are warm and admirable,
They do not ladder or go into holes suddenly.
I can boast quietly about them
And smirk while others admire my industry;
As it happens, I like knitting
And nothing gratifies one more
Than to be admired for doing what one likes.
-- Dorothy L. Sayers

(Hannay, Margaret P. (ed.), As Her Whimsey Took Her: Critical Essays on the Work of Dorothy L. Sayers, Kent: The Kent State University Press, pp211-2)