The Good, The Bad and the Multiplex by Mark Kermode, a review

I can still remember the moment I fell in love with this thing called cinema.  Doctor Alan Grant, striding into a field, and looking out over the plains and seeing dinosaurs.  Living, breathing up-there-in-all-their-glory dino-fricking-saurs!  I didn’t know how Steven Spielberg had done it – but that summer in 1993, I sat entranced in my local flea-pit cinema (one screen, sticky floor, but with ushers, projectionists, chocolate raisins at the food counter; a cinema that didn’t seem to have changed since the 1930s and one I hoped never would: That old cinema is a Wetherspoons pub now.)  So anyway, Jurassic Park was the first time I fell in love with the medium.  I’d seen films before (Timothy Dalton as Bond in The Living Daylights in 1987, in the same flea-pit cinema… how I miss her!  I’d been terrified by Spock as they Searched for him in 1984 and I was 5), seen many more on home video (I cherished those days when Mum used to bring home something from the video shop (remember them?), be it the latest Karate Kid, or Bond, or even some dodgy ninja knock-off), but Jurassic Park was the moment I fell in love.  It wasn’t just the film, but the experience, my first time alone, in the dark, facing my fears.

I go to the cinema a lot less these days.  It’s overpriced for the experience you get, an experience Mark Kermode so rightly rails against in his frothy, insightful and often very funny book, ‘The Good, The Bad and the Multiplex: What’s Wrong with Modern Movies?’, an experience not worth paying for.  I’ve had my fair share of digital freezes (in a medium that supposedly cannot freeze), badly projected films (I remember watching Johnny Depp in something once and half his face was missing, spilling out over the ceiling!), and in cinemas where the staff don’t care that its patrons are being short-changed by all their poor work.  I complained once that a film was badly projected, and received a risible snort from a manager, a comment that it was being shown how it should and reluctant offer of my money back.  As Kermode shows in his book, such experiences are now common place in the British multiplex, a place in which anybody with knowledge of cinema is considered a snob.

If you love cinema as deeply and widely as I do (you’ve no problem with subtitles, and have seen rather more subtitled cinema than Hollywood cinema in an actual cinema in the last decade) then many of the arguments Kermode projects will be nothing new.  But I suspect his book isn’t aimed at the true cineaste, but rather at the average punter who doesn’t know the difference between Antonioni and Tom Arnold.  His blokey, jokey banter that fills most of this book, before he launches into his explanation of what is wrong with modern movies, is clearly aimed at the average punter.  And if his book takes at least one person to a cinema showing a subtitled movie, or makes them track down Spoorloos over The Vanishing, or Låt den rätte komma in over Let Me In, then he’s doing his job.

The Good, The Bad and the Multiplex is an admirable book, though sometimes I found the banter that fills its pages less funny than Kermode seems to think it is.  The arguments he makes could easily have been told over a fifty pages – but I think presented so, they’d have come across as a lecture and he’d have reached less people.  Its current format, jokes and all, make his book accessible.  This is the intelligent article remade for stupid people, just like those intelligent art-house films are remade for those who can’t be bothered concentrating.  This isn’t a criticism as such: you have to reach the people somehow.  It just means it’s not quite the book for me – though he did make me laugh a few times – and didn’t say anything I hadn’t already thought.  But I read a lot about film, I think a lot about film.  And I agree that Saw 3D is rubbish.  So I’m already a convert to the message Kermode is preaching.

There is a lot that is currently wrong with the British cinema experience – the solutions Mark Kermode presents here might go some way to correcting it.  If only those with money would listen to the people who pay for their product, rather than to the money kerchinging in their coffers.

Man Booker Prize Shortlist Predictions

The longlist for the 2013 Man Booker Prize seems a diverse one.  There are works that range from 100 pages to 1,000.  They are a set of works that cross continents and set in different historical periods, from the dark ages to present day.  They are works that deal with the Iraq conflict, the fallout from the Japanese earthquake and tsunami, the enclosure of British land, a pioneering flight and the effects of the 2008 economic crash on two very different countries.

Yet despite such differences, there are common links between some of the works.  Two novels deal with the economic crash (The Spinning Heart, Five Star Billionaire).  Two novels mention Virginia Woolf (Unexploded, in which Woolf appears).  A number of the novels deal with foreigners adrift in the United States (We Need New Names, The Lowland, TransAtlantic).  There are novels that deal with motherhood (The Testament of Mary and The Lowland) and novels that deal with children growing up (We Need New Names, The Marrying of Chani Kaufman, Almost English, A Tale for the Time Being).  Yet more deal with how the past is more relevant than we might think and remain thrilling for their historic setting (The Luminaries, Harvest, The Testament of Mary).  All of them remain uniformly excellent.

I’ve read all 13 longlisted novels and spent some time considering what might make the shortlist.  There were some novels that leapt out immediately as potential shortlist candidates, others accrued their place slowly in my mind but now seem impossible not to shortlist.  If I’m honest, there are 8 novels battling it out for those coveted six spots in my mind.  But I have to choose six.

So here is my final six:

Donal Ryan - The Spinning Heart / Colm Toibin - The Testament of Mary / Jim Crace - Harvest

Colum McCann - Transatlantic / Tash Aw - Five Star Billionaire / Eleanor Catton - The Luminaries

Even when I scan my final choice, I think: perhaps there is too much history in there, and they’ll choose We Need New Names over The Luminaries say, or The Lowland over The Testament of Mary.  It’s what makes the Man Booker so interesting, and so difficult to call.  Those are my six up there, though, and I’m sticking with them.

It is worth stating that I have felt that this year’s longlist has been great examples of the novel, with no novel making me doubt its place.  Chair Robert Macfarlane, and Judges Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, Stuart Kelly, Natalie Haynes and Martha Kearney have chosen a fascinating range of novels, and I suspect their selection process for the final six has been heated and hotly contested.

The shortlist is announced tomorrow (10 September) and the winner announced on the 15 October.

The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton

Eleanor Catton came to prominence with her 2007 debut, The Rehearsal, which won international acclaim, and was awarded The Betty Trask Award, and a long-listing for the Orange Prize in 2010.  There was, then, high expectation for her second novel.  Before it had even been published in the UK, that second novel, The Luminaries, had been long-listed for the Man Booker Prize 2013.  Coming in at over 800 pages, The Luminaries is a complex, multi-layered novel that owes a debt to both Dickens and Wilkie Collins, but yet feels fresh, thrilling and very modern despite its 1860s setting.

Opening in January 1866, Walter Moody has just disembarked off Godspeed, a barque that has bought him to Hokitika on the west coast of New Zealand where a gold rush is forcing towns to spring out of the barren landscape.  He checks into the Crown Hotel where, unbeknown to him, 12 men have gathered.  As Moody is quietly interrogated, he reveals to men that he can be trusted, and they step forward to discuss their part in a sequence of events that has rocked their world.

Two weeks earlier, a hermit had been discovered dead in his cabin.  On the same night, one of the richest men in town disappears, and a local whore is found insensible on the roadside.  Much of this story fills the first chapter of the novel, which is almost half the novels’ length, as multiple narrators step forward and fill in some blanks, confuse in others, as the truth of what happened that night is slowly revealed. 

There is a lot going on in The Luminaries, but it is testament to Catton’s skill and control over her material that it never becomes hard-going and remains, at all times, utterly engaging.  The scope of her novel is huge: she deals with life in a community torn asunder by gold, power plays, political scandal, passions run wild, betrayal, murder and conspiracies.  It is also a wild book, designed to take you on a thrill ride through a gripping tale.

The Luminaries then is an epic, clever novel, one that attempts to emulate a novelistic form many would say is dead and has no relevance – but proves triumphantly that those big Dickensian style novels can work in the twenty-first century and that they can still have something to say and the power to shock and surprise.  Many contemporary novels attempt to emulate cinema, and feel slimmed down and brief because there is a belief readers no longer have the concentration span for such material.  This feels like one of those novels you have to read, before cinema takes it and dilutes it.  It feels like the antidote to that blithely stupid statement that readers have no concentration span.  The Luminaries is a rare breed, a rare novel, and a beautiful one.

Will it be shortlisted?

I hope that it is.  Writing of this kind is rare and should be treasured, but I fear its scope and range might intimidate. 

The Kills by Richard House

At over 1,000 pages, The Kills is by far the longest novel on the 2013 Man Booker Prize longlist.  It is by novelist, Richard House, and comes trumpeted as a multimedia experience, for House is also a filmmaker and there are short films that add to The Kills experience when viewed online or embedded in the digital edition.

The Kills is actually four novellas grouped together (the spine of the hardback states that these are Books 1 – 4, novellas individually titled Sutler, The Massive, The Kill and The Hit, and all were, it seems, published individually as ebooks before being grouped together for physical publication.)  Then there are those online films – the book provides the URLs and tells you when they should be watched.  If you buy the book on your iPad you can watch the films at the right spots.  These films are extras, things that enhance what you know already, or offer a side story connected to the main plot, and though they are not necessary to your enjoyment of The Kills, it is true that they add something when viewed in tandem with the reading.  I read Sutler without watching any, and then made a point of watching them when it was time to.

This is a massive undertaking.  The first two parts – Sutler and The Massive – are interconnected, stories about contractors working in Iraq, one of whom has gone on the run with a huge amount of stolen cash – but the wrong man might be on the run.  In The Massive, the toxic clouds caused by the burning of rubbish causes death around the burn pits at Camp Liberty. These two parts provide a unique perspective on the Iraq conflict, a point of view rarely put across in fiction of that conflict.  There are no soldiers here, no insurgents, but simply middle-men, contractors trying to make a living. 

The third part is perhaps the most difficult to appreciate.  The action shifts to Naples, and we meet all the gory elements of Neapolitan lowlife – the prostitutes, the dealers, the murder rooms and tortured dogs.  It is a brutal, violent world House conjures in this part, and quite often it turns the stomach. 

The final part returns us to the mystery of Sutler, when the sister-in-law of a German diplomat becomes embroiled in the disappearance of Sutler. 

What The Kills shows, time and again, is House’s ability to create vivid characters.  These characters breathe on the page, and very quickly the reader is involved in their story.  His style is pared down, direct, but never dull.  He has also managed as well to do that rare thing, to create a digital edition that is worth reading over the print version. 

Will it be shortlisted?

At first I thought probably not.  This is a thriller, and thrillers never get shortlisted.  But the digital edition seems to be something fresher, original in execution, and it could easily see The Kills rewarded over one of the more traditional novels currently longlisted.

The Testament of Mary by Colm Tóibín

Colm Tóibín is no stranger to the Man Booker prize.  He has been shortlisted in 1999 and 2004, and longlisted in 2009.  His work is often cited for its originality, beauty and power.  Of all the novels longlisted for the 2013 Man Booker Prize, Tóibín’s is the shortest, coming in at just 104 pages in hardback.

The Testament of Mary tells the story of Jesus Christ from his mother’s point of view.  Her first person narration brings us close to many of the gospel tales, but from a perspective never accorded them before.  To present stories that are so familiar to anybody raised in a Christian country, whose iconography is ubiquitous, must present challenges to any writer: to make those moments seem fresh and startling again is the mark of a master.  For in The Testament of Mary, Tóibín manages to breathe new life into the gospel stories, and to bring to life for the reader a woman whom we all think we know, but never truly have.

My initial fear would be that Tóibín would attempt to write in some faux-Biblical voice – to present this as some forgotten now found gospel – but what he does is cleverly than that.  He writes very sparingly, allowing Mary’s voice to come across sharply and clearly.  By doing so he brings us closer to Mary.   The novel is set some time after the crucification when two unnamed visitors have come to find her and ask her to give testament to her son.  Mary, who cannot bring herself to name her son, simply referring to him by that name, or “the one who was here”, offers her own quiet interpretation of events. 

She refers to her son’s followers negatively, is distrustful of the cult she sees rising around him, and sees that her son is drifting from her – until, in a moment from the wedding feast at Cana, she fails to recognise him.  Her love, though does not diminish, and she is there with him at the crucifixion, and admits to weaknesses her visitors would prefer not to hear.

The Mary of Tóibín’s novel is contrary to much Marian doctrine and to the beliefs of the Roman Catholic church, but never feels disrespectful.  It presents a different interpretation of familiar stories, and brings to life in Mary a depth of human feeling she is sometimes not allowed in Christian belief.

The Testament of Mary then, is a beautiful, haunting novel, full of quiet power and dignity.  Even for the non-religious it offers jewels.

Will it be shortlisted?

Almost certainly, I feel.  Writing this good comes along so very rarely that it should be rewarded.  However, the subject matter might see certain people immediately distrustful of it, and could see it booted out at the longlist stage.