A friend recently returned from trekking in the Himalayas tells me that a copy of The New World Order was in his rucksack as he looked down on the Everest base camp.
You may now resume your lives.
Category Archives: Books
A vampire that doesn’t suck
I could never be or have been J.K. Rowling or Stephanie Meyer, because it honestly would never occur to me to write a novel about teenage wizards or vampires. Not having completely sold out on my early ideals (yet, give it time) I try to make each novel different, and as far as I’m concerned everything that can be said or done about either genre has been said and done. What I’ve read of Rowling and heard of Meyer only confirms this opinion.
I will admit this could potentially backfire because it means I could never have written John Ajvide Lindqvist’s Låt Den Rätte Komma In / Let the Right One In either, which is a vampire novel and a bloody good one and everyone ought to read it. Or failing that, watch the movie, which I’ve just done and which sticks pretty close to the book though loses some of the subplots and depth.
Not that it particularly says anything new – it owes too much to Interview with the Vampire for that – but it says it very well. Much more Ingmar Bergman than Neil Jordan. That novel featured Claudia, a little girl who was vampirised at an early age and thus fated to be a child-shaped immortal with a taste for blood. It followed the consequences of this idea through with remorseless logic. Similar set-up here, except that even as a human Claudia was a brat, and Eli is actually quite pleasant. Yes, innocent people must die to feed Eli’s unfortunate habit, because if s/he (the gender is ambiguous in the novel, less so in the movie) takes any nutrition from source then the source must be killed or become vampirised themselves. Eli didn’t ask to be made into a blood sucking monster, but since that is the hand that fate has dealt … The logic is followed through just as remorselessly, but because Eli is fundamentally sympathetic, the triumph of the novel and film is that we understand. We’re rooting for Eli.
It’s satisfyingly bleak and Swedish and so we can thank our lucky stars Hollywood never picked it up. In fact, Hollywood couldn’t pick it up. Hollywood simply could not produce a movie which climaxes with a gang of twelve-year-old bullies being dismembered. The vampire would have to pay for it. Or, the bullies would have had to have done something truly evil to deserve their fate. Or at the very least, make them older. No, they’re just bullies, faces cherubic and voices unbroken, and no, the vampire doesn’t pay for it.
Eli does it because she’s protecting her friend, Oskar, a lonely, alienated boy of 12. And Oskar would rather go along with a creature who can’t help the fact that people must die for her to live, rather than the human bullies who may be small children but were there entirely by choice.
And, being 12, Oskar can’t help pushing his luck, like deliberately making Eli demonstrate exactly what happens if you do enter without permission.
I’ve barely begun to scratch the surface. Read Roger Ebert’s review, and either watch the movie for the story-lite (e.g. missing out on exactly how Eli became a vampire, and her relationship with the man she lives with who gets her blood) or, best of all, read the book.
I will wear the green willow
Sometimes I think my childhood was just too innocent.
For instance, it was only a couple of days ago that I was listening to Steeleye Span’s “All around my hat”, a song about a girl staying faithful to her far, far away true love despite the attentions of a much nearer poor, deluded young man. And it contains this line:
“the other night he brought me a fine diamond ring
but he thought to have deprived me of a far better thing”
I looked at that for a while, and thought, crikey, they sung that on Crackerjack.
Then I whiled away a large part of a gloriously sunny afternoon yesterday re-reading Alan Garner’s Elidor. I want to get into the zone of writing children’s fantasy and it’s a classic, though one that left me stranded at about the age of 10. I remembered the gist of it – three brothers and a sister from sixties Manchester have to preserve the four treasures of the land of Elidor from the encroaching darkness. The darkness will only be banished for good when the Song of Findhorn, whatever or whoever that is, is heard.
It could so easily nowadays be derivative fantasy pap, but what makes it is the relationship between the kids, with their simultaneous love and bickering; the depictions of bombed out Manchester matching the desolate, blasted Elidor; and the resolutely respectable middle class Watson family, at a time when families would plan their evening TV viewing together. I remember our TV misbehaving in exactly that way, though probably not for the same reasons.
And then there is the weird stuff as Elidor starts to encroach on the Greater Manchester urban area. Trinkets in Christmas crackers bear a strange resemblance to the treasures. Household appliances start to switch themselves on, energised by the treasures’ energy field (reading it now, I see that Garner brings a very scientific sensibility to his fantasy, which is added points). And two shadows on the wall gradually take on the form of armoured men, the more you look at them, and you can’t help not looking at them …
Meanwhile the sister, Helen, finds a broken pot depicting a unicorn and the legend:
“Save maid that is makeless no man with me mell.”
The kids scratch their heads over what this can mean, and get on with their lives. Then we learn that Findhorn is in fact a unicorn (not much of a surprise in my edition which showed a rearing unicorn on the cover, towering over young Roland). There is a certain minimum qualification for unicorn whispering and Helen has it.
Oh, so that’s what makeless means. Not that Garner spells it out, and I’m betting at the age of 10 I still wasn’t certain. But I do wonder how many 10 year old kids in class demanded to know. “Are you makeless, Miss?”
Next stop, Garner’s The Owl Service, which again left me stranded as a kid because it turned out not to be about a service either run by or providing owls.