Photograph too Languid for its Own Good

Photograph (2019)

Directed by Ritesh Batra

Amazon Studios, 108 minutes, Not-rated

In Hindi and English

★★

Director Ritesh Batra attracted attention for his delightful 2013 film The Lunchbox. It garnered so much renown that he got to direct The Sense of an Ending, a 2017 adaptation of an acclaimed Julian Barnes novel. If, however, you plan to see his new film, Photograph, set your personal shutter to a slow speed.

Our protagonist Rafi (Nawazuddin Siddiqui) is a street photographer who poses his subjects in front of Mumbai’s Gates of India, a famous city landmark.* Rafi scrapes by and carries most of his belongings, including a portable printer, in his backpack. He shares a squalid and allegedly haunted hovel with four other men and his only real indulgence is a once-a-month kalfi, a frozen dessert that’s like a cross between ice cream and a popsicle. Indeed, one wonders how he can afford the expensive Nikon that he uses in his work. Poverty is just one of his problems. His dadi (grandmother) is relentlessly pressuring him to marry and settle down. She’s so tenacious that, though she lives in a remote village, she is known to Rafi’s friends and uncle, who also pester him about marriage and making his dadi happy.

Rafi recalls an enigmatic young woman whose picture he took, but who had to dash off before her picture was developed. Imagine his surprise when he finds her image on a poster outside an accounting school as its star student. He learns that her name is Miloni (Sanya Malhotra) and concocts a scheme to pass her off as his girlfriend to get his grandmother (Farrukh Jaffar) off his back. Perhaps because in her own way Miloni is as morose as Rafi, she agrees. If this is a love story–and that’s up for grabs–it’s certainly an unconventional one. Rafi is dark-skinned, Miloni of fair complexion. He is an impoverished Hindu who is streetwise, and she a sheltered middle-class Muslim whose parents employ a beloved house servant. There is also an age discrepancy.

Let's cut to the chase, which is something Photograph takes its time in doing. The strictures of Indian society are such that all relationships must play out according to social norms. Don’t expect fireworks in relationships or in any other way. In one scene, Rafi and Miloni are in a rundown movie house where a Bollywood film is being shown. Miloni is so distressed that she runs out. Rafi pursues her and the two share their dislike for the Bollywood genre** and the sameness of story arcs. This is reflexive filmmaking from Batra, whose reputation was built upon not making formulaic Bollywood films. This is to be applauded, but Batra goes too far in the other direction. The line between languid and somnambulant is porous and is often transgressed in a film that spotlights two characters defined by their inaction. The only break in the pacing is a scene that makes no sense. I won’t spoil it, but let’s just say that a splash of magical realism in a film with two characters trapped within the routinized and quotidian seems misplaced.

There is also the issue that Photograph is not a comedy, a drama, or a recognizable romance. Was this deliberate on Batra’s part? Perhaps, but the film has the feel of painting one’s self into a corner. Apparently distributors were also confused. Photograph gets tagged as a “love letter to Mumbai.” Huh? It is quite a stretch to infer that from what’s on the screen, most of which is literally or figuratively interior. Whatever Photograph might be, though, it’s certainly not a travelogue.

Both Siddiqui and Malhotra are fine actors that wring as much as they can from a thin script that calls each to be passive. If you think the film’s deliberate pacing is a refreshing change from Bollywood and Hollywood histrionics, this film is for you. I liked parts of it, but overall Photograph is underexposed.

Rob Weir

* The Gates of India were built in 1911 to commemorate a royal visit during the days of British colonialism. They are impressive and Indians like to pose before it, an oddity in that the Gates are practically modern in such an ancient land.

** This is an inside joke on Malhotra’s part as she rose to cinematic fame for her dancing in Bollywood films. Bollywood films nearly always feature singing, dancing, and a formulaic chaste romance.

Sleeping at Last, Molly Thomas. Rachael Sage, SUSTO and More

Sleeping at Last, The Spring

New Age music–now generally called ambient music–has taken hits from critics who dismiss it as elevator or fern bar music. Often that's warranted, but when done right there's something about it that reaches deep into one's emotional core. Seeping at Last, the handle of Chicago composer/producer/musician Ryan O'Neal, decidedly does it right. His original composition The Spring evokes adjectives such as contemplative and pretty in some very good ways. This project began as the score for a 2016 film fin support of Charitywater.org. I gave a plug for it when just a few tracks were released, but now that I have all 13 tracks in hand, I want to give it a rave. It is, save one selection, an instrumental album but one that will make you revel in the spring, appreciate the very life force of water, and astonish with its crystalline beauty. Rain-like piano and museful strings (Anya and Sharon Gerber) frame "Atlantic" and then send us metaphorically coursing downstream and into mysterious depths. The cello in "Transformations" is so gorgeous it aches; it's simply a work of rare beauty. If you need to get out of your own head, try "Insteadof Myself" and disappear down a swirling, magical hole. The keys and jumping string bounce with what is at once joyous, yet urgent.  And, yes, the title track captures spring's essence, even though it means water's source, not the season. But you can be forgiven for conflating the two given the composition's opening fragility and the radiant burst into which it evolves. Objectively, the plinky piano keys are overused on the album, but I was so nonetheless deeply moved by it. ★★★★ 

Molly Thomas and the Rare Birds, Honey's Fury

 If you've ever seen Todd Snider's band and were dazzled by his fiddler and backup singer, chances are good it was Molly Thomas. Thomas is also a crackerjack songwriter, acoustic guitarist, and lead vocalist. Her latest project, Honey's Fury, finds her fronting a dynamic quartet that includes one-time Wet Willie lead guitarist Rick Hirsch. Think a country-flavored rock vibe and a voice that's somewhere between Patty Griffin and Emmylou Harris and you're in Molly's wheelhouse. As you will hear on "The Boatman," she can sing it soft or bold. On "Calling My Name, " she soars through a big arrangement like a fearless bird, and the surf isn't the only thing thundering on "The Ocean." On the latter she sings, I was born in a little town east of the Biloxi wind and all one can say is that though it may be the case that the ocean is in my veins, the currents have carried her far. There aren't many videos yet available from the new album, but check around and you'll find samples from the rest of the album. I particularly admire Thomas' ability to shift moods, as she does on "Tumbleweed," which truly could be one of Emmylou's songs with its folky ambience that gives Thomas quiet spaces to air her voice. And, man, does she ever air it! She also gets swampy and bluesy on a cover "I Wanna Live," a piece that flashes "Danger!" at every turn. The album title comes from the enigmatic trippiness of "Calling My Name," which would have been at home at the Fillmore West circa 1968. From where I sit, Molly Thomas left it all on the studio floor when she made Honey's Fury.  ★★★★

Rachael Sage, PseudoMyopia

Some singers possess an innate sense of how to construct grab-you-by-the-earbuds songs. Rachel Sage is one of them. She doesn’t have a big voice, but she more than compensates through her command of how to work her way through intriguing mixes. On “Alive,” she lulls us into a middle groove and then punches out the It’s good to be alive refrain with such panache that it snaps us to attention. Some have compared her to Carole King, but I thought of Sarah McClachlan when I heard “Spark.” Listen to how Sage uses the piano cadences to build to the repeating lines that begin Hold me like a candle/Shine me like a knife. The EP’s theme is vision, as in both perspectives and in sight; Sage is legally blind without lenses. Sage is nothing if not adventuresome and quirky. “Olivia” is a strong woman inspired by a Law & Order character. The arrangement of this one is ever-so-slightly off-kilter and is a sound envelop that features everything from bouncing cello to piano cascades and sprays of strings. For my taste, Sage swallows a bit too much air on “Myopia,” but she redeems herself with a redux of her 1998 “Sistersong.” True to form, it’s a wee bit offbeat, opening like the prelude to a jingle and venturing off into accented vocals and dramatic instrumentation that evokes a scene from a musical. ★★★★

SUSTO, Ever Since I Lost My Mind

SUSTO [sic] is a five-piece Charleston, SC-based indie rock band captained by Justin Osborne. It has been around since 2013, but almost broke up when Osborne considered becoming an anthropologist. A study tour to Cuba changed his mind; Osborne hung out with musicians and began to explore new ways of making connections. Susto is, by the way, a Spanish word that's a bit hard to translate exactly. It's a scare or something that appears suddenly and unexpectedly, or–as the band's Website puts it–a kind of "spiritual panic attack." This makes the title of SUSTO's new recording a bit of double wordplay. The band's material is equally elusive to pin down. "Esta Bien" finds them in full Caribbean mode, with Osborne toggling between Spanish and English like a folk crooner, "Homeboy" sports a galloping acoustic intro that delivers us unto a mix of crashing power chords, electric surf guitar, and a splash of psychedelic lead. But what do we do with "If I Was," a bit folk ornamented with crystalline electric lead and bass? Or "Last Century," with its buzzy mix that feels like The Police on 'roids? If you're not perplexed and intrigued yet, try "Weather Balloons," a hopeful little love song that gathers force and repeats its reminder: I'm not dead yet. ★★★★

  

In Brief:

Whenever I get free EPs of back pages material, it generally means performers are about to drop a new release. Yet insofar as I can tell, this isn't the case of Toad the Wet Sprocket. No matter, their 5-track Something Old Something New is a reminder that they are one of the better jam bands. Check out a few tracks from Constellation (2013), their most recent release. You can hear the title track and "California Wasted." For my money, though, their 1991 song "All I Want" makes me hope the band will indeed release a new record soon. For those that don't know, the unusual band name was lifted from a Monty Python sketch.

I also got a Wilco concert sampler titled 12-12-11 that is four songs from its album The Whole Love (2011): "Born Alone," "I Might," "One Sunday Morning," and "Rising Red Lung." I offer this Noise Trade release for the many of you who are fans. My confession is that Wilco has always underwhelmed me.

Where the Crawdads Sing is Best When It's Wild

Where the Crawdads Sing (2018)

By Delia Owens

G. P. Putnam and Sons, 384 pages.

★★★

Where the Crawdads Sing was among the top-selling novels of 2018, helped enormously by an endorsement from actress Reese Witherspoon, who has secured the right to make a film adaptation. You can also find effusive, even worshipful praise from those who post reviews to Amazon and Good Reads. Does it live up to its hype? It depends upon which part of the book one means.

The bulk of the story takes place between 1952-1969. It centers on Katherine “Kya” Clark, whom we first meet at age 6. She lives in the wetlands of coastal North Carolina and hails from what is derisively called poor white trash. When Kya observes her mother walking down the dirt track in her “fake alligator shoes” carrying a case, Kya quickly surmises that she might not be coming back. For the next 4 years she witnesses her older siblings leave home, including Jodie to whom she is closest. Poverty can grind you down, and pa has become an abusive alcoholic who disappears for long stretches until one day he stops coming home at all. From this point on Kya is on her own.

This is the first of several improbable things a reader must accept. Locals whisper about “Marsh Girl,” who occasionally comes to town (the fictional Barkley Cove) to buy supplies, but few ever venture to the ramshackle cabin where she lives. (You’d need a boat or an exceedingly rugged vehicle to get there.) The school truant officer manages to track her down and forces her to attend one day of school, where other pupils make fun of her. This will be her only formal education; Kya is swamp smart and knows how to hide.

How does she survive? That’s where improbable thing number two comes into play. Kya digs mussels and fishes from the small boat her father left, and sells them to “Jumpin’,” a black man who operates a fuel, fish, and bait shop in the bayou. Also, he, his wife Mabel, and a deep-in-the-woods black church supply the charity that white Christians only think about for an hour on Sundays. Plus Kya comes to know the marsh in all its rhythms, mysteries, and abundance.

The only one to breach her watery fortress signals in ways only one versed in nature would know: by leaving rare shells and feathers by an old stump Kya passes on her travels. He is Tate Walker, a boy her own age who loves the marsh almost as much as Kya, and will eventually teach her to read. In one of the book’s least believable passages, Tate will also explain menstruation to Kya, a device we are supposed to believe because Tate harbors dreams of becoming a marine biologist. (Huh?)

Despite credulity issues, these sections of the book are so beautifully evocative that we can conjure mental images of the marsh and metaphorically lick the saltwater from the pages. Owens wrote three non-fiction books on African wildlife before penning Crawdads, her debut novel, and possesses a gift for making us feel both the wonders and terrors of nature. It’s when she takes us beyond childhood that things become problematic. As Kya and Tate get older, Crawdads drifts toward contrivance and the cheap sentimentality of a YA novel. When Tate goes off to college and stops coming around, isn’t he just like the teens on the beach that make fun of her? Or worse, just the latest to abandon her?

By the time she 23, Kya is deep into poetry, but is also a self-trained evolutionary biologist familiar with John Maynard Smith’s “sneaky fuckers” study of how the male of a species often assumes a subordinate role to mate with a female. (It often goes badly. I’d say ask a male praying mantis, except you can’t for various reasons!) Kya is also recognized as a budding ethnologist for her keen observations and beautiful and exacting illustrations of swamp ecology. She has even been out of the marsh to meet with a publisher. Still, she’s at least 50% feral/socially inept, so how does she negotiate the attention shown her by the studly Chase Andrews, a former star high school quarterback who comes from the closest thing Barkley Cove has to a bourgeoisie: one that owns a Western Auto store.

When Chase is found dead at the base of a tower, Kya is charged with his murder, though there are no footprints and she has an airtight alibi. Owens goes full Harper Lee for courtroom scenes that feature a deus ex machina resolution. The central mystery isn’t hard to unravel if you’ve paid attention to the book’s internal themes and the trial serves to make us begin to see the various ways in which the book’s internal logic is 21^st century, not that of the 1950s and 1960s. Take the book’s race relations. How likely is it that a black community would reach out to a white girl during the age of Jim Crow? Could Kya become an ethnologist without training or a powerful mentor/sponsor? There is also the matter of a murder investigation that's more CSI than what was done in he 1960s. Nor is it feasible that a district attorney would try a white girl when there was no physical evidence–not even in 1960s North Carolina.

Owens does give us a few twists here and there: revelations about Kya’s family, a nice play on “broken token” legends, and an alter ego reveal. Still, after a while the flashback/flash forward/flash sideways structure wears thin, as do simplistic good/bad characterizations. If the last few post-1969 chapters feel like tack-ons to get us to a resolution, that’s because they are.

The phrase “where the crawdads* sing” references a place where the “critters” (Kya’s phrase) remain in an Edenic wild space. It’s also a metaphor for how I felt about the novel. To invoke an old rock song, Kya was born to be wild. When Owens tames her, even ever so slightly, both Kya and the marsh become more ordinary and the fireflies dim. Read the novel for its elegant prose, but be skeptical of Ms. Witherspoon’s gushing adulation.

Rob Weir

* If you don’t know, a crawdad–also called a crayfish or crawfish–is a crustacean that looks like a shrimp crossed with a miniature lobster. They are quite tasty.

The Favourite a Well-Acted Mess

The Favourite (2018)

Directed by Yorgos Lanthimos

★★½

The three reasons to see this film

I’m an independent cinema fan who intensely dislikes malls, which means that I’m just now catching up on some of the 2018 Oscar contenders on Netflix. In the case of The Favourite, that’s probably just fine, as it didn’t exactly light up the box office.

Olivia Colman won the Best Actress hardware for this one. Did she deserve it? Nope. She was very good, but she wasn’t even in the same league as Glenn Close in The Wife. (I’ll get back to you on Lady Gaga, as I’ve not yet seen A Star is Born.) Colman’s victory, though not a travesty, resulted from one of Hollywood’s most annoying traits: tokenism. Every few years Hollywood takes flak for being out of touch and decides to prove its empathy by dishing out statues to those in the correct checklist box, whether or not they actually deserve them. This time, Hollywood tried to prove it really loves the LGBTQ community. I applaud that, but I’d be more impressed if what we saw wasn’t a repeat of 1994 when Tom Hanks won an Oscar for Philadelphia: straight actors playing gay.

The Favourite is basically a messy­­–on many levels–power triangle with a lesbian subtext. Colman is cast as Queen Anne, the British monarch who ruled from 1702-14. We meet her as war with France has precipitated a political and economic crisis. Anne is obese, ravaged by gout, is carried about in a sedan chair, and in the thrall of her childhood friend, Sarah Jennings Churchill, the Duchess of Marlborough. Anne has lost 17 children* and keeps the same number of rabbits in her chamber, where she is little more than a sickly child scarcely capable of wiping her own mouth. Sarah (Rachel Weisz), Anne’s Keeper of the Privy (treasurer), is a political animal who bends Anne to her will by also being her lover. Into the mix comes down-on-her-luck Abigail Hill (Emma Stone), Sarah’s cousin, who secures work as a scullery maid until the herbs she picks eases Anne’s gout, gains her a rise in position, and, eventually, also a place in Anne’s bed. What plays out is a struggle between Sarah and Abigail to see which is more Machiavellian. It’s a classic be-careful-of-what-you-ask-for film.

Colman, Weisz, and Stone are terrific, though you’d be hard-pressed to rationalize why any one of them is the “lead” actress and the other two are in “supporting” roles. When the three of them are engaged in palace intrigue, The Favourite is conspiratorial, acidic, and steamy. As for being entertaining, that probably depends upon your grasp of 18^th century English history. I mean this literally. Unless you know that the war against France is the War of Spanish Succession, and are versed in the struggles between Hapsburgs and Bourbons, the haplessness of the Stuart monarchy, and Parliamentary factionalism between Tories and Whigs, you’ll probably be left in the dark as to who is stabling whom in the back at any given moment. This means that secondary characters such as Robert Harley (Nicholas Hoult), the 1^st Earl of Godolphin (James Smith), the 1^st Baron Marsham (Joe Alwyn), or even Sarah’s husband, the Duke of Marlborough (Mark Gatis) are little more than male peacocks in silly wigs and sillier clothing battling over pecking order.  

Beware any film tagged as “loosely based” on real people or events. There is very little in The Favourite that passes historical muster. Screenplay writers Deborah Davis and Tony McNamara claim to have researched carefully. What they have not said is that Anne’s lesbianism was a smear job concocted by Sarah Churchill as revenge for having been dismissed from Court. Or that, by most accounts, Anne was devoted to her Danish-born husband, Prince George–who does not appear in the movie, though he lived until 1708–and that severe illness during the last decade of her life (1665-1714) rendered any love affair, marital or extramarital, exceedingly unlikely.

Historians generally interpret Anne’s whispered lesbianism within a context in which Sarah Churchill promoted the Tories, whereas her cousin Abigail courted the Whigs. Filmmakers, of course, have artistic license, but it’s hard to get past the idea that The Favourite is, like its secondary characters, just an excuse to play dress up and mask contemporary issues behind miles of crinoline. Were it not for strong performances from Colman, Weisz, and Stone, The Favourite would the biggest mess of “loosely based” historical comedy/drama since Sofia Coppola’s inept Marie Antoinette (2006).

Rob Weir

*If anyone cares, Anne actually had 18 pregnancies.

Third Hotel is Unusual and Enigmatic

The Third Hotel  (2018)

By Laura Van Der Berg

Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 209 pages.

★★★ ½

I generally don't pay too much attention to publisher PR, but whoever called The Third Hotel a "shape-shifting novel," nailed it. Early in the book our principal character and unreliable narrator Clare tells us, "I am experiencing a dislocation of reality." So you will the reader and, maybe that's as it should be.

Clare has a reason to feel dislocated; her husband Richard–a film studies professor specializing in horror films–has been struck and killed by a hit-and-run driver, but maybe that's not all that has knocked her out of sorts. Clare was an odd duck even before Richard's death. She's a sales rep for Thyssen-Krupp elevators and spent more time in the air and on the road than in the couple's home near Albany. When we hear Clare tell us that the first thing she does when she reaches still another hotel is turn off the TV, the lights, the air conditioner, and anything else making noise and sit naked in her room, we suspect that perhaps all the sky miles have taken their toll on her sanity.

Just before he died, Richard had been invited to be part of a conference panel on new Latin American cinema in Havana, as one of his research subjects, Yuniel Mata, was debuting his new film Revolución Zombi. Clare impulsively decides to attend the conference, carrying with her a box that belonged to Richard that she fears to open. Things get strange before she touches down, when she meets Arlo, who says he's a documentary filmmaker. But maybe he's a fraud. Or a leech. Or a pursuer. But that's not half as odd as when she spies Richard standing outside of the Museum of the Revolution. So what do we have here? An imposter? A ghost story? Is Richard a life-imitates-art zombie? What do we make of other odd occurrences such as a train derailment, a missing actress, surreal hotels, and encounters of the weird kind? By the time Clare hears Mata speak of new kinds of reality that distress us like eels under the skin, Clare already has a few wiggling beneath her epidermis.

The story unfolds in the present and in flashbacks. Is this a book in which all the characters are dead and don't know it? Or is Clare crazier than a March hare–perhaps a victim of paternal sexual abuse or violence at the hands of an old boyfriend? We certainly learn that her grief over Richard's death seems out of sorts from what she recalls of their marriage, but as I said, she's an unreliable narrator.

Then again, maybe it is a kind of zombie novel. Van der Berg blurs the lines between fantasy and reality, paranormal and temporal, invention and the authentic self, and grief and memory. As you can surmise, this is an unusual novel. It is probably the case that Van Der Berg is also an unreliable narrator who wants to induce Clare-like turmoil underneath our skins. All I can tell you for certain is that Ms. Van Der Berg is a very fine writer whose sentences sometimes feel like elegant philosophic rumination. She is, however, sometimes too oblique for her own good. I suspect she wanted readers to engage in independent intellectual speculation. If that's the case, it was a risky gambit as some readers are likely to want more resolution than she offers. I'm willing to cut her some slack as it's a short book and a bit of ambiguity seldom harms. The Third Hotel does, however, have the earmarks of a book written to impress other writers more than please a general readership. I recommend it, but whether it will satisfy depends entirely upon your own capacity for the ambiguous. I liken it in tone to the movie Pan's Labyrinth in that it's not entirely clear if the surfaces are meant to be taken literally or as parables.

Rob Weir

 

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Milkman Teaches about the Troubles but Doesn't Always Deliver

Milkman (2018)

By Anna Burns

Faber and Faber, 368 pages.

★★★

Back in 1996, Frank McCourt's Angela's Ashes was all the rage. It is a fine book, though a bleak one. It's so grim that when she finished it, my wife hurled it across the room and exclaimed, "Thank God I'm not Irish!"

I'm of Scottish extraction, so I'm in no position to judge anyone else's forlorn past. I relate this anecdote because when it comes to gloominess there are decided parallels between McCourt's memoir and Anna Burns' Man Booker Prize-wining novel Milkman, which is set in Northern Ireland during the "Troubles" of the 1970s. Officially some 3,500 soldiers and civilians died during a British occupation of Northern Ireland that badly mediated conflict between Catholics and Protestants. Untold numbers simply disappeared and were likely victims of terrorist groups such as the Irish Republican Army and the Ulster Defense League. This means that Milkman is not the sort of book likely to be delivered to everyone's reading stands.

As Burns makes clear, it was a time of tragedy, paranoia, and despair. She details a bifurcated world of "renouncers" and "informers," shorthand for Catholic nationalists who were members of or sympathetic to the IRA, and those who wanted Northern Ireland to remain part of Great Britain rather than merge with the Republic of Ireland*. Burns introduces us to some of the code phrases from the conflict: "Over the water" is a pejorative term for England (or the United States), "over the Border" is a stand-in for the Irish Republic, and "over the road" means Protestant neighborhoods where a Catholic would not wish to venture.

Milkman is narrated–if that is the right term–by an unnamed 18-year-old Catholic woman who lives is an unnamed neighborhood in an unnamed city, though we can safely infer the locale is Belfast, as this from whence Ms Burns hails. None of the major characters have names and are mostly referenced by their roles, quirks, and status: nuclear boy, tablet girl, maybe boyfriend, beyond the pale, and so on. Early in the book our narrator recites a litany of first names that instantly label individuals as Irish, English, Catholic, or Protestant and that's all we need to know. Burns wishes to immerse us in the politics and psychology of the Troubles and presumably thought that proper names would divert attention to personalities. It also serves her purpose of showing how growing up in such an environment damaged psyches and (in a metaphorical sense) obliterated personalities; humans were pawns in a bloody game they had to play whether or not they desired to do so.

This is certainly the case of the narrator. She is fatherless, one of her brothers was murdered, her mother thinks she's headed for damnation, she is often called upon to take care of her "wee sisters," and she's routinely berated by her older sisters and (surviving) brothers-in-law. Like many 18-year-olds, her identity is a work in progress and she indentifies as neither religious nor political. Good luck with that. She has already called attention to herself for a dangerous habit: reading 19^th century novels while walking! In the eyes of the community, she could be an informer passing secrets to British troops–perhaps through the book titles. After all, many of those books are English. What else would explain the fact that she's 18 and unmarried? She does have a "maybe boyfriend," but he too has called the wrong kind of attention to himself. He's a gear-head who collects auto parts, one of which the community learns is from a Bentley (British). Rumor has it that there's a Union Jack label on it. Could things get any worse? They do when a mysterious figure known as Milkman–reportedly a 41-year-old married IRA bigwig–begins to stalk her. The community begins to whisper that the two are lovers. (He's so shadowy that some confuse him with the actual milkman!)

We feel the weight of the world on our narrator, though I am at a loss to explain how this book won the Man Booker Prize. Here's another reason why many will shy away from Milkman: it is written in stream of consciousness style. This certainly helps get inside the mind of a confused 18-year-old, but it is a notoriously difficult form to master. At her best, Burns illumines how a young woman trapped in a world of suspicion, innuendo, and crippling social norms rockets from anger to resignation to misanthropy in the blink of an eye. There is, however, no disguising the fact that Milkman is also often a frustrating and tedious read. Stream of consciousness writing often impresses other novelists far more than it enthralls readers. Milkman also suffers from a jarring tonal shift in the last quarter or so–an attempt to interject humor and in the process humanize the narrator's tyrannical mother.

Should you give Milkman a try? That depends upon what your purpose for reading might be. You can learn a lot about gender expectations in the 1970s, what it means to live in a warzone, and how causes are driven by inflamed passion rather than cool reason. If you read carefully, you can infer a lot about the Troubles. If, however, you like clarity, distinct characters, and at least a ray or two of hope, you might be tempted to hurl Milkman across the room. Or across the water.

Rob Weir

*Northern Ireland is riven by religion and economics. 48% of its residents are Protestant and 45% are Catholic. Britain, however, is far more prosperous than the Irish Republic, hence pragmatic materialism motivates many Northern Irish residents to prefer the status quo over nationalist dreams or religious sectarianism.

Readers Rediscover Mr. Finchley's England

Mr. Finchley Discovers His England (1936/1972/2013/2018)

By Victor Canning

Macmillan, 260 pages.

★★★

First things first: You will notice numerous publication dates for a work I read this spring as a “new” e-book. This makes more sense if you’re British. Mr. Finchley Discovers His England (1936) was the first of three comedic novels penned by Victor Canning (1911-86). It’s a whimsical tale of a bachelor clerk in a London solicitor’s office forced by a new boss to take his first holiday. It became an overnight sensation that allowed Canning to quit his own clerkship and become a fulltime writer*.

The second thing that will help you appreciate Canning’s novel is to locate it in its own time period and circumstances. Holidays were not a given in the early 1930s, and 45-year-old Edgar Finchley had never taken one under his old boss. Finchley knew little of England beyond London’s metropolitan limits. As Brits had been doing for several hundred years, Finchley’s abstract idea of a vacation was to book a hotel in the faded Kent seaside resort of Margate in Kent–some 80 miles distant. To put it in contemporary terms, it’s the equivalent of a middle-aged man from Trenton taking his first vacation in Atlantic City.

Finchley never made it to Margate. At the rail station he is asked to watch someone’s fancy “motor,” as automobiles were often called in the days in which they were still relatively new. Finchley crawls into the backseat, falls asleep, and awakes to find that he has been spirited away by a thief. It would be the first of several zany mishaps to befall Finchley, many of which involved the fact that a tweed-covered bald man carrying a rucksack and wearing city shoes is not exactly prepared to trudge across moors, fall into ditches, sleep in haystacks, scramble over stone walls, or plunge through nettles. Along a zigzag journey that will eventually take him across Devonshire, Finchley befriends or battles with farmers, gypsies, con men, an itinerant artist, orphans, a street band, a self-proclaimed philosopher, a lunatic, snooty elites, and a smuggler.

You also need to know that the times were somewhat gentler, the recent war (World War I) notwithstanding. Even gun-toting thieves were polite, police were respected, gender roles were prescribed, much of the population was peripatetic, and residents in the countryside routinely took in scruffy strangers in need of a meal and/or bed. It was also a time in which rural roads were such that if cyclists wanted to get away from someone chasing them in van, they could reverse direction and get a half mile lead before the van could turn around and gain on them.

All of this is to say that Canning’s breakthrough novel has a quaint throwback charm for modern readers. To experience that charm one must surrender to it rather than filtering it through today’s realities. It’s almost enough to make one lapse into romantic dreams of “simpler” times. Key word: almost. It’s doubtful that today’s readers will admire Canning’s (non) structure. What we read is a series of vignettes disguised as a novel. Some have compared the Mr. Finchley books to comedian Rowan Atkinson’s Mr. Bean series. It’s a decent comparison, as both characters are basically nebbish innocents overcome by events. To this I would add that Michael Palin’s “Cycling Tour of Cornwall” sketch for Monty Python owes a debt to Canning. I don’t know this for certain, but Palin’s character name of Mr. Pither might be a wink to those who know that Canning originally called his character “Pitchley.” In any event, Pither’s encounter with rural England is similarly fraught with misfortune.

To move from the speculative to the literary, the Mr. Bean and Monty Python analogies work as they call attention to the fact that the Mr. Finchley “novels” are actually disconnected sketches basted together loosely. Many Brits actually know the Finchley books as an individual BBC Radio programs that aired in the 1980s and were revived in 2005. As we see, the Finchley novels also enjoy frequent revival. The moral, I suppose, is that charm, innocence, and frothy frolick transcend time. It would be too much to rank Mr. Finchley–or Mr. Bean for that matter–among the classic works of 20^th century humor, but it won’t hurt anyone to take an unexpected detour now and then.

Rob Weir

*In the British legal system, a solicitor generally handles civil cases, whereas more prestigious barristers argue cases in court. A “holiday” is what North Americans call a vacation. Canning spent most of his life in Devonshire near the port city of Plymouth. He was born to working class parents and, though he qualified for Oxford University, there was no money for such an extravagance and he became a clerk at the age of 16. He is perhaps better known in North American for creating the Rex Carver detective series.