It’s been a while – what made me decide to try and start maintaining this blog again?
Could it have been all that extra lockdown free time?
Not exactly, you’ll find out soon enough what I did with that period (threat).
The news we’re getting a Fisherman’s Friends 2?
Delighted as I am for another opportunity to ogle James Purefoy in knitwear, it wasn’t that.
Maybe some thrilling new development emerging from one of Disney’s many tentacles?
Nah – enthusiasm or no, it’s somewhat embarrassing to see this blog has been languishing with my cheerful take on Endgame on the front page. I re-read that post in a state of bemusement recently – I don’t think I’ve once spent more than two seconds thinking about that film since then. I hear Wandavision is good – I’ll try to stir myself to watch it some time. But Thor: Love and Thunder is really the only forthcoming Marvel title I’m interested in, and as for Star Wars… how can the same person who wrote thousands of words justifying her enjoyment of the spectacle of The Last Jedi not have made a single post about The Rise of Skywalker? It’s not so different from my experience with the prequels, really – from enthusiastic defence of The Phantom Menace, even as I knew I didn’t believe my own arguments, to not even bothering to see Revenge of the Sith for years after its release.
Sometimes I notice how hollow the enthusiasm rings a few days/months/years after the event. Usually means I’m ready for a cultural reset and need some time off the blockbusters.
If that sounds a bit pretentious, don’t worry – I’ve barely got started.
What’s led me back here is all my overflowing thoughts about some of the films I’ve been watching recently and a curiosity to see if I can articulate what interests me in them and what patterns I’ve been seeing. This has been about as far from the Hollywood blockbuster scene as imaginable – I’m talking arthouse cinema from the Caucasus, baby.
However, I still like to keep a record still of what media I’ve been consuming – influences, interests, annoyances, whatever. It probably won’t be an exhaustive list – there’s bound to be stuff I’ve forgotten watching or reading since 2019, and some things I probably have no opinions on.
Books that I read in 2020 (I was not a voracious pandemic reader, as you will see) [still in draft].
Cinema and other pre-lockdown activities in 2020. [still in draft]
Or, if you prefer, there’s a list of titles, linked to the posts concerning them, see below.
As for the rest of 2020/2021 so far: So much of what I’ve been reading, watching and listening to over the past year is a direct result of seeing one film – a film I heard of by chance from a blog that doesn’t post often these days, that I was probably only able to watch because it couldn’t get a cinema release due to the pandemic, and was available from Curzon Home Cinema. I rented it on March 30 last year and watched it every day for the three days I had it – uncertain fascination turning rapidly into the decision to let myself fall hard in love. It’s not a perfect film, but it’s astonishing given the circumstances under which it was made, and it is an important film, though easily and unfairly lumped in with other ‘gay coming of age’ cinema. It’s also a gateway drug to the Georgian language, which has been my lockdown hobby (along with the sourdough and the gardening, the hair-dying and the new dog).
Here’s my review of And Then We Danced/და ჩვენ ვიცეკვეთ, and the film features in my other posts on Georgian cinema here, here and here [still in draft]. As well as leading me to watch movies from Georgia and about Georgia, it encouraged me to watch more global cinema [still in draft] and more queer cinema [still in draft]. Though I do still, occasionally, watch less heavy or obscure stuff – that’s gathered in a post here [still in draft].
2019 Mr President (book) Embassytown (book) Wreck-It Ralph 2 (film) Ready or Not (cinema) Knives Out (cinema) Rise of Skywalker (cinema) 2020 Ipswich players panto Gorky Park (book) Booksmart (film) Vikingdom (film) Under the Pendulum Sun (book) To Calais, In Ordinary Time (book) The Diaries of Frannie Langton (book) Kiki’s Delivery Service (film) King Arthur (film) Conversations With Friends (book) The Reavers (book) Kate Butch (live) The Murder in the Red Barn (theatre) 1917 (cinema) David Copperfield (cinema) And Then We Danced/და ჩვენ ვიცეკვეთ (film) Portrait de la jeune fille en feu (cinema) Sam Lee (live) The Lighthouse (cinema) The Captive Prince and Prince’s Gambit (books) Shubh Mangal Zyada Saavdhan (film) Ek Ladhi Ko Dekha Toh Aisa Laga (film) Two queer Indian shorts (films) A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (film) Anna Karenina (film) Frozen 2 (film) Chess of the Wind (film) Wolkwalkers (film) Monanieba/მონანიევბა [Repentance] (film) Dancing in Odessa (book) The Tradition (book) Six Georgian Poets (book) Tomorrow Never Dies (film) The Literature Express (book) Me var Beso/მე ვარ ბესო [I am Beso] (film) Chemi Bednieri Ojakhi/ჩემი ბედნიერი ოჯახი [My Happy family] (film) The Man Who Surprised Everyone (film) In Bloom/გრძელი ნათელი დღეები (film) March For Dignity (film) No (film) The Pear Tree (book) Casablanca (film) Singin’ in the Rain (film) The Sound of Music (film) Ghori/ღორი [Pig] (film) Marilivit tetri/მარილივით თეთრი [Salt White] (film) 2021 Post Mortem (film) Dasatsqisi/დასაწყისი [Beginning] (film) Ashik Kerib (film) The Colour of Pomegranates (film) Udzinarta Mze/უძინართა მზე [Sun of the Sleepless] (film) Magdana’s Donkey/მაგდანას ლურჯა (film) I Wish Summer Would Never Come Again/ნეტავ აღარასოდეს მოვიდეს ზაფხული (film) The Plank (film) Natvris xe/ნატვრის ხე [The Wishing Tree] (film) April/აპრილი (film)
If people ask me why I’m learning Georgian, I tell them it’s a bit silly, it’s because I watched a film and fell in love. If they want to know which film, I answer with pride that it’s And Then We Danced – which has resulted in the response ‘oh, you know that’s actually quite controversial?’ as well as conspicuous silence. Often there’s a swift assertion that there are far better Georgian movies. From many, there’s a curious dismissiveness, a grumbling insistence that no one would have cared about the film if a few bigots hadn’t made such a fuss. But those bigots made quite a fuss: they harassed cinema-goers when the film was released in Tbilisi and they threw missiles, yet their hatred was a tiny taste of the hatred that Tbilisi’s small, determined Pride group faces when they try to hold a march each year, and a sliver of the horror that confronted Georgian rights activists in 2013 – an event that inspired Levan Akin to do the research that led to this film.
It’s legal to be gay in Georgia and it’s illegal to discriminate against someone on the basis of their sexuality – it’s a protected characteristic in laws designed to butter up EU allies, but trying to get someone convicted of and punished for a hate crime against queer people in Georgia seems to be next to impossible. Insecure gangs of men, worried that their cushy patriarchal, church-backed lifestyle will be disrupted, and spouting well-worn global Anti-semitic conspiracy theories, feed into precisely the narrative the Kremlin would love to see dominate in Georgia, even while maintaining that their fear and hatred is an act of patriotism.
So the dismissiveness makes me more determined to make it clear that I’m only interested in learning the language because of what this film did. Ignoring the hate groups behind the disruption at the premier isn’t enough to change things, it’s not enough to win protections for people who are still denied their human rights and prevented from living their lives to the full in their home country. And Then We Danced set out to raise awareness of the situation for queer people in Georgia and it set out to ruffle the plumage of those who think compromise is needed: those who would say, ‘it’s fine, it’s legal, what more do you want? Don’t rub your lifestyle in others’ faces, don’t flaunt it, don’t give the youth ideas!’ It does this by presenting an achingly relatable, warm story of young love and heartbreak, a coming-of-age story about realising your hopes and realising how fragile they are, where love of your country and its traditions is pitted against a narrow idea of what fits the national, correct narrative. It’s a warning, to my mind: lose people like Merab Lominadze from your country and its traditions at your peril. You’ll be all the lesser without such passion and creativity, and without innovation, tradition will become stale, without the youth, what is the future of the place you claim to be protecting?
Admittedly, a lot of these strong feelings have kind of bedded in since I saw the film. It took a little time to filter through my consciousness as I researched what I could about the country and the making of the film. Initial impressions were led far more by emotions and by the visuals and soundtrack of the movie, and by the stunning debut performance of Levan Gelbakhiani in the lead role.
And Then We Danced tells the story of a young man in an ensemble at the Georgian National Ballet, who dreams of dancing on stages around the world, just as his parents and grandparents did. Merab works hard, though his form is criticised by teachers and relatives alike, and he ends up reassessing his priorities after a whirlwind love affair with a new dancer, his rival at the ensemble, Irakli. Family, tradition and passion come into conflict as Merab finds out how much more complicated his dreams are than he’d always supposed.
Filmed under unpredictable, often hostile conditions, with locations denied to the crew at the last minute and ambivalence from the government’s ministry of culture, it’s a wonder to see what a coherent, subtle, beautifully produced film Levan Akin was able to put together on his tiny budget. The orange light of the sun and of Georgian street lamps unites the whole thing, bathing the film in an inviting, soft glow, and the carefully curated soundtrack – much of which consists of rerecorded Georgian folk songs arranged anew because previous performers refused to be associated with the film – soothes and invigorates as needed, amplifying the emotions of the narrative. A centrepiece is the unaccompanied, powerful polyphonic ballad Tsintsqaro (Before the Wellspring), which sits bracketed by ABBA and Robyn – Levan Akin makes sure his Swedish heritage is not neglected – undercutting the repeated message that Georgian masculinity is about strength and hiding emotion. These songs say that love is love and heartache is heartache, and Georgian men have traditionally been proud to display their emotions through art.
Ironically, the dancer who the film references when Merab is told that Georgian dance used to be softer and more suited to the way he moves, but that it was changed to be more masculine, was gay himself – though Georgians are quite happy to compartmentalise this aspect of their hero Vakhtang Chabukiani’s life. There’s no room for sex in Georgian dance, as the instructor tells his class at the film’s outset.
It’s a message that’s wasted on his young class though – that’s all they can talk about in the changing rooms, the guys swapping filthy jokes and tales of brothels and the girls gossiping about a gay scandal. Irakli, the new dancer, sidles into this setting with a cheeky smile, a prohibited earring, and a habit of talking back to the teacher. Naturally, everyone wants to get the measure of this new guy and his interests – he won’t go to the brothels because he has a girlfriend back home, but he’s curious about taking one of the girls in the ensemble out to dinner. And for all his apparent rebelliousness, he seems awfully concerned that Merab shouldn’t be mad at him when he gets swapped into the duet Merab had been practising with his lifelong dance partner and presumed girlfriend, Mary.
So much has been said, quite rightly, about Levan Gelbakhiani’s performance as Merab – he’s absolutely integral to the power of the film. The camera clings to him throughout, following close at his back, getting up in his face in scenes of high emotion, adoringly framing his dances and the blossoming of love on his features. As Merab, he’s an open book, vulnerable and fiercely determined all at once – for all that people see weakness in Merab’s dances, there’s a stubborn core in the character that is left bare by the end of the film. He ends up being more of a rebel than Irakli could be. Gelbakhiani’s background in contemporary dance gives him the experience of channelling emotions into body language, and means that Merab’s loose, graceful style of dance really stands out as something unique – if not what the traditionalists want. Gelbakhiani can pull your heartstrings with nothing more than the tightening of the muscles on his back, with a grin brought swiftly under control – or not – with any look from his mutable, striking features. He gives the film a winning hero, who you simply have to root for, who will remind anyone who’s been in love of the force of that emotion and the relentlessness of it.
Bachi Valishvili deserves more recognition for his part as Irakli, too. It’s a harder role to win praise for, his perspective is distant from the audience’s, his motivations are kept private and often seem contradictory. He’s a harder character for audiences to love because of the choice he makes in the end, though it might be said that the real tragedy of the film lies in Irakli’s future. Valishvili plays him with subtlety, as an inscrutable cool guy who swings between fun-loving openness and silent, reserved introspection. He has to tread a fine line to persuade viewers that, while he remains more concerned by others’ opinions and by family loyalties, Irakli is nevertheless as enthusiastic a participant in the affair as Merab is. And he must also make us believe that Irakli is the naturally better dancer – when Valishvili’s training was a matter of months before the film, as opposed to Gelbakhiani’s years of dance. He succeeds in this with the help of clever techniques – cunning camera angles, a focus on others’ reactions to his dance – and narrative generosity – such as when Irakli is too hungover to practise hard. But he gives the character all the charm he needs for us to believe that Merab would be smitten, and he injects a sweetness and a vulnerability into Irakli’s expressions as we – and Merab – are left to wonder whether he regrets what he’s done and which of his words were true.
The whole cast is a wonder, really. The naturalistic dialogue and the light-touch of the director’s hand leaves the actors to sell the strength of the relationships – Ana Javakhishvili as Merab’s partner, Mary, does so much with the slightest widening of her eyes or the tightening of her mouth. Her heartbreak is as real and vivid as Merab’s, though it must happen in comparatively private moments, muddied by fear and misunderstanding.
The film glides along, timescale and details left impressionistic as it builds to a crescendo at a vineyard in the countryside. In the last third things begin to fall apart for Merab, and the film mirrors the sudden aimlessness of his life as, without warning, one thing and then another goes wrong. Between the heartache, the film gets in its plug for Tbilisi’s defiant queer scene: cameos from activists and local characters make the film inclusive, reinforcing the fact that it’s not just founded on the impressions of a Georgian who lives in Sweden, but involved people who live in Tbilisi and directly face the attitudes Merab and Irakli must hide from. When, at last, Merab is told – out of love – that there’s no place for him in Georgia and he must find a way to leave, the sense of community that radiates from the club scenes is what must stand against this pragmatic, frustrating advice.
I am glad that the film does not wrap up the issue of whether Merab stays or goes. Evidently life becomes untenable for some, such as the dancer Zaza, whose scandalous downfall is gossiped about through the film, but Mate, who takes Merab to the safe havens of Success Bar and the legendary club Bassiani, shows the other side of the coin. As Matt Shally, the actor playing Mate, has said in this short about his life in drag and the queer art scene in Tbilisi, Comfort Zone (2020), Georgia is his home, he shouldn’t be expected to leave because of who he is. The advice Merab gets to leave comes, after all, from his older brother – who proves he does care for him and says all Merab needs to hear about his dance – but whose opinions can certainly not be taken uncritically to be in line with the film’s own intentions.
As well as telling a very familiar story of youth, whirlwind romance and obsession, And Then We Danced not only makes this part of its story feel as fresh and impassioned as every young love affair is to those involved – you can’t be cynical about how Merab feels, the beats of his emotions are sold so convincingly, shown in their earnestness but never patronised – but it also evokes a very palpable love for the setting and its traditions. Food, music, dance, family are all crucial to the atmosphere of the film. The pointlessness of stoking conflict between these elements is really emphasised by the amount of love the characters – and certainly the director – holds for all these aspects of life in Georgia, while also saying simply, that queer people should be allowed to love these things too.
Today is International Day Against Homophobia, Transphobia and Biphobia. In Georgia, since 2013, it has also been the ‘Day of Family Purity’. The religious bigots who stoked violence against a tiny, peaceful group of people then have never faced any consequences – the church is untouchable. In And Then We Danced the traditional idea of the nuclear family is shown to be in tatters, an institution that isn’t fit for purpose, adherence to which does not make anyone happy – and this is a portrayal that is echoed by many other contemporary Georgian films. Merab’s parents have separated, Mary’s parents have separated, David and Sopo – carefree, cavalier, irresponsible kids – must marry to save her family’s ‘honour’, and while Irakli’s loyalty to his mother and his dying father may be laudable, it also looks like martyrdom. Nevertheless, there is huge love between Merab and his parents, and Mary and her father. These are families finding their own ways of surviving and being happy, and the toxic idea of ‘family purity’ does them no more good than it does Merab and his ilk. But more of that when we get to My Happy Family/ჩემი ბედნიერი ოჯახი. Note, also, that Patriarch Ilya II’s Easter speech this year came across almost as a parody for how closely it echoes the priest’s words in And Then We Danced, stoking vague fears of international influences and the loss of patriarchal roles.
There’s no great conspiracy here though, nothing complicated or sinister. It’s just about love, and answering hate and fear and misunderstanding with love. And no one who watches it could mistake that for weakness. This film changed me, it invited me to fall in love with the country too, despite the struggles and the attitudes that still need to change. There is such hope in the young generations involved in this film, and I will cheer them on as loudly as I can until change comes.
I wonder if Eula Bliss has seen this near-dialogue-free Soviet-era Georgian short? In Having and Being Had (a book I am admittedly yet to read), Bliss takes as her starting point the purchase of her house: “In 2014 she bought her first house, with her husband John. This should have made her happy; instead it made her uncomfortable in a way that she couldn’t describe.” (source) From the reviews and excerpts I have read, her concerns are given particular focus by the issue of furniture, its maintenance and longevity, its design and creation. Furniture is also at the heart of this unsubtle, cheeky little warning against the march of consumerism and, presumably, Western ideals of living.
A young couple wanders the streets of Tbilisi – they tease each other, they fall out, they make up. They search, endlessly, for a quiet place to share a kiss. Privacy is all they ask for. Meanwhile, those around them seem unconcerned with such things: the residents of an old building fling open the windows of their rooms and deliberately eschew privacy in favour of communal vivacity; playing music from their windows, watching the world while doing weights, practising ballet to the sounds of the musicians all around. This cheerful racket is only matched by the clatter of a gang of devious removal men (furniture sellers? Their actual jobs are unclear. They port furniture from place to place – loudly).
All the furniture goes out of the building and a new building appears, square and squat and regular. The locals move in and happily fling open the square, regular windows and carry on as they were. The young couple finds an empty apartment and finally they get to enjoy the privacy they sought, now with electricity, gas and running water! They have nothing else in the apartment and they are quite content with one another. Downstairs, one of the noisy furniture men moves his stock in and goes about from keyhole to keyhole, searching for customers. Having shown the young people the potential on offer – a life in old age, solemnly polishing the glassware together – and been rebuffed, he resorts to leaving a chair in their apartment. The chair sits like a dark stain in the bright, empty rooms, but its influence is immediate: item by item, the couple now buys into the life of consumerism.
Now that they have things, they must get locks on their door to protect the things. One thing begets another; outfits must change; plants in vases need water; furniture needs polishing; and why open a window when you can buy a fan? As the women in the building wave their dusters out of the windows, the musicians retreat indoors, their instruments coated in dust, the sounds of electrical equipment drowning them out. The man exercising at his window turns away from it and the ballet dancer gives up, unable to concentrate. The film’s scant dialogue bubbles up as the couple argue – earlier they spoke softly, inaudibly, when all they had to compete with was the music around them. Now all they can do is yell at one another – even the furniture man notices, and is surprised that their things have not made them happy.
Things break, and the couple struggle to connect as they move awkwardly around the crowded rooms. Happily, the usual Georgian reluctance to gather the narrative into an ending, or to articulate a clear message, is absent from this little film. With a clamour of noise, the couple fling their troublesome furniture from the window to the street. The musicians begin to play in joyful response, the ballet dancer resumes her practise and the weightlifter turns back to the window with a smile. The couple go to their window, they throw it open and beam at their happy neighbours. The furniture man and his friends shake their heads over the mess on the street, uncomprehending.
Up on the pasture, where the couple used to go to kiss before they found their apartment, there is a reminder that despite this about-turn in their priorities, the damage cannot entirely be undone: the tree they used to kiss beneath is gone, chopped down to make the furniture they demanded more and more of. It may not be subtle, but აპრილი [April] is a charming little comedy in the vein of works like The Plank (forgive me, my references for this time of film are still limited), summarising a place and a time with a few deftly drawn characters and locations. It is playful and romantic – the lights are kept on and the water is kept running by the strength of the couple’s love for one another – and you won’t be able to help smiling along with the musicians when they catch their opportunities to play in the moonlit night. The use of sound, particularly the squeaky shoes of the furniture man, disturbing the peace wherever he goes, is ingenious, and it’s all very beautiful to look at. Didn’t do much for my Georgian listening practise, but it was a delight.
Influential proto-magical realism from Miguel Ángel Asturias, not-about-Guatemalan-dictator-Manuel Estrada Cabrera-honest! Has its moments – notably when it delves into the city’s streets and underbelly, showing the characters in the bars and in the gutters – but the central relationship between Angel Face and Camila marred my enjoyment too much. The story of the President’s closest advisor falling in love and trying to escape his old job never really achieves the depth I wanted. Angel Face remains dislikeable, neurotic and self-obsessed even as he distances himself from his former boss. His actions end up looking naive and it is hard to have any faith that he will succeed, which spoiled the drama as the end approached.
Embassytown
Some glorious world-building, as you’d expect from China Mieville. His protagonists, I note, habitually claim to be normal and uninteresting, merely bystanders observing their far more significant colleagues. It doesn’t really ring true in Embassytown, where the protagonist Avice Benner Cho plays such a crucial role in things, and appears to hold a remarkable position in her society from all relevant perspectives. There is so much jammed in this rich, linguistically-savvy sci-fi that it’s futile to summarise it all, but what stuck with me was the casual way in which Mieville allows things to be normal and healthy that are still contentious in our society: Cho’s bisexuality and the communal upbringing of the children stand out particularly in my memory. The Ariekei are genuinely strange creations too, though the human response to them seems painfully familiar in its colonial mindset. When things descended into relationship drama and bloody, drug-addled war I did long for something like a TV series to give all the characters and the setting the depth they deserve, but the ending was very deftly balanced, demonstrating that change can be necessary for survival, and not wholly a negative thing, even if it was brought on by external forces.
Wreck-It Ralph 2 (film)
If, standing in the customs queues at JFK airport for hours, it felt appropriate to be reading Embassytown with all its supposedly well-intentioned beaurocracy, Wreck-It Ralph 2 was more my level for the return flight. After a sweltering four hours wandering along the Highline and drinking more beer than we should have, failing to operate the subway ticket system, being unable to get wi-fi in the airport to download our boarding passes, and consequently nearly missing the plane and not knowing whether our luggage had actually made it on board…I simply absorbed whatever was on the screen in front of me. Criminal lady car racer? Cool. I mean hot. I mean…well I guess it was a pleasant surprise in the film. I don’t remember much else – it was very predictable, and less likeable than the first installment. But it killed some time on the flight and didn’t require any brain power.
Ready or Not and Knives Out (cinema)
I didn’t see them on the same day, but they’d make an excellent double bill featuring entitled rich people getting their comeuppance. Both gleeful, funny and full of heart, true to their respective genres but still fresh and original, these two films gave us heroines worth rooting for and fantastic ensemble performances. I’ve watched Knives Out again since, and it stood up well to multiple viewings – even though a good measure of the fun on the first viewing comes from trying to work out whether or not Daniel Craig’s Benoit Blanc really is as oblivious as he appears so be. It’s played and paced beautifully though, so remains a delight even when you know what’s coming. The future installments will be fun, I have no doubt, but the heart of the movie is Marta, who we must root for even when it looks like she’s made a heart-breaking mistake – it would be an error to think they could repeat the formula without her. Ready or Not I only saw the once, and it’s not a genre I’d seek out as often – it’s often visceral, horror done really well, but genuinely made me cringe at some of the things Grace goes through, as, one supposes, good horror should. Yet again though, it’s funny and surprisingly earnest, cramming more characterisation in than most Hollywood ensemble pieces manage. Honestly, in an ideal world, the sequel I’d commission would involve Marta helping Grace prove herself innocent of all the stuff that happens to her new in-laws, and Grace and Marta pooling their collective inheritances to fight crime and fuck up rich people.
The Rise of Skywalker (cinema)
Unlike the case of the Star Wars prequels, this time I did drag myself to the cinema for the third installment, and, much like Endgame, I just sort of…decided to try and enjoy it for what it was. Which was still a bit of a mess – JJ Abrams trying to reassert his take on a story he couldn’t be bothered to plot out in the first place, picking up strands from The Force Awakens in a half-hearted and rushed manner, and throwing in contradictory and unnecessary characters and bits of backstory, cherry-picking the least interesting bits of the Legendary EU to keep (why, of all the things to re-make as canon, are we doing Dathomir, Kyp Durron and cloned emperors???). When it was revealed that the Force could be used to bring the dead back to life in present Star Wars canon, I just sort of…threw my hands up, went “That’s not how the Force works!” and decided to enjoy the very gay adventures of Poe, Finn and 3PO (Poe’s absurd new backstory and ex aside). The highlight for me was, undoubtedly, the single shot of Wedge Antilles they managed to persuade Denis Lawson to return for – followed by the raising of the x-wing on Ach To, a call-back to Empire I had sort of longed for in TLJ. I decided to believe that when Kylo Ren died and Leia did whatever she did, that Leia was actually just puppetting Ren’s body around – yeah, kiss with Rey and all. I enjoyed the fact that those alien beasts were definitely just horses in wigs. I loved every minute of Lando’s presence. I thought the whole thing was a hot mess, and a waste of potential for the two wonderful new characters Abrams gave us in Rey and Finn. I am, still, interested in rewatching it some time – but these sequels are the real ‘legends’ in the Star Wars canon of my heart. They haven’t come near to replacing the EU novels for me.
I’m not sure I’ve ever really had a good gig experience at the Corn Exchange. Some have been fine — genteel, seated affairs, where instead of dancing I just have to twitch impatiently in my balcony seat (Richard Thompson’s 1000 Years of Popular Music; the Manics’ Send Away the Tigers tour). Some have surprised, simply because I had no expectations and loafed at the back of the crowd, beer in hand (Paloma Faith). Others have been supremely disappointing, because sometimes I find a Cambridge crowd to be irritatingly unenthusiastic (it’s a very me problem to have, perhaps). And that trait isn’t confined to venue, a bad crowd at the CornEx reminded me of all the other bad crowds at local gigs: people sitting down on the venue floor through the support act of Sons and Daughters at the Barfly, people smoking at the Junction even when Jonathan Richman said he’d given up and had recently had surgery on his throat, drunk teenagers with Red Stripe at The Long Blondes, twats in hats trying to get a fight pit going at Patrick Wolf despite the presence of pre-teens in the front rows, smug Half Man Half Biscuit fans thinking that dour stage presence and bad sound quality is what makes the band, not the biting lyrics you couldn’t hear, or the sense of mischief that seemed to have been lost in the miasma of middle-aged nostalgia.
*deep breath*
This wasn’t the worst local gig experience, anyway. And maybe I was the obnoxious one, because I wanted to dance and sing and get sweaty, not to pretend I was leaning comfortably on the railings as I was slowly suffocated by people inching in to get their phone videos (flashbacks to Maxïmo Park’s second album tour at the CornEx 2007).
But what about the music, I Enthuse? I hear no one cry. Couldn’t you do your best to enjoy that, even if no one else was appreciating it outwardly in the same way? Well, yeah, I tried. It was also fine. A good long set, a jumbled run through of all the tracks from the twenty-year-old This is My Truth Tell Me Yours followed by a nice mix of other songs — including Sleepflower, which was absolutely the highlight for me. James Dean Bradfield chatted in a perfunctory way, and certainly put a lot of energy into leaping about the stage. I like to think he heard me half-jokingly ask for Faster, as there was a shake of the head and a laugh while he caught his breath before Motorcycle Emptiness.
Overall though, it felt a little like, for all this was meant to be a treat, a tour of familiar small venues, they’re now a band that is much more at ease on the larger stage. It was professional and well-executed, but there was little engagement between band and audience. A pity, because although music journalism holds that TIMTTMY is the beginning of the decline into middle-aged wilderness that lasts until Lifeblood, it’s an album I really enjoy, full of dreamy, catchy, incredibly likeable songs, many of which I was thrilled about hearing live for the first time. I’m not sure that jumbling up the order added anything to it, either — perhaps after twenty years then band are a little bored of some of the material and felt doing so would perk up a little more interest. Perhaps it’s the kind of thing bands do to assert their control over the material and preclude audience anticipation of the familiar next track. Either way, the songs sounded good, but I didn’t feel as much as I’d hoped. Guess I’ll have to stick to the big, impersonal venues if I want that personal touch.
I made it, spoiler-free! It was late, it was a work night, I didn’t have a chance to re-watch Infinity War beforehand, but the important thing was that I could still be surprised when I walked into the cinema. And I was, right the way through the movie. It wasn’t perfect, and I’m not sure if it took me so long to get into because of its own slow beginning, or just because it’s been a while since I’ve been to this kind of CGI-fest at the cinema. Still, it was a respectable, solid ending for whatever phase the MCU just wrapped up, somewhat self-indulgent, but scattered with really good moments. I’ll start with those, before my quibbles.
This was a perfect palate cleanser of a novella. Like a citrus sorbet on a very hot day, it was not all sweet and smooth, but sharp, ephemeral, refreshing. I loved it.
It is a speculation on the might-have-beens of the artist Michelangelo Buonarotti’s stay in Constantinople in the early sixteenth century, and it’s not only a wonderful example of how to do historical fiction, but a gorgeous, humane observation on art and love and human connection. Pieced together from a thin spread of sources — a sketch of a bridge, a list of belongings, letters with unfulfilled promises and curious omissions — the story that Énard imagines is an ingenious, melancholy little thing. He writes it in short bursts, fragmentary and sometimes jumbled and disorienting as time, perspective and tense shift. His characters speak of Art and Beauty sincerely, with the reverance of capitalisation, but their choices leave them lonely and isolated, like a chapter only a paragraph in length, dwarfed by the surrounding emptiness of the page.
Hands that don’t quite touch, a bridge destroyed before it could reach across the river, words unspoken and love unrequited: into all these spaces Énard weaves his tale. His Michelangelo is a dour, reserved, sober man: an observer of the world more than a participant. Énard shows him as a man pushed by necessity and danger, pulled by pride and curiosity, when he sets out for the capital of the Ottoman Empire. His letters don’t confirm his presence in Constantinople, but the Ottoman archives do, and Énard is careful in balancing the apparent contradiction of his sources. Caught in a disagreement with his employer, the Pope, Michelangelo agrees to travel to Constantinople at the behest of another powerful patron. Sultan Bayezid desires a bridge, one designed by a genius of the Renaissance: da Vinci disappointed him, so he asks for Michelangelo, and the 31-year-old artist, determined to outdo his predecessor, agrees to the challenge.
In the strange city Michelangelo struggles. His mistrust of the native religion vies with surprise at the integration of different cultures there, including a recent influx of refugees from Andalusian Spain. He marvels at the beauty of the native architecture but cannot get under its skin to imagine how to out-do da Vinci’s design. His burgeoning friendship with his guide, the Turkish poet Mesihi, is a two steps forward/one step back sort of affair between artists who have committed so thoroughly to their different ways of life that they can never really come together.
At its close, the novella surprised me with the sting of a plot hidden between the languid scene-setting and musing interiority that had dominated the rest of the narrative. I didn’t like the intrusion of plot at first, but Énard won me over when I got to the close and read his epilogue. I wish they were universal to historical fiction because I always long to know how the author got there: did I just fall in love with an historical source or a more recent work of imagination? Did that detail grate because life is not fair, or because the writer is a hack? A good epilogue keeps the writer of historical fiction accountable, too. It requires the author to step back, be humble, and to act responsibly — much as I also love Ali Smith’s How to be Both, which this book often reminded me of, I have seen a lot of people take her story uncritically as fact, which is not helpful to the well-intentioned cause of increasing representation in accounts of the past. In any case, Énard gives his sources succinctly, and the detail in the Ottoman inventory of Michelangelo’s abandoned room smoothed over enough of my resentment of the novella’s ending. His story is a deliciously clever way of linking together the strange details he has to work with, appealing to universal emotions even as it describes a never-quite-was image of the past.
It won’t be to everyone’s tastes. Words like ‘precious’ and ‘pretentious’ seem to come to reviewers’ minds, or it’s reduced to a sort of steamy exotic (progressive historical) fantasy. I’ve no time for the naysayers. It had me from page one, and Charlotte Mandell’s translation is a work of art itself. But Énard’s Michelangelo is abrasively distant, and his Mesihi extravagantly melancholy and self-destructive. A distinction is made between people of the day and people of the night, leaving Michelangelo languishing in the twilight, afraid and curious, but too committed to the singular path of genius to be tempted fully into the light or the dark. The book journeys with him in the gaps between, from day to night, west to east. If you want to share in the intoxication of feeling a strange and wonderful new place can bring, then pick this up, and broaden your ideas of what lurks in the gaps in our knowledge.
588th Night Bomber Regiment. Photo taken in 1942 (from Wikipedia).
Deceptively easy to read, this one. Alexievitch spent years interviewing women who fought for, served and supported Russian forces during the Second World War, and this is the polyphonic, humble, utterly compelling result.
I call it a humble work because of Alexievitch’s restrained way of corralling and framing the stories she’s gathered, and for the way all the women’s voices murmur with awe and surprise as they recount the deeds of their youth. It’s a quiet book, full of pauses and ellipses, breaths drawn, stories that trail off. But it’s also monumentally powerful and frequently shocking reading. It issues the reminder that if you have a society where women are told from a young age that they can fly planes, shoot guns and drive tractors then they’ll grow up believing they have as much right to do so as men, and it reveals again and again that the human body is capable of extraordinary things in times of stress. But it is a story that went untold for years: the early flurry of women’s rights granted in communist Russia was pushed back before change could really take hold, and by the end of the war, mingled with the desire to move on and forget, society allowed conservative, divisive gender roles to return. The role of women in the war went unexplored and remained misunderstood. They faced hatred from those who hadn’t fought, men who had served alongside them turned on them, and many could not speak openly of their experiences during the turbulent politics of the mid-century USSR. Their accounts of war were dismissed for years, until Alexievitch decided to find out what it all looked like through the eyes of people who had never been socially conditioned to distance themselves and think only in troop movements, regiment numbers and the names of the great men at the head of the column.
It’s often a little overwhelming. Each account is short, with the longest only perhaps ten pages of text. They’re preceded by the name of the woman speaking and her wartime position, but first person blends with first person: friends, relatives and spouses are sometimes interviewed together, but more often Alexievitch simply juxtaposes accounts that relate to one another — thematically or chronologically — and it’s like a slowly building avalanche of voices, relentless, barely nudged into shape by the editor’s touch, life and memory shaped together to recreate a mere fraction of the experience of War and occupation.
She begins with the optimism and spunk of schoolgirls insisting on signing up at the outset of fighting, of girls who would not take no for an answer, teenagers thinking of it as something that would barely interrupt the lives they had planned for themselves. Illusions are shattered quickly: the accounts of female snipers are loaded towards the front of the book, their gung-ho attitudes soon shaken by the experience of killing. We move through the war by experiences, largely gathered together by the roles women played in all aspects of the fight: nurses, battlefield medics, sappers, bread-makers and laundresses, commanders, tank drivers, engineers, pilots, members of the resistance.
Alexievitch is openly grateful and awe-struck when she meets these women. She speaks of her love for the generation, and her interviewees’ stories are often interjected with references to the emotion shared with the interviewer. The opening positions this as a study of ‘womanly’ war, asking whether it is harder for a woman, who is capable of bringing life into the world, to kill. It’s not a starting point that sat well with me, I’ll admit, but in these highly personal accounts, you get the highly personal perspectives of each woman. Some things are barely talked about, others require a little anonymity, but you always understand that the details recounted to Alexievitch are honestly remembered and honestly told. Above all, it is not that a woman’s experience of war is different because she is a woman, it is that each individual experiences it differently. If it is only women who can talk about the details — the dandelion on the roof of a Gestapo prison, the smashed demitasses in German houses — then I pity the men who cannot speak of them, because I cannot imagine that half the world does not see these things. Humanity is in the detail: our relationship to the world around us, to life and the drive to go on living. Alexievitch wants to find answers to her questions about death, but she uncovers only the blind determination of the living.
What have I been doing? How on earth are we at the end of March already? Well, I may have been reading slowly, but this is because you can’t read and knit, and I’ve been nurturing an addiction to knitting that has necessitated the creation of another blog (Girl, get your gansey! — in which I try to continue knitting at the rate of one jumper a month for a year. Look, it’s the only thing keeping me sane with the headlines these days).
I’ve seen a few good movies though, watched a lot of rugby and TV, and made it to some good exhibitions. This post is a summary of what I got up to so far this year.
To be truly honest, not much has made as much of an impact on me as the three seasons of Monty Don’s gardens: French, Italian and Japanese. It’s perfect documentary TV, enhanced by nestling under a blanket on a grey winter’s morning, dreaming of sun and blossom and light. He’s a knowledgeable, enthusiastic host, unable to repress his joy at every garden he enters. The history of the great and good ties his narratives together (from kings’ mistresses to would-be popes), alongside smaller insights (the invention of the secateurs and their effect on our idea of what plants should look like). He’s a gentle, twinkly-eyed presenter, an utterly trustworthy guide, and the arc of the series is tied to decades of his life: he relives his bohemian student days in France and then reflects on a recent, serious illness in the zen gardens of Japan. It’s enormously soothing if you like watching thoughtful people encounter nature, art and human creativity. Or if you just want to learn how to appreciate a good hedge.
With that in mind, the films I’ve watched have had stiff competition. Which fared best? Probably the first I saw…
I watched
Can you ever forgive me? (cinema)
Melissa McCarthy gets her Kathy Bates on, while Richard E. Grant gives us a more joyous, flamboyant version of an aging Withnail. As cozy, ugly and uncomfortable as a beige sweater vest, but still warm. It’s hard to be churlish about the cat dying and the gay man getting AIDs when it’s based on real lives: what, in fiction, might be trite or forced is here just as sudden and unfair as in life. There are great performances and really dark humour — earlier versions of the cast would have made it a completely different movie, but I think McCarthy and Grant made it something special. You’ll cringe, but god you’ll root for Lee Israel, and her defensive lashing out will frustrate you as much as it does the few people who might be called her friends — she’s excellent at making her own pain and problems. She finds all the ease and warmth she can’t manage in reality when she adopts the personas of famous authors in her faked letters, more Dorothy than Dorothy indeed. Oh, and the passing swipe at Tom Clancy is glorious, too.
Maxïmo Park – As Long as We Keep Moving (2019)
My old favourites recorded a live DVD to see off keyboardist Lukas Wooller, who has since moved to the other side of the world (I hope he’ll meet up with Chris Chinchilla and form a supergroup). It’s a short and sweet set list played in a country church, run through kaleidoscopic filters that make it more of an ambient art piece than the attempt to capture the full live experience of 2008’s Found on Film. The list reflects all six of their albums, plus b-sides, which is quite a feat, but the tracks sit well next to one another, and this is a set list designed to get you dancing. I still don’t think Girls Who Play Guitars works without an audience, but other than that, the energy builds to the accustomed high point of Limassol, before gently guiding you to the close with Books from Boxes (proving its worth by getting stuck in my head whenever I even glance at the DVD title). It hits the expected notes and is very much for the fans: the long-time supporters will see reflections of the old 2004 video for The Coast is Always Changing in the neon-tinted monochrome shots of Paul Smith at the mic — though he’s more the showman now, arms spread in the church doorway, a hint of summer’s heat shining into the church from behind him. It’s a nice thing for die-hard fans, though I’m not sure of its wider appeal. The songs sound great though, and if you enjoyed watching old Microsoft screensavers you’ll have a grand time spacing out to this, too.
Moana (rewatch)
I’ve reached this point where animated films just…get under my skin in a way live action doesn’t. Give me a wall of song, wistful but hopeful, a young girl determined to prove herself, the bittersweet memory of a loved one lost and the mysterious motivation provided by knowledge one’s past combined with a thrill for the future, and, well, it rains on my face. What’s that about? Still, it seems only to work in the dark of the cinema, where there’s no hiding from it. At home, I can simply enjoy How Far I’ll Go and We Know the Way as the toe-tapping, lung-busting pop tunes they are. Even with Disney life’s crappy app, this is a beautiful film, and a firm favourite of mine alongside Brave. Love that eco-concious ending, love the dynamic between our heroine and the trickster god, love Alan Tudyk’s work as the stupid chicken and Jermaine Clement’s terrifying crab.
In Time (2011)
This was… weirdly compelling, but also Not Very Good. It was an interesting mutation of Logan’s Run, but not one that bears close examination, and the characters felt poorly fleshed out, as though they rested on assumptions the film never had time to explain. The cast of careworn ‘twenty-five year olds’ included Olivia Wilde and Cillian Murphy — beautiful people to be sure, but not quite eternally youthful. Still, I enjoyed its earnestness, and the game efforts of Murphy and the leads, Justin Timberlake and Amanda Seyfrid. Their Bonnie and Clyde style rampage, implausible as it might all be, was satisfying good fun, even if Murphy’s end was a huge anticlimax. It felt like it wanted to be part of a bigger franchise, and it’s probably a good thing it didn’t get to be. But that misplaced ambition remains to contribute to the film’s odd charm.
101 Dalmatians (rewatch)
The 1961 animated version of course! I kept seeing appreciation posts and figured I’d remind myself of Disney’s earlier output. It’s a cozy classic, its outdated gender norms far enough from the fore to allow a modern viewer to relax and enjoy the beautiful animation. Full of plucky British spirit in the face of hardship, full of good natured, easy going helpfulness, it trots by easily. The exception is the long, snowy journey back to London, which drags a little, but still looks gorgeous.
The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society (2018)
Gosh Lily James is just so darn likeable! She has lit up every role I’ve seen her in, and she’s perfect here as the dissatisfied biographer looking for her next weighty subject. On the surface her character is doing well: success and money from a comedy persona she writes as, a well-to-do American fiancé, and the care of her kindly, brotherly agent. Beneath it all, the war still affects her though: the loss of her parents and their home during the Blitz, and the long years of dereliction and staleness in the city. She’s ready for an adventure in a wild part of the country, a return to simpler things and a regaining of perspective. Cue a chance letter from the island of Guernsey, asking for help in sourcing a book. The British do fish out of water, city-dweller visits the sticks stories pretty solidly. We’ve had a lot of practice. Sure, they’re often saccharine or a little patronising, but when the formula works it’s a rich, warming treat. This is one where the formula works very well, carried by a compelling cast of characters, and most of all by James’ performance. She avoids the patronising naïveté that can so easily spoil these things, not letting the story the islanders are holding onto go, while respecting the emotion surrounding it. My only unease was with the flashbacks: it felt like some detail got lost in the transfer to film, where we had to take it on trust that this man was ‘different’ from his comrades without ever finding out what made him different. It was eminently watchable though. The kind of thing you would always be happy to tune into on a weekend afternoon and watch again. [edited 28 April because I always confuse my Lilys…]
Captain Marvel (cinema)
Further. Higher. Faster. Better! I know I’m not meant to pit heroine against heroine, but I did prefer this to Wonder Woman. The uneasy buddy dynamic between young Nick Fury and Carol Danvers was delightful, especially with that ’90s soundtrack. No male love interest, not even hinted at, and an unapologetically kick-ass finale that made me think of Commando: “throw away that chicken-shit gun.” Unlike Arnie’s nemesis, Carol isn’t stupid, and has nothing to prove. Seeing that offer of a ‘fair fight’ slide right off her like the proverbial water off a duck’s back was one of the most satisfying moments I’ve had in the cinema for a while. Sure, as a whole it’s a by-the-books superhero outing — it is never not predictable — Jude Law? Actually evil? Animatedkirk.gif And it’s got a lot to cram in so that it fits within the overarching steamroller of the MCU’s designs, whereas it might have been a more interesting film given more time to do its own thing. But it gave us a bit more Djimon Hounsou as Korath, it gave us a sweetly affecting performance from Ben Mendelssohn, and it gave us the glorious Rambeaus. I think I like it about the same as I like the first Captain America: it’s solid and easy to watch, even if it isn’t challenging in any way.
Fisherman’s Friends (cinema)
Some things really make you notice when you’ve got older. I don’t normally pay much heed to the number on my birthday cards, but I remember the ‘oh’ moment the first time I filled in a survey and found myself outside the 18-24 category. Watching Fisherman’s Friends was a little like that. The girl who fell in love with the Black Prince of A Knight’s Tale has grown old enough to see James Purefoy play the father of the ingenue, not the romantic lead. And to be honest, I quite like it: it’s a better look for him these days than whatever was going on with Olga Kurylenko in Momentum (which I haven’t managed to bring myself to watch). And he was honestly quite good in the role of dour Cornishman Jim, ringleader of the singing fishermen: he was a genuine presence, a mixture of slouchy, surly mistrust and the proud, charismatic performer. That work on Hap and Leonard has given him new depth. Of course, why bother denying that I went to this purely for Purefoy? I was still by far the youngest in a lairy grey-haired crowd, and the film was the standard fish-out-of-water, Londoner learns the value of community story. But it was likeable enough, I laughed in the intended places, and the music was almost as good as the jumpers. It didn’t have the originality of Guernsey‘s plucky female protagonist, nor the heartfelt, righteous feeling of Pride, but we do these movies so often here in the UK and we’ve got the formula down pretty solid. Nothing new or surprising here, but it’s a comfortably easy watch nonetheless.
I read
The Ballad of Reading Gaol and other works (Oscar Wilde)
Like Keats, a love of beauty and its transience, but rages with more bitter loneliness (as you’d expect), uniting Melancholy and the philosopher who would clip the angel’s wings or unpick the rainbow to find a darker theology: each man kills the thing he loves. It’s not a belief I share, and pity for the man who murdered his wife is hard to summon. Pity for the man about to be executed is another matter, and it’s startling and painful all over again to see it through Wilde’s eyes and to imagine the aesthete stripped of his velvets and silks, coated with the grey dust of labour and murmuring his horror at what he experiences. Some of his struggles with religion in the prose poems are harder for me to identify with, and though the observation of nature in the Garden of Eros has its moments of transcendental beauty, the framing is more Keatsian than I can stand. But then he just hits you with one of those perfect lines: ‘Ambition, love and all the thoughts that burn’.
He Judges has been trying to get me to read this for years. I’ve drawn a bookplate for him based on one of the dreams in it, I’ve asked questions about it as if I’d read it at conferences and attended papers on its construction. But I never wanted to read a lengthy nineteenth-century translation online or in a home-printed version, and it was never the right time to get it out of the library when researchers might always need to recall the one available copy… I could have read it in Old Norse. Yes, I could have. But it’s long, I’d heard it used quite different vocabulary to the family sagas I’m more accustomed to, and there were other things to read.
In the end I’m sorry I put off reading it for so long, but I guess we come to these things when the time is right. I got hold of one of the paperback reissues of Sephton’s 1899 translation, which gives a generally fluid take on the prose, even if one might wish for fewer spoilers in the chapter headings and the return of the final consonant in the title character’s name (Old Norse: Sverrir, modern Norwegian: Sverre, Sephton: Sverri). Unashamedly, I approched this story of a Faroese claimant to the Norwegian throne as something that might be adapted into a rollicking script for a TV drama, picturing its protagonist somewhere on the spectrum between Paul Ready’s twitchy Macbeth and Alan Rickman’s Sheriff of Nottingham. The near contemporary bust of the king from Nidaross Cathedral, pictured above, looks more like Tim Curry from certain angles. This is also acceptable fancasting.
This whimsical exercise might give you some idea of our protagonist’s character: Sverrir is savvy, cunning, ambitious, weaselly and an expert at talking himself out of problems. He’s a brilliant anti-hero, utterly convinced of his right to rule, building his power on a paper-thin claim and the faith of his followers. And this saga started to be written down while Sverrir was still alive and king of Norway. There’s still disagreement as to just how much of it was written under the King’s direct guidance, but consensus seems to be that the early chapters, full of portentous dreams and rather nonspecific hardships, had Sverrir’s seal of approval. Later, the narrative diversifies, providing an idea of what Sverrir’s enemies were up to, allowing him to face failure, and adopting the tone of a campaign diary or chronicle as events are related.
I am far from an expert on Norwegian history in the twelfth century, but the gist is that the royal line was still unstable. There were claims from pretenders to the throne and illegitimate relatives of kings, and at the time a young priest from the backwater Faroe Islands emerged claiming that he was the illegitimate son of Norway’s deceased King Sigurður Jórsalafari (Jerusalem-goer/crusader), the positions of power were held by the earl Erlingr and his son Magnús. Sverrir secured the backing of a band of mercenary fighters known as the Birkibeins (the birch-legs), and with their fearlessness and his tactical approach he managed to defeat his enemies and secure the kingdom. Well, sort of.
Sverris saga is in many ways utterly unlike any other saga I’ve read. Moments where characters are introduced or some aspect of the setting is highlighted often come to nothing, particularly in the early story. It’s thrillingly disorienting when you’re used to classic family sagas and their genre-savvy manipulation of audience attention. On the other hand, there’s a very deliberate deployment of ‘stranding’ as discussed by Clover: the progress of one side towards a location is narrated matter-of-factly (oh they just happened to stop at Fimreite), then we switch back to their enemies and see how they come to end up in the same location. Travel, and the travel of knowledge, become essential to events because they tell us how one battle leads to the next. The hard cost of civil war on a country is also brought out time and again: towns are taxed and men are levied over and over, first by one combatant then another. It’s no wonder the farmers stage their own rebellion before it’s all done.
Sverrir is a new kind of leader in this world: tactically-minded, unashamed to admit where his strengths and weaknesses lie, and refreshingly disinterested in traditional, violent statements of honour. Twice he’s challenged to a duel by his rivals (to save the suffering of the people!) and he freely admits how ridiculous he finds the suggestion, even telling his men to ignore the taunts of their enemies. It’s a fruitful contrast to the Birkibeins who serve him: just as he uses them for their military verve, the Birkibeins use him as a figurehead, a useful claimant to cluster around, and one who keeps this professional army engaged in war. They often ignore his orders, and after he seems to have secured the kingdom, some even peel off to support the next rebellion, led by Bishop Nikolás and the young King Ívarr.
Conquering Norway is something of a juggling act, too. Look at how far apart it’s three major cities are! You must hold Trondheim/Nidaross, Bergen and Oslo/Tonsberg in order to say you have secured the whole place under your rule — much of the saga follows Sverrir and his enemies dashing from town to town like Norway was a corridor in a Scooby Doo episode. The importance of ships to a Norwegian king was never clearer, and Sverrir’s struggles to maintain his navy are closely scrutinised by the text, which also indulges in the most detailed accounts of ship battles I’ve come across in a saga.
It does take a little getting into — as a personality, Sverrir is sometimes elusive, not least at the opening, which has a sheen of hagiography over it. The appearance of a series of short-lived pretenders and claimants who appear after his [second] wedding is narrated in an episodic, repetetive way, and the number of names is guaranteed to baffle. But in general, Sephton guides the reader well with a smattering of useful notes, a comprehensive index, and those summary chapter headings. It’s worth a read whether you’re a fan of the sagas or not, simply as a near-contemporary medieval narrative account of Norway’s most audacious, driven rulers.
I enthuse 
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