Review: The Unwomanly Face of War (Svetlana Alexievitch)

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.

Review: Sverris saga (translated by J. Sephton)

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.

Rewriting the epic: Eaters of the Dead and The Penelopiad

I was furious to have wasted my time, but I had only myself to blame.

— Michael Crichton, in his afterword to Eaters of the Dead

Two very different authors approach a similar task with two very different aims. Atwood wants to tell the untold version of The Odyssey, unpicking clever words and formulae and turns of phrase and revealing the cruel foundations of the society the poem depicts; Crichton confesses in his afterword that he merely wanted to prove that Beowulf wasn’t as boring as a friend claimed it was. I agree with Crichton — the epic poem is not boring. It’s my favourite surviving Old English composition. His approach in fact becomes less about bringing out the best of what’s there, and instead about showing off Crichton’s cleverness in academic nose-tweaking. Additionally, I am a big fan of The Odyssey, and thoroughly enjoyed reading it (in English translation) in a school class that appreciated Odysseus as a different type of hero, while also making him a healthy figure of fun. We roundly mocked Telemachus and figured the suitors had what was coming to them. I approached both of these retellings with degrees of caution, therefore.

Crichton approaches his epic via the eyewitness account of the tenth-century Arab ambassador and explorer Ibn Fadlan. You can see the kernel of the character that Antonio Banderas brings to life with such charm in The 13th Warrior, but there’s little of the measured, keen intelligence of the historical Ibn Fadlan, despite Crichton’s pseudo-academic posturing. Crichton enjoys his charade a lot though, sprinkling footnotes and explanations along the way as he apes the dry prose of the chronicler. His cultured Muslim outsider is able to express shock and awe at the distant Norse society he — and the audience — encounters, which neatly excuses all manner of exposition. I’ve said my piece on the actual ‘eaters of the dead’ in my movie review, and the same applies here, but it’s even more anti-climactic. Herger’s duel remains a high point, and though the novel is more evenly balanced than the film, it suffers the disadvantage of including a scene involving cave-dwelling prophetic dwarfs. Crichton wants to invent ‘real’ versions of as many Norse myths and legends as he can, and does not know when less is more. I find this approach rather dull: Beowulf is a far more interesting story of human jostling for power and heroic hubris than this busy, grim-faced feud with Neanderthal man.

Eaters of the Dead was published at a time when a full translation of Ibn Fadlan, with up to date scholarly commentary, was unavailable. Crichton acknowledges that thinking on Neanderthal man moved on even during the period of the book’s writing; thinking on the Rus also continues to shift and advance. In one sense, I suppose it’s laudable that this strange, unsettling account of a boat burial, complete with human sacrifice, is brought to a wider audience by Crichton, but I have reservations about giving the impression that this was what all of ‘Norse’ or Medieval Scandinavian society was like. In any case, I direct all interested parties to the freely available translation by the eminently qualified James Montgomery. Crichton breezes confidently through hotly debated questions of nationality and origins in a way that only a straight white man writing in the 1980s could. Although this feels occasionally like a breath of fresh air the charm that can be attributed to it comes mostly from the way in which the film adaptation rounded and softened the characters somewhat, removing them from the deliberately terse and unemotive chronicle style Crichton apes.

Margaret Atwood, on the other hand, has little time for the affectations of style and vocabulary. For her they are simply a gloss on everyday, human truths: only sometimes is a dawn rosey-fingered for her heroine. Indeed, in one of the opening sentences Atwood confronts you with the word ‘factoid’. It’s jarring, and I very nearly shut the book at this first encounter with her Penelope’s jaded, speakeasy drawl (as I came to read it). It’s no doubt deliberately unsettling though, as is much of her blunt retelling of the Greek epic. She sketches out the details of Penelope’s upbringing and the social norms of her world with vividness but also a degree of impatience. History is not the main interest of the book, which intersperses Penelope’s narrative with scenes from the afterlife, where she wanders among the shades and looks in on the modern world now and then. It pads the book out, but I’m not too sure what of substance these contemporary sections add, and to a large extent I found them unnecessary.

Penelope is prickly in Atwood’s imagination, regaling us with a ‘not like other girls’ confessional. The voice of the fifteen-year-old Penelope is never quite shaken off throughout all the other episodes in the story, as she is continually shown as an isolated naif, constrained by society and the good intentions of others. Forgive me, but I miss the (illusion of?) independent-minded, cunning and cool Penelope from the epic. This Penelope has a lot of savage words for her cousin Helen, who is nothing but a vapid proto-Kardashian, utterly narcissistic and unsympathetic; Eurycleia the old nursemaid gets similarly short shrift, and with Penelope’s near-contempt for all who she encounters — bar those young maids… — she’s a tough character to enjoy. It feels like there is very little that Atwood likes about the source material, and this sours the retelling.

Nevertheless, the most important difference between these two books covers the topic that gets Atwood most exercised, where her writing truly shines with a furious passion. Thoughtful Telemachus (it’s his heroic epithet, dontcha know?), Odysseus’ berk of a teenage son, thoughtfully hangs twelve young maids for having been overly friendly with the suitors hoping to oust Odysseus. It’s a moment I remember well from the poem: a casual aside, dealt with quickly, causing bafflement and disgust amongst my modern classmates. It fuels Atwood’s narrative, and the ironic chorus of maids who flit in and out of the story force the reader to acknowledge the abhorrent realities of slavery. These maids are property, used by their mistress and her unwanted guests alike, then used again to prove a young man’s leadership qualities. Contrast them with the omnipresent slave girls in Crichton’s vision of the medieval North: at every opportunity his heroes have their dick in some girl, but it’s ok, because they seem to enjoy it, they enter into the sacrificial ritual of drugs, sex and death willingly, don’t they? Atwood shows that the willingness of a slave in these circumstances is wholly meaningless, because their lives are not their own. She shows how these background figures try to snatch morsels of humanity, brief illusions of control here and there, but ultimately to no avail. Crichton simply shows his prudish hero eventually succumbing to the mores of the society he’s visiting: we know he’s truly bonded with his Norse friends when he’s merrily making out with slave girls at the dinner table too.

It’s pointless to say that Crichton’s priorities are different from Atwood’s. The source that inspired him and fuelled his novel approach to Beowulf is one that revolves around the rape and ritual murder of a slave girl. To him this is the outset of a heroic adventure, a journey into the minds of the society that promises such a glorious afterlife. Atwood sees beyond the elites of her epic though, forcing us to remember the multitudes whose lives propped up the heroic lifestyle of aggressive independence. True, the critique offered by Atwood’s chorus would be hard to recreate in Crichton’s mock travelogue, but it is still a choice to never show the other side of this society. The corresponding insinuations about the primitive villains, with their clan mother and mother goddess, are clear enough against the backdrop of a society in which men dominate wholly, and women are easy to take, but hard to understand.

You might think this only annoyed me in hindsight, having read The Penelopiad so soon after finishing Eaters of the Dead. You’d be wrong. Ibn Fadlan’s account of that slave girl has always been an upsetting window on a very uncomfortable aspect of history for me, so to see it used as the opening to a boy’s own adventure is pretty grim. Atwood’s anger on behalf of the maids just solidified my dislike of the conceit. Still, I gather from the afterword that, with the benefit of hindsight, even Crichton was a bit embarrassed by the aggressively arrogant undergraduate tone of the novel. I haven’t read up on Atwood’s approach; I did think that, though she eviscerates self-important academics so well (see also the end of The Handmaid’s Tale), Robert Graves’ cultic musings are something of an easy target. But I’m more inclined to forgive this for the effective rebuke with which she ends the elaborated account of his theory:

You don’t have to get worked up about us, dear educated minds. You don’t have to think of us as real girls, real flesh and blood, real injustice. That might be too upsetting. Just discard the sordid part. Consider us pure symbol. We’re no more real than money.

I still love The Odyssey. I still love Beowulf. I still enjoy them as products of their cultures (by no means the same as those they depict), and I enjoy their depictions of their elite heroes being by turns superhuman and also so humanly fallible. But where Atwood offers something new to bring to my next reading of the original, Crichton does not. Still, in entertainment value I don’t think that either reworking outdoes these two epic poems that have already proved their staying power.

Review: Belle (2013)

Bear with me — I was very hungover when I watched this. Some detail may be fuzzy. And when I started watching I’d forgotten this was an Amma Asante film, so was pleasantly surprised every time I didn’t find myself having to cringe from patronising benevolent white people being presented as the pinnacle of goodness and kindness. The film is told very much through Belle’s own eyes, and half-hearted gestures from those around her are most definitely presented as such. Belle covers a lot in its running time, and handles issues of race, gender and class with far more sensitivity and dexterity than most British period dramas, though I’d like to have seen it all given a bit more space to breathe. A short series, rather than a film, might have allowed for a bit more depth and a more satisfying narrative arc.

Belle is based on the true story of the eighteenth-century woman Dido Elizabeth Belle, born into slavery, daughter of a slave woman and an officer in the British Navy. Her father whisks her from the life her mother endured to have her raised by his brother, who just happens to be the Lord Chief Justice, Earl of Mansfield, William Murray. Dido is raised in the household as one of the gentry, taught all the things a young woman should be taught, and eventually inherits enough to be free from an obligation to marry, making her an heiress. A few details of her life have been tweaked to make the story neater, and I tend to think it’s a pity when people making historical dramas feel the need to do this, but here I do at least see the point of some of the changes made.

The movie starts choppily, in a rush to get from Belle’s initial, disorienting arrival at Mansfield, through the key points of her situation as a young woman, speeding on like it’s set to fast-forward until it can introduce a wider cast of characters. It’s a shame to rush through all this, and though all the key information in there — Belle’s grave attitude towards the subservient role of other black people in her new home’s art collection; her cousin Elizabeth’s lack of a fortune and their closeness; the liminal status of their governess, Mary, who has wealth but never married — it feels perfunctory. Given the larger details of Belle’s life and the historical context that the movie alters, it’s a pity that it didn’t take the time to slow down and speculate on her character a little more. She comes across as a smart, principled woman who realises she is trapped by her unique status, but I’d just love to have had more depth to her and the other characters.

Things pick up as the movie zeroes in on two aspects of Belle’s life at home: the portrait that her uncle commissions of her and Elizabeth, and the case of the slave-ship Zong, in which Marshall is due to give a ruling. The story of the Zong massacre is a key part of the abolition movement in Britain — I think I first saw it dealt with in Garrow’s Law, which, like Belle, involves its own lawyer in proceedings rather than portraying the anti-slavery activist Granville Sharp, who was the most forceful voice against the slave-ship’s owners. Garrow’s Law did, however, concentrate on the significant testimony of Olaudah Equiano, a freed slave, and though there is no evidence that I know of that Belle ever met Equiano, her presence at Marshall’s ruling is equally unattested, so it might have been interesting to see the film speculate on her response to Equiano’s words too. Along with the touching scene where the black maid, Mabel, teaches Belle about the different way she needs to comb her hair, I’d like to have seen a bit more about Belle’s response to other black people in Britain at the time. She’s not quite as isolated as Stephen Black becomes in the BBC adaptation of Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, but it felt like something that could have been explored in more detail.

These are really minor gripes of course, Belle highlights important aspects of its heroine’s situation that I expect that a movie entirely crewed by white people would not have thought to include. The way in which Belle comes to appreciate the difference between her skin colour being tolerated by those who claim it doesn’t matter to them, and finding a genuine connection with someone who cares about changing the society that can only put up with her as an exception to the rule, is handled beautifully. The fragile allyship of her cousin Elizabeth, who does not want to hear that the man she’s courting is a racist who has been actively violent towards Belle, is another important scene, reinforcing Belle’s isolation as soon as she starts to become conscious of the difference of her position.

It is, at heart, a period romance, though. John Davinier — the name of Dido Elizabeth Belle’s actual husband, though he was a Frenchman and a gentleman’s steward, not an ambitious rural law-student — is an appealing, emotional foil for Belle. His low position allows the film to highlight issues of class and income alongside Belle’s own experiences of racism, and alongside the sexism that limits Mary’s options in later life and looks likely to limit Belle’s in the same way. Elizabeth’s story combines these issues too, showing the pressure on her to secure a wealthy husband because she has no income of her own. A lot of people find themselves trapped in the society depicted, and the film doesn’t allow any of them a truly easy way out. But in its ambitions to address all of these social problems, and to let Belle’s relationship with Davinier have the space to gain real emotional heft, I still think it perhaps tried to do too much.

I might have preferred a story without Davinier that focussed on the two rulings made by Marshall that were combined into one by the film, weaving in the story of the portrait as an elegant piece of symbolism for Belle’s fears and awareness of her unique status. Or, as I said above, a mini-series that did all that the movie does in a bit more depth, with a bit more slow characterisation and a bit more detail in the historical context. Despite this, it’s a significant development in British period drama, and I’d like to see a lot more historical dramas with this kind of clued-up attitude towards the intersectional nature of inequality. It also, inevitably, looks gorgeous, and Gugu Mbatha-Raw’s performance is quietly powerful, offering audiences as much insight into Belle’s inner unease as she can within the film’s clipped narrative frame. More like this please. Much more, in every sense.

Review: Santa Evita (Tomás Eloy Martínez)

(Photo by Robin Minchum, at Perón Perón [x])

I accumulated floods of file cards and stories so as to be able to fill in all the unexpected blank spaces of what, later on, was going to be my novel. But I left them where they were, leaving the story, because I am fond of unexplained blank spaces.

In this, I am of one mind with the author. And it is more for the ‘unexplained blank spaces’ and for the swampy, indefinable territory between history and fiction that I came to Santa Evita, than out of any knowledge or particular interest in Argentine history.

It’s a long, meandering novel, and it feels appropriate to begin by discussing the ending, not least as the ending concerns the work’s beginning. By its close, I felt more than anything the strength of its similarities with Javier Cercas’ far more compact Soldiers of Salamis (2001; Santa Evita was first published in 1995). Whether there was direct influence I won’t speculate, but the same slightly neurotic, ambivalent narrator is pulled inexorably, reluctantly into both stories. Both are stories mired in a violent, vivid memory of history, and both thus encourage ambivalence: the accidental moment where a leading fascist was spared death, and the strange indignities to which the body of Eva Perón was subjected after her husband’s first deposition in 1952. Soldiers of Salamis discovers an ending full of internationalism and hope, however, where Santa Evita finds the author finally able to return to Argentina after years of exile, unable, or unwilling, to fully describe the hold that Evita’s story has on him — and on the other subjects of his story — though perhaps it is indescribable, recognised and understood only by the Argentines who lived through the politics of the twentieth century.

It is an interesting story, though not, perhaps a satisfying one. Santa Evita weaves an imagined account of Evita’s last days with the author’s interpretations of newsreel footage and his interviews with figures such as her hairdresser. It also wanders into her past, via the recollections of her mother and fellow actresses, and the lascivious speculations of her political enemies, but its focus is largely on the reception of her corpse by Perónists and by the military following Juan Perón’s flight from Argentina later in the year that she died.

The author retains a sympathy for all the characters who appear in his text, though he describes himself as a distant, unemotive and on occasions cruel researcher, as in the encounter with ‘Irene’. He is perhaps keen to emphasise the journalistic intent that originally prompted his investigations; or perhaps mired in the depression that he claims lifted miraculously upon his decision to write the story down. The sympathetic approach to all the individuals involved, from his depiction of Eva Perón’s last days, to the struggles of the man initially tasked with concealing the embalmed corpse, means that this is not a novel with a particularly strident political message. It explores madnesses and insecurities on all sides, teasing out the human doubts of its subjects, and the inappropriateness of their equally human lack of doubt. Some of Martínez’s ‘revelations’ are shocking — such as all that is inflicted upon the corpse — and others are less so — the proposed reason for the young actress Evita’s mysterious absence from the historical record for a period of eleven months or so will probably surprise no female reader, at least.

A sense of personal dislocation and unease permeates the novel, where description is at its finest in instances such as when a source’s brief flashes of emotion are accompanied by his need to look away from the author, who describes this expression as one in which the subject’s experienced emotion is thought to be the mislaid emotion of some other person, whom he then looks for. The involuntary nature of our feelings and the actions that they induce us to take is a constant here: never investigated directly, nor questioned, but implicitly underlying the inexorable descent into obsession that so many characters in the novel experience.

The story is also one of male possession. Evita’s voice opens its narrative, her dreamy self-reflections as she lies weakening, dying of cancer, but after her death her wishes are denied, she is talked of and talked over and constantly redefined as an object of want by so many others. The way in which her requests are ignored upon her death; the way that her mother gradually loses influence over what is to happen to her daughter’s remains; the fearful helplessness of Colonel Koenig’s wife; of Arancibia’s sister-in-law; the unaffected horror of Irene when informed that she had not had a doll as her childhood companion, but a real, human body; all cry out pitifully from the margins of the novel. As Perón claimed to have made her, so each man who encounters her body after death remakes her in his own imagination, turning the hatred of slurs — Mare — and attempts at distance — Person — into a fierce struggle to ‘tame’ bones and formaldehyde, and the dangerous ideas that live on with her preserved corpse.

Eva Perón died at 33, the same age that Christ was supposed to have died, the same age that medieval representations of the dead aimed to show their subjects. Like all good saints, she must have a martyrdom, only in Santa Evita the deprivations and misunderstandings that martyrs are subjected to occur after her death, to her impassive body. Flowers and candles apparently planted by her supporters, and the scent of lavender from the embalmer’s ointments, are the standard attributes of a saintly corpse. But the removal of a finger, a nick of her ear, a star-shaped incision, and the endless longing hands of a stream of fascinated men are Evita’s trials after death; she is as passive in her ‘sufferings’ as the tortured women of medieval saints’ lives.

The novel offers neither historical fact, nor closure to the reader. Like Soldiers of Salamis, I am most fond of it when the author’s voice is clearest, musing on the nature of truth and fiction and watching, listening to his sources, drawing sad and lonely people with an effective line or two of description, or by recounting a night of conversation between them and the author. Martínez somehow needed to tell this story, but he does not offer a full explanation of why. Prompted to ‘join the cult’ by Rodolfo Walsh, who stayed, and died, for his publications, he does not say whether following the story that he found himself investigating to its end(s) brought him any closure for himself. But he doesn’t really need to say; the loose ends, the blank spaces, are true to both life and to the form of the novel. They leave us space to think in, and they leave the story space to just be, without imposing any trite, moralising conclusions or explanations for the events within it.

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I read the translation by Helen Lane from 1996.

Review: Soldados de Salamina (2003)

“I was about to tell her that Miralles hadn’t fought in one war, but many, but I couldn’t, because I suddenly saw Miralles walking across the Libyan desert towards the Murzuk oasis — young, ragged, dusty and annonymous, carrying the tricolour flag of a country not his own, of a country that is all countries and also the country of liberty and which only exists because he and four Moors and a black guy are raising that flag as they keep walking onwards, onwards, ever onwards.”

I love this book. I only read it relatively recently, at the nagging reminders of He Judges (ta love) and adored its introspective, meandering blend of history, fiction, biography and autobiography. I found the movie by accident, on what must be about the 50th trip to Diego Luna’s imdb page. My repeated ignoring of it must have been down to the slightly different place-name (I read it in translation as Soldiers of Salamis), and to the fact that the author, Javier Cercas, becomes Lola Cercas in this movie adaptation. And it’s also quite expensive still on Amazon; lucky, then, that I work in a city with more world-class libraries than you can shake a stick at.

It’s a strange story to adapt: it’s the story of how a journalistic investigation hits a dead-end and slides into wishful thinking and unanswerable questions, told through the self-doubting lens of the author, a one-time novelist who’s been bereft of inspiration for years. But the movie does an amazing job of adapting its source, contriving situations that allow for all the historical exposition in the book, and retaining a good deal of its humour, not least that which comes at Cercas’ expense.

In the first half of the movie, Lola thinks she’s conducting a serious investigation into facts from the Spanish Civil War — tracing the steps that led to the fascist writer, Sánchez Mazas, surviving a mass execution on the Spanish/French border, and returning to serve Franco with the help of his ‘Forest Friends’ and some Catalan farmers. The movie uses documentary footage, real and expertly mimicked, plus flashbacks featuring Ramon Fontserè as Sánchez Mazas, to show the narrative in all its detail. Most effective of all is the way in which Lola’s discussions with the old survivors are filmed: the camera focuses on the men’s faces, and the outside light washes the colours thin, giving the impression of documentary filming, whilst Lola quietly prompts them from the edge of the shot. There is far less of this on show in the second half of the movie, where Lola looks for a hero, a heart for the story of the cold fascist’s survival, trying instead to identify the man who spared him in a clearing in the forest just outside Collel. In this part, it is just one or two flashbacks that are returned to again and again: the vivid, romantic image of the soldier dancing his paso doble in the rain, and his dark-eyed, enigmatic, happy expression as he decides to spare Sánchez Mazas.

Joaquín Notario does not look anything like how I imagined the soldier in the forest. But he’s perfect. The movie lingers and returns to his wondering, open expression again and again and rightly so; if you don’t get that shot right you lose so much of the story’s beating, intangible heart. Similarly, Joan Dalmau looks not a jot like my imagined Miralles, but he’s wonderful nonetheless. He Judges and I were alternately cackling loudly and sitting in stunned silence as he slipped between observations on the present and on the past. Although a lot of detail had to be culled from Miralles’ memories, the effect was still profound, even without that closing narrative meander that I love in the book, where Cercas imagines dancing the paso doble ‘Sighing for Spain’ with Sister Françoise on Miralles’ grave, watched by Conchi and Bolaño.

The latter doesn’t make it into the movie at all, but oh boy, Conchi sure does. She gradually comes into her own in the book; Cercas’ first relationship since his divorce, someone who seems strange and unrelatable to him, even as he takes solace in the physical side of their partnership, yet whose feedback and pushy support keep Cercas on track to complete the novel. She’s a blend of brash overconfidence and brittle fears, and she bursts to life in the movie in María Botto’s hands, the character barely altered despite the fact that Javier has become Lola. The scenes between Lola and Conchi are easily the best of the scenes set in contemporary Spain (barring Miralles’ interview perhaps), but rather than have them in an established relationship, here it’s about Conchi’s unrequited lust/love for Lola. It does a good job of allowing the movie to show Lola’s emotional distance, but feels like a bit of a cop-out in some ways, too; not least because it then shoehorns in a quick snog between Lola and young Gastón, the Mexican exchange student, to prove that Lola likes men, no, honest guv, she does! I wonder if Diego Luna felt he was being typecast after Y tú mamá también? Can’t imagine he’d mind much, if so…

Ariadna Gil holds the whole movie together, despite the historical male figures threatening to make it only about them. She’s a delightful klutz, constantly dropping things, fixing a hole in her pocket with a stapler, falling asleep at the keyboard with her glasses on, and it’s always great to see a female character who’s this clumsy, and who gets to remain emotionally aloof rather than becoming some sort of cutesy ditz who just needs a sexy guy to carry her stuff for her (not for lack of Gastón’s trying). She’s as frustrating as she should be, single-minded about her search for the man who spared Sánchez Mazas, even when Miralles is telling her far more interesting stories from his own life and those of his long-dead friends.

More so than the book, the movie shows how prickly mentioning the Civil War still was (is!) in Spain. Cercas struggles to identify the precise nature of the humanity he’s looking for at the heart of his story: the mass execution is wrong, regardless of its victims’ repellent political beliefs, so it’s good that Sánchez Mazas doesn’t become just another body in the mud in that clearing. But what does he go on to do? We know he remains loyal enough to his Forest Friends to order the release of a son of one of them from jail, but he’s still an influential part of the fascist dictatorship. The soldier who spared him is a naïf, a romantic child caught dancing in the rain rather than guarding his prisoners, and Miralles is a hardened fighter, troubled by the loss of so many friends, and no longer at home in Spain at all. It’s up to Cercas, listening to figures from all sides, drawing out the individual, human stories, and telling Miralles that he will not be forgotten, to blend this awkward cocktail of all-too-recent memories into a story of both hopelessness and hope.

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And then I’d take Sister Françoise by the hand and ask her to dance with me besides Miralles’ grave, I’d insist that she dance to a music she didn’t know how to dance to on Miralles’ fresh grave, in secret, so no one would see us – so no one in Dijon or in France or in Spain or in all of Europe would know that a good-looking, clever nun (with whom Miralles always wanted to dance a paso doble and whose bum he never dared touch) and a provincial journalist were dancing in an anonymous cemetery of a melancholy city beside the grave of an old Catalan Communist, no one would know except a non-believing and maternal fortune-teller and a Chilean lost in Europe who would be smoking, his eyes clouded, standing back a little and very serious, watching us dance a paso doble beside Miralles’ grave just as one night years before he’d seen Miralles and Luz dance to another paso doble under the awning of a trailer in the Estrella de Mar campsite, seeing it and wondering if maybe that paso doble and this one were in fact the same, wondering without expecting an answer, because he already knew that the only answer is that there is no answer, the only answer is a sort of secret or unfathomable joy, something verging on cruelty, something that resists reason, but nor is it instinct: something that remains there with the same blind stubbornness with which blood persists in its course and the earth in its immovable orbit and all beings in their obstinate condition of being, something that eludes words the way the water in the stream eludes stone, because words are only made for saying to each other, for saying the sayable, when the sayable is everything except what rules us or makes us live or matters or what we are or what that nun is and that journalist who is me dancing beside Miralles’ grave as if their lives depended on that absurd dance or like someone asking for help for themselves and their family in this time of darkness.

Rewatch: The 13th Warrior (1999)

This, frequently hailed as the Best of Beowulf Movies, came out in the same year as its steampunk counterpart.(1) A year before Gladiator, when special effects wizards were developing innovative ways to keep Oliver Stone alive, and two years before The Fellowship of the Ring, so also when Weta Workshops were sacrificing all they could to the gods of CGI… in my memory, it’s more of a mid-nineties film, but on rewatching, that seemed unfair. What it is, is an Antonio Banderas film, and we’ve not had enough of those recently (I blame the Shrek franchise).(2)

It shows off its budget not through CGI (thanks goodness – the few bits and pieces around the sea-journey to Scandinavia have not aged well), but through live-action battle sequences. Unfortunately, as borne out by its disastrous performance at the box office, these don’t really seem to justify the costs… The battles are dimly lit and smokey, and although they occasionally make nice use of dramatic backlighting, in all, the effect is muddled and rather chaotic.

Dramatic backlighting

Okay, battles are chaotic and muddled, but compare the opening fight in Gladiator just one year later, and you really feel the difference.

Despite the dull fight scenes then, why does this remain a candidate for Best of Beowulf Movies? Well, it helps that it respects its sources. Ibn Fadlan’s account of a Rus funeral is not an easy read: the fate of the sacrificial victim is deeply unpleasant from a modern perspective (if you’re interested, James Montgomery’s translation is the one to use (pdf), but be aware: trigger warnings for rape, intoxication and human sacrifice). But The 13th Warrior, presumably following its source material, Michael Crichton’s Eaters of the Dead, opens with a subtle, playful representation of the priggish Ahmad ibn Fadlan’s first meeting with the Rus. The nastiest elements of the funeral are omitted from the movie: the slave girl is seen in the door ritual, reciting what she can see of the otherworld, and her death is hinted at from a distance, as we peer across the crowds from ibn Fadlan’s own perspective. An appropriate choice, given that the account’s accuracy has been questioned by scholars who claim ibn Fadlan would not have been able to witness much of what he describes as it happens out of sight.

Other good signs in a Beowulf adaptation are that Hrothgar is treated with appropriate respect (don’t get me started on naked, CGI Anthony Hopkins – the poem itself has nothing but praise for Hrothgar as a ruler…) and that Wealtheow (or Weilew here) is not made into a love interest for the hero. Most Beowulf adaptations don’t know what to do with her, the only speaking female character in the poem. They want her to be more, somehow, misunderstanding her role in the poem as something subservient and downtrodden. Wealtheow is the epitome of the medieval noblewoman, however: she is the hostess, and the diplomat, and her awareness of the precarity of the peace between her sons and her nephew is one of the most emotionally affecting parts of the poem. Okay, so The 13th Warrior sidesteps these issues in a way by just adding in Olga, who gets to be the love interest instead, but it leaves Weilew to be aloof, in control and about as haughty as a noblewoman should be (I liked the touch that she knew the people of the territory better than anyone, identifying the child who survived the Wendols, and leading the warriors to the old woman who provides information).

Of course, The 13th Warrior is not just a Beowulf adaptation. Grendel, descendant of Cain, monster of indistinct appearance, has become the Wendols – presumably meant to evoke the Vandals, or Wends, and so conflating two completely different historical groups – and the Wendols are in every way a mish-mash of many other confused influences. They’re not a particularly good replacement for Grendel and his mother, I must say. They wear bear-skins and are so ferocious they’re not immediately recognisable as men (so evoking stereotypes of the berserkr, a class of elite warrior). They seem to follow a cult of the Mother Goddess, but their women are only ever seen secreted away underground (I guess it’s probably more likely than the matriarchal society Gimbutas would have extrapolated from the Wendols’ figurine…). ‘Grendel’s mother’, the matriarch herself, is quite cool, in her cave, with her poisoned bear-claw, but why it is that she craves human heads is never really made clear. So we have various ancient northern European tribes, the idea of the berserkr as described by late medieval writers, an indistinct connection between bears and pre-Christian Scandinavian religions, the ancient fertility symbol of a large-breasted pregnant woman, and a culture of head-hunting. It’s all a bit much, really. And the primitivism is laid on so thick that these Wendols may as well not be human (as Ahmad notes when in their cave).

Usually, I find the ‘humanisation’ of Grendel in Beowulf adaptations to be an unnecessary encumbrance to the story – except in the case of Grendel, Grendel, Grendel, which lets the monster be a monster, but tells things from his own, strange point of view, and encourages a different reading of the heroes and their society. The feud plot of Beowulf and Grendel (2005) is particularly grating; if you want to make a feud movie, just adapt an Icelandic saga, don’t stick some Ugg boots on a bloke and call him Grendel and have him shag some random Irish witch so that their son can continue the feud between Grendels and humans. Sorry, digressionary rant – but in The 13th Warrior I actually found myself longing for a bit more depth of characterisation to the Wendols. Just a bit more explanation of what they were and why – how had they been assumed to be extinct for so long, but so many remained?

Well, it’s getting hard to sustain the idea of this as the Best of Beowulf Movies now, isn’t it? That’s because Outlander (2008) probably gets the balance overall somewhat better, even if it has to become a sci-fi movie in order to do so.

But as The 13th Warrior how does the film do? Well, the portrayal of the main characters’ friendship is genuine and warm, and keeps you rooting for the heroes even through the dull battles and the confusing mythology. Banderas is always likeable, and he brings that likeability to Ahmad with full force: he’s prickly and snobbish when he meets the Northmen, but over the course of the movie his transformation is consistent and, mostly, believable (not sure about the sudden abilities with the scimitar…). The other warriors are just defined well enough, like the dwarves in the recent Hobbit trilogy, and Ahmad and Herger’s camaraderie is real and palpable. Buliwyf, mostly silent and square-jawed, makes a fine, elusively charismatic hero. Where he and Ahmad speak together, the movie journeys into territory that it’s hard to imagine contemporary films venturing into: Ahmad teaches Buliwyf how to write Islamic holy words (‘there is one God and Muhammad is his prophet’), and when calls of ‘Odin’ bring the Northmen successfully to land on a foggy coast, Buliwyf makes sure to thank Ahmad’s god as well as his own. Similarly, having prayed to God, Ahmad joins the Northmen in their repetition of the slave girl’s chant from the funeral at the beginning. This respectful, if at times bemused, encounter of beliefs is refreshing in the context of what is essentially a ‘viking’ movie, and rings true to a number of medieval sources.

The opening third of the movie is the one that I enjoy the most, and it was from this opening third that most of my memories of the film came prior to this rewatch. Still, The 13th Warrior is hugely ambitious in its scope and in the depth it aims to give to its characters and cultural setting. It’s just a pity that too many cultural referents lie behind this setting, and they bring confusion and unnecessary complexity to what is, in origin, a fairly straightforward story of heroics and fate.

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(1) Okay, Grendel, Grendel, Grendel (1981) gives it a run for its money, but it doesn’t seem fair to compare John Gardner with Michael Crichton… And I do really, really love the Christopher Lambert Beowulf too. 1999: Beowulf’s best year since surviving the Cotton Library fire of 1731?

(2) You know, like the Zorro movies, or even Evita. Something that suits his special brand of tongue-in-cheek intensity, and preferably allows for slapstick action sequences. I do keep meaning to watch The Skin I Live In, but I don’t think it features the latter…

Review: Narvik (New Diorama Theatre, London)

The first review on this blog might not be all that representative. I don’t go to the theatre that often; this was my second trip since ooh, probably 2009? But having read an interview with the playwright, Lizzie Nunnery, there was too much about Narvik to resist.

Narvik tells the story of one man’s experience of the Arctic Convoys in WWII. The narrative emerges through a series of memories, told for the most part in chronological order, whilst the protagonist, now an old man, lies trapped on his floor after a fall. I was drawn to go and see it because my grandfather was a supply officer in Murmansk and Archangel during the war (though he didn’t talk about it much); because of my own interest in Norwegian history; and because of Nunnery’s distinctive way of writing folk song and music into her plays.

The stage design and the use of said music were two of the most instantly impressive things about Narvik. I’m still humming the haunting theme (see the video above): scene changes, slipping between memory and the present and back again, and then sometimes deeper into childhood memories, were smoothed through music. Three backing actors sprinkled just enough keyboard, mandolin and percussion behind the stark vocals to fill out the space, making the small theatre feel as expansive as the view from a Norwegian fjord. The scaffold that they circled around and over functioned as a ship’s bunks, communications array and deck, as well as a backstage of sorts. The action fitted the compact space beautifully, and never felt limited by the setting.

Narvik is only about 90 minutes long, and it’s an intense experience, carried by the three main actors. Joe Shipman, playing the protagonist, Jim, has to maintain a particularly gruelling level of emotional tension throughout, but his powerful Liverpudlian accent buffets you securely through the waves of Nunnery’s poetic script. Lucas Smith is equally effective in the two roles of Jim’s father and his closest comrade, bringing something for the psychoanalysts as Jim struggles with the anger he feels towards his absent parent. The third member of the main cast, Nina Yndis, makes a flighty, feisty Else: a young teacher in pre-war Oslo, and when the story wraps back around to post-war Oslo, Yndis sells the changes her character has had to endure particularly effectively — and at a point when it is most difficult to sympathise with the protagonist, Jim.

It was a far more personal play than I anticipated: Jim is lovingly rooted in Nunnery’s own Liverpool, and he’s an angry, lonely guy, whose anger and loneliness is magnified by the war. His affair with Else highlights the cruel after-effects of Nazi occupation and reminds us that it wasn’t only the men in the armed forces who suffered from their wartime experiences. It’s a lot to absorb in 90 minutes, and I can’t quite shake the feeling that it might have been a more effective story if it had been trying to do less. But the cast sells it with such conviction, and the atmosphere overtakes you so effectively, that this is something of a minor complaint.