Beowulf - The Movie

So I saw Beowulf last week. (What, you want timely? This is a history blog. Timely is not a priority.) I had been threatening to drag my wife to it for weeks, and every time I did, she would threaten to drag me to some Jane Austen Knitting Club movie in retaliation, until we were sitting in a Barnes and Noble coffee shop across from a Beowulf book display, and the following conversation occurred:

HER: Why didn't you tell me that Neil Gaiman wrote the screenplay?
ME: I'm pretty sure I did.
HER: No, you would just point and say "I'm dragging you to see that."
ME: Well, it's been mentioned in every single ad.
HER: We could go this weekend.

(Postscript: my wife went home and watched the trailers. Contrary to what I led her to believe, there is no booming voice that says "Screenplay by Neil Gaiman and Roger Avary." But, you know, the credits were still there.)

(He will kill your monster ...)

A friend who came with us called it "Monty Python on steroids." Me, I'm still cogitating. I liked it. I liked it a lot. The story moved, the actors were excellent, and the 3-D got oohs and aahhs. But there was a lot going on. It was animated, basically. Motion capture of live action, but every frame had clearly been computer-generated. And I don't know why, but I really thought that helped the tone. This is basically a big, gory fairy tale. If it had been live-action, it would have lost a little of the fairy-tale quality. If it had been more Shreklike, it would have been harder to take the mature content seriously. (As was, I think some of the audience had a hard time downshifting from the comic first act to the tragic third act.)

The plot took quite a few liberties with the poem. (It had to, if it were going to be filmable.) What I was impressed by was how Gaiman and Avary kept so many of the main elements (Grendel, Grendel's mother, the dragon), and played with the minor elements to make it a more unified story. In the poem, for example, Wiglaf is only around at the end, for the dragon parts. In the film, he's Beowulf's loyal sidekick. It worked. While the poem takes the approach "There was this guy Beowulf, and this is what happened to him," the film adds a few things in on the margins to give his story (I can't believe I'm saying this) an emotional arc -- gloryhound makes good, maybe, before dying violently. (This spoils nothing. The movie's been out for a week, the poem for more than a thousand years.)

My wife, who is far more literate than I (she's read the poem, in the Olde Englishe), assures me that several plot elements were lifted from John Gardner's Grendel, which I have on my "To-Read" shelf. Guess that will come down sooner rather than later. Meantime, I'm working my way through the poem (which I have never been able to finish). More on that when I do.

You Can't Make This Stuff Up: Chevalier St. Georges

Quick quiz. The man depicted above:

(a) wrote six operas in the late eighteenth century, including one on which he collaborated with Pierre Choderlos de Laclos, of Dangerous Liaisons fame;
(b) founded the Society of the Friends of the Blacks, dedicated to eradicating slavery;
(c) was the most celebrated pupil of the Tessier de la Boessiere fencing academy;
(d) once threw a exhibition fencing match to the Chevalier d'Eon, a former spy who, after a stint in Russia disguised as a woman, spent the rest of his life as a transvestite.

The answer is "(e)," all of the above. I love it when it's all of the above.

The Chevalier on Wikipedia.

More here.


And, of course, soon to be a major motion picture.

Sontag on Story Shape

It's late, and I haven't posted yet, so I'm going for an easy link entry tonight. The Guardian has never-before-published essay by Susan Sontag that has this little bit in it:

The pleasure of fiction is precisely that it moves to an ending. A novel is a world with borders. For there to be completeness, unity, coherence, there must be borders. Everything is relevant in the journey we take within those borders. One could describe the story's end as a point of magical convergence for the shifting preparatory views: a fixed position from which the reader sees how initially disparate things finally belong together.

I was going to say that this suggests one difference between history and historical fiction -- that one tries to bring things together, and the other doesn't. But that's not really true. Good history can do what Sontag describes. Bad novels don't. So I'll let this nag at me some more. Now it can nag at you, too.

Soft idiot softly

And now, your moment of highbrow high concept for the week:

WH Auden may have helped Guy Burgess flee Britain for the Soviet Union back in 1951.

It doesn't look like it was intentional. Burgess, looking for cover for his escape, tried to get himself invited to Auden's new home in Ichia, Naples. (Burgess and Auden were both gay, and had a passing acquaintance.) When he called the friends Auden was staying with, Auden was too drunk to answer. Somehow, the phone calls became public knowledge, and MI6 wound up interrogating Auden.

Just imagine: one of England's most famous poets gets questioned about his role in helping one of England's most notorious spies flee the country. How nerve-wracking would that be for a closeted gay man in the 1950s?

... 299 ...

A tiny bit of 300 followup, from BBC News. Some Iranian government officials and newspapers are protesting that the movie is "psychological warfare."

Javad Shamqadri, a cultural advisor to Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, said it was "plundering Iran's historic past and insulting this civilization".

He branded the film "psychological warfare" against Tehran and its people.

...

Daily newspaper Ayandeh-No carried the headline "Hollywood declares war on Iranians".
The paper said: "It seeks to tell people that Iran, which is in the Axis of Evil now, has for long been the source of evil and modern Iranians' ancestors are the ugly murderous dumb savages you see in 300."

Can't say this is a surprise, or even that it's unfounded. (I do think Shamqadri may have meant "propaganda," though. Psychological warfare presupposes the movie will get wide distribution in Iran.) For example, the BBC article runs a photo of a Spartan fighting one of the Persian immortals. Students of history know the Immortals as the Persian imperial guard, which served as an infantry unit at both Marathon and Thermopylae. Viewers of 300 know the Immortals as the Masked Persian Zombie Ninjas that attack right before the elephants and the rhinoceros.

Free Story Idea: The Anglo-French Republic

From the latest New York Review of Books (which, clearly, got it from the Guardian when I wasn't looking):

In January, a government document was discovered in the British national archives which, according to the Guardian newspaper, "shocked historians." This was the note, dated September 28, 1956, of a meeting in London between the British prime minister, the conservative and Francophile Anthony Eden, and his French equivalent, the socialist and Anglophile Guy Mollet—one of those rare encounters when two premiers spoke each other's language both fluently and willingly. ... [A]t this rare moment of concord, Mollet suggested that the two countries unite; or, if not that, then at least France join the Commonwealth. The British note shows that Eden recommended "immediate consideration" of the latter idea; also that Mollet "had not thought there need be difficulty over France accepting the headship of Her Majesty; [and] that the French would welcome a common citizenship arrangement on an Irish basis."

There's the basis for an interesting alternate history. What would the past fifty years have looked like if Mollet and Eden had tried for unification?

The Review notes that the "British treated it as a jokey what-if, speculating on amalgamated soccer teams and the possibly improved quality of croissants in British shops."

Forget if it was successful. What if the countries had tried it, and it failed?

Women Onstage

From the Times Literary Supplement, a review article on women's roles onstage since the Restoration:

If we are to change the way that theatre women are included in today’s stories, we must attend to how they have been marginalised in the stories of the past.

The article is mainly focused on the business end of the theater, which, frankly, makes it even more interesting.

Clockpunk

(via Warren Ellis)

Clockpunk is the new name for alternate history stories that take place in a world where the Renaissance yielded more technological innovation than ours did. (I'm assuming, from the few writeups I've seen so far, that the soon-to-be-cliched premise of much of this fiction will be "What if we had listened to Da Vinci?")

The term appears to derive from an old role-playing-game manual, and the term may have referred to something else entirely at one point.

The new blog devoted to this Renaissance strain of clockpunk -- The Da Vinci Automata -- seems interesting enough so far. But, so far, it also seems more an attempt to create a subgenre around a label than a recognition of an actual literary movement within either science or historical fiction. (For example, click on the "Bibliography" at DVA, and all you'll see is "To be added soon.")

Still, I'll keep an eye out. Good alternate history can be fascinating, and it's possible the Da Vinci Automata will point out some solid stories that would otherwise get overlooked.

History and Film: 300

The good news is, it was just about what I expected it to be. Awkward hard-boiled bon mots, gloriously over-the-top violence, computer-generated rhinoceri. The trailer did not lie.

Historically, this movie was nowhere close to accurate, but if you're going to a movie about ancient Sparta where the poster looks like it's advertising a heavy metal concert, what were you expecting? Among other things, the movie tries to cast the helot-owning Spartans as the champions of freedom, and has a plot point turn on the queen's alleged adultery, despite the fact that extramarital sex was not particularly scandalous in Sparta.

But the biggest problem, from a storytelling standpoint, was that the script allowed the foregone conclusion (the 300 Spartans die) to rob the story of any tension. Up until the moment they die, none of the Spartans surrender. None of them even consider surrendering. And none of them lose at hand-to-hand combat. Which means that most of the scenes are just a repeat of the Spartans facing a threat, dispatching it handily, and then reaffirming that no, they're still not surrendering. It's too bad, the last thing I expected was that the battle scenes would get boring.

303 ... 302 ... 301 ...

Going to see 300 tonight.

It looks gloriously bad.

There will be a full report later.

(also, Rome reviews to resume shortly)

Rome - "Passover"

"Sorry about your uncle."
"I'm made his son, by will."
"Oh, congratulations. You'll be wanting vengeance, then."
Titus Pullo and Octavian.

The new season of Rome is finally here, which makes me a little giddy, since it's one of the few shows that bothers to dramatize history, and since it does it so well. I'd been thinking about how it manages to create an ancient Rome that feels so convincing, without bogging the viewer down in detail. Tonight, at least, two things pop out: violence and ritual.
The violence in Rome is brutal and casual. (As opposed to the violence in Deadwood, which, while brutal and common, was usually accompanied by somber lighting and that plucked-string score that heralded major events.) As a result, it leaves the feeling that violence, while serious, was something that ancient Romans lived with every day. What makes pieces of violence noteworthy on the show are their meanings to the characters. Caesar's death is worth paying attention to because it has an immediate impact on a number of lives. The manner of his death is noteworthy primarily because it occurred in the Senate chamber. Alex Epstein of the screenwriting blog Complications Ensue has already made this point well about the first season, particularly about how the writing frequently makes violence the second most important thing in the scene to the characters.
But the other thing that Rome does well is its use of ritual. Dropping in rituals that advance the story but still seem foreign to modern viewers help to create a different world very effectively without slowing down the story. Sometimes, these rituals are set pieces, like the twin funerals in this episode. Other times, they're just snatches of dialogue or actorly business. Titus Pullo marries his former slave by asking, and then marking her forehead. Attia, when planning to flee the city, barks a quick "Pack the money and the household gods." The script doesn't dwell on the exotic moments, and neither do the actors, and it's that ruthless efficiency that sells the difference so well.

Sunday at Borders - 1 October 2006

New and reviewed this week in history and historical fiction:

Historical Fiction
House of Meetings, by Martin Amis, reviewed by Bharat Tandon in the Times Literary Supplement, by Tim Martin in the Independent, and by M John Harrison in the Guardian. Martin Amis shifts tone to write about the Soviet gulag -- or does he? Tandon thinks he hit his mark by adopting a more restrained style; Tim Martin thinks it sounds too much like a Martin Amis self-parody; Harrison thinks that the style "opens us into the central irony of most Amis novels, in which the issue of storytelling is always the issue of character, of self-interest and nuanced self-deception - narrative as the filthy Nabokovian stream from which the reader, like a shit-eater at the bottom of the labour camp food chain, must filter moral sustenance," which, I think, puts him in Martin's camp.

Thirteen Moons, by Charles Frazier, reviewed by Jonathan Yardley in the Washington Post. Yardley thinks Frazier is overrated, and his latest is "corny" and "will be putting a lot of people to sleep." At that point, does it really matter what it's about?

On Agate Hill, by Lee Smith, reviewed by Donna Rifkind in the Washington Post. Oh look, another post-Civil War novel -- this time, it's about a girl coming of age in 1880s Appalchia. Rifkind singles out the way that Smith has "invented artifacts" to tell the story -- maybe it's the first time she's run across it.

History
"All Governments Lie": The Life and Times of Rebel Journalist I.F. Stone, by Myra MacPherson, reviewed by Paul Berman in the New York Times. I.F. Stone was a journalist who debunked press coverage of the Vietnam war; he also may or may not have been a Soviet stooge. Berman thinks MacPherson's zealous defense of the man may have hurt him more than it helped him.

Liberty, by Lucy Moore, reviewed by Marianne Brace in the Independent. Moore has written six portraits of women who lived through the French Revolution. Brace calls it a "lively narrative full of pungent details."

More Emma Darwin

Leaving aside a few fatuous observations by the interviewer (she's just learned about this new "buzz term" historical fiction, "it's so hot right now ..."), another interesting interview with Emma Darwin. I'm going to have to pick up her book soon. If Darwin writes half as well as she thinks about writing, it should be great. For example:

I usually do basic research first, to establish that I can do what I want to do. Then I write the first draft without stopping to find things out more than I absolutely have to. Then I have a manuscript and a pile of notes for more research. That's often when I'll try to travel to places I need to, partly to get that authenticity, and partly because you stumble across things you wouldn't have known to look for. But you have to get beyond the research, or your novel turns into a ghastly kind of history-book-with-dialogue.

Plus, anyone willing to say that Charles Darwin is too well-traveled a historical topic to write about right now gets huge points from me. Redeemable for what, I don't know ...

HistFiction.net

I'm in the middle of revising how I handle this site a little. Expect some small (but, to me, significant) changes come October. But I don't want to leave the blog dead in the meantime. So, a little linkblogging. Today, HistFiction.net, which seems to be a decent collection of links about historical fiction. While I'm not crazy about the lack of diverse categories, I'm willing to chalk that up to two factors:
(1) There may not be that many other historical fiction sites.
(2) These links are not a bad snapshot of how people think of historical fiction.
So click over, and do a little exploring.

Sunday at Borders - 24 September 2006

It's a light week this week. So, without further ado, new and reviewed this week in history and historical fiction:

Historical Fiction
Imperium, by Robert Harris, reviewed by Dennis Drabelle for the Washington Post. "I could have used this book while taking third-year Latin," says the reviewer (halfway through this myself, I know how he feels). Harris hits the high points of Cicero's career, but fills in lots of juicy backstory about just how the conspiracies and prosecutions that led to his great speeches happened -- it's inside baseball for high-school classics students, and I mean that in a good way.

History
Donne: The reformed soul, by John Stubbs, reviewed by Katherine Duncan-Jones in the Times Literary Supplement. Donne has pretty much defied biographers, says Duncan-Jones. Which makes it all the more remarkable that Stubbs has "completed a substantial and lively account of Donne's life and times ..."

Consuming Passions: Leisure and pleasure in Victorian Britain, by Judith Flanders, reviewed by Rosemary Ashton in the Times Literary Supplement. This isn't the first historical account of leisure, but the angle (that increased leisure time and funds were spin-offs from the Industrial Revolution) feels fresh. Of course, since it's a British history, it wouldn't be complete without some account of class conflict; at least this time it's relevant.

The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million, by Daniel Mendelsohn, reviewed by Ron Rosenbaum for the New York Times. I have to admit, my first reaction on seeing this review was "not another Holocaust book," but Rosenbaum points out a few things that turned me around. Mendelsohn is an interesting and careful scholar who writes on a number of subjects, and his book appears to eschew a number Holocaust cliches (like "backshadowing" -- making lives seem tragic in light of the coming Holocaust) in favor of reconstructing the fate of a single family.

Graphic History: Chicken with Plums

This is a first, because the English-language version of this graphic novel (the original French edition, Poulet aux Prunes, was published in 2004) hasn't come out yet, and won't until October 2. Pantheon Books sent out advance copies to graphic novel reviewers, and and the fact that I can occasionally be mistaken for one delights me to no end.

[and once again, Blogger Beta is having trouble with images]

Chicken with Plums is by Marjane Satrapi, author of the excellent Persepolis and Persepolis 2. It's the story of her great-uncle Nasser Ali Khan, a musician who, in 1958, suffered the loss of his favorite tar, and died of a broken heart eight days later. The graphic novel covers those eight days. Since it hasn't been released yet, I am going to go really light on anything that might be considered a spoiler. And I'm simply going to say that, while I thought both Persepolis graphic novels were excellent, I thought this surpassed them both. Buy it. You won't regret it.

Small observations:

• The history is worn lightly. Satrapi doesn't shy away from referring to events or people that her Western audience won't know offhand, and that adds to the verisimilitude. Rather than stopping the narrative for explanations, she just drops footnotes, which works better in graphic novels than it does in prose.
  
• Satrapi also plays a lot with chronology. The events of the book take place over eight days, but flashbacks (occasionally repeated) provide context and add layers to interactions we've already witnessed. In many ways, she has structured this like a murder mystery, even though we are watching the death as it happens.
  
• The linework is deceptively simple, and the backgrounds (the set dressing of comics) are minimal. Each detail Satrapi does use is telling enough that the end result is more powerful than if she had laden her backgrounds with endless Easter eggs.
• Like most great historical fiction (and this is historical fiction in the loosest sense -- it's necessarily a fictionalized account of her family, and it takes place before she was born), Chicken with Plums plays with interpretation. We watch the events that lead up to Nasser Ali Khan's death, but she wisely doles out information sparingly, so we don't really understand them until the end of the story. It's the things no one bothers to tell each other that are most important to Nasser Ali Khan's motives.
  

Overall, just an outstanding piece of work. Highly recommended.

And Still More Black Dahlia

Because it's late, and I'm tired ...

Slate's Seth Mnookin on why people seem so fascinated by the Black Dahlia murder. (Hint: It's Ellroy's fault.) A sample:

The Black Dahlia is, with its overlapping themes of obsession, sublimated lust, revenge, trust, and incest, the most personally revealing of Ellroy's novels. It transformed the murky facts surrounding Short's life and death into art, the unknown "dead white woman" becoming a tabula rasa on which the author could wrestle with his anger and affection toward his mother. ... Ellroy's book introduced the paradigm of Short as an unknowable Everywoman to a new generation.

I kind of buy it. The Dahlia murder was kind of a train wreck, and it was amplified by Ellroy's own issues, as well as his ample writing talent.

Sunday at Borders - 17 Sept 2006

New and reviewed this week:

Historical Fiction
The Translation of Dr. Appelles, by David Treuer, reviewed by Brian Hall in the Washington Post. Treuer's novel covers a pair of parallel love stories: a modern one about a forlorn translator and a college librarian and an early 19th-century one about a pair of foundlings rescued by an unnamed (in the review) Indian tribe. The focus on the translator sounds interesting -- if only Hall weren't so convinced the majority of us great unwashed won't like the book as much as he did.

The Fall of Troy, by Peter Ackroyd, reviewed by Sue Gaisford in the Independent. A "lurid and generally entertaining drama" that's "packed full to bursting with extreme and supernatural occurences." Oh yeah, it's about a fictionalized version of Heinrich Schliemann, the man who supposedly discovered Troy.

The Meaning of Night, by Michael Cox, reviewed by Christian House in the Independent. House thinks this "600-page Victorian murder mystery pastiche" is "an unadulterated pleasure." My guess is that people who like this sort of thing will like this particular version of this sort of thing.

Zoli, by Colum McCann, reviewed by Ed Wood in the Independent. A novel about "the rise and decline of a Romani singer and poet" in Iron-Curtain Poland. Wood thinks it's ambitious, but doesn't quite hit.


History
Five Germanies I Have Known, by Fritz Stern, reviewed by Anne Applebaum in the Washington Post. The renowned German Historian (Blood and Iron) tells a more personal history of Germany. Unlike Grass's controversial new memoir, there are no surprise revelations about the Waffen SS, but that doesn't mean there are no surprises.

LBJ: Architect of American Ambition, by Randall Woods, reviewed by Nick Kotz in the Washington Post. I've reviewed this one before, but Kotz seems to like it. He cites its balance and "nuanced sense of Southern politics" as its greatest strengths, and a series of "minor errors" as its biggest weakness.

Bad Faith: A Forgotten History of Family, Fatherland and Vichy France, by Carmen Callil, reviewed by Christopher Caldwell in the New York Times. Louis Darquier, one of the architects of the Vichy government in France, sounds like a twisted, real-life version of Casablanbca's Captain Renault. But the real story here is apparently why Callil decided to write the book in the first place: when her psychiatrist committed suicide, she turned out to be Darquier's abandoned daughter.

The Lost Men, by Kelly Tyler-Lewis, reviewed by Magnus Mills in the Independent. Another book about Shackleton, who explored Antarctica. This one, though, focuses more on the Ross Sea party, left behind while Shackleton ventured out on the continent.

The Long Exile, by Melanie McGrath, reviewed by Edward Marriott in the Guardian. In the 1950s, Canada convinced a number of Inuit to resettle from the Hudson Bay to Ellesmere Island in the Polar Arctic -- when they found out they'd been lured to a dark, barren land under falser pretenses, the Inuit asked to return, and were refused. I'll be seeking this one out.

Philippa Gregory on Historical Fiction

The Boston Globe has a (brief) interview with Philippa Gregory:

The way I write historical novels is that I research and research so that I could write a book of straight history. Then I put my novelist hat on and inhabit the private life of these people until I can convey the feeling to the reader that they are really there. All characters are at one level unknowable, all you can do is look at their actions. But I haven't received any criticism.

Black Dahlia - Followup

An interview with Ellroy and Friedman. There's one bit that caught my attention:

His language is so lush. Josh was a very good barometer of what you could and couldn’t do with his work. He lived and breathed Ellroy’s complex, dark material for a decade, forcing the material into Ellroy-ese, never taking the simple route.

That explains one of the things that felt wrong to me. Too much voice-over, which led to that ponderous, choreographed feel. (LA Confidential had some of it, but it was punchier, playing as cribbed newspaper copy.)

Also, despite Ellroy's protests here, he has propounded at least one theory before. It was in an documentary. Pretty sure this was the one.