Screenwriter »

• Leave China Miéville alone, Priest.

  April 1, 2012 @ 10:36 pm | by Donald Clarke

  Have you seen this? Christopher Priest, the author of The Prestige and The Affirmation, has got himself in a terrible tizzy about the nominations for this year’s Arthur C Clarke Award. Mr Priest maintains that his objections have nothing to do with the fact that his own novel, The Islanders, was omitted from the shortlist for the science fiction gong. Anyway, he’s really got stuck in up to the oxters. He has described the list as “dreadful” and demanded that the judging panel resign. Among the writers he slagged off was China Miéville, among the best of his generation, whose superb Embassytown enters the Arthur C Clarke starting gate at narrow odds.

  

  Would you mess with this man?

  Priest says that unless China is ”is told in clear terms that he is underachieving, that he is restricting his art by depending too heavily on genre commonplaces, he will never write the great novels that many people say he is capable of”. What the  heck is he talking about? It is hard to think of a novelist less at home to the commonplace than China Miéville. Raised in North London, China studied social anthropology at Cambridge and has spent time campaigning for the Socialist Workers Party. Those two interests come together in a series of novels that combine rigorous construction of alternative worlds with an unavoidable concern for the politics of the one in which we all live.

  Inevitably, he has been co-opted into a movement. Apparently, China Miéville is part of something called New Weird Fiction. Okay then. There is something of H P Lovecraft in his taste for gloopy, eerie versions of our universe. But Miéville works much harder at the greater architecture. Rush, for a demonstration, towards the first two novels in his Bas-Lag trilogy: Perdido Street Station and The Scar. Even if you don’t have any time for the fantastic, you will surely find it hard to resist the way in which he fashions cities every bit as vibrant and overstuffed as the London of Dickens or the St Petersburg of Dostoevsky. They may be made of boats bound together on dangerous seas. They may feature ghettoes stuffed with insect people. But you still feels that, armed with just the text, you could navigate your way through one of those wild conurbations.

  When discussing the better science fiction (or crime) novels, we often set to moaning about the way such writers rarely get nominated for the mainstream literary awards. More often that not, such arguments play to bum notes. Literary fiction is, rightly or wrongly, almost a genre in its own right. We know roughly what to expect from a book by Julian Barnes or Ian McEwan, just as we have some notion what we’ll get from a work by Ian Rankin or James Elroy. Why bother trying to mix it up. The genres thrive in their own waters.

  Well, it strike me that Miéville is going to hang around in the same way that H G Wells or Robert Louis Stevenson has done. More than a few supposed literary writers will go the way of Hugh Walpole or Marie Corelli. It might be nice to give him a gong from the zone beyond science fiction’s specialist thoroughfares.

  For now, Christopher Priest should be dispatched to the street with a boot to the bottom. If you want to get aboard the Miéville train then grab a copy of Perdido Street Station and work forwards relentlessly. I wouldn’t bother waiting for the movies. They haven’t minted the mind that could turn these visions into manageable motion pictures. They may never manage it.

  

• Why so little chatter about Dickens?

  February 9, 2012 @ 12:43 am | by Donald Clarke

  

  The question is, of course, more than a little facetious. Having kicked off sometime in 1978, the Dickens bicentennial has now passed through about five media cycles. You know how these things go. Four hundred articles appear. Then somebody pens a piece wondering “Why oh why is everyone writing about bloody Dickens?” Then one of the original correspondents bemoans the inevitability of the backlash and happily finds himself or herself at the vanguard of a counter-counter revolution. The procedure repeats itself until the tricentennial looms.

  Here’s the thing. No British novelist is more worthy of your time than Charles Dickens. You will note that I have expressed myself in slightly couched terms. Yes, George Eliot is a more piercing social analyst. Yes, W M Thackeray is less sentimental. Yes, Jane Austen has a lighter touch. But none of those writers had the same ability to re-imagine the universe with such potency. What I mean is that the novels of Charles Dickens take place in an environment that is every bit as believably fantastic as that conjured up by less conspicuously Earth-bound talents such as Jules Verne, J R R Tolkien or H P Lovecraft. It is a very agreeable place to visit. Aged sea captains are forever opening dusty bottles of Madeira with their hooks. Dyspeptic nurses sit beside suspicious cats. Strange young men makes friends with humane pedagogues. It is often a very unsettling spot. Crossing-sweepers die lonely in the street. At least two wicked old ladies teach their charges to lead men astray. Ingratiating factotums crawl horribly after their vain superiors. Immerse yourself in all this for an hour or so and Jane Austen begins to seem more than a little underpowered.

  

  Mervyn Peake’s drawing of Jo, the crossing-sweeper, from Bleak House.

  So, why is any of this worth writing? We have, in recent weeks, been told over and over (and over) again that there’s nobody to touch old Charles Dickens. He occupies, puffier pieces suggest, a place just below Shakespeare in the pantheon. Well such raves ignore the fact that the venerable geezer has been fiercely old-fashioned for at least a century. Obviously he had supporters, but most critics echoed George Orwell’s view on Dickens: “rotten architecture, but wonderful gargoyles”. That is to say the books are awash with great characters, but they are shabbily structured. University lecturers tolerated Dickens, but usually argued that anybody who preferred him to George Eliot could not be regarded as a serious person. Up to 20 years ago, we Dickensians could, at least, celebrate the fact that he remained the most popular of 19th century English novelists. When Colin Firth hopped into a lake that all changed. Now, filthy Austen comfortably holds that title.

  Let’s get the most common objection out of the way. There is (alas) no disputing the fact that Dickens can be appallingly sentimental. Few articles on the great man fail to mention Oscar Wilde’s amusing (I admit it) remark that: “one would have to have a heart of stone to read the death of little Nell without laughing.” Peter Ackroyd, who bows to nobody in his devotion to Charlie, notes that, in Dombey and Son, the pathetic, wan Florence Dombey weeps on 87 occasions; even in a book so weighty that’s an awful lot of blubbing. But, as you move through the career, the characters harden up somewhat and — take heed, Orwell — the plots become ever more securely structured. I can understand why a reader might, after embarking on The Old Curiosity Shop or Oliver Twist, quickly reject the author as nothing more than a maudlin melodramatist.

  Dipping in for the first time, you don’t really want to bother with any full-length novel written before Dombey and Son (1848). Yes, I’m sorry. This does eliminate Oliver Twist, Nicholas Nickleby and The Old Curiosity Shop. Come back later if you fancy. The gargoyles really are great in those books. But the novels are chaotically plotted and the noise of blubbing young women is quite overpowering.

  The books written after that period do, however, help to explain the recent hullabaloo. Bleak House, Little Dorrit, Great Expectations, Our Mutual Friend: what a sequence of masterpieces. True, unlike in Austen, pale young ladies rarely go shell-collecting. But there are murders, labyrinthine law cases, unexpected windfalls, lurking ghosts and untouchable depictions of London that make that city seem more exciting (and a deal less cosy) than Middle-earth. Heck, somebody actually spontaneously combusts in Bleak House. Take that Mrs Gaskell.

  Anyway, this being nominally a cinema “blog”, I should probably say a bit about Dickens on film. In truth, the larger 19th century novels have always fought back against adaptation. They’re so darn long. They have so many characters. Here’s an interesting thought. Many critics’ choice (though not mine) for the greatest English novel of the 19th century has never been made into a movie. It seems astonishing. But no film-maker has ever attempted Middlemarch. Emily Brontë comes off all right. Dickens doesn’t do badly. There’s that nice Ralph Thomas version of A Tale of Two Cities. Who could fail to love W C Fields as Mr Micawber in George Cukor’s take on David Copperfield. The Polanski Oliver Twist isn’t bad. I came close to recommending Christine Edzard’s Little Dorrit as the best of the lot. Split into two parts, featuring a superb Alec Guinness as the useless Mr Dorrit, the picture is an essential watch for any member of the Dickens clan. But let’s not be silly. The greatest Dickens adaptation on film is, of course, David Lean’s gorgeous, creepy translation of Great Expectations. I was going to post the fabulous beginning. But apparently I can legally show you the whole bleeding film. We’ve come along way in 200 years.