Do you remember The Flashing Blade? You'd need to be of a certain age, I guess, and to have grown up in the UK, but basically it was the background music to every long, six week school holiday in the 1970s. As soon as the holidays rolled around, the BBC would wheel out a children's TV schedule for the weekdays to keep the little horrors entertained. And it was always the same schedule, it seemed. It would consist of seemingly endless loops of Why Don't You?, Robinson Crusoe, White Horses and of course The Flashing Blade.
Most of the others didn't interest me much, but a swashbuckling action series with swords and explosions and lots of riding around for no good reason? Sign me up! I used to love The Flashing Blade, and can still recite the lyrics to the theme tune word perfect to this day:
You've got to fight for what you want
For all that you believe.
It's right to fight for what you want
To live the way you please.
As long as we have done our best
Then no-one can do more.
And life and love and happiness
Are well worth fighting for.
I was vaguely aware at the time that it was dubbed and that it seemed to be set in some obscure war that we were never taught at school, where the French were fighting the Spanish and the French were, amazingly, the good guys, but not much else.
So in a fit of nostalgia a week or so ago I went and ordered the two-set DVD of the series from Amazon. It consists of 12 episodes, the last of which the BBC never showed for some reason, and which consequently is in French with English subtitles. It was of course a French TV series - Le Chevalier Tempête - the Storm Knight, I guess? - made in 1967. For the uninitiated it concerns the siege of a fortress - Casale - by the Spanish, and the attempts of the French Chevalier de Recci, the Knight of the title, to get through Spanish lines to organise a relief force. It is in the tradition of Dumas and the Three Musketeers, with lots of swashbucking action.
I had thought that I remembered a lot about the series - the dashing raid into the Spanish lines, the escape disguised as lepers, the beautiful Lady Isabella and the villainous Don Alonzo, the fall into the river that the Chevalier recovers from, but re-watching it has been an interesting experience, as I clearly only understood about one third - maybe not even that much - of what was going on. What - they were captured by a Croatian bandit called The Voivode? I didn't remember that. It was all about a peace conference involving the Abbe (later to become Cardinal) Mazarin? It was set in northern Italy? The Chevalier disguised himself as Harlequin in a Commedia dell'Arte troupe? Wow.
The plot was much more involved than I remembered, and even as an adult I needed my wits about me to keep up - no wonder so little had registered on the 10-year old me. There is politics, double-dealing, intrigue, romance... it is clearly intended as a fairly adult series. I'm not quite sure what the BBC were thinking, scheduling it for children. Presumably it was cheap, and maybe bought as a job lot with Robinson Crusoe, which was also French.
As an amateur historian, more interesting for me was that much of the historical backdrop was reasonably real. In fact the siege of Casale Monferrato (in the series they actually use the beautiful and impressive Chateau Gaillard in Normandy as a stand-in for the besieged fortress) was a real event and part of the War of the Mantuan Succession, one of the myriad sub-conflicts that formed part of the larger Thirty Years War in Europe. It ran from 1628-1631 and was indeed ended by a peace brokered by Mazarin, at the time a Papal envoy, and guaranteed by the Duchy of Savoy, where most of the action in the series takes place.
Mazarin is an interesting character. He was later the replacement for Cardinal Richelieu as the Chief Minister of France, and is the foil of the last Musketeers novels - Twenty Years Later and The Viscount of Bracelonne. But in fact he was an Italian, studied as a Jesuit but never joined, became a lawyer, and had a brief career as an infantry captain with Montferrat in the War of the Mantuan Succession before ending up as a Papal envoy. He is portrayed in the series, as he probably was in real life, as an admirer of Richelieu and French supporter.
The series is also very good at portraying the dilemma of the small state (here Savoy) caught between two, or perhaps three superpowers - France, Spain, and the Papacy. The equivocating of the Count de Sospel - in the series Savoy's chancellor - is very well caught.
And also - it took me a while, but I eventually most definitely started to get this vibe - the series also features French agents hiding people in barns and smuggling them past the black-clad Spanish troops, secret rendezvouses, betrayals... it's essentially a little play on the French Resistance, told only 20 years after the real thing. There's a bit in Episode 9 where the Maquis are basically delaying the Wehrmacht to let the British agents get to safety. It was at that point that the penny dropped. Of course, in the spirit of the nascent European Union, the actual Germans in the series are represented by a heroic mercenary captain, Kleist, who is on the French side, and who dies a noble death fighting for them.
So... what to make of The Flashing Blade? For all of its cheap 60s production values, it was clearly a fairly serious series, with French-Canadian, Belgian and Swiss money involved as well as French. It can easily hold its head up alongside offerings like the BBC's more recent Musketeers. It certainly didn't belong as children's holiday viewing, but instead, re-watching it, I was surprised how good it actually was. Maybe something of that impinged itself on my young mind. I'm certainly glad to have made its reacquaintance.
Monday 20 August 2018
Saturday 21 July 2018
Bad Books
Someone on Twitter asked today: "What is the worst book you have ever finished?"
I found that quite an interesting question, as I am not one of those people who feels duty bound to plod through every single page of a book they are not enjoying. I decide the book isn't for me, put it to one side, and feel no guilt whatsoever. Very occasionally a book has surprised me and got much better as it went on, but more often than not the first 100 pages is quite enough to realise that what you are holding is garbage. So for that reason, there are many many bad books I've never finished. In my 20s, I tried, out of some sense of completing an unfinished education, to read books like Das Kapital and Mein Kampf, but quickly gave up. Marx is like reading a badly translated textbook on the dullest subject imaginable, and Hitler is like being trapped next to the person on the bus who won't stop going on about immigrants - if Rudolf Hess had edited it, I'd hate to have seen the original. Likewise fiction: L Ron Hubbard's Battlefield Earth is probably the worst written book I have ever read, but I felt no compunction to slog through all 1,050 pages to make completely sure of that, and James Joyce's Ulysses may be a breakthrough work of modernist literature, but I have to agree with Virginia Woolf's verdict: "never did any book so bore me", and like her, I quit around page 200. By the by - some books that often make it into people's 'most hated', like Moby-Dick, I actually quite enjoyed. I guess you just have to find the technical stuff about whaling interesting.
So for me to finish a book, it has to have held my attention somehow, and surely that means that by at least one definition, it can't be that bad a book? The Da Vinci Code springs immediately to mind; like Jeffrey Archer, with whom he has a lot in common, Dan Brown writes terrible prose, but both authors have the saving grace that they can do plotting and pacing, like a lot of pulp fiction writers, and so they carry you along to the end in spite of themselves. For sheer incoherent muddle it's hard to beat the Reverend Lionel Fanthorpe, whose career with pulp imprint Badger Books spanned dozens of pseudonyms and literally hundreds of books, 'written' at the rate of one per week, actually dictated into tapes sent off to be typed up by little old ladies, who might call back to say he was approaching his word limit, leaving him to wrap up the story in about two incredibly confused pages of deus ex machina. His Galaxy 666 (written as 'Pel Torro') is the Plan 9 From Outer Space of pulp SF, but like that film it enters into 'so bad it's good' territory, as Fanthorpe desperately tries to pad his word count with thesaurus dumps or spends three pages describing the colour of grey, pink and white rocks. He's also a lovely man in person by the way.
I had to wrack my brains to think of the worst book I had actually finished. Full disclosure - I read a lot of very bad pulp SF and horror in my youth. Frederick Dunstan's Habitation One? A derivative SF tale of a post-apocalyptic society in a huge closed city that aims for JG Ballard via Logan's Run, but falls horrifyingly short. The entire corpus of Guy N Smith, sub-James Herbert low rent British horror writer, a kind of real world Garth Marenghi, with his tales of killer crabs and the seven plagues of Egypt unleashed upon Birmingham? Getting warmer. The Splatterpunk Anthology, an unremitingly disgusting feast of shock-lit that wanted to be Bret Easton Ellis when it grew up (or at least Clive Barker)? Certainly in the bottom ten. Incidentally - do not attempt to read any of these books. Really. To paraphrase the warning they used to give after Captain Scarlet - Sub-Editor is Indestructible - You Are Not.
But all fiction, no matter how bad, still has something to it - that human desire to tell stories and entertain. I think to really plumb the depths you have to consider factual (or notionally factual) writing. Below the 1421 - China Discovers the World and Holy Blood, Holy Grails of this world are reams of poorly thought-out works of pseudo-history and pseudo-archaeology to make the blood of any rational individual boil with their cavalier disdain for 'evidence' and 'facts'. And then we come to self-help books. And then we come to those that try to combine them all with cod philosophy and act as a cheap way of cashing in on people's insecurities. I'd love to place Dianetics, the Modern Science of Mental Health in here, but unfortunately that's another one that I never finished. So my own prize for the worst book I have ever finished goes to a piece of garbage I was given as a going away present to university by my eccentric aunt, herself a devotee of transcendental meditation, reflexology and various other forms of bullshit. Behold the wonder that is: Bring Out The Magic In Your Mind, by 'Al Koran'. To quote Angel Heart: "even your name is a dime store joke." 'Al' - I think we can assume this is not his real name - to quote the blurb, tells you how his incredible discovery of "Personal Electricity Within You" gives you "Magnetic Powers". With these you can "Learn How To... Send Out Dynamic Thought-Wishes, Silent Messages That Influence People To Like You, Trust You, And Help You." Boiled down to its roots, his thesis is - if you wish hard enough for something, it will happen. Naturally these wishes must be essentially selfish - a new car, an attractive girlfriend, a private plane. All is within your grasp, if you will it. Go through the world bending lesser mortals to your mighty will.
I didn't know then, but have since discovered, that Al was born in the rather more prosaic surroundings of Clapton in 1917 as Edward Doe, and after giving up his career as a hairdresser, he became a magician and "mentalist" in the 1950s and 60s, and he wrote the book in 1964 at the height of his 'fame', before he went to the US. You can see him performing in a very grainy recording of the Ed Sullivan Show here. He reminds me a bit of a proto-Yuri Geller, in that like him, he was clearly a talented stage magician who had decided to pretend he was a genuine psychic because it brought in bigger bucks, and I'm half certain that he was Geller's inspiration. The book was ghost written for him, and was clearly just a cheap cash-in. Looking back on it now, it seems one of many similar such things, and I'm not sure why it annoys me so much that it has become my Worst Book Ever, but I think chiefly it's not just how terribly written it is (and by God it is), but the lazy cynicism at the heart of it. At least Jehovah's Witnesses believe the rubbish they're spouting. Al Koran clearly didn't, and just wanted to squeeze some more moolah from some gullible marks, and I think it annoys me most that my aunt was one of them.
Anyway, that's mine. What's yours?
I found that quite an interesting question, as I am not one of those people who feels duty bound to plod through every single page of a book they are not enjoying. I decide the book isn't for me, put it to one side, and feel no guilt whatsoever. Very occasionally a book has surprised me and got much better as it went on, but more often than not the first 100 pages is quite enough to realise that what you are holding is garbage. So for that reason, there are many many bad books I've never finished. In my 20s, I tried, out of some sense of completing an unfinished education, to read books like Das Kapital and Mein Kampf, but quickly gave up. Marx is like reading a badly translated textbook on the dullest subject imaginable, and Hitler is like being trapped next to the person on the bus who won't stop going on about immigrants - if Rudolf Hess had edited it, I'd hate to have seen the original. Likewise fiction: L Ron Hubbard's Battlefield Earth is probably the worst written book I have ever read, but I felt no compunction to slog through all 1,050 pages to make completely sure of that, and James Joyce's Ulysses may be a breakthrough work of modernist literature, but I have to agree with Virginia Woolf's verdict: "never did any book so bore me", and like her, I quit around page 200. By the by - some books that often make it into people's 'most hated', like Moby-Dick, I actually quite enjoyed. I guess you just have to find the technical stuff about whaling interesting.
So for me to finish a book, it has to have held my attention somehow, and surely that means that by at least one definition, it can't be that bad a book? The Da Vinci Code springs immediately to mind; like Jeffrey Archer, with whom he has a lot in common, Dan Brown writes terrible prose, but both authors have the saving grace that they can do plotting and pacing, like a lot of pulp fiction writers, and so they carry you along to the end in spite of themselves. For sheer incoherent muddle it's hard to beat the Reverend Lionel Fanthorpe, whose career with pulp imprint Badger Books spanned dozens of pseudonyms and literally hundreds of books, 'written' at the rate of one per week, actually dictated into tapes sent off to be typed up by little old ladies, who might call back to say he was approaching his word limit, leaving him to wrap up the story in about two incredibly confused pages of deus ex machina. His Galaxy 666 (written as 'Pel Torro') is the Plan 9 From Outer Space of pulp SF, but like that film it enters into 'so bad it's good' territory, as Fanthorpe desperately tries to pad his word count with thesaurus dumps or spends three pages describing the colour of grey, pink and white rocks. He's also a lovely man in person by the way.
I had to wrack my brains to think of the worst book I had actually finished. Full disclosure - I read a lot of very bad pulp SF and horror in my youth. Frederick Dunstan's Habitation One? A derivative SF tale of a post-apocalyptic society in a huge closed city that aims for JG Ballard via Logan's Run, but falls horrifyingly short. The entire corpus of Guy N Smith, sub-James Herbert low rent British horror writer, a kind of real world Garth Marenghi, with his tales of killer crabs and the seven plagues of Egypt unleashed upon Birmingham? Getting warmer. The Splatterpunk Anthology, an unremitingly disgusting feast of shock-lit that wanted to be Bret Easton Ellis when it grew up (or at least Clive Barker)? Certainly in the bottom ten. Incidentally - do not attempt to read any of these books. Really. To paraphrase the warning they used to give after Captain Scarlet - Sub-Editor is Indestructible - You Are Not.
But all fiction, no matter how bad, still has something to it - that human desire to tell stories and entertain. I think to really plumb the depths you have to consider factual (or notionally factual) writing. Below the 1421 - China Discovers the World and Holy Blood, Holy Grails of this world are reams of poorly thought-out works of pseudo-history and pseudo-archaeology to make the blood of any rational individual boil with their cavalier disdain for 'evidence' and 'facts'. And then we come to self-help books. And then we come to those that try to combine them all with cod philosophy and act as a cheap way of cashing in on people's insecurities. I'd love to place Dianetics, the Modern Science of Mental Health in here, but unfortunately that's another one that I never finished. So my own prize for the worst book I have ever finished goes to a piece of garbage I was given as a going away present to university by my eccentric aunt, herself a devotee of transcendental meditation, reflexology and various other forms of bullshit. Behold the wonder that is: Bring Out The Magic In Your Mind, by 'Al Koran'. To quote Angel Heart: "even your name is a dime store joke." 'Al' - I think we can assume this is not his real name - to quote the blurb, tells you how his incredible discovery of "Personal Electricity Within You" gives you "Magnetic Powers". With these you can "Learn How To... Send Out Dynamic Thought-Wishes, Silent Messages That Influence People To Like You, Trust You, And Help You." Boiled down to its roots, his thesis is - if you wish hard enough for something, it will happen. Naturally these wishes must be essentially selfish - a new car, an attractive girlfriend, a private plane. All is within your grasp, if you will it. Go through the world bending lesser mortals to your mighty will.
I didn't know then, but have since discovered, that Al was born in the rather more prosaic surroundings of Clapton in 1917 as Edward Doe, and after giving up his career as a hairdresser, he became a magician and "mentalist" in the 1950s and 60s, and he wrote the book in 1964 at the height of his 'fame', before he went to the US. You can see him performing in a very grainy recording of the Ed Sullivan Show here. He reminds me a bit of a proto-Yuri Geller, in that like him, he was clearly a talented stage magician who had decided to pretend he was a genuine psychic because it brought in bigger bucks, and I'm half certain that he was Geller's inspiration. The book was ghost written for him, and was clearly just a cheap cash-in. Looking back on it now, it seems one of many similar such things, and I'm not sure why it annoys me so much that it has become my Worst Book Ever, but I think chiefly it's not just how terribly written it is (and by God it is), but the lazy cynicism at the heart of it. At least Jehovah's Witnesses believe the rubbish they're spouting. Al Koran clearly didn't, and just wanted to squeeze some more moolah from some gullible marks, and I think it annoys me most that my aunt was one of them.
Anyway, that's mine. What's yours?
Friday 18 May 2018
Homeward Bound
"There is no real going back. Though I may come to the Shire, it will not seem the same; for I shall not be the same."
J.R.R. Tolkien - The Return of the King.
I watched Peter Jackson's concluding part of the The Lord of the Rings trilogy, The Return of the King again last weekend, and it set me thinking about the book, and what Tolkien was really driving at. I have always liked but never really loved Lord of the Rings, even when I first read it as a teenager. To me it had a strange, bloodless, rarified quality; oddly stilted, like a pre-Raphaelite painting brought to life, full of Solemn Councils and Chaste Maidens. The descriptions of scenery seemed to go on forever, and what was it with all of the bloody songs and poems? Get on with it already! I skimmed a lot of that.
Yes, I know, I know - it's supposed to be A Mythology for England, Anglo-Saxon epic mixed with Arthurian Romance, and all that, but it always felt to me more like the last dying gasp of English Romanticism, and I freely confess that I'm constitutionally more at home with the dirtier, lustier worlds of Swords & Sorcery - Robert E Howard and Fritz Lieber, and that High Fantasy has always somehow alienated me - it never felt like it was about real people with real drives and emotions. Nevertheless, I did very much enjoy Peter Jackson's films (at least, the LOTR trilogy, not the Hobbit films, which are, let's face it, the Star Wars Prequels of the piece) - incredibly long as they were - because they managed to avoid most of the problems I had had with the original books. Jackson did this by compressing and focusing the narrative; instead of the three page descriptions of mountains, now the sweeping vistas of scenery spoke for themselves, and the songs and poems were wisely mostly chopped away - especially Tom Bombadil, who I know some people think of with kindness, but who only ever irritated me. The ending of the final film could have benefitted from some judicious editing, but generally they were as a good a version as we're likely to see. With one exception.
Everyone has their pet gripe with the films, I know, but for me there was one area where I felt they had seriously mis-stepped, and that was by cutting out one of my favourite bits of the books; The Scouring of the Shire. This final reckoning with Saruman and Wormtongue was presumably cut from the films to allow them to kill Saruman at the end of the second film in order to provide an artificial kind of ending/closure there that it would otherwise lack, and perhaps because it would have been too anti-climactic a scene to end with after the struggle at Mount Doom, but I personally missed it being where it should be. It's the completion of the Hero's Journey; the return of the four hobbits to the Shire that they left at the start, and the realisation that they are not the same people that they were when they left, and that they can no longer simply just slot back into the roles they once filled. It's almost like the Trilogy's 'Deer Hunter' moment. It shows that they have been forged in a crucible of war, and now are unafraid to tackle the petty tyrants and bullies that Saruman's pint-sized police state represents. But it also brings home to the four how out of kilter they are with what was once their homeland - it is only via corruption and collusion within elements of the existing hobbit power structure that Saruman has come to power, after all.
This downbeat, melancholy ending was excised from the films because it is quite at odds with the epic quest that has gone beforehand, but to me it feels like the mask slipping from the upright world of elves and High Magic, and instead giving us a glimpse into the soul of Lieutenant John Tolkien of the Lancashire Fusiliers, a veteran of the Somme, and the feelings he had when he came back from Flanders. If The Shire is a bucolic fantasy of rural England, and the blasted, lifeless, ash-strewn wastes of Mordor are the horror of the trenches (yes yes, Tolkien's dislike of the Industrial Revolution, but come on...), then the Scouring of the Shire is what it feels like to come back to that rural idyll after four years of slaughter, and find that nothing is quite as you remembered it. Although the final book of The Lord of the Rings was not completed until 1949, Tolkien always strenuously denied that it was anything to do with World War II, that Sauron was not Hitler, and that the Ring was not the Atomic Bomb, and I believe him. Rather, I think it was very much to do with WWI and his experiences of it - with the passing of the Victorian/Edwardian world of his youth, diminshing and passing into the West, where the new rising power of the USA lay, and the birth of the new world of the 20th Century, and I think that leaving out that final chapter diminishes the whole.
J.R.R. Tolkien - The Return of the King.
I watched Peter Jackson's concluding part of the The Lord of the Rings trilogy, The Return of the King again last weekend, and it set me thinking about the book, and what Tolkien was really driving at. I have always liked but never really loved Lord of the Rings, even when I first read it as a teenager. To me it had a strange, bloodless, rarified quality; oddly stilted, like a pre-Raphaelite painting brought to life, full of Solemn Councils and Chaste Maidens. The descriptions of scenery seemed to go on forever, and what was it with all of the bloody songs and poems? Get on with it already! I skimmed a lot of that.
Yes, I know, I know - it's supposed to be A Mythology for England, Anglo-Saxon epic mixed with Arthurian Romance, and all that, but it always felt to me more like the last dying gasp of English Romanticism, and I freely confess that I'm constitutionally more at home with the dirtier, lustier worlds of Swords & Sorcery - Robert E Howard and Fritz Lieber, and that High Fantasy has always somehow alienated me - it never felt like it was about real people with real drives and emotions. Nevertheless, I did very much enjoy Peter Jackson's films (at least, the LOTR trilogy, not the Hobbit films, which are, let's face it, the Star Wars Prequels of the piece) - incredibly long as they were - because they managed to avoid most of the problems I had had with the original books. Jackson did this by compressing and focusing the narrative; instead of the three page descriptions of mountains, now the sweeping vistas of scenery spoke for themselves, and the songs and poems were wisely mostly chopped away - especially Tom Bombadil, who I know some people think of with kindness, but who only ever irritated me. The ending of the final film could have benefitted from some judicious editing, but generally they were as a good a version as we're likely to see. With one exception.
Everyone has their pet gripe with the films, I know, but for me there was one area where I felt they had seriously mis-stepped, and that was by cutting out one of my favourite bits of the books; The Scouring of the Shire. This final reckoning with Saruman and Wormtongue was presumably cut from the films to allow them to kill Saruman at the end of the second film in order to provide an artificial kind of ending/closure there that it would otherwise lack, and perhaps because it would have been too anti-climactic a scene to end with after the struggle at Mount Doom, but I personally missed it being where it should be. It's the completion of the Hero's Journey; the return of the four hobbits to the Shire that they left at the start, and the realisation that they are not the same people that they were when they left, and that they can no longer simply just slot back into the roles they once filled. It's almost like the Trilogy's 'Deer Hunter' moment. It shows that they have been forged in a crucible of war, and now are unafraid to tackle the petty tyrants and bullies that Saruman's pint-sized police state represents. But it also brings home to the four how out of kilter they are with what was once their homeland - it is only via corruption and collusion within elements of the existing hobbit power structure that Saruman has come to power, after all.
This downbeat, melancholy ending was excised from the films because it is quite at odds with the epic quest that has gone beforehand, but to me it feels like the mask slipping from the upright world of elves and High Magic, and instead giving us a glimpse into the soul of Lieutenant John Tolkien of the Lancashire Fusiliers, a veteran of the Somme, and the feelings he had when he came back from Flanders. If The Shire is a bucolic fantasy of rural England, and the blasted, lifeless, ash-strewn wastes of Mordor are the horror of the trenches (yes yes, Tolkien's dislike of the Industrial Revolution, but come on...), then the Scouring of the Shire is what it feels like to come back to that rural idyll after four years of slaughter, and find that nothing is quite as you remembered it. Although the final book of The Lord of the Rings was not completed until 1949, Tolkien always strenuously denied that it was anything to do with World War II, that Sauron was not Hitler, and that the Ring was not the Atomic Bomb, and I believe him. Rather, I think it was very much to do with WWI and his experiences of it - with the passing of the Victorian/Edwardian world of his youth, diminshing and passing into the West, where the new rising power of the USA lay, and the birth of the new world of the 20th Century, and I think that leaving out that final chapter diminishes the whole.
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