A Most Wanted Man by John leCarre

Posted in Books with tags , on March 4, 2010 by maryignatius

I’m not going to go so far as to say that only leCarre could have written this story, although it probably woudn’t have been as good if someone else had.

It would also likely never have seen the light of day.  Only someone with leCarre’s stature could get published a book this courageous, this close to the edge of the reality we now find ourselves in but choose to ignore except as entertainment.

As compelling as each and every character is (no matter how little space they take in the narrative), they shouldn’t be seen as purely individual representations.  Everyone’s an archetype, some are conscious of it.  Tommy Brue, for example, knows himself to be a dinosaur, presiding over the terminal phase of his inheritance, Brue Freres, a Scots bank operating in Hamburg with a French name indicating the existence of brothers who never were; an anachronism in a world that doesn’t know much anymore about ledger books, except in the figurative sense.

Annabelle Richter, who sits upright (as she should) and finds herself having to be certain she doesn’t put a foot wrong from more than one perspective, is a thoroughly modern, highly-educated, self-determining Western woman who nevertheless finds herself swathed in multiple layers of baggy clothes and wears a headscarf to put her client at ease.  It takes no time at all for Brue to fall for her.

On the other side, or I should say another side for there are far more than two, sits Gunther Bachmann, an old-fashioned spy-master, expert recruiter and runner of the original on-the-ground human eyes kind of intelligence gathering, now part of an officially non-existent Unit operating under a Joint Committee intended on paper to draw German espionage into a single coherent organization with one boss.  The rest of the team is that: Drawn clearly as individuals, they nevertheless act as a team, following orders, blended thoroughly into the new way of doing things, deeply dependent on the kind of technological data gathering that it should scare you “they” can do, and actually do, all the time.  Bachmann almost alone understands that data isn’t knowledge, a point he tries repeatedly to make; a Quixotic exercise.

All the to-do flies like a storm around a young man named (not for nothing ) Issa Karpov, the son of a Russian Army General turned criminal and a Chechn mother.  Issa is the creature of Russian culture gone awry anda become aware of the devastation wrought my his father not just as a person but as a nation on his mother not just as a person but as an ethnic group, and he has sided with her, with equal amounts of ignorance and passion.  All we know of Issa is that he has been tortured, beaten in a Turkish jail for unspecified crimes, that he is broadly considered a terrorist either in fact or in potentialis; he is the eye at the center of the storm.  Rather as is the case for his namesake, a lot goes on around him and because of him, but at his heart, Issa himself remains a mystery.

Layer after layer is peeled back to show us the history of the characters (please, this is much smeller than an onion), the way things got to be this way, at least in part, and details accrue like sand on the beach but they mustn’t be ignored.

A Most Wanted Man begins with a pace that is almost laconic, and slowly builds, Issa the still point against which everything else pushes, until the story reaches an ending that will leave you as shattered as the characters.

John leCarre has given us a masterpiece that isn’t merely timely, it is the times in readable form.  It’s all there – the anguish of irrevocable change both personal and cultural, visited upon us from outside somewhere, not our choosing; embracing the loss of the past and celebrating the resulting freedom only to find oneself in a new land without a road map; the violent clash not only between cultures but between patriotism and jingoism, promises meant and promises that are lies for what the speaker thinks express loyalty to a greater truth; and on almost every page the deep anguish of discerning the right thing to do no matter which moral lexicon you were raised with, if any.

We live in a world where we are collectively and individually unsure of who we are because we are collectively and individually unsure of where we are, or what.  This is what it’s like for those who are so fortunate as to live through one of the hinges of history.  This is the situation we are in.

A Most Wanted Man is a keyhole through which we can peep at that situation.   That you’ll find it in the fiction section may make the experience a little easier to take.

A Short Break for a Little “Live” Poetry.

Posted in Uncategorized with tags , , , , on February 16, 2010 by maryignatius

Check it out:

An Archaeology of Freedom by Alexis Pauline Gumbs.

Gumbs is, as you will hear, an original and strong voice, not only in poetry, but for social justice.

Enjoy.

White is for Witching by Helen Oyeyemi

Posted in Books with tags , on February 11, 2010 by maryignatius

I’m not merely excited about this book, I’m excited about this author.  Helen Oyeyemi is a brilliant, original, unique voice in a world of also-rans.

White Is for Witching for me came on the heels of reading two books seminal to the vampire genre, and of course, in a story about vampires, the Biblical phrase “for the life is in the blood” never quite leaves the back of your mind.  In White, the main character, Miranda Silver, a sliver of a girl, develops Pica, a disease that causes its victims to crave substances that have no life in them to give – chalk, dirt, plastic spatulas.  The taking in of an inanimate bullet closed Lily Silver’s life, cutting a hole in the Silver family that can’t be healed or patched over.

As Miranda Silver, daughter of Lily, consumes things that cannot sustain her, the house around her consumes her, the not-living eating the living, who in turn eats the things with no blood, no life, in them.  The myth of the Soucouyant reaches the pages, along with the acknowledgment that if one does not feed one’s own life, move it forward, one must live off the lives of others, like Dracula, like the vampires Buffy slays.  (BtVS as background of serious literature.)  Trading one’s own future for the consumption of the past of the other, of their potential future.

What has a soul?  Can a house have a soul, a spiritual existence?  Does the Soucouyant, the vampire?  Miri’s craving for inanimate objects, for taking them into herself and reconstituting them into her being represents her desire to not-be.  Miri wears her mother’s watch, stopped at the time of her mother’s death, a death caused by violence, and is befuddled when a friend buys her batteries for the watch, energy to feed it, to make time move forward again.  Time has stopped, so should she, become fixed, perfect, good.

Miri and her brother Eliot are twins, driven apart first by her disease and secondly by her acceptance to Cambridge, leaving Eliot to (perhaps) go to South Africa.   But Miri has other twins, and isn’t quite herself, sitting in her room she calls “the psychomanteum.”  A psychomanteum is a place designed to reflect, to contact the world of spirits, to induce an altered state, and Miri is certainly not the girl she was before a bullet tore her mother’s life away in Port au Prince.

At first you get told which character is speaking, then you become so familiar with the different voices you simply know when the narrator has changed.  Miranda herself is always described in the third person, as is Luc, father of Miranda and her twin brother Eliot.  Luc is a lost man in more ways than one, and Miri, in her silence, remains a mystery.

White Is for Witching is gothic, but not horror.  There’s too much crammed into its few pages to call it just one thing.   It’s gothic, it’s feminist, it’s romance, it’s current events, it’s the impact of cultures against, within and beside cultures, its totally worthy of your time to read and I can’t wait to see what Oyeyemi does next.

Here are some links:

To the site for the book (UK edition)

To the randomhouse page

To a lovely interview conducted by Bernardine Evaristo, herself an accompmlished author.

Detectives Don’t Wear Seatbelts by CiCi McNair

Posted in Books with tags , , , , , , , on February 8, 2010 by maryignatius

Book Jacket Image

This is the first non-fiction book published by Clarissa, A.K.A. CiCi, McNair.  It recounts her experiences getting into and staying in the business of being a private detective.

Reading Detectives Don’t Wear Seatbelts is a lot like reading Sue Grafton at her best (which for my money was L is for Lawless), except the story is being told by a real person about her own life.  It will make you want to put the book down and go learn how to skip trace.

McNair is a good, solid writer, handling the English language in a refreshingly crisp fashion, getting the details right so a whole picture can emerge.  Her supporting cast are each well-defined, they feel real, and of course, they are real, but it’s not so easy to put real people on paper as you might think.

McNair made me far more aware than I had been of the issue of counterfeit goods, how that industry operates, its impact on the larger political and economic systems, and the lives of those at the bottom of it all – the people who make the fakes, often in fear.

I kept waiting for the moment when the title would emerge naturally from a comment made by someone or from an experience recounted within the book, but that didn’t come.  McNair uses the phrase twice, but as a tag line.  Doesn’t make it any less true; does make it feel more contrived.

My favorite part of the book was the section that took McNair home to Jackson, Mississippi, where she worked often with her mother riding shotgun.   In this section, McNair’s writing took on the softness of a Southern vowel, without losing any sense that the jobs she took on were at least occasionally risky.  Mississippi is more alive as context than is New York, where fashion tends to take the place of geography, even when the fashion under discussion is jeans and boots.   This isn’t a bad thing, necessarily, only that the cases described could have happened anywhere, there’s nothing peculiarly New York about the settings, even if NYC does have the largest Chinatown in the Western hemisphere.

There’s also a lesson in this book about family tensions, pre-planning, and advanced directives, and the odd comfort of having what you already know is true confirmed by the observation of a third party.

You could easily get at least three movies or a really nice tv series out of this  book.  And I hope someone does.

I also hope McNair writes her next non-fiction book about packing for travel.

Jantsen’s Gift; A True Story of Grief, Rescue and Grace by Pam Cope with Aimee Molloy

Posted in Books with tags , , , , , , , , on February 1, 2010 by maryignatius

This book is about a ton of things, possibly more than Cope intended. I don’t know where to begin.  Cope is willing to openly discuss subjects most of us shy away from and she does it face-forward, and with dignity.

Probably it would be useful to tell you that the Cope family (Pam, husband Randy, son Jantsen and daughter Crista) seem to have been living a fairly comfortable rather upper middle class modern American life, until the day that Jantsen died from one of those rare congenital heart conditions that have as their first symptom sudden death.  He was fifteen.  Sitting on a sofa, watching television.  The Copes, their extended families and circle of friends were understandably devastated.

Someone established a memorial fund, and not long before the first Thanksgiving after Jantsen’s death, the Copes realized they had $25,000 on their hands with which they could make a difference in the world to honor their son.

They began by accepting an invitation from friends who were involved in charitable work in Vietnam to go there over the first Thanksgiving after their son’s death.  Their experiences there led to the establishment of the Touch a Life Foundation, as well as the adoption of a son they named Van.

Touch a Life’s first project was a group home for fifteen at-risk street children in Vietnam, with a housemother, food, medical care, clothing, and most important, an education – at the staggering cost of $2,500 a year.  After the first year, Cope looked at the balance in Jantsen’s memorial fund, made what most of us would consider a startling sacrifice, and went and got fifteen more kids in a second group home.

Another trip to Cambodia, in which Cope unflinchingly describes the Asian chils sex slave trade, led to the adoption of three more children, two who were brought to the US for desperately needed medical treatment, and another who joined the Cope family.

While in Cambodia, Cope wonders if the lurid warren of shanties that pass for brothels will ever be made into museums, will the suffering that takes place there ever be recognized for the genocide it is.

Some of the more alarming statistics: Approximately 20,000 children are sold into prostitution annually from Vietnam alone. UNICEF estimates that almost 60% of the 45,000 prostitutes in Phnom Penh are children sold or lured from Vietnam, where a virgin can fetch between $350 and $450 from a Cambodian brothel owner.  This is a lot of money for a too-large, hungry family in a country where $2,500 can house, clothe, feed and educate fifteen children for a year.

I was recently involved in one of those long and interesting conversations on facebook that end up including comments from people you’ve never heard of let alone met, and a man said that in his 39 years of life, he’d never had a white person walk up to him and apologize for slavery.

I responded that if I knew where he was, I’d do that, but since I didn’t I apologized on thread, and said it also grieves me that it goes on today. (Seriously, do you think all that stuff made in China sells for such low, low prices because the workers got paid?  Please.)

So I was most intrigued by the chapters recounting Cope’s experiences in Ghana, and the successful liberation of at least twenty-one children from slavery on Lake Volta.

Ghana, you may know, is home to the Elmina Castle,

Elmina Castle

Elmina Castle, built in 1482

through whose Door of No Return walked most (if not all) of the slaves brought to the United States. Elmina Castle, like Tuol Seng in Cambodia, like Auschwitz, is now a museum, a profitable tourist attraction dedicated to the ending of slavery in a country with its own modern economy dependent upon the use of child slave labor.   (Not only in less-visible istuations like the fishing industry on Lake Volta but also in the cocoa-growing industry.  Ghana is the primary producer of cocoa in the world, and child slave labor makes the industry run there, as well as in Cote d’Ivoire, Cameroon and Nigeria.  Think about that the next time you reach for that Snickers bar.)   Cope makes the complexity of the issues that create the situation comprehensible, while showing the answers are, in fact, available to be used.

The need to rescue children from slavery on Lake Volta in Ghana led the Copes to another choice that, if presented out of context, will seem extravagant, ridiculous, as if they had lost their minds, when in fact, they were finding them.

As of August, 2008, they had 21 children out of slavery and living in the newly-built Village of Hope, which includes schooling.

But I don’t mean this to be a panegyric. There is the random split infinitive. There is the glaring difference between Cope’s attitude toward Jantsen, the child she gave birth to, and Crista, the first child she adopted, and who got very short shrift during the months immediately following her brother’s death. But this is perhaps not something I can fairly assess, and Crista herself shows remarkable resilience and generosity.

There are passages in the beginning of the book when it feels as if the narrative gets bogged down too deeply in trying to convey something that can’t be conveyed.  The only way to understand the impact of grief is to experience it. That said, Cope does one of the better jobs I’ve read.

It’s clear the intended audience is other white  (“Everyone should experience being in the minority at least once”), well-to-do, conservative evangelical Christians, and Pam Cope’s husband Randy does provide a section of the book, making it possible for male conservative Evangelical Christians to know that Pam wrote not only with her husband’s support/permission, but his active participation enables them to read this book too.

I know this sort of attitude is archaic, but it’s out there.  I’m quite serious.

All of that aside, and whether you decide to support this particular foundation’s efforts to end child slavery in Ghana and rescue street children in Asia or you want to choose a more secular approach to support, Jantsen’s Gift qualifies as an Important Book, it deserves to be read, and the children deserve not to be forgotten.

If you didn’t know about this before, you do now.  And now, you have some decisions to make.

House

Posted in Television with tags , , , , on January 19, 2010 by maryignatius

This show just gets better as it ages, like stinky cheese.

I’m not going to do an episode-by-episode commentary, I just have a few general observations about the season thus far.

First, anything that allows me to watch Andre Braugher do anything is okay in my book.  My other favorite guest appearance was from Joshua Malina, who slides effortlessly into every role I’ve ever seen him in, making me believe he is who he stands there being for the time he’s on screen.   Someone once asked George Raft what the secret was to acting.  Raft’s reply was, “You hit your mark, and you tell the other guy the truth.”

Yeah.

I like, very much, the increase in screen time for characters the writers clearly know what to do with.  I’ve especially enjoyed watching Wilson grow, and hope to see Robert Sean Leonard at least nominated for an Emmy for his work this season.

Using a trite technique (“Oh, Bobby, I just had the most horrible dream!”), they hit the reset button, jumped the shark, and made it better.

The concept of friendship is something sacred to me, and the development of the friendship between House and Wilson is a wonderful thing.  Since I’m not a slash person, I read it as that, even in The Down Low, where they torture each other like the brothers from different mothers that they are.  Some of us find our closest bonds turn out to lie in atypical places, and intimacy does not necessarily imply sex.  You can live a healthy and fulfilled life without sex, but not without intimacy.  They’re not the same.  Or, maybe they’re actually going there, as they did on “Boston Legal.”  Time will tell.

Hands up, everybody who got the reference to Room 12A.

Help for Haiti from A TV Hero

Posted in Television, Uncategorized with tags , , , , , on January 18, 2010 by maryignatius

Jimmy Jean-Louis, who plays The Haitian on “Heroes,” has set up a web page for channeling donations to help his native Haiti.  Funds go to Hollywood Unites for Haiti RELIEF FUND, a 501c3 organization that puts 100% of received funds into relief efforts.

You can go to haitianhero.com and read about how you can help.  It’s not just a front page – there’s actual information here to educate you about what’s going on, what’s needed and how to help.

Thanks to The Band from TV for sharing this information via their news feed.

If You’re Going to Be in New York

Posted in Books, Television with tags , , , , , , , , , , , on January 16, 2010 by maryignatius

Check it out:

Good Ol’ Girls – a musical by Lee Smith and Jill McCorkle, songs by Matraca Berg and Marshall Chapman.

What’s this got to do with books and television?   Lee Smith and Jill McCorkle have pretty solid reps as authors.  They don’t need me to tell you how good they are.  There’s also a really solid cast including faces you may have seen on the small screen -  Sally Mayes has been on “Law & Order: Criminal Intent” and “Sex and the City.”  Gina Stewart has been on “Dawson’s Creek,” and “Walker, Texas Ranger,” in between doing a variety of other things.

Not Your Grandmother’s Vampire

Posted in Books with tags , , , , , , , , , on January 15, 2010 by maryignatius

“Why won’t you watch Buffy?” Asked my BFF while driving at her space normal speed of 50 MPH on a city street in an old Nisan convertible with the top down.

“Because I don’t want to get obsessed with vampires like I was when I was a teenager.”

“Obsessed like how? I’m obsessed.”

“Yeah, you are, but have you sealed your bedroom windows with a paste made of crushed garlic, then painted a row of tiny crosses with actual 24 Karat gold leaf around the edge of each window pane?”

“What? Hell no. [pause] I’d be, like —- What’s the opposite of garlic??”

So it was with some trepidation that I picked up the copy of DRACULA; The Un-Dead; the Sequel to the Original Classic, by Dacre Stoker and Ian Holt. I felt somewhat protected by the simple fact that the book has three titles.

With some exceptions, the characters from the original Dracula by Bram Stoker, continue (at least by name) from the first book into this sequel, which is a true sequel and not a re-imagining or re-framing of the story. Except that it is. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Back to the Original Version

For those few who do not know the story or about the story, the Original tells the story of how a vampire named (duh) Dracula makes use of the services of young solicitor Jonathan Harker to make his way from rural Romania to the outskirts of London.  Shortly after Dracula’s arrival, he begins his seduction (there’s no other word for it) of the unfortunate and 1.75 dimensional Lucy Westenra, whom he successfully turns into a vampire. No clue is ever provided within the text as to why he picks Lucy or how she comes to his attention.   Did he come to England specifically to find Lucy? We get to make up our own minds about that.

Jonathan, his (eventual) wife Mina and a small band of heroes chase down the evil invader from the east, some of whom tell their own part of the story in the first person, after the manner of Wilkie Collins. There is no omniscient narrator, no final authority to whom we can turn to let us know what is true and what is false. The closest we get to that luxury is Van Helsing. The reader decides for herself whether any particular narrator is reliable. Because, especially in the earlier parts of the book, the characters themselves know and present only fragments of the overall story, unlike most modern works of fiction, Dracula requires that the reader participate in the story by actually thinking.

Imagine!

Van Helsing in his narrative sections goes on for much too long at a time, and far too often, and then everyone else just runs off and does what he says, with no evidence whatsoever that he has a clue what he’s talking about other than his own commanding presence. At first, his curious use of English is entertaining, then it often becomes confusing and sometimes cloying, at least to this modern reader. Otherwise, the characters have such distinctive voices, perspectives, and commentaries that it’s possible to tell which narrator is talking to you by the tone and content of the passage.

The one critical character from whom we never hear is, of course, Dracula himself. Or, as Van Helsing would probably prefer it, Itself.

The Heroes discover poor Lucy’s fate and kill the vampire she’s become, and she becomes visibly human again, and they know they’ve saved her soul as she has not yet taken a life in her vampire form, during which time she supposedly had no soul to lose.  Subsequent vampire deaths follow, (we always get descriptions of male humans driving massive stakes into the writhing bodies of female vampires), culminating in a wretchedly slow lead-up to the death of the title character at Castle Dracula deep in the Carpathian mountains.

Unlike the various Draculae of film, Stoker’s original has nothing sexy about him:

His face was a strong – a very strong – aquiline, with high bridge of the thin nose and peculiarly arched nostrils; with lofty domed forehead, and hair growing scantily around the temples, but profusely elsewhere. His eyebrows were very massive, almost meeting over the nose, and with bushy hair that seemed to curl in its own profusion. The mouth, so far as I could see it under the heavy mustache, was fixed and rather cruel-looking, with peculiarly sharp white teeth; these protruded over the lips, whose remarkable ruddiness showed astonishing vitality for a man of his years. For the rest, his ears were pale and at the tops extremely pointed; the chin was broad and strong, and the cheeks firm though thin.

Mmmm. Sexy.

Nothing remotely like Bela Lugosi or Frank Langella or Christopher Lee. Only Gary Oldham’s portrayal comes close to the image presented by Bram Stoker in the Original. And I didn’t even get to the hands, which are stubby, have pointy fingernails like your Aunt Estelle in 1952 and hairy palms. Palms.

So what makes this book such a masterpiece of Victorian pornography?

It’s the women. It usually is, but here there are the three overtly voluptuous female vampires at Castle Dracula whose sexuality Harker actually finds frightening before he realizes they don’t want kisses of the garden variety. There is fragile, ethereal, plot-device Lucy, who epitomizes the ideal woman of the Eighteenth Century, over against her best friend Mina Harker, who is thoroughly modern (knows shorthand, types – albeit both in preparation of being useful to her husband in his legal career – picks up a revolver without flinching or struggling with the weight of it – and is described as having the brain/mind of a man).

Mina is the bridge between the two books, the hinge, as it were, on which the narrative turns from Bram’s original vision to that of the sequel.  And Mina turns.

Now for the Sequel

In the sequel, Dracula; the Un-Dead, the title character himself is definitely a post-Barnabas, post-Spike, post-Angel, post-Edward, and most especially post-9/11 kind of vampire. Vlad has, by virtue of driving back the Renaissance Islamist invasion of Europe, become not a bad guy at all, just seriously misunderstood.  All that impaling.

In the sequel, nice female vampires follow their beloved in acts of suttee-like devotion.  Bad female vampires bite the girls and they like it.

The Dracula of Bram Stoker’s novel was a count. In the new book, he’s a prince, and identification of the novel’s character Dracula with the historical  Vlad III Dracula who defeated the Turkish Empire’s attempt to invade Europe with extremely severe measures, is made express, explicit and complete. No ambiguity here, whereas in the original novel there are hints as to a possible connection. This new Prince Vlad was a papal favorite, a hero of the Christian West, a good-guy member of the (historically real but somewhat murky) Order of the Dragon.  This book’s Dracula is the übermensch we’ve all been waiting for.

Also notable is that, in direct contradiction to the BtVS-verse, not to mention the original Dracula as envisioned by Bram Stoker, it turns out that vampires do in fact have souls. Let the debate begin.

The book opens with a scene so overtly, and so over-the-top-ly, pornographic readers will either put the book down or lick their lips for more. There won’t be much middle ground.  The body count is almost insanely high.

The villain of this piece is actually not Dracula himself, but Elizabeth Bathory, who, like Vlad III Dracula was an actual historical person. In the first book, Count Dracula had three female attendants. In the second, the Countess has two, who are physically similar to two of the female vampires in the original.   In the first, the sexuality of the piece is submerged, hinted at, most overt in the scene where Mina is discovered drinking blood from a wound Dracula has made in his chest.

In the Original, Dracula has three female attendants, two dark-haired, one fair.  Bathory here has two, one dark haired, one fair.  When, in the Original, Lord Godalming hammers the massive wooden stake into his beloved’s heart to destroy the vampire she’s become and her head is subsequently severed from her body, no mention is made of her body crumbling to dust, only of her restoration to her humanity in death.  When Van Helsing does his “butcher’s work,” destroying Dracula’s female followers, they specifically are described as crumbling to dust.  Perhaps this has something to do with how long one was a vampire before being killed/rescued, or perhaps given how vigorously Lucy’s beauty has been impressed upon us, it would have been too much to have her crumble to ash just after her would-be husband has pierced her with his big stick.

Dracula himself crumbles to ash when stabbed with a kukri and his throat is cut at the end 0f the first book.  He is the only male vampire killed in the book, and killed by human men, and there is no piercing with a big stick, which I think clearly demonstrates that Stoker was fully intentional about  the sexual symbolism of the stake.  And yet, Dracula has managed to return.  So one wonders whether the two attendants on Countess Bathory have any identity with the attendants on Dracula or are they meant merely to recall him and Bathory’s replacement of Dracula as villain.

Bathory is more an embodiment of the mythical Lilith as she is of the historical Countess who spent the last years of her life bricked up for killing possibly as many as 600 women.  And yet, there are significant differences.  The fictional Bathory of this narrative began her human life like any other girl, then was denied the chance to be a normal wife and mother, her nature was twisted by the early experiences of her life.  Her children are lost to her, the husband who should have loved her was cruel, and at least in this fictional version, in her vulnerability she was preyed upon by someone she should have been able to trust.   Bathory’s evil is the evil of the misplaced, thwarted feminine.

Mina, still young thanks to the gift received from Dracula, still strong, is a loyal if frustrated wife and mother, her Jonathan still alive, but obviously ageing while she is not.  Her son Quincey, named for the band of heroes but called by the name of the one who died in the fight, is himself abnormally strong, and inexplicably attracted to an actor who goes by the name of Barsabas.  Quincey, you see, wants to be an actor himself.  He first sees Barsabas perform in Paris, where Quincey has been sent to pursue his education, away from distracting influences.

You can stop laughing now.

The now aged (except for Mina) Band of Heroes tries to reconstitute itself, to fight once more the evil they (in this version mistakenly) perceive Dracula to be.  But we are let in on the secrets – Dracula, who is now living in the persona of the famous actor Barsabas, is the Prince who saved Europe from the Turks, he is the hero who saved the West, with a soul, with a good soul that seeks to serve God – the same character who could not endure the presence of a consecrated Host now claims status as papal representative against the Infidel.

And then one can look backward and see the three voluptuous women who attended Dracula in his castle in a different light.   Impaling was, sometimes, used by the Romans and referred to as crucifixion.  And the name Basarbas, which was in fact Vlad III Dracula the Impaler’s family name, conveniently, is an anagram for Barabas.

Here is the best things about the new book.  Well, one of the best things, there are two.  First, copyright in the United States to the Dracula franchise has been restored to the Stoker family, who haven’t seen much out of the US in the way of royalties due to an early legal oversight.

Second, it’ll make a hell of a movie, and I can see the line of actresses waiting to play Bathory with my mind’s eye.  I have my first pick.  Dacre Stoker and Ian Holt are careful in that they don’t provide much of a physical description of Dracula at all.  They certainly can’t go with the original, which is actually not that far away from the only existing portrait of Vlad III.

Dracula; the Un-Dead; the Sequel to the Original is not as good as the original, but sequels rarely are.   This is not to say it’s bad, because it’s not.  It’s a very readable, interesting update to the story, not least for its politics, both geo- and gender.  It’s also exciting enough to make you keep the pages turning, if you aren’t squeamish.

It may be a bit of a stretch of “poetic license” to have shifted the action of the original from 1893 to1888 specifically in order to bookend the story with Jack the Ripper on the front end and the sailing of the Titanic on the back. I wouldn’t have made that choice but then I didn’t write the book, either.

There is one other choice I would not have made.  I don’t particularly like Van Helsing, but I’d have given him a better end.

If you enjoy the vampire genre, you’ll enjoy this book.

All Hail Conan

Posted in Television with tags , , , , , , on January 14, 2010 by maryignatius

UPDATE:  Roughly to quote a character in one of Dominick Dunne’s excellent novels, $40,000,000 is just about the perfect amount of money.  You can do anything you want without touching the principal, and it’s not so much as to seem gauche.    See exclusive at deadline.com – for some reason, I can’t link to it, will try to fix it.

Or maybe I should say, “Zuck the Peacock.”

Everyone who gives a damn already knows that NBC has canceled the Jay Leno Show – the prime time version – and will move a half-hour version to 11:35 PM, to be followed by “The Tonight Show” at 12:05 AM – and Conan is right, that makes it no longer the tonight show but rather the first show you watch tomorrow.  And then Jimmy Fallon is left with security guards, insomniacs and clips on hulu.

Leno’s willingness to move wherever the money goes doesn’t surprise me, and I’m not condemning him for it.  I mean, times are tough, and God forbid he should have to sell a car.

My respect, though, is huge for Conan O’Brien’s willingness to tell NBC and the rest of us some truth, with his customary honesty and humor.  I think he should go have a drink with David Letterman, and then go hire a few nice attorneys.  (Apparently, he did not get a specific commitment to the time slot when he signed his deal.  Those attorneys he should fire.  Then sue.)  Personally, I’d like to see O’Brien land somewhere like Comedy Central, where the suits seem to get it.

NBC, like an auto accident in slow motion, continues to commit the slowest suicide in history — you can’t watch and you can’t look away.  Except you can – look away, that is.   They’re clearly hoping to survive until the Olympics come along and maybe save their ass for the rest of this season, but I can’t imagine any actor or production company being willing to sign on with them after this season.

I can see NBC surviving if it focuses on two things – news and sports.  It still does coverage of both well, and viewers are used to turning to the network for them.   Sunday Night Football is for now keeping them in good shape on a weekly basis with the (imo) over-valued 18-49 demo, and the Olympics will draw viewers for a while,  but unless something amazing and shocking happens this spring…

You can’t sustain a network on three hours of watchable scripted programming a week.

Sorry David, Chet, but that’s the way it is.