That Sort of Thing

After reading a novel that was very well crafted and ultimately satisfying but not quite as page-turning as I'd hoped, I picked up one by another admired author, Life Class by Pat Barker. 

Having liked Barker's spare but powerful and beautifully rendered Regeneration trilogy, about World War I soldiers and survivors, I was shocked at how pedestrian, clichéd, and almost completely lacking in verisimilitude her more recent Life Class—also a WWI story—was. Honestly, the self-absorbed-artists-in-love first half could be a Lifetime movie set in the mid-1990s with very few alterations. 

                    "For what it's worth, I think he's still very much in love with you."

                        "Then he's got a bloody funny way of showing it."

That sort of thing.

I tried to stick with it once the plot moved to the war front, where the book admittedly improved in just about every way, but the first part had wasted so much of my time—which could have been used making me care about the characters—that I just couldn't muster the interest. Anyway, the Regeneration books covered the exact same territory so much better. Why bother?

What a delicious, chocolaty pleasure to now to turn to an Alan Hollinghurst novel. I've been reading him out of order, most recently his first, The Swimming-Pool Library (which I never blogged about; let's say for the time being that it was clearly the first novel of a great author who hadn't yet come into his own, which isn't to say I didn't like it). I've just started his third, The Spell, which is my fifth and last Hollinghurst until his next one comes out.

Here one of the characters, Alex, visits an ex, who is lying out in the sun wearing a thong:

Alex loitered beside him for a minute, unable not to look, hot-faced and haggard above the sprawl of what he had lost. . . . His eyes took in the blond down on the calves darkened with sun-oil, and the slumbrous weight of the buttocks with the tongue of lycra buried between them, and the arms pointing backwards like flippers . . . . 

Then there's the "hurrying greeny-black surface of the stream." Later, Alex "felt needlessly shy, as if warned at the beginning of a party of some worrying game to be played after tea."

That sort of thing. Each word a joy.

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D. and I have simultaneously started watching the BBC adaptation of Holinghurst's The Line of Beauty, starring none other than Dan Stevens, who plays Matthew Crawley in Downton Abbey. What's left of an Alan Hollinghurst novel without Hollinghurst's incredible language and observation? A story, some characters, relationships. Perhaps more—we've only watched the first of the three episodes. Kudos to the BBC for tackling such forthrightly gay material, even if Stevens's smiley take on what in the book is a seriously horny sex-in-the-park scene is a little too "jolly good."

All in the Eyes

D. gave me the book The World of Downton Abbey for my birthday in September—which might be funny (see how the literarily mighty have fallen!) if it weren't for the fact that I've never been anywhere near as "literary" as people seem to think I am. (Example: At lunch the other day, a former colleague was telling me about her book group and how much she loved Democracy, the 1880 Washington novel by Henry Adams. "Have you read it?" No. "Oh, I really think you'd love it." Hmm, maybe. But what evidence have I given you that makes you think so? I'm not really drawn to Washington or political fiction, and I read mostly contemporary literature, albeit sometimes set in the past. By the way, did I like the much-lauded movie Lincoln? No, I thought it an endless, wonkish bore, as did D. Perhaps the subject of the future, contrarian post.)

Back to The World of Downton Abbey. The fact that I've read it might also be funny if it weren't such an interesting, gorgeously designed, and skillfully researched and written book (by Jessica Fellowes, niece of the show's creator, Julian Fellowes), about the history and sociology of the era and class divisions as much as about the show itself. Oh, and a book that happens to be about a TV series I'm so addicted to that I've seen most episodes at least three times.

For Christmas I received the book's sequel, The Chronicles of Downton Abbey, which is mostly tied into the third season (the first book covered the first two). It looks equally yummy, but I haven't explored much beyond the photos yet because I'm nervous that it might give too much away. (I already inadvertently heard two spoilers when I was in London in November, where the season had finished its run.)

One of the first book's insights pertains to one of my favorite characters, O'Brien—the lady's maid who is as loathsome as a badly overripe and discolored cheese, yet (in the third season) an increasingly, and strangely, sympathetic character, even as she plots revenge against her former ally, the footman-turned-valet Thomas. We're seeing more of her fear now as well as her sadness. She's becoming, for the first time within her downstairs world, a victim.

Siobhan Finneran and Rob James-Collier ( Carnival Film & Television Limited 2011 for Masterpiece)

"O'Brien moves almost seamlessly between floors; she is very good at her job, proud to be so, and her ease amongst both servants and family is a measure of this. Of all the servants, O'Brien is probably the best actor, showing only the face she wants her colleagues or her employer to see. Lady Grantham, after all, believes they are friends."

As for the actress who plays O'Brien, Siobhan Finneran, I agree with a comment in the same book by Rob James-Collier, who plays Thomas: "Siobhan is a fantastic actress to work with—you really learn from her. She's very measured and it's all in the eyes. In rehearsal you think there's nothing going on and then you see it on screen and you think 'wow—everything's happening.' "

A similar thing occurs when you watch an episode for the first time . . . and then for the third.