Blockbuster, or How Hollywood Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Summer – Tom Shone

A well-written, sloppily edited overview of 1980s Hollywood from Jaws to The Fellowship of the Ring.

In part this is a riposte to Peter Biskind’s brilliant Easy Riders, Raging Bulls. Biskind argued that Jaws/Star Wars made it impossible for the great 70s directors to get funding for their pictures leading to a drop in the production of the “mainstream arthouse” likes of Five Easy Pieces, The Godfather, The Last Picture Show etc. Shone counters that the real money-makers in the 70s were the lumbering likes of Airport and the Towering Inferno, and that Lucas and Spielberg freshened things up and allowed the likes of The Terminator and Alien to get made.

There’s some truth in both arguments, but I tend towards Biskind’s point of view. If nothing else, Best Picture Oscar winners show a massive drop in quality from around 1981 (when Ordinary People beat, among other things, the awesome Raging Bull).

Nevertheless, Shone keeps things lively and demonstrates a talent for the witty one-liner that at times had me joyfully spluttering through my popcorn .

Numbers

Book 4 of the Bible, and an early runner for the most boring although it has its moments. As usual, the mind boggles at a literal interpretation of this stuff; every Sunday morning the churches would be a bloodbath, the main victims being goats without blemish.

I like the bit where some poor bloke is spotted gathering sticks on the Sabbath, and God instructs Moses to gather the tribe and stone him to death, which they duly do. Firm but fair, I say.

Keep the Aspidistra Flying – George Orwell

…Money suffereth long, and is kind; money envieth not; money vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up, doth not behave unseemly…And now abideth faith, hope, money, these three; but the greatest of these is money.

The opening parody of 1 Corinthians xiii sets the tone for this grim, but very funny, dissection of life as a poor man in 1930s London. The central conceit is that our hero, an unsuccessful poet, tries bloody-mindedly to live his life outside the world of money and experiences a series of disasters as a result.

In a traditional book, the ending – marriage, kids, a ‘good’ job – would be a happy one. Here, ironically, it represents the final defeat of principle by pragmatism.

I love Orwell, so I’ve been meaning to get around to this novel for ages. It’s not as good as his best stuff (Homage to Catalonia would be my pick), but definitely worth reading.

Pobby and Dingan - Ben Rice

I stumbled across this fantastic novella from a first-time author whilst browsing the web, and I reckon Ben Rice could be a big name in the future.

The plot sounds trite; in an outback opal mining town, a girl loses her imaginary friends, and the whole community eventually comes out to help find them. The story is heart-warming but told in such a way as to undercut sentimentality. The language is typically earthy Australian, and the hardships of the mining life are ever-present.

Eucalyptus – Murray Bail

I enjoyed this odd fable about a man who will only allow his daughter to marry someone who can identify each of the hundreds of eucalypts on his large plantation. The Shakespearean aspects (The Tempest, the casket scene from Merchant) together the stories-within-stories reminiscent of the 1001 Nights or The Decameron provide a timeless feel, exacerbated by the isolated setting.

There is also a touch of Moby Dick in the scientific digressions, which I know some people found distracting. As in Melville's masterpiece, I found the essay style sections complemented the story well and added an extra layer of meaning.

Trilby – George du Maurier

It was a du Maurier cartoon that begat the term “curate’s egg”, which I suppose would be a reasonable description of this odd novel. It was a runaway best-seller in it’s day (the 1890s) thanks to a couple of vivid characters, a fun Parisian setting and a jocular narrative voice.

To the modern reader, though, it feels horribly dated. The depiction of arch-villain Svengali is hopelessly anti-Semitic, the pacing is way off and the references to popular songs and literature of the day have no meaning at all any more.

In historical terms, interesting. In literary terms, close to worthless.

Goodbye to Berlin - Christopher Isherwood

Sally Bowles, for whom life is a cabaret old chum, is the one we all know, but Isherwood's brilliant series of interlinked stories describes a range of Berlin characters during the rise of Nazism. Gradually the character sketches recede as the political climate becomes more threatening.

Perhaps because it was written in 1939, before the full horrors of Hitler's policies became apparent, the narrator is able to maintain a coolly detached tone, only occasionally allowing his fears and sadness to show.

The description of sex is also very much of its time. The sexuality of the protagonists clearly ranges across the spectrum of human experience, but direct reference to gay relationships is avoided, presumably to avoid censorship. There would be years to wait until the Chatterley trial finally ended book censorship in the UK.