I seem to continuously be drawn to books about people similar to myself. Escapism in books is wonderful, and I love fantasy novels about epic warlords as much as the next guy, but understanding what’s going on in a characters head, and seeing their decisions being made [...]]]>

The Coincidence Engine - Sam Leith

I seem to continuously be drawn to books about people similar to myself. Escapism in books is wonderful, and I love fantasy novels about epic warlords as much as the next guy, but understanding what’s going on in a characters head, and seeing their decisions being made inside your own is a great feeling. Of course, this is the intention of almost all writers. If you’re similar to the character or not, the author wants you to be inside their head, understanding their decisions. A truly great author can give you this feeling of personal connection with any protagonist, but a starting similarity certainly helps.

So, take The Coincidence Engine, a novel about a mathematician at university, whose life is turned upside-down when he starts being tracked on his spur-of-the-moment trip to the States by two large and slightly sinister interests. (Admittedly, this part is less true of my life, but a book entirely about me probably wouldn’t be as interesting). Alex, our protagonist, makes an impulse decision in an antique shop standing in front of a ring. He’s going to buy that ring, and a plane ticket to the States, and propose to his girlfriend.
Odd things have been happening however. A plane has fallen out of the sky, which would be annoying enough except that there’s no record of this plane ever existing, and it seems to have been piloted by a male stripper with no piloting experience past the costume he’s wearing. The Directorate of the Extremely Improbable (an organisation almost as farcical as its name) is worried that someone has finally built the coincidence engine that the fanatical mathematician Barchanski was raving about before he disappeared. They’ve tracked its effect and they believe it’s in the case Alex is couriering to the US to gain a cheap flight.

If this seems slightly confusing and far fetched, you’d be right. A coincidence engine seems like a really interesting and useful plot device. Why have these two characters met up at random despite having no idea the other was here? Must have been the coincidence engine. But it’s got it’s problems. Firstly you can only do this so many times before it starts to feel a little lazy, and also, the concept as a whole is very confusing. It is discussed in the book that, as coincidences aren’t a tangible thing, the coincidence engine must actually have some other, powerful effect that causes these things to happen, but other than this small concept, the workings are left unexplained. To me this just seemed like careless storytelling. Why is the central concept, that gives the book its name, so poorly explained and realised?

The writing style of the book is rather odd as well. The book is written as a third person omniscient narrative, a style not normally though of as one with a relatable narrator. However, twice in the book, the narrator breaks off from the story and directly addresses the reader, giving his ‘opinion’ on the story and characters. These interludes didn’t seem to add anything to the novel at all, mostly reminding me that I was reading a made up story and pulling me out of the action. I was, at one point, happily sympathising with Alex, after he’d made a particularly stupid mistake and was feeling rather chagrined when the narrator chimed in and told me how stupid Alex was, and how he should buck up his ideas. Possibly this is the view of other people reading the book, and I’m just too sympathetic, but the assumption of how readers will feel towards a character is a foolish one to make.

I did rather enjoy parts of the story. The sections of the book focusing on Bree, an operative for the DEI who is sent to track Alex, are well thought out and well told, and her backstory is well considered as well. It seems tangential to the plot though. It becomes linked in at the end but as it’s being told, it seems like a pleasant if irrelevant pause in the actual plot of the book.
Alex is being tracked across the US by two groups, one from the DEI, and one from a rival corporation. The differences between their approaches and successes is rather interesting, however, as the story swaps between the three sets of characters, none of them quite seem to get enough exposure to be truly fleshed out and relatable. If this were an expense taken so that a fascinating and tightly woven plot could be threaded through the book, it would probably be acceptable, but most of it seems to be taken up by people driving around, doing very little, and as I said above, quite a lot of the more important or exciting moments are explained away by just saying that “the coincidence engine did it”, which feels rather weak.

While I can see the ambition in the story he was trying to write, I don’t think that Sam Leith has quite managed it. The book is quite readable, but I found that the plot was too muddled and the characters mainly too insubstantial to make it a particularly great novel.

I’ve been a fan of Murakami’s books for a while. I originally picked one up because it was in a double-pack of books by Vintage with Alice in Wonderland. I’d bought them to try and persuade my girlfriend of the time to read a little more [...]]]>

Dance Dance Dance - Haruki Murakami

I’ve been a fan of Murakami’s books for a while. I originally picked one up because it was in a double-pack of books by Vintage with Alice in Wonderland. I’d bought them to try and persuade my girlfriend of the time to read a little more (if at all), and I thought that Alice in Wonderland would be a good start and that she might get around to reading the other one if she finished the first. I’m pretty sure that she never read either of them (it was, admittedly, a venture obviously doomed to failure from the start), but I picked up The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle and decided to give it a go. It remains my favourite of his novels to this day. The outer placidity and the inner doubts of the main character resonated with me at a much deeper level than the action heroes or sad and misjudged but obviously deeply wonderful inside protagonists that I’d been reading about at the time, Toru just seemed to me like more of a real person trapped in an extremely strange world, giving you the chance to see this odd wonder through a relatable pair of eyes. To me this approach is what makes Murakami’s books so special. Irrespective of what is going on around them, the characters themselves make understandable decisions that I could see myself making in their shoes, and I think that’s why I enjoy him so much.

Dance Dance Dance is Murakami’s sixth novel (although the first two of these have never been translated into English), and follows the search of its unnamed protagonist on the trail of a woman he once loved but hardly knew, an ex ear-model and high-class prostitute, Kiki. Upon returning to the location of their encounter, the Dolphin Hotel, and finding it changed beyond all recognition in the four years since he last left, he meets an increasingly strange cast of characters who lead him to find out more about himself and his surroundings than he had ever seriously considered.

The novel philosophises a lot on the relationships between its characters, and their capability to love. Our protagonist fell in love with a strange girl he met a work four years ago who has plagued him ever since, and he shares a strange relationship with a receptionist at the hotel based upon their strange shared experiences. He seems to fall into these kind of friendships easily, quickly gaining the trust of a call-girl bought for him by a friend, falling in and out of what stretch just short of casual relationships through most of the novel. One his most enduring relationships is with a thirteen-year-old girl he chaperones back to Tokyo at the behest of his receptionist friend, always teetering towards a slightly confused feeling between the two of a mixture of comfortable attraction and propriety standoffishness, leaving you wondering slightly what value he gives to any of his relationships beyond that which he can quickly gain.

The other characters have similar problems in their ability to form relationships. The young girl is stuck in limbo between her brilliant mother who constantly forgets of her existence, and her father who, despite seeming to care greatly for her well-being, fails to manage to show any direct affection to her at all. The contrast between these negligent relationships founded on a parents love, and the present but shallow relationships shared by the protagonist bring an important depth to the novel, almost overshadowing the plot.

Plot, it has to be said, seems to be Murakami’s one weakness. Over almost 400 pages, very little actually occurs. The protagonist sits around in several different places, happily mulling things overt to himself, or chatting with friends, before almost all of the plot exposition and action of the novel occurs in the final 50 pages. I don’t begrudge Murakami for this, he’s by far at his best when philosophically pontificating, but even by the standards of his other novels, things seemed to progress rather slowly. I don’t think I’ve ever read a Murakami novel and known where anything is going to head next, but I got a slight feeling of being lost when reading. I can never quite be sure that this isn’t deliberate though.

I’m reliably informed by Wikipedia that this is, in fact, a sequel to A Wild Sheep Chase, apparently the third of “The Trilogy of the Rat”, though the only one to be translated into English. I never got the impression when reading that I was missing some vital part of the story having not read this.

On the whole, I rather enjoyed Dance Dance Dance. The interaction between the characters, and the strange and subtle oddness of the world was, as usual with Murakami books, fantastically realised. It’s slightly longer-winded then others of his books that I’ve read, and probably a rather difficult introduction to the author to people who’ve never read his work before, especially those who are looking for something with an easier to follow plot (I’d recommend Norwegian Wood or Kafka on the Shore), but for those looking for it, it continues his beautiful and brilliant look on the human existence, aided by a wonderful translation by Alfred Birnbaum.

Now, only a day left to finish the remaining two-thirds of The Coincidence Engine. Off to read I go!

Another year passes, and another Harry Potter film comes along. Ever billed as a series of films for the whole family, it is quite nice to see that this iteration has kept to the friendly tone of its predecessors, although it has lost some [...]]]>

Another year passes, and another Harry Potter film comes along. Ever billed as a series of films for the whole family, it is quite nice to see that this iteration has kept to the friendly tone of its predecessors, although it has lost some of the dark tension of its source material in doing so.
The original book is a tale of Voldemort’s growing strength, both over Harry’s school year, and during his original rise to power. It forebodes the dystopian setting of the final book, occasionally dipping into the personal lives of the characters to lighten its tone. The filmakers, in possibly a wise profit making move, if maybe not so good from a storytelling perspective, have decided to change the tone of the film from this feeling of dread to a happier one, concentrating more on the relationships between the Hogwarts characters than that of Harry and Voldemort.

One can, unfortunately, see the change of screenwriters in this. Steve Kloves, who took a film off from adapting Harry Potter during “Order of the Phoenix”, returns, and seems to have decided that any character development (or lack of such) undertaken in the previous film should be ignored in favour of his version of events at the beginning of this film. Ginny is therefore oddly close to Harry even from the start, despite Harry’s relationship with Cho Chang in the previous film. This is especially obvious in the Quiddich tryouts, where Ginny stands with Harry, away from the rest of the croud addressing the prospective players, despite Harry and Ginny never having been shown as being more than friends, whilst Ron is relegated to stand with the other players.
On the flip-side of the newly discovered romances in the films however, it is nice to see Ron and Hermione being given much more character depth beyond Hermione’s irritated/knowledgable persona and Ron’s general goofiness. Both characters have much more filled out roles in this film, as their attitudes towards each other change from the previous rather covert portrayal, to their new, much more obvious attemts at each other.  By the end of the film however, I had begun to feel that I was being beaten around the head with this a little, as the “Ron and Hermione like each other, as do Harry and Ginny” message was repeated about every ten minutes throughout the film, just in case you had forgotten. This treatment befell several other plot-points as well, although it is possible that this is merely a harkening to the the films younger audience members.

The film’s more human focus is a to stark contrast to the few action-packed sequences which did manage to make it through the child-proofing process. Near the beginning of the film there is an astounding fly-through of London, climaxing in the destruction of the Millenium Bridge by Death Eaters, which continues the high standard of  special effects which have been apparent throughout all of the films. The basis of the film of course relies on these special effects, and although gigantic CG montages are of course in evidence once again, with several large-scale shots of the castle, a quite impressive climactic battle, and a rather perfunctory Quidditch match, it’s the small things that are really impressive throughout the film. I was particularly pleased by Ginny’s pink tribble (miniature puffskein), which was a nice nod to the original text. My only major complaint is the lack of adherance to the work on the previous films. I realise that it’s now basically cannon that Hogwarts and its surroundings look completely different in every film (I suppose it’s another way of hiding the castle and hinting at its magical origins), however the Dark Mark has changed form completely for this film, and whilst it looks slightly less ridiculous than that in the Goblet of Fire (which was incredibly cartoony), it is rather difficult to connect the two, especially during its first short appearence in the film.

The film contains many of these nods, for better or for worse. Dumbledore has a blackened hand throughout the film, for example, and although he doesn’t elaborate on how he got it at such great length as in the book, it’s nice to see that such things have still been carried over. Lupin and Tonks are in the film as well, although their contribution towards the general angst of it all has been reduced to a single throwaway line by Tonks as they leave the Weasleys’. Some of these short mentions however, seem to have been the effect of cuts for time, as Fenrir Greyback is mentioned prominently during the first part of the film, despite his part being mainly reduced to running at the characters out of a cornfield, before growling and running back in again, in possibly the least effective attack ever undertaken by any Death Eater, (although the others of his group do more than make up for it). The largest of these losses is unfortunately the title, where, although the film does explain the origin of the Half-Blood Prince, it’s rather unclear why he should be important enough to merit inclusion in the title, and the rather brilliant double-meaning is lost.

Despite these foibles, the film is held up extremely well by its (as usual) excellent cast. Alan Rickman, despite his sadly brief appearances and rather neutered storyline, manages to add an impressive air of cold distain into every scene he enters in an excellent characterisation of Snape, whilst Michael Gambon does well in showing us many more sides of Dumbledore. Jim Broadbent is, of course, truly brilliant as Slughorn, portraying his indulgances and eccentricities wonderfully to bring a greatly likable character to the film. The main cast also perform extremely well, despite some of their more Lucas-esque “romantic” lines, and perform their characters to a higher standard than ever before.

In general, the film is a success for Potter fans, and brings us succinclty towards the closing chapters of the story. Although the original book’s rather enjoyable dark tone has mostly been removed from the film, the theme of light’s fight over darkness still perseveres (nicely illustrated in a scene near the end of the film), bringing the common theme of hope against all troubles back to the audience. Whilst not quite keeping up to the standard of the book, it’s still a nice family film, and worth watching for any fans of the Harry Potter saga.

For an amatuer choir, they’re not bad all! You can listen using the flash player, or download from the links below (please not too much, as some of us have to foot the [...]]]> Last week, one of the choirs I sing in (the University of Liverpool Singers) recorded themselves singing a couple of tracks. 

For an amatuer choir, they’re not bad all! You can listen using the flash player, or download from the links below (please not too much, as some of us have to foot the bill for the bandwidth). If anyone wants lossless copies of these, I have them.

01 – Locus Iste  

02 – Abendlied

03 – Loch Lomond

04 – The Long Day Closes