The Three Musketeers: Milady

This was meant to be the second part of two, but it was left on a cliffhanger so I would think that a third film’s in the offing.   It’s not entirely faithful to the books, but the characters are largely the same.  And it’s in French, so, unless your French is fluent, you’ll need to follow the English subtitles!  It’s very entertaining – lots of swashbucking adventuring, everyone dashing about, plenty of history of which *some* is accurate.

And I kept finding myself rooting for Milady de Winter, because it’s usually only men who get to do the swashbuckling adventure stuff, but she gave as good as she got!   Poor Constance, D’Artagnan’s true love, met a sticky end, after she’d tried to help Milady to escape, but D’Artagnan and the Three Musketeers all lived to fight another day.

Forty years after Dogtanian and the Three Muskehounds, I still primarily think of Milady as a glamorous black cat.  But never mind!  Enjoyed this.  Hoping for a sequel!

The Black Air by Jennifer Lane

The weather has gone berserk.  There should not be tornadoes in Stalybridge.  Anyway.  This is a “young adult” book based in the fictitious East Lancashire town of Long Byrne, where, in the 17th century, eighteen young women were hanged for witchcraft.   It’s clearly inspired by the Pendle Witch Trials, but the story’s been changed so that all the “witches” were teenage girls, and the witch hunt started when two of the girls, who’d been best friends, quarrelled in public.   The story’s set in the present day, when the local secondary school cum sixth form college is putting on a Halloween play to mark the 400th anniversary of the hangings.

The narrator is Caitlin Aspey, who moved to Long Byrne from Manchester four years earlier, after her mother’s suicide.  (Marks deducted for referring to Manchester as “the city”.  No-one in the Pendle area, or indeed anywhere else, does that.  It’s not Home and Away.)  We later learn that Caitlin is severely anorexic, dependent on caffeine, as has attempted suicide herself.   Her best friend is the glamorous and oddly-named Tawny Brown, whose younger sister Robyn is also beset by mental health problems.

One of the points the book makes is that everyone in Long Byrne is obsessed with the story of the witches.  Now, do not get me started on the subject of the “Witch Way” buses which run along the main road at the bottom of my housing estate, linking the Pendle area with Manchester city centre.  There’s even a shop in Newchurch in Pendle where you can buy “witchy” T-shirts and little “models” of the Pendle witches.  And, on a visit to Massachusetts in 2019, I was somewhat bemused to find that the shopping centre in Salem was called the “Witch City Mall”, and that there were umpteen shops selling witch-related souvenirs.   I understand that tourism is big business and that we’ve all got to make a living, but it seems a bit tasteless.   Ten of the “Pendle witches” were hanged, and one died in prison.  Twenty people were killed as a result of the Salem Witch Trials, and another five died in prison.   We’re not talking about some kind of Disney film.  *Steps down off soapbox.*

A new girl, Bryony Hollingworth, moves into the village, and it turns out that she’s related to one of the girls hanged for witchcraft.  Bryony is bullied at school as a result, but both Caitlin and Tawny become obsessed with her, and Robyn becomes obsessed with the idea that she’s a witch.   The book strays into the realms of fantasy in that Bryony eventually tells Caitlin that she’s possessed by the spirit of her ancestor, and then disappears without trace, after an incident which leaves the other three girls seriously injured.   It’s a different take on the story of how obsessive female friendships at school can become, and also about how families can fail to notice eating disorders.

This book was recommended by my old school.  I was going to say that I didn’t think children’s books were this dark in my day; but, actually, they were.   There were a lot of books set during the Second World War.   Anyway, this is quite an interesting book, and something a bit different.

Lorna’s Last Year at Wynyards by Amy Fletcher

This is something a bit new from GGBP – a sequel to Elinor M Brent-Dyer (EBD)’s two “Lorna” books.  There’s plenty of scope for writing more about some of EBD’s non-Chalet characters, such as Heather Raphael and Pollie Ozanne, rather than more books re-telling the stories of Chalet School terms about which EBD wrote herself, so hopefully that’s something we’re going to see, going forward.  (But please, please, let no-one even *think* about writing another book about Preachy Beechy!!)  Also, I suspect we may get a sequel to this book, telling us about Lorna’s time at university.  That would definitely be something new.

Wynyards is not the Chalet School, and, whilst no-one has to cope with rejections in their career or undergo an application process to get into university, nor does anyone get caught in an avalanche, fall into a lake, have triplets or finds that they are someone’s long-lost cousin (er, although there is a long-lost godfather).   A lot of the action actually takes place at home rather than at school … and it’s interesting that this is an all-female household, with men hardly featuring in the book at all.  Mrs Arnold, or Auntie Kath, lives with her daughter Kit, her niece Lorna, and her step-nieces Rosemary and Marigold, and there’s a daily woman known as “Mrs Monty”.   The three younger girls attend an all-girls’ day school, where Lorna is a prefect.   Rosemary doesn’t really get any storylines, for some reason, but there’s quite a bit about Marigold getting involved with a bad crowd.   The other main storyline is about whether or not Lorna’s future plans will be derailed by her mother.  Of course, everything turns out well in the end, but it happens naturally, without any butting in or Marigold meeting with any more accidents.

There’s a lot about cooking, but, TBH, it went a bit overboard.  Amy explained in the afterword that, like EBD, she’d ignored the issues which would have been caused by rationing, but I wouldn’t have minded reading about coping with rationing, because that would at least have been of historical interest.  As it is, we get pages and pages about meal preparation, even in a chapter about a family bereavement.  I love food – I wouldn’t be so fat otherwise 😦 – but there was a bit too much of it in this!

There’s also a chapter involving a visit by Joey Maynard.  Some people will be pleased to see such a familiar face.  Other people will be frustrated that we have to see Joey even in a book which isn’t about the Chalet School.

Despite the complicated family set-up, everyone gets on well, and there’s a nice family feel to the book.   It’s an interesting move by GGBP to publish a “filler” (or, rather, sequel) to a non-Chalet EBD, and hopefully this is going to be the way forward.   I like most of the Chalet fillers, but there are an awful lot of them now, and I’d really like to read more about Heather or Pollie.

Jack and the Beanstalk – Manchester Opera House

I love the idea that pantomimes could soon be given UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage status!   The pantomime’s a great Christmas tradition, and, in the age of iPads and Play Stations and whatever, it was wonderful to see the Opera House packed to the rafters for another year with Jason Manford and Ben Nickless.  Also, they used Prestwich for the tongue-twister bit, which was very exciting.  OK, it was only because they needed a part of Manchester which began with a P – the pythons hissed in the pit – but it was very exciting anyway.  I actually once wrote a pantomime (well, a bit of one) and cast my dolls and teddy bears in the various parts.  I was about 7 at the time, and had been reading In the Fifth at Malory Towers.

Most of the football jokes got left out this year … which was probably for the best, seeing as this season’s more of a tragedy than a pantomime.  Well, I suppose it’s a pantomime as well.  Anyway, enough about that.  They picked on two members of the audience, which made me cringe, but I suppose you can always shake your head and refuse if they pick on you and you don’t want to be involved.   Generally, it was a very good laugh, and I think we could all do with that at the moment … especially as the bit where Ben Nickless sang “And there won’t be snow in Manchester this Christmas time – just rain” is very true this evening!    Oh, apparently it’s going to be dry tomorrow afternoon.  Good.

Merry Christmas, one and all!  And bring on this UNESCO cultural heritage thing.

 

 

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year

Thank you to anyone who’s read any of this during 2023!   Wishing you a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.

The Waiting Time by Eugenia Price

This was the last book Eugenia Price wrote before she died, and, unfortunately, it isn’t one of her better ones.   In the 1850s, the main character, Abby, and her new husband Eli move from Massachusetts to Georgia to take over a plantation which Eli’s inherited.  I was assuming that the book would be about how two New Englanders settled into life in the Deep South, especially running a plantation operated by slave labour, but it wasn’t really.  Eli drowned, and most of the book was about Abby and their overseer Thad getting together and having to wait until a decent interval had passed before they could marry.   We were told that Abby had become an abolitionist and wanted to free the slaves, but that was only really a sub-plot.  It was readable enough, but not a patch on the Savannah quartet.

Little Women – Home, Manchester

 

I recently went on a Christmas markets break to Geneva, and got the train to Montreux – how Girls’ Own-ish is that, travelling round Switzerland 🙂 ? – and, as the train drew into Vevey, I immediately thought about Amy and Laurie.  Little Women‘s that sort of book: a lot of people know it so well that bits of it come to mind all the time.   So it must be quite hard to make that into a stage show, especially when you’re trying to fit Little Women and Good Wives into under 2 1/2 hours, with a cast of only 8 people.  Inevitably, some scenes and even whole plotlines are going to have to be left out.   But all the really iconic moments were there.   Taking the food round to the Hummels.  Amy falling through the ice.  Jo selling her hair.  Meg saying yes to John Brooke.  And, of course, Beth dying 😦 .

The younger girls were aged a bit.  They had to have the same actresses playing them all the way through, so fair enough, but it was rather confusing that Beth and Amy were both taller than Meg!   Aunt March was given some comedy value.  And Marmee was de-sanctified and made more human, which worked really well.  No dead canaries!

The character of Hannah was completely omitted, but I think that was more due to the limited cast than a desire to avoid showing the Marches having a servant … although we were told several times that the Laurences ran a business and Laurie had to work in it.  Mr Laurence had been bumped off before the story started, which was a shame – I like his grandfatherly relationship with Beth.  The bits about Amy’s problems at school were left out.   I’ve still never had a pickled lime.   I really must try one some time.  And I’ve still never read Pilgrim’s Progress, which I’ve been meaning to do for over 40 years.  My dad had to read it for English lit O-level.  He wasn’t very impressed.

Pretty much everything about Meg and John’s married life – even including the wedding – was missed out, which I was sorry about.  There are a lot of GO books about romance.  There aren’t a lot about what it’s like when you’re on a limited budget, both partners are tired, and the kids are playing up.   However, there just wasn’t time to fit everything in, and the main focus was put on Jo.   And everything that was included really did come across very well – with a nice touch at the end, when Jo told Professor Bhaer that she’d play her part financially when they got married.   The point about Jo’s penny dreadful stories paying the books was made quite forcefully, and the scene in which Amy tells Laurie to get his act together was done very well.

Poor Amy comes in for a lot of vitriol from readers.   People seem to have this thing that she betrayed the sisterhood by stealing Jo’s man.  She didn’t, OK!   Jo had turned Laurie down, long before he and Amy got together!

I don’t really get Professor Bhaer, even when played by Gabriel Byrne in the 1994 film.   I think a lot of the problem is that in Good Wives, and in The First Violin which was written at about the same time,  German music and literature were seen as being very romantic.  That idea was killed stone dead by the two world wars.  Also, Professor Bhaer is 40 when Jo meets him.  When I first read the book, aged about 7, 40 seemed pretty much equivalent to 100.

Speaking of wars, this production did make more of the wartime setting than the book did.   Jo used some unparliamentary language about the Confederates.   We were told that Mrs Hummel’s husband and eldest son were in the Union army.  And part of the de-sanctifying of Marmee was a scene in which she said that the Hummel son had been killed at Bull Run, and his father badly wounded, and that Mrs Hummel had accepted it in a way she’d never be able to do if Mr March were killed.  I wanted to howl that it couldn’t possibly be Bull Run/Manassas because that was five months before the first Christmas, but then I thought that, OK, it could legitimately be Second Bull Run/Manassas, which was eight months after the first Christmas!

I did go through a phase of finding some bits of the book irritating.  I’ve already mentioned the dead canary!   And was it really so bad for Meg to borrow a friend’s party frock because she wanted to look nice?  And what was the point of all that virtue-signalling with having no Christmas presents?  It wasn’t going to help the war effort, was it?   But, when you think that Little Women‘s contemporaneous with the horrendous Elsie Dinsmore, and didn’t come all that long after the even more horrendous The Wide, Wide World, it really was an amazing achievement.  Jo going to live in a boarding house in New York on her own was a very bold storyline.   And, even though I don’t really get Professor Bhaer, I quite like the fact that Jo ends up with him, even though I think Louisa M Alcott would have preferred her to remain single.

All in all, this was a lovely pre-Christmas treat, in front of a packed (and about 95% female!) audience.   Great stuff!

 

 

Stone Blind by Natalie Haynes

  This is yet another feminist re-telling of a Greek myth, but this is a very good one.  It’s told in a rather tongue-in-cheek way, and the narrative voice asks a lot of questions, but that works quite well.   It’s about Medusa, who really does deserve a feminist re-telling of her myth.

In most versions of her story, she was a beautiful maiden who was punished by Athene for being the victim – the *victim* – of a rape by Poseidon in Athene’s temple.  Her hair was turned into a mass of snakes, and anyone who looked into her eyes would be turned to stone.  Then she was beheaded by Perseus, who was sent to kill a Gorgon by Polydectes, a baddie king who wanted to marry Danae, Perseus’s mother.  Neither Medusa nor her two sister Gorgons were doing anyone any harm: she was hardly the Minotaur.  It’s a pretty sad story, and yet Perseus is regarded as a great hero.   In this book, he’s presented as a complete prat, whereas Medusa is a sweet girl who is much loved by her sisters.

The book covers the story of Medusa, the story of Zeus and Danae, and also the story of Perseus and Andromeda.  Strangely, it doesn’t show Perseus killing Polydectes, and it doesn’t show the blood of Medusa giving rise to Pegasus and Chrysaor.  It does show Perseus being assisted by the gods, but uses this largely to suggest that Perseus was an idiot who couldn’t do anything without help.  And it suggests that the sea monster slain by Perseus when he rescued Andromeda was actually Medusa’s mother.   The gods all come across as being rather silly, and rather unpleasant.  It’s tongue-in-cheek to the point of being flippant, but the points it makes about Medusa are serious.   She really did get a very raw deal.  As did most women in Greek myths, and that’s partly why this genre seems to be so popular at the moment – there are so many tales to be retold from a feminist viewpoint.

 

Wonka

This was lovely.  Yes, all right, as some of the critics are saying, it’s all very nice and sweet, whereas Roald Dahl’s books are basically pretty horrible – whilst in the third year infants, I had nightmares about the Vermicious Knids, and was so upset about Fantastic Mr Fox’s tail being cut off that I’ve never looked at that particular book since – but, hey, it’s two weeks to Christmas, and I think we could all do with something nice and sweet.

The Pure Imagination and Oompa Loompa songs from the Gene Wilder film feature, but most of the songs are new.  Don’t expect deep and meaningful lyrics.  Sample – “Noodle, Noodle, apple strudel, we’re having oodles of fun.”

The film’s meant to be about Willy Wonka’s younger days, when he was starting out.  We’re told that he’s been in the Navy (the US Navy?), and now aims to set up as a chocolatier … in a fictional country where a lot of people have Cockney accents, there’s a clock which looks like it belongs in Prague, the police uniforms look French, there’s a large Catholic church and a lot of monks, there are dukes with Germanic names, it seems to be very cold all the time, and everyone speaks English.  The three baddie chocolatiers who feature in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory all operate there, and are bribing the police, and keeping secret ledgers and stores of chocolate underneath the church, with the assistance of a chocoholic priest and 150 chocoholic monks.

Willy is naive and innocent and very sweet.  He reminded me a bit of Freddie Slater in EastEnders.  He’s absolutely nothing like the Willy Wonka in the books, who’s really quite a nasty piece of work.  I mean, did those four kids really deserve such horrible fates.  What exactly was Violet Beauregarde’s crime, other than chewing gum?!  And don’t even get me started on the fat-shaming of poor Augustus Gloop.  This young Willy’s easily taken in by a baddie, and ends up imprisoned in a workhouse-esque laundry, along with Carson from Downton Abbey, a young girl called Noodle, and various other people.   He manages to escape for a day, and dances about a lot.  Maybe some shades of Oliver! there, and there are definite shades of Mary Poppins when he and Noodle dance about on a roof at night.  And there’s a giraffe.  Called Abigail.

There are various more escapes, and chocolates made with giraffe milk are sold – but the chocolate cartel get the nasty woman who runs the laundry to poison the chocolates.   However, with the assistance of an Oompa Loompa, the inmates of the laundry vanquish all the baddies, and Willy sets up his chocolate factory.   Noodle is reunited with her mother, and the rest of the laundry inmates all have happy endings too.

It’s all very nice and sweet, and we know that the baddies will get their come-uppance in the end.   And there’s nothing bad about Willy Wonka himself – which doesn’t fit in with the books, but, hey, it’s Christmas, and the world needs some niceness and sweetness!  Go and see this.  It’ll cheer you up!

Trapped by Michael Northrop

This was my December “reading challenge” book, about seven kids, aged around 14-15, who somehow managed to get left behind when a school a remote part of New England sent everyone home early during a severe blizzard.  The storm meant that all phone and internet connections were down … a ploy which modern authors are going to have to use a lot, otherwise “adventure” books just aren’t going to work!  The seven kids were three boys who were best mates, two girls who were best mates, one boy who was known as a bully and one boy who was considered a bit of a dork.  Given that an entire book was devoted to this, I was expecting big drama – either some kind of Lord of the Flies-esque chaos or else everyone pulling together and realising that dorky kid was actually really cool and that the bully could change his ways.  However, not very much actually happened.

There was a lot about the toilet arrangements.   It always amazes me how people moan about the lack of references to toilets in older books.   Honestly, I don’t need to know about toilet arrangements!   And our hero, the narrator, was a bit of a prat.  He didn’t want them to break the window of the kitchen so that they could get food because he was worried that he’d be thrown off the basketball team for damaging school property.   Did he think that the teachers would expect them to starve?!   There was an interesting observation about how one of the girls had a pass into all the cool crowds because she was pretty, and there were a few arguments, but, really, very little happened … until one of the kids went out into the snow and died, which was a rather depressing end.

It was a good idea for a book, but it wasn’t really developed very well.   Weirdly, I once went through a phase of thinking that being trapped at school in a snowstorm would be very exciting.  I was going to write a book about it, starring myself.  And call myself Fiona.   It was my favourite name at the time.  I think it was because it sounded quite exciting in What Katy Did At School.   I didn’t stop to think that that was a boarding school and would therefore have beds, bathrooms and toiletries, whereas my school, like the one in Trapped, er, didn’t.  Anyway, it would not have been very exciting.  And this book wasn’t very exciting either.