strange and random happenstance

Kelly Jones is easily as much of a fangirl of Regency Magic as I am judging from her debut in the genre, Murder, Magic, and What We Wore, which is a treasure trove that mines the genre for the best of the best. But one would expect that combination of the literary and the historically studious from an author who received a Bachelor of Arts in English and Anthropology, two subjects I wished I'd taken more classes of in college. Growing up in San Francisco she was introduced to Jane Austen at a young age and I'd like to think that that helpful librarian is what spurred her into getting a Master’s in Library and Information Sciences from the University of Washington after she finished her undergrad. Over the next fifteen years on her way to becoming an author she surrounded herself with books; working in libraries and bookstores until she finally decided to focus on her writing. Nowadays when Kelly isn't writing she's teaching workshops for writers of all ages on such diverse topics as just writing a novel to superpets to the science of chickens. Sadly Shoreline Washington is a bit far for me to commute for a workshop...

Getting back to the chickens... not only does she keep chickens that are sadly not showing any aptitude for magic but her first book was about chickens! Unusual Chickens for the Exceptional Poultry Farmer is about twelve-year-old Sophie and her magical chickens. The book is illustrated by Katie Kath and published by Knopf Books For Young Readers and got a slew of awards. While I have yet to read this book, or it's sequel which comes out later this year, if it is anywhere near as funny or original as Murder, Magic, and What We Wore, I see many awards in Kelly's future. And given her diversity in interests, from "magic, farm life, spies, sewing, the odd everyday bits of history, how to make sauerkraut, how to walk goats, superheroes and what makes them so super, recipes to make with a lot of eggs, anything with ghosts (particularly friendly ghosts), how to draw chickens that actually look like chickens, and any story she’s never heard before" I can't wait to see what she'll write next... though I would like to put in a vote for a sequel to Murder, Magic, and What We Wore!  

Question: When did you first discover Jane Austen?

Answer: As a young person, I was a strong reader with a small public library, and everyone worked hard to keep me from running out of (reasonably appropriate and interesting) books. So, my mother and one of the librarians introduced me to Jane Austen in middle school. I'd never realized a classic could be funny!

Question: What do you think Jane Austen would think of her impact with so many literary offshoots, from parody to pastiche?

Answer: I think she might be a bit surprised to see how many of us share her sense of humor, more than 200 years later! (I know I worry whether anyone will find my writing as funny as I do.) But I think she'd be pleased that other writers understood that she was capturing a world in her stories, and to see how they imagined that world in theirs.

Question: Where do you get your inspiration from?

Answer: I tend to pull bits of stories from the world all around me. For Murder, Magic, and What We Wore, part of the inspiration was Florence Nightingale's Cassandra (early Victorian, I know!), where she talked about upper-class ladies (like herself) losing their minds for want of useful, valuable employment. I love and value the work I do; so what would it feel like to be prevented from doing it by society? Regency England was a time when women could cross class boundaries -- think of Emma, Lady Hamilton. But what would cause a lady to deliberately step down society's ladder, instead of up? What would that lady risk, and why, and what would it feel like?

I find amazing pieces of actual history, too, and try to let those lead me. What were women doing in 1818? Who had power? How did they use it? What did the world look like? The more history I learn, the more I question my own assumptions -- and I consider that a gift. The chapter heading quotes are my answer to anyone who tries to tell me "But a woman could never have -- " Really? Are you absolutely certain about that?

I also write the books I want to read, and I was craving a Regency fantasy that wasn't a romance. I love romance, but I also love stories about work, and family, and friendship, and responsibilities. I wanted to read about a girl who was too busy with other things to fall in love. What would it look like if Jane Austen had written and published a novel about a lady writer who did not marry? It bothered me that I couldn't quite imagine such a story.

Question: What makes the early 19th century mesh so well with magic?

Answer: That it was a time of great change, all over the world, including technological change. Magic fits best into times where anything seems possible, and where it would be used in new ways. I also particularly enjoy the way science and magic can fit together, so I like to think that the scientific advancements of the previous century would have had an impact on magic as well.

Question: The world building and system of magic varies greatly in the regency fantasy genre, how did you go about creating yours?

Answer: I love puzzling out a world from the clues an author includes. One of the things I love about reading Austen outside her time is that she doesn't explain anything, but a reader can pick up what's important to the characters as the story progresses. I like to treat magic and how it interacts with a novel's world the same way.

For this book, I thought about magic as creating things that could not be manufactured -- couldn't be designed and passed on to someone else to produce. It's artisan-magic, perhaps -- something where the person with the magic can't avoid getting their own hands dirty. And that means that a lady who's talented in something other than ladylike accomplishments like music or painting might not be able to use her talent, or at least might not profit from it. I love the ways that practicality and magic interact: what would you need magic for, if you were wealthy? What couldn't you get any other way? I try to think about the social questions as well: In a society with a wealth gap the size of Regency England's, would the lower classes have any experience of magic at all, unless they had it themselves? Or would it be almost indistinguishable from the other privileges of wealth -- just another way to one-up Lady So-and-So? What would people in that particular time be concerned about, or be unable to accomplish any other way?

Question: If you had to choose between writing only period literature or only fantasy literature, which would win?

Answer: It would be a tough choice, but I'd choose fantasy. My first novel, Unusual Chickens for the Exceptional Poultry Farmer, is a contemporary fantasy about a girl learning to care for magical chickens, after all! I cannot stop asking "what if?"

Question: Be honest, have you ever dressed up in Regency clothes just to pretend for a moment you are in the past?

Answer: Alas, I haven't managed to make the clothes yet so that I can wear them! Instead, I take out the sewing patterns and dream about having a sewing talent like Annis does (and the patience to figure out how to use it!) But I had an amazing amount of fun looking through fashion plates to see what Annis would wear and what she would sew.

It's a funny kind of pretending for me, though. I never wish I was actually in the past, because I know my family history. I'd be the Irish maid, not the English lady -- and I have no illusions about the challenges that Irish maid might face. I suppose that's why I choose fantasy over history: I want to try on a world where I could be something my ancestors couldn't dream about.

Author Photograph © Susan Brown

Posted by Miss Eliza at 12:00 AM 0 comments  

Labels: Anthropology, Class System, English, Florence Nightingale, Jane Austen, Kelly Jones, Librarians, Magic, Murder Magic and What We Wore, Regency, Regency Magic, Unusual Chickens for the Exceptional Poultry Farmer

High-Rise
Based on the book by J.G. Ballard
Starring: Tom Hiddleston, Sienna Miller, Louis Suc, Luke Evans, Elisabeth Moss, Jeremy Irons, Keeley Hawes, Sienna Guillory, Enzo Cilenti, James Purefoy, Dan Renton Skinner, Stacy Martin, Louis Suc, Toby Williams, Peter Ferdinando, Reece Shearsmith, Augustus Prew, Tony Way, Bill Paterson, Leila Mimmack, Neil Maskell, Julia Deakin, Dylan Edwards, and Fenella Woolgar
Release Date: September 13th, 2015
Rating: ★
To Buy

Following the death of his sister, Doctor Robert Laing moves into a 25th floor studio apartment in a luxurious modern 40 story high-rise. Every modern convenience is taken care of. You'd never actually have to leave the building, and soon that becomes the case, more out of need than necessity. Being in the middle of the building Laing is more open to befriend those both above and below him. He starts seeing an attractive single mother from the floor above, and befriends a family, the Wilders, from a lower floor. But Laing will ascend to the heights when he's invited to the penthouse, where the building's architect Anthony Royal lives. Laing comes to a party which he didn't know was fancy dress, humiliated and thrown out of the party with one of his own medical students looking on he becomes trapped in the elevator in a power outage that is to become commonplace, not a rarity. Due to a series of fortuitous circumstances Laing is able to get revenge on his uppity student, but that student's subsequent suicide seems to be the catalyst for the complete disintegration of law and order within the high-rise. The power outages have been followed by the water being shut off and garbage chutes overflowing. The infrastructure of the building is failing and Royal might just be keeping the authorities away as the building devolves into outright warfare. This isn't "growing pains" this is a microcosm of civilization tearing the class system to shreds. But there is one person who has a plan. Richard Wilder plans to take off the head of the beast. Anthony Royal will die at his hands, what happens next doesn't matter.  

Here is a sentence I never thought I'd write: There are some things that even Tom Hiddleston's bare ass can't fix. I know! This is a shocking revelation to me as well. But High-Rise is one of those high concept adaptations that has literally been in development since the book was written in the 1970s and never really found the right team to shepherd it to the big screen. And yes, I am including the team that actually made this movie, because seriously, it's two hours of my life I want back. A fairly straightforward book was made into a bizarre orgiastic incoherent mess that critics just gobbled up and audiences hated. It's more like a hedonistic verging on incomprehensible overly long music video than a film. There's no structure, just writhing bodies. And such bodies! I mean, the talent on board here is astonishing: Tom Hiddleston, Luke Evans, Jeremy Irons, Keeley Hawes, James Purefoy! I could go on and on because this is like a dream cast with the cream of the crop taken from British television and cinema but if High-Rise proves one point, you can get the best actors in the world and if the vision isn't there, if the writing doesn't shine, if the plot is nonexistent, they can in no way save the film. As I shockingly said before, not even Hiddlesbum could save this mess. Though perhaps we can throw a little blame at Elisabeth Moss? She's destroying dystopian adaptations left and right these days... 

What confused me most about this adaptation is why oh why did they decide to make it period? Yes, this is 100% enshrined in 70s glory. This was the biggest mistake they could have made. The reason the book actually works is that there is a universality to it, so while it was written in the 70s you can totally see it happening now. This specificity of period makes it dated and implausible. Yes, I say implausible. Because if this uprising had occurred, if this past had happened, then the future we live in would be different. There's a reason dystopian literature is either in an alternate timeline or in the near future. This makes it believable. The world we live in could take a turn into a giant dumpster fire and then we're there. We have reached dystopia. Having this horror happen in the past and then forgotten while Margaret Thatcher talks on the radio? Um, no. What's more is the era went on to inform the sets and the costumes. This leads to the audience having a disconnect. I kept thinking, oh look, there's something I vaguely remember from my childhood, or the Wilder's apartment has a vague Star Wars feel to it, Aunt Beru and Uncle Owen must have been called in to decorate. There was no immediacy to the story and the horrors within. I couldn't connect because this 70s framework was a distancing device. But the biggest flaw? Don't model your high-rise lobby off a set from the original Battlestar Galactica.  

The embracing of the 70s aesthetic goes deeper into destroying this film than you might think. As I've mentioned there's a disconnect by having the story take place in the past versus the present or near future, but more than that by having it set in the 70s the film isn't a commentary on the universality of human behavior but a commentary on human behavior during this specific time. Despite what may or may not have happened in the 70s it's come to mean certain things in popular culture. It's viewed as a time of excess, drugs, drinks, and swingers! Where cops didn't have to answer for killing the occasional criminal and justice was sometimes gotten in the most nefarious of ways. Therefore we already have these preconceptions of the 70s and to have this acted out on screen it just seems a product of the time, the 70s was the catalyst, not man's base nature. It's like the director and the writer, who happens to be the directors wife, just didn't get it. The book is a statement of human nature and the devolution of man, and the movie is just "wow, things were crazy in the 70s weren't they?" And in that last scene with Margaret Thatcher coming on the radio? Are they trying to make the film into a political statement of what Thatcher did to England? Because that's a cheap shot. Trying to tag your own message on when you couldn't even properly convey the author's message.

With this bizarre music video style the whole film contains there is one scene, and one scene only that I think captured the essence of the book while creating a new spin on it, letting the filmmakers leave their stamp on the classic book, all while still feeling like an homage to the Annie Lennox "Walking on Broken Glass" video. Doctor Laing is invited to a party in the penthouse. Anthony Royal and his wife are throwing a fancy dress party and the theme is the French court of Marie Antoinette, which of course they didn't bother to tell their guest from the lowly 25th floor. Why is this so perfect? Well the book, not the movie, is about the stratification of the classes within the high-rise and how those lower down are trying to topple those at the top. What happened in France as a result of the excesses of Marie Antoinette and her court was The French Revolution, off with their heads and all that. What is happening within the microcosm of the high-rise is what happened on a larger scale in France. The filmmakers are grounding what is happening in the high-rise with historical precedence, which I think is the only time in two hours of rubbish where I almost liked the film. For that brief instance they got it. Also with the cover of ABBA's "SOS" by Portishead we get a wonderful double meaning, triple if you really want to bother with the whole 70s of the thing. What we get with the song is a menacing warning to those decadent partiers that their time has come, but also a warning that what happens in the high-rise stays in the high-rise. There will be no one coming to save ANY of them. Now if only they burned the whole thing to the ground, film and all I might be satisfied.

Posted by Miss Eliza at 12:00 AM 0 comments  

Labels: 70s, ABBA, Adaptation, Battlestar Galactica, Class System, Dystopian, Dystopian Drama, Elisabeth Moss, French Revolution, High-Rise, J.G. Ballard, James Purefoy, Keeley Hawes, Margaret Thatcher, Tom Hiddleston

High-Rise by J.G. Ballard
Published by: Liveright
Publication Date: 1975
Format: Paperback, 208 Pages
Rating: ★
To Buy

Two miles downriver from the City of London right on the Thames there's a new complex surrounding a small lake. On one side of the lake is a new medical school and television studio. On the other side there will be five identical high-rises reaching forty stories into the sky. The architecture by Anthony Royal may be brutal, creating a concrete landscape, but for Doctor Robert Laing moving from Chelsea into his 25th floor studio apartment in the first completed building, three floors above his sister Alice, he feels like he's traveled forward in time. He's now living in the future. The high-rise has a glut of conveniences, with a 10th floor concourse having a supermarket, bank, hair salon, as well as a swimming pool, and the 35th floor having fine dining, not to mention there's a school for the kids living in the high-rise. It's a small vertical city that has everything Laing needs. In fact with all the bored housewives and rumors of a brothel higher up the building is a sexual playground for the recently divorced Laing and his upstairs neighbor Charlotte Melville might just well be his first conquest. But when he arrives at Charlotte's he finds the unwelcome presence of Richard Wilder, a documentary filmmaker who lives down on the 2nd floor with his wife and two kids. While Laing and Wilder both work just across the compound soon they both feel reluctant to leave, a feeling which seems to be spreading. Soon there are breakdowns, garbage chutes not working, lights going off, elevators behaving erratically. Skirmishes arise between neighbors, whole floors band together to attack other floors further up the high-rise. Time becomes irrelevant as the violence escalates. Bodies start to pile up, canine, feline, human... Will anyone escape the lure of the high-rise and the desire to kill? As the first power outage hits the second building one wonders if the insanity will spread.

Usually I like a good rant. In fact back in high school when I first started writing reviews, though usually about art, I found that it was easier to write a negative review than a positive one. Because sometimes it's really hard to put your finger on what works but it's so much easier to know what doesn't work. Despite years and years of writing, let's not discuss how many years please, I do still find it easier to write a negative review, though I hope I've gotten better at communicating what makes something work for me, because I truly want to read only good books, but that is just a utopia that I fear will never exist unless I were to spend a year just re-reading my favorite books. All this brings me to High-Rise... this is a book that deserves the biggest longest rant I can give and yet, for the longest time, I just couldn't be bothered. It has been over a year and a half since I read this book and it has languished on my shelf for books I need to review. It's sitting there waiting. Waiting to be sold. Because that's right, the second this review is done off it goes to Half Price Books in the hopes that I can get something back for my time and energy. Such wasted energy. Even writing this now I'm like, why bother? I seriously don't know where this lassitude with regard to all things High-Rise comes from. I read this for my book club and most everyone really liked it. But I'm here just going, no. All the no for this book. Perhaps my differing opinion has led to me dragging my hells? Who knows. Yes, High-Rise has an interesting and plausible concept that is somehow timeless yet it just fails utterly in the execution. There are no characters likable or fascinating enough to be invested in. At no point did I relate to the situation or the people and therefore I just checked out.

A big turnoff is the treatment of animals. You know the website Does the Dog Die? where those who can't handle animal deaths go to vet (ha ha) a movie? Well, here it wouldn't just be one dead dog, it would be Laing roasting one on a spit for dinner. Yes, seeing as this flash forward happens on the first page I should have known what was to come. Yet somehow I thought that was just setting the apocalyptic tone and wasn't going to be something so graphically carried throughout the book. I was wrong. Reading so much of what happens in the high-rise actually made me physically sick. And it wasn't JUST the animals, women and homosexuals were treated just as badly. And I'd like to make it clear, I'm not saying the women and homosexuals are animals and should be treated that way, J.G. Ballard is. The women have two purposes, one is that the more women a man has in his harem, the more power he has. They are just a status symbol. The other purpose they serve is sexual release. Women are constantly being raped here. This book should just have a trigger warning placed on the cover. And while I see what Ballard is doing with showing what happens with the breakdown of a society, he seems to take glee in it. Violence just for the sake of violence making it impossible for the reader to become desensitized. While I should applaud Ballard for creating such a visceral book wherein violence never loses it's potency, I just can't because it made me sick. It's like that scene in A Clockwork Orange where Alex undergoes the Ludovico Technique, violence of this level just creates nausea in me.

And yet Ballard could have subverted this male dominated narrative and created a more balanced story. At the denouement of the book we learn that there's been a band of women roving the high-rise lead by a children's book writer. They have not only been protecting the children but meting out punishment on the men. Where is this in the rest of the book!?! Where is this story? Yes, it basically redacts what was happening in his narrative, but it's so quickly mentioned and pushed aside that you can't be 100% sure that this is what Ballard meant or what really happened. There's this "Blood Garden" (the title of the only chapter this is dealt with) and the women bring their victims there? Oh, and this is also when cannibalism makes its way into the story. I also forgot to mention the incest. Seriously, why would anyone read this book? But this little hint of female empowerment turns everything on it's head. Up until this point it's been a bit of a testosterone fueled slog to read the book, and I can't help thinking, what if this second plot line about the second sex been introduced earlier? What if the female narrative was parallel. Yes, you get a bit of a nice surprise to learn what else has been going on when the men were too busy with their conquests, both in turf and women, but it's too little too late. Yes, you could say that this opinion, in fact all my opinions of the book are based on me being a female, but that doesn't account for the fact that this book is badly paced, badly plotted, and could have been so much more.

Because the crux of the problem, the book's failing, isn't violence or women, no matter how much I have issues with that, it's in a sameness to the three main characters. So much of the book is a metaphor for the struggle between classes and this is born out in our leads, Richard Wilder, 2nd floor and working class, Doctor Robert Laing, 25th floor and upper middle class, and finally, Anthony Royal, penthouse and upper class. Prior to the outbreak of hostilities, each man lower down is trying to jockey for a position higher up in the building. In fact Richard Wilder's obsession to get to the 40th floor leads to his death in the blood garden. But what annoyed me was the sameness of all three men. They basically all behave the same and that's just stupid. Yes, you could say that this shows that despite class, rank, status, whatever, everything boils down to men and their mommy issues, but that literally makes this book too darn simplistic. This universality is a point that is made so quickly that it's constant repetition makes the book boring. In the end there is literally no way to tell these men apart. Sure, let's say that is what Ballard was going for, going back to my previous statement, this does not a compelling book make. Stereotypes, tropes, avatars for the everyman can not be at the center of a good story. They are a character without character. They give you nothing and therefore the book is nothing. A book needs a payoff, or at the very least a hook. Violent male archetypes/stereotypes aren't enough. Again, you could say all this was Ballard's point. He meant to make a statement with High-Rise. Well, you know what makes a better statement? A book you want to read and analyze and discuss, not torture porn.

Posted by Miss Eliza at 12:00 AM 0 comments  

Labels: A Clockwork Orange, Animals, Anthony Royal, Class System, DEATH, Doctor Robert Laing, Dystopian, Dystopian Drama, Female, Hierarchy, High-Rise, J.G. Ballard, Male, Rape, Richard Wilder, Torture Porn