Nicci French Blog

Solitary Pleasures

I just read an interesting article about the effect that the ipod has had on the way we listen to music, which had a terrific quotation from a ninety-year old edition of the Gramophone. The writer was confronting the new embarrassing idea of someone sitting and listening to music on their own. Catching them at it would be 'as if you had discovered your friend sniffing cocaine, emptying a bottle of whisky, or plaiting straws in his hair. People, we think, should not do things "to themselves," however much they may enjoy doing them in company.'

Straw-plaiting? I think the correspondent may have had something else in mind. Be that as it may, the quotation made me think, not of the things I'm ashamed to do on my own, but on the things I have to do on my own, because I cannot or dare not get anyone else to do with me. Namely:

1) There is a fairly long list of TV shows that I can't get anyone to watch with me. They include Dexter, the drama whose hero is a serial killer (because its hero is a serial killer and because of its violence); Battlestar Gallactica (because of the basic taboo of SF, space, all that sort of boys' stuff in a basically female household); Breaking Bad, the disturbing comedy about a terminally ill chemistry teacher who becomes a drug dealer (because it is considered disturbing, creepy and generally yucky); Life on Mars, of which I've only just started the second series, and that was about a year ago (I'm not sure exactly why, but no one else in the family liked it).

2) Rock documentaries (with a few exceptions, we all watched and loved DiG!). Considered boys' stuff.

3) The Battlestar Gallactica exclusion zone applies to almost all SF films. 

4) Buried (just look it up, or read the title).

5) Horror, especially gross-out horror. I watched Drag Me to Hell alone (great ending, by the way).

6) There are things to listen to alone as well. Even if I could get anyone to listen to Yessongs with me, which I couldn't (and it's so inviting, a triple live prog album!), I think it's a pleasure to be experienced alone, like straw-plaiting. Anyway, I think if you didn't hear Yes by 1973, then it's too late.

7) The Tunnock's Tea Cake. How can anyone not like the Tunnock's Tea Cake? It's a marshmallow, it's a biscuit, and it's covered in chocolate.

8) Sparkling red wine. How can anyone not like sparkling red wine? It's red, it's bubbly, it feels strangely ironic and forbidden. I've found an article describing it as a grown-up pleasure. Not in this house.

Too Good to Check

There are certain stories that are like the killer in a slasher movie - they just won't lie down and die, however often they are refuted (and I mean refuted, not rebutted). Mama Cass died choking on a ham sandwich, Walt Disney was cryogenically frozen. Not true and not true. Only a few days ago I told some people at dinner about how a drunk Clark Gable once drove into and killed a pedestrian in his car and how MGM got an employee to confess to the crime. (There's a particularly interesting article on snopes.com demonstrating the falsity of that particular myth.)

Back when I was a teenager, we used to whisper to each other: 'You know that sex scene in Don't Look Now, the really good one? It was actually real. Julie Christie and Donald Sutherland really did it.' It was so exciting. It was also, needless to say, untrue. Even back then Donald Sutherland was denying it in interviews. And now today, there is a report that the ex-editor of Variety, Peter Bart has written a book in which claims to have been present on set and witnessed them 'really doing it'. And poor Sutherland, 38 years after the event, is denying it again. It won't do any good.

Incidentally, in the report Simon Reynolds describes it as the 'infamous' scene. As I understand it, that means famous in a bad way. I think 'celebrated' or 'fondly recalled' or 'much enjoyed' would be more appropriate.

 

Sharps and flats

Nicci:

Today, driving in the car together, Sean put on Chopin's 'Ballade', saying that if he could play one piece, this would be it - some of it so quick that the notes merge into a ripple and rumble of music, and it seems impossible that human fingers can be that deft and delicate. There's a theory that states that everyone can become great at a subject if they devote ten thousand hours to it, but I don't entirely believe it. If I devoted ten thousand hours to playing the piano, I might achieve a moderate level of fluency (actually I doubt even that), but no more. I know this because I'm a rotten musician. I can't sing - I make a noise like a frog. At school, i was made to mouth the words so as not to ruin the group sound and now just the sound of my voice trying to make music brings me out in a sweat of shame. I can't play any musical instrument, either. I've tried. I had violin lessons in my early teens and was so bad my parents made me move bedrooms to the end of the house, where i would inflict less pain on the rest of the family. I tried again when our youngest daughter started learning - we thought we should learn together, but it was a bad idea and although I slogged away for a year or two, dutifully practising scales, drawing my bow with a wail and a shriek along strings that i never quite managed to tune, standing in front of the mirror with the violin tucked under my chin and seeing how rigid and uncomfortable i looked, it was clear from the start that i was going to fail. I couldn't hit the right note: I could hear it was wrong, appalling, but I didn't know if it was too sharp or too flat. 

Sean is a far better musician than I am. He used to play the piano and even now can pick out a tune (I can't understand how two hands can move in different directions simultaneously; I have a flat and linear approach to music - one line of melody is all I can comprehend). He learned the violin and viola for a bit, in order to make up the string quartet he dreamed we would miraculously turn into. But he remains far far away from Chopin's 'Ballade'.

All of which is a way of saying that music is at the heart of our most recent book, Complicit, in which a music teacher and several friends form an impromptu bluegrass-type band in order to perform at a friend's summer wedding - with deadly consequences.... And that Complicit is out this week in paperback.

The Suffolk Chainsaw Massacre

Nicci and I were using the chainsaw this morning. (I should have included a photograph of Nicci wielding it - there's something about a woman with a chainsaw...well, enough of that). The thing about rural mechanical equipment is how dangerous it is if it goes just a little bit wrong. A neighbour of ours in Sweden built his own mechanical log splitter. One day, the strap on his dungarees got caught on it and he was pulled into it. He survived, just about. 

I was thinking of films that make use of this potential horror. There's The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, of course, a film that was banned by the British Board of Film Censors largely for its wonderful title (the film itself has remarkably little violence). A chain saw also plays a grisly part in Brian DePalma's remake of Scarface. Pauline Kael described it as a 'Keystone Kops' sequence, but it didn't make me laugh, though admittedly I only saw it through my fingers. There's the famous wood chipper scene in Fargo. 

But still, this machinery is so scary: you can fall into it, it can fall on you, you can lose your grip on it, fall off a tree holding it. It should be used more than it is.

 

For all ages

Nicci: Today I was signing one of our books for a young woman, who asked me to dedicate it not to her, but to her grandmother's boyfriend. At which point I had to lay down my pen and find out more. It turns out that they have only recently met. They are in their late seventies, in love and very happy. It reminded me of a time when Sean and I were at a party and the host's mother arrived. She was in her late eighties, even early nineties, and was accompanied by her new partner, who was the same age, and whom she had known when they were both young and had re-met a few months previously. There is something particularly optimistic about people falling in love towards the end of their lives - and it reminds us what we all too often forget: that you can be old and grey, have failing eyesight or find it hard to hear - but inside, you're the same as you ever were. Romantic, ambitious, needy, urgent, buoyant, full of fresh affections and desires.

PS. A few minutes ago, very casually and matter-of-factly as if it was no big deal, Sean said to me: 'I think that it's about a seventy-five per cent possibility that in 200 years, mankind won't exist.' Then picked up his book again.

Blast from the Past

I just watched Rosemary's Baby with a couple of young(-ish) people. There's always something a bit worrying about revisiting a film you've loved years ago.

I can report that it has entirely maintained its power to creep people out. The key is that remarkably little emphasis is given to the nitty gritty of Satanism and the presence of Satan himself. All the horror comes out of the ordinary domesticity. The main characters are very much like the cast of a Sixties sitcom: the young couple, the husband who's having problems at work, the nosy neighbours, the avuncular doctor. It works wonderfully as a young pregnant woman's paranoid fantasy: what if the husband your having snappy rows with the the couple next door who get on your nerves and the doctor who you don't feel properly listens to you - what if they were all conspiring to steal your baby?

For a few movies, Repulsion, Rosemary's Baby, Chinatown, Roman Polanski had the ability to portray London or New York or Los Angeles as if he'd arrived from another planet. He also had the weirdest sense of humour. Like calling the horrible neighbour Roman Castavet, a strange combination of his own name and that of John Cassavetes, who incidentally gives the most wonderfully nasty performance.

All the best horror, even vampires and zombies, comes out of the fears under the surface of our everyday lives. Lesson one for anyone writing suspense or horror: start from the ordinary and work out rather than the other way round. This is even true of movies like The Birds and Jaws. These seem like entirely exterior threats but Hitchcock and Spielberg managed to make you feel that they were manifestations of some strange communal anxiety.

It's interesting the movies that do and don't stand up. We watched the Hal Ashby/Robert Towne, Warren Beatty movie, Shampoo, the other day. It felt horribly dated. The problem with Warren Beatty is that he was always really a 1950s swinger with a 1970s hairstyle.

I've tried Beatty out on my daughters (as it were) and they really can't fathom what their mothers and grandmothers saw in him. Although we loved McCabe and Mrs Miller (which Beatty himself loathed), partly perhaps because he is entirely hidden behind a vast beard and drowned in a Leonard Cohen soundtrack. On the other hand, the young Marlon Brando is a bit hit with our household's younger women - and older woman, for that matter.

Five Easy Pieces stands up. The Godfather movies get better with each decade - I think some of the weaker, TV-movie sort of performances of some minor characters don't stand out so much. I'm worried about Apocalypse Now, though, especially after the disastrous extended version, with those awful 1970s sex scenes. 

PS Sorry about the lay-out problems in my previous post. I wasn't drunk. I thought I'd worked out how to lay out verse on the page. I was wrong.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Do Angels Have Sex? (Yes)

The latest book I'm listening to is Anton Lesser's truly superb reading of Paradise Lost. I haven't read it since I was at university and I'd forgotten almost all of it. Including, for example, how much attention Milton gives to the awkward question of sex. Do Adam and Eve have sex before the Fall? Do they feel desire for each other? If so of what kind? And, then, almost shockingly, there is the moment when Adam turns the tables on the angel Raphael and says, what about you? Do you have sex?

 Love not the heavenly spirits, and how their love                                                                          Express they, by looks only, or do they mix                                                                            Irradiance, virtual or immediate touch?

    And, rather charmingly, Raphael blushes as he answers that yes, they really do:

 To whom the angel with a smile that glowed                                                                            Celestial rosy red, love's proper hue,                                                                                      Answered. Let it suffice thee that thou know'st                                                                              Us happy, and without love no happiness.                                                                                    Whatever pure thou in the body enjoy'st                                                                                        (And pure thou wert created) we enjoy                                                                                          In eminence and obstacle find none                                                                                              Of membrane, joint, or limb, exclusive bars:                                                                                  Easier than air with air, if spirits embrace,                                                                                    Total they mix, union of pure with pure                                                                                    Desiring; nor restrained conveyance need                                                                                      As flesh to mix with flesh, or soul with soul.

Sounds good to me.

 

Two Wheels Good

In the old days, a columnist would write some vaguely controversial opinion and maybe the newspaper or magazine would receive some letters and nothing much would happen. Now things are very different. On 8 March, John Cassidy (a writer I normally like very much) begins a post on his New Yorker blog, thus: 'At the risk of incurring the wrath of the bicycle lobby...' and then mounts an attack on the increase of bike lanes in Manhattan. His Jaguar gets stuck in traffic, he complains. He can't find anywhere to park when he has a restaurant reservation.

In the old days nothing much would have happened, but as the old song puts it, that was then but this is now. All hell breaks loose. There's not just an outpouring of rage and grief from New Yorker readers in the comments section, but responses from Felix Salmon (here and here), Nobel Prize-winner Paul Krugman, Ezra Klein and even the Economist, all worth reading and all devastatingly critical.

By 12 March, the New Yorker has a special bike-lane page on its website, including a robust defence of bike lanes by political editor, Hendrik Hertzberg. 

It's democracy in action. The disappointing bit is that Cassidy returned twice to the debate (here and here) and tetchily and rather self-pityingly re-states his position, taking no account of the rebuttals at all. How often in your life have you ever seen anyone presented with evidence, accept it and change their mind?

 

 

Food for Free

Nicci, preparing lunch, earlier today. But why is she wearing gloves?

One of the pleasures of spring is Nettle Soup, when the nettles are bright green, tiny and tender. 

Fry some chopped onion and a clove of garlic. Add a bowl of nettles and a few handfuls of spinach. Fry until it reduces to a green mushy pulp. Add some stock, salt and pepper. Simmer for ten or fifteen minutes. Liquidize. Eat. Feel virtuous.

PS Nettles are delicious just fried as well.

Thanks to John Naughton for the photo.

Grate Expectations

Is this the most interesting drain in London?

Well, maybe one of them. I've had a lifelong relationship with the Fleet River, the greatest of London's hidden rivers. It flows past my parents' house. The two houses I lived in as an adult lacked basements because the river ran under them. A few hundred years ago, you could have rowed down it, from Hampstead Heath to the Thames. Today, if you go to Ray Street, just next to Farringdon Road, and stand outside the Coach and Horses, and kneel down by this grating, you can hear the river flowing underneath. (Don't get run over by the white vans that use it as a rat run.)

The place features in our next book, Blue Monday, which is published in June. More of that later.