The Casual Vacancy

Rather too much ham?

Having not read any of the Harry Potter books, nor watched the films, we can't say we came to this with eager anticipation.  Rowling seems to have set her sights firmly on the crime genre now with her second outing as Robert Galbraith on the shelves, but between magic and murder came 'The Casual Vacancy', an adult lit fic novel that garnered fairly mixed reviews.

Pagford is a fictional Gloucestershire village... and a metaphor for the seething, grasping, petty bourgeoisie of modern middle-England, according to Rowling.  The first hour (of three) introduced us to the spread of characters from the rich Sweetloves ("My wife does fun runs... well she knows people who do") to young hotpants-wearing Krystal Weedon (Abigail Lawrie) whose big mouth and drug-addicted mother bring her nothing but trouble.  The catalyst for the action is the death of Parish Councillor Barry Fairbrother (Rory Kinnear) who opposed the development of a town spa as "social engineering".  His titular vacancy is now being fought over by the pro and anti-spa lobbies, in a way that will have the Daily Mail frothing about BBC Leftie Dramas and turning over to watch the Good Old Days of the Raj on Channel 4, or possibly the entrepreneurial (if American) spirit of Mr. Selfridge on ITV.

Did we like it?  It had its moments, inevitably with this calibre of cast, but overall its tone was uneven and its characters so stark as to be almost cliche.  No doubt TV producers thought the book was an obvious choice for an adaptation, but the novel is a long one, with plenty of room for nuance, and 180 minutes of television is not going to bring out the best in the material.  We felt bludgeoned by the juxtaposition of soft sandstone exteriors and modern social housing, and an incessant soundtrack.  Extremes exist, of-course, in real villages and towns, so it's quite a feat that this feels so unnatural.  Maybe it's the - it has to be said - Harry Potteresque nature of everyone so far.  The Mollisons (Michael Gambon and Julia McKenzie) are shallow, devious snobs while Fairbrother, whose online identity someone is appropriating (or are they?) to comment on the ongoing Pagford squabbles, was just trying to do the right thing for the locals, and his abused nephews.   We have the comically absurd plotting of the Councillors one minute and a toddler being neglected in a drug den the next.  The problem of being not-quite drama and not-quite comedy is that the social commentary comes across as rather blatant, and black and white worlds tend to make drab grey dramas.

The Town

Very unlike usual ITV output, i.e. we'll keep watching.  Sounds like a surreal version of JK Rowling's 'Casual Vacancy', and so far in a subtle and intriguing key.  More anon....

Drood – the Denouement

It may be limp to say it just didn’t feel right, but then, the arts are not science and there are no objective, empirical measures, so... it just didn’t feel right.  All credit to Gwyneth Hughes for even trying to conclude a Dickensian tome when he’s arguably even more popular now than in his lifetime, and not known for his simplistic plots.   The resolution she proposed, however, seemed a mish-mash of modern psychology (Jasper’s bad because Daddy didn’t love him) and enough coincidences to out-Dickens Dickens (not only are Drood and Jasper brothers, rather than nephew and uncle, but the Landless twins are also the product of Drood Senior’s lust).  We were tempted to ask whether Ms Hughes had helped out with the recent spoof with Stephen Fry et al.

The contrivance of Edwin’s having gone to Egypt without telling anyone, therefore leaving everyone to believe him dead, and turning up again just in time to tie up all the loose ends, was less than convincing, to say the least.  They may not have had email, but they did have post and even, for some of the distance, telegraph.  His reputation had enjoyed something of a renaissance by then – strange how often this is the case with the dead – yet despite his growing maturity he hadn’t seen fit to bother informing anyone for the supposed year he was away?

Perhaps the main problem with finishing the creative vision of someone else, particularly when the original work is from a different era, is that it can’t be picked up from where the author left off.  The externals that shaped Dickens’s thoughts are so far gone that the modern writer must rely as much on Dickens’s other novels as on history books.  Had he lived, he would undoubtedly not only have finished writing but revised earlier parts of the book, perhaps making major changes, and what he left us with is by default inferior to what would have been published, had it reached that stage.  There is a continuing fad for ‘additionals’, be they sequels, prequels or reimaginings, and some have more success than others but, we would argue, one of the reasons for the popularity of Dickens in this cynical, business-driven age, is his ability to take his world and from it create something new.

Edwin Drood

 

Dickens’s famously unfinished last novel gets the BBC treatment.  For those seeking comfort, his stocks-in-trade are mostly to be found: aptly-named characters, Cockney urchins and grubby old drunks, and coincidental love-interests.  Where ‘Drood’ differs from the rest is in its lack of a sympathetic central character.  The main trio of Edwin (Freddie Fox), Rosa (Tamzin Merchant) and Edwin’s Uncle John Jasper (Matthew Rhys) are all in need of a good shake, though at least Rosa comes to her senses towards the end of the first episode of two.

This made the unfolding drama less gripping than it might have been, and we can’t help but speculate as to whether Dickens would have revised and re-written swathes of it, as he often did after first serialisation.  Or maybe, in his declining years, he decided to shade his characters a little differently.  There is a lovely atmosphere of darkness, perfect for a winter evening, and as usual it all looks sumptuous but we’re not sure about the casting.  Fox is boy-band pretty with a voice to match, and does it really add anything to have the Landless twins as mixed race?  We’re not talking about colour-blind casting – their ‘foreign’ nature is a key narrative feature – but Dickens wasn’t explicit about whether they were Colonial British and seen as inferior for that reason, which was a very real prejudice of his times.  OK, it’s quibbling, and the hour rollicked along with everything pointing towards the perfect solution of Neville Landless (Sacha Dhawan) marrying Rosa, his sister Helena (Amber Rose Revah) marrying Rev. Crisparkle (Rory Kinnear), Edwin growing up a bit and Jasper suffering eternally for his impure thoughts.  Castration might be a safer solution for Rosa, but we doubt Dickens would ever have made that particular revision....

Being a 19^th Century novel, however, ‘downhill’ doesn’t mean an easy ride, and we were left with a scene of Jasper apparently carrying out his laudanum-induced desires of murdering Edwin, believing him to be a rival for Rosa.  So, is Edwin really dead at Jasper’s hands?  Will Neville be blamed?  Has it left Rosa vulnerable to the unwelcome attentions of her music master?  Dickens wrote more, with his usual large cast of characters, and even hinted at an ending, but it’s been left to screenwriter Gwyneth Hughes to script her own conclusion.  It may be hard to please Dickens purists, but at least anything she comes up with won’t be any more outlandish than anything written by the great man himself.