The Man in the High Castle: Guest Post

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Man in the High Castle, Philip K. DickGuest-reviewer David Sherr gives 5 stars to this 10-part Amazon Studio Series production, which he binge-watched one recent weekend. Says David:

The Man in the High Castle is a complex story of espionage and betrayal based on a 1963 Hugo Award-winning novel by Philip K. Dick. It’s produced by Ridley Scott, who directed Blade Runner (1982), based on another of Dick’s dystopian tales, and Frank Spotniz (The X-Files). The story provides an alternative history: Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany win World War II, and the United States is under totalitarian rule.

While very few movies are as compelling as the book that inspired them, this one holds true to its source in essential plot and character development. (This Gizmodo review describes some of the differences, for fans of the book.) The series is perfectly paced with tight dialogue and uniformly superior directing and acting. The cinematography is exquisite—lingering shots in muted color settings.

Man in the High Castle

Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa in Man in the High Castle

Among the production’s leading actors are Alexa Davalos, Rupert Evans, Luke KleinTank. One particularly outstanding and subtle performance is that of Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa as the melancholy but kind US Japanese Trade Minister, Nobusuke Tagomi, in the accompanying photo. (You may remember him as Chang in Bernardo Bertolucci’s Academy Award-winning film, The Last Emperor [1987], or Eddie Sakamura in Rising Sun [1993], based on a book by Michael Crichton.)

The artistic director, costume designer, and set designer all deserve kudos. The film depicts technology, clothing, hair styles, and vehicles that appear to be from at least a decade earlier than 1962, when the story is set, which is consistent with a point in the story-line about how progress is inhibited by the effects of fascism.

The Man in the High Castle became available for Amazon streaming on November 20. It’s billed as “season one,” so there may be more to come.

Rotten Tomatoes critics rating: 95%.

Guest review by David Scherr. Contact him at dmsherr@gmail.com or on Twitter: @davidsherr

Last-Minute Book Gifts

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book gifts

(photo: Quinn Dombrowski, creative commons license)

Is  Santa still searching for a few perfect stocking-stuffers for the people on your list? Here’s some help.

I scanned through the books I’ve read and reviewed this year, and selected some for people having different interests.

Included are a few lesser-known books, too. You don’t need me to tell you about Everything I Never Told You (by definition!) or other front-of-the-store best-sellers.

And, you’ll find The Cowboy and the Cossack there, once again, because everyone who takes my advice about it says it’s one of the best books they’ve ever read!

Clicking on the title will take you to my review. If the lucky recipient likes:

While you’re at it—buy two copies, one for yourself! Happy reading!

****The Man in the Wooden Hat

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tulips

(photo: Denise Krebs, creative commons license)

By Jane Gardam — Getting to know intimately one half of a married couple can ill prepare you for meeting the other half, who may fail to live up to their superior advance billing, or, as likely, be so surprisingly normal—even pleasant—that you mistrust your own memory of past marital revelations. Award-winning British writer Jane Gardam’s books Old Filth (from the husband’s point of view) and The Man in the Wooden Hat (the wife’s) apply these different lenses to the same 50-year marriage.

I’ve read only this one, published in 2009, but went back to reviews of Old Filth (2006) and found that many of the animating events in the couple’s life are described in both novels. While the bones of the relationship remain the same, “Little here is as it seemed in ‘Old Filth,’ and both books are the richer for it,” said Louisa Thomas in her New York Times review.

The sobriquet Old Filth—created by and applied to talented barrister Edward Feathers, later Sir Edward—is an acronym for “Failed In London, Try HongKong.” Try there, he does, and succeeds. Also in Hong Kong, his future wife Elisabeth Macintosh debates whether to marry him, decides to, and carries through at rather a slap-dash pace in ancient borrowed finery. Eddie’s preoccupation is that Betty should never leave him, and she promises she won’t. This is a promise Betty learns will be enforced by Edward’s best friend, the card-playing Chinese dwarf Albert Ross (“Albatross”): “If you leave him, I will break you,” Ross threatens, and she is sure he means it.

The wedding ceremony follows by a few hours a one-night affair, in which Betty is deflowered by Eddie’s nemesis, rival barrister Terry Veneering, a secret to which The Albatross, unfortunately, is privy. Trust Charles Dickens to recognize an allusive name when he hears one; like the nouveau riche social climbers in Our Mutual Friend, this Veneering has a charming surface. His attraction for Betty lasts for decades, and he weaves in and out of the story of the couple’s marriage.

While a story of interpersonal relationships, the book takes place after World War II, and is necessarily revelatory about broad social upheavals in Britain. Class and privilege are never the same after the unraveling of Empire, the economic upheavals of the decade before the war, and the war itself. The world into which the three protagonists were born simply disappeared beneath their feet and dissolved out of their arms.

Gardam’s novel follows the couple from youth to old age, with Betty’s death planting tulips in their rural garden. Mostly, though, it focuses on their early relationship, including the tragedy of a miscarriage that leaves Betty unable to have her heart’s desire, children. The closest relationship she maintains with a young person is with Veneering’s precocious son, Harry, whom she meets when he is nine years old and “crunching a lobster” under the table at a banquet. She has numerous lively and colorful friends in Hong Kong and later in London, whose appearance in the narrative is always welcome.

As for the everyday relationship between the spouses, the reader is shown the benefits of accommodation rather than the head-to-head battles that often characterize “relationship books.”

Well plotted and carefully written, full of good humor and getting on with it. A third book in the Old Filth trilogy, Last Friends, was published in 2013. It’s a view of the Feathers’s marriage from Veneering’s point of view. Now that should be interesting!

Charles III

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Charles III

Tim Pigott-Smith in Charles III

The prize-winning play King Charles III, billed as a “future history play” and now on Broadway at the Music Box theatre, is a compelling theatrical conjecture. It anticipates the time when Queen Elizabeth is gone and her oldest son, Charles, is in position finally to become king. Charles, alas, has always been a person from whom little has been expected (some would say this is one reason QEII has hung on so long), a view which he himself has contributed to. His perceived rejection of Diana—“the world’s princess”—in favor of the unloved Camilla Parker-Bowles added fire to his critics, who had previously mustered little more than a yawn.

In the play, the Liberal Prime Minister assumes Charles will play the role of thoughtful rubber-stamp that his mother did, so well portrayed in The Audience (Helen Mirren as Queen) on Broadway earlier this year. Not so. In their very first meeting, Charles objects to a Liberal bill to restrict freedom of the press. As in a high-stakes chess game, parliamentary move and monarchal countermove ensue. In the fragile edifice of his family, the issue of controls on the frenzied media are of more than academic interest. The plot keeps turning and turning, and I won’t say more about it, except that I found it riveting.

Let’s talk about style. The simple set is intended to remind the audience of the Old Globe, showing shows five sides of an elegant brick structure. A frieze running around the entirety, about ten feet above the stage, comprises semi-abstract faces lit in various ways to denote “the people”—crowds, demonstrators, in other words, those most likely to be affected by the affairs of state on which Charles aspires to be a benevolent, active force.

The echoes of Shakespeare are more than visual. We have the machinations of Lady Macbeth, the indecisiveness of Richard II, the desperation of Lear. Written in blank verse, playwright Mike Bartlett’s language is often given an Elizabethan cadence, “Husband,” Kate calls to William, and nearly every scene ends in a rhyming couplet. This is artificial, but doesn’t seem artifice. Rather it reflects the tragedy, if tragedy is defined in the dramatic sense, as a fall from a great height, playing out before us. We are seeing critical precedents discussed and the weight of 1600 years of history. Such events are worthy of Shakespearean language in the country’s leaders, and not the territory of “Oh, whatever” or a graceless “WTF?”

The cast, which comes from London’s prestigious Almeida Theatre, is excellent. By training and experience, it manages this demanding language well. Tim Pigott-Smith is a heart-breaking Charles (The Telegraph of London calls it “the performance of his career”), and Margot Leicester is perfect as Camilla. I also especially liked pencil-thin Lydia Wilson as Kate and Richard Goulding as “the ginger idiot,” Harry. Adam James and Anthony Calf were fine as the Liberal and Conservative leaders, respectively. The program notes that many of the actors had vocal training, and that stands them in good stead in various scenes, in which solemn chanting (this is not a musical!) establishes a moody atmosphere, which is not to say there are no laughs elsewhere.

Bartlett also wrote the theatrical version of Chariots of Fire (seen in London in 2012 and greatly admired), among many others, and won a Best New Play award for Charles III. It’s nice to see something on Broadway that grapples with thought-worthy issues, including questions for which Americans are merely interested observers, like the future of the monarchy.

As in London, the production is directed by Rupert Goold, the award-winning Artistic Director of Almeida Theatre. I wondered what the U.K. critics thought of it, and found they quite approved. For example, critic Michael Billington in The Guardian said, “It gains traction as it goes along and by the end has acquired a borrowed grandeur through its Shakespearean form and a tragic dimension through the performance of Tim Pigott-Smith.” Agree. Whole-heartedly.

Christmastime In NYC

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New York, Christmas

(photo: Vicki Weisfeld)

New York, Christmas

(photo: Vicki Weisfeld)

New York, Christmas

(photo: Vicki Weisfeld)

(photo: Vicki Weisfeld)

 

 

Best Salvation Army Bellringer Team Ever!!

***Deceits of Borneo

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hong kong, woman traveler

(photo: ksobolev0, pixabay)

By H.N. Wake – This is the second full-length thriller by H.N. Wake and a repeat outing for her gutsy female protagonist, CIA Agent Mac Ambrose. (Read my interview with H.N. Wake to find out what she loves about this character.) The action takes place in Hong Kong and various spots in Malaysia—Kuala Lumpur, Miri, and the rain forests of Sarawak Province—with occasional scenes back at the CIA mothership in Langley, Virginia. Wake’s familiarity with Asia and Southeast Asia, gained during more than 20 years’ working overseas for the U.S. government, stands her in good stead here, as the ease and detail with which she describes these lush locales effectively transport the reader right into the setting.

Mac is deep under cover in Hong Kong, at a new job in the Risk Analysis department of a major international financial institution called Legion Bank, and her real identity is known only to one of the bank’s executives. When another Non-Official Cover CIA agent—Josh Halloway—goes missing out of Kuala Lumpur, Mac’s boss back in Langley tells her to find him.

Gradually we learn her concern about Halloway’s disappearance is not just collegial solidarity, it’s also personal. Halloway is handsome, charming, and intriguing, and they’d met and connected in Hong Kong. Mac was falling for him. The Bank provides cover for her search, when she’s assigned to the risk appraisal of a potential Malaysian client, Alghaba Financing, a major player in Malaysia’s timber and palm oil industries. If the bank takes the company on, it will receive millions of dollars in fees.

Given the opportunity to kill two birds at once, Mac flies to the Malaysian capital. When she checks in with the U.S. Embassy, she finds the ambassador has a chip on his shoulder the size of a teak log and is unwilling to help her. Evidence on the ground is scant, but Mac picks up Halloway’s trail, and the game is literally afoot in the jungles of Borneo. Wake’s choice of a female protagonist with the investigatory skills, cunning, and physical courage to undertake her next steps make this a refreshing antidote to the overdose of testosterone in many thrillers.

However, the goings-on back at Langley aren’t as persuasive. They add complication and some coincidence that detract from the main story. Perhaps it’s a reflection of how people in the field always regard the folks back at the main office: “What are they thinking?” At times Mac’s own behavior is a bit murky. She frequently presses a little too hard in trying to get information from a potential informant, and I never did figure out how she got the key to Josh’s room at the Miri Beach Resort.

What Mac discovers in the rain forest, the lengths people will go to keep her discovery a secret, and the fate of Josh Halloway are the key questions of this compelling story. Wake knows how to put together an exciting narrative, an exotic and interesting setting, and believable characters. H.N. Wake is an exciting new author worth tracking.

A somewhat longer version of this review appeared on the Crime Fiction Lover website.

Trumbo

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Bryan Cranston, Trumbo

Bryan Cranston as Dalton Trumbo

After practically having the frequently shown previews for Trumbo memorized (trailer), I finally saw the film itself. (Though one trailer scene with Helen Mirren didn’t actually appear in the movie. Weird.) This is the second movie in the past week that celebrates the role of righteous writers in upholding social values: Trumbo supporting “freedom of thought and expression,” and Spotlight pursuing “truth, however uncomfortable.” I’m basking in reflected authorial glory!

As you undoubtedly know, Trumbo is the story of the Hollywood 10, writers blacklisted during the communist witch-hunts of the late 1940s and 1950s. Joe McCarthy and all that. When called before the House Un-American Activities Committee, Dalton Trumbo (played beautifully by Bryan Cranston) and the other nine refused to give Congress information about their beliefs or to rat out others in the film industry. As a result, a number of them including Trumbo went to prison for contempt of Congress (“I am contemptuous of Congress,” he said after the HUAC hearing).

He was in the slammer for 10 months and once he was out could no longer get work.

Meanwhile, some industry personages—in the movie, producer Buddy Ross (Roger Bart) and actor Edward G. Robinson (Michael Stuhlbarg)—saw their careers going up in smoke and did testify (though in real life, Robinson did not name names). The movie effectively skewers that Great American Flag-Waving Hero, John Wayne, who managed to avoid any military service during World War II and Korea. “If you’re going to act as if you won the war single-handedly,” Trumbo tells him, “it would be more believable if you’d actually served,” as he and so many of his black-listed colleagues had.

They represent the tip of the iceberg of people harmed by the virulent anti-Communism of the day, and although the movie is about the Hollywood 10, it’s really about the Hollywood One, Trumbo, the most accomplished of the lot. The composite character Arlen Hird has the unenviable job of being Trumbo’s verbal sparring partner and representing an amalgam of several of the harder-line writers’ views. Trumbo is unfailingly supportive of him, even though he inserts his political views into scripts (which Trumbo rewrites) and clearly doesn’t trust Trumbo. (This is where the “You talk like a radical, but you live like a rich man” line from the trailer fits in.)

While not a lot of acting was required of Diane Lane as Trumbo’s wife, she did a fine job, and Helen Mirren is perfect as the odious Hedda Hopper, blackmailer without portfolio. As writer Hird, comedian Louis C.K.’s acting inexperience shows a bit, as he’s up against such acting superstars, while John Goodman is all prickly geniality and Alan Tudyk plays a credible Ian McLellan Hunter. Hunter wins the Academy Award for the Roman Holiday script (the Gregory Peck, Audrey Hepburn classic), but Trumbo wrote it. In fact, Trumbo and the others write many screenplays for which they receive credit only belatedly, if at all. The back of the blacklist can’t be broken until a few Hollywood luminaries are willing to give appropriate screen credit.

Directed by Jay Roach with a solid script from John McNamara. While in their vision, the character of Trumbo doesn’t change much over the course of the story—except perhaps to learn not to take what he most cherishes for granted—“he is no more or less principled at the end than he was at the start,” said Anthony Lane in The New Yorker. He is forgiving, though, and in the end acknowledges that all humans are a mix of good acts and bad (except perhaps for Hedda Hopper).

The real opportunity for learning lies with the audience. While those anti-Communist days may now seem rather quaint—Congress taking on a bunch of two-fingered typists—there always are people who believe they know best what other people should think, who believe others are too dim or inattentive to grasp hidden political messages, who think citizens are like children who have to be protected from difficult ideas. That, Trumbo seems to say, is still the danger. Another film well worth the price of a ticket.

Rotten Tomatoes critics rating 71%; audiences 84%.

Related articles

***Impact

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moon

(photo: halfrain, creative commons license)

By Douglas Preston – This 2010 thriller with a sci-fi premise keeps the reader guessing—and turning pages—start to finish. And, what’s with the moon? Our benign space companion has suffered calamitously in several books I’ve read this year. Not good for us earthlings.

In Impact, Princeton dropout Abbey Straw uses her new telescope to snap a photo of a brilliant meteor coming to ground somewhere in the island-dotted vastness of Muscongus Bay. “It ruined your picture,” says her friend Jackie, peering over her shoulder. “Are you kidding? It made the picture!”

The astronomers all guess the meteor landed somewhere in the Atlantic, where it’s lost forever. Abbey, armed with her photo and data from a buoy showing no sea level perturbations at the time of the crash, believes it hit an island and she can find it. Selling a meteorite will do a great deal to replenish her empty bank account. If she gets there first.

Meanwhile, the President’s science adviser has sent former CIA agent Wyman Ford to Southeast Asia. He’s to investigate the source of some strange new gems finding their way into circulation up from the seedier layers of the international gem market. Called honeys, they’re beautiful, but laced with deadly radioactivity—Americium 241, an isotope of an element not found in nature. The U.S. government, fearing the stones could be ground down to make a dirty bomb, wants a quick and quiet mission to investigate, not the heavy boots of the Agency. If Ford goes, he goes as a freelance. No cover, no backup.

And, Mark Corso, working on a government-funded Mars observation project visits his former professor and mentor’s home and discovers his body—a murder the police describe as a random robbery-gone-wrong. The dead professor had been obsessed with tantalizing evidence that something on Mars is doing the impossible, emitting gamma rays, and sent Mark classified data and an illegal hard drive to prove it. Mark is determined to follow his lead, even though project managers forbid him to spend time on it.

These three pieces of the story come together, of course. Hidden in the islands, in the jungles of Cambodia, and in a crater on Mars’s moon Deimos, is a literally earth-shattering threat. But before that can be understood, more than one opponent is determined to stop them.

The plot moves along energetically and the characters of Abbey and Ford are engaging and believable. Corso is more than a bit irresponsible and self-satisfied, heedless of consequences. In fact, all the staff at the National Propulsion Facility (modeled on the Jet Propulsion Laboratory) are two-dimensional. Preston expertly describes the settings Abbey and Ford must negotiate, whether the Cambodian jungles, the labyrinth of Washington, D.C., science agencies, or the stormy waters of the Atlantic.

This book “dances on the edge of sci-fi but definitely is structured like a contemporary thriller,” says Amy Rogers on the review site ScienceThrillers. I enjoyed it, although at the very end, just when the reader understands the significance of the book’s title, he pulled his punches. He has a new one in the Wyman Ford series (The Kraken Project), and I’d certainly read it, too.

Spotlight

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Spotlight, Boston Globe

Rachel McAdams, Mark Ruffalo, & Brian D’Arcy James in Spotlight

Shades of Woodward and Bernstein, the based-on-a-true story Spotlight (trailer) follows the actions of an investigative journalism team way out on a limb in Catholic Boston. They’re not just in pursuit of the story of clergy child sex abuse, their mission is also to expose the shameful cover-up of abusive priests, and the institutional shortcomings that allowed them to carry on. Unlike today’s social media blowhards (and political candidates), they can’t just make accusations; they need actual proof.

A nice coincidence is the support the reporters receive from another Ben Bradlee—this one Ben Bradlee, Jr., played by John Slattery, who never has a good hair day. Like his father in the Watergate era, he lets the reporters run, even though he’s initially skeptical they’ll come up with anything.

Crusading journalists are a social corrective we have largely lost in the era of declining newsroom budgets and staffs and the competition for sound bites and snarky bits. The reporters in this film reporters fill the job description, pushed by a fierce desire to expose the truth. Sometimes, of course, that leads to more truth than they might desire—closer to home truths of different kinds. They’re after the kind of story that wins Pulitzers (and did), but more important to the journalists, they know it’s an important story for the affected families and a sobering story about how evil can hide in plain sight.

The principals include the Boston Globe’s new editor, Marty Baron (Liev Schreiber) and his investigative “Spotlight” team, led by Robby Robinson (Michael Keaton of the pursed lips), with reporters Michael Rezendes (Mark Ruffalo, who sticks his head out like a turtle, so eager is he to grab onto the story), Sacha Pfeiffer (Rachael McAdams), and Matt Carroll (Brian D’Arcy James). The actors do a fine job, as do Stanley Tucci and Billy Crudup in smaller roles.

As written by Tom McCarthy and Josh Singer and directed by McCarthy, the film is a “magnificent nerdy process movie—a tour de force of filing cabinet cinema,” says Justin Chang in Variety. Yet it is never uninteresting. Even better, it is never sanctimonious.

The film’s tension comes from fear that the Church will find out what the Globe is up to and exert its considerable influence to put a stop to it or—and almost worse from the reporters’ point of view—the Boston Herald will scoop them. If they can delay publication until they have proof top Church leaders knew about the abuse, it would be impossible for them to persist in the “few bad apples” claim.

In sum, “A taut story, well-told,” says Jim Lane in the Sacramento News & Review.

Rotten Tomatoes critics rating: 98%; audiences 96%.

***The Red Road

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UK Courtroom

(photo: fayerollinson, creative commons license)

By Denise Mina, narrated by Cathleen McCarron – Denise Mina has earned her place in the group of distinguished Scottish crime writers whose works are known collectively as Tartan Noir. This award-winning novel about the long, entangling tails of murder has its beginning in Glasgow in 1997, when a young boy is accused, convicted, and imprisoned for years for murdering his brother. Those events resurface in the current day, in which Detective Inspector Alex Morrow is increasingly dubious about her future with the police force and about her own testimony in the same man’s trial for arms-dealing. Her doubts come to the fore when the fingerprints of the accused turn up at a recent murder scene, one where it would have been impossible for him to have been present. The reader/listener knows from early on that he was falsely imprisoned and who the real killer was, a 14-year-old prostitute, but who mixed up the fingerprints? And why?

The tentacles of the conspiracy reach far and wide, and over the intervening 15 years. They even may extend as far as Morrow’s brother Danny, a known gangster, but one she’d rather not be involved in bringing to justice. Meanwhile, all the people involved in the earlier false accusation and coverup, if that’s what it was, have their own reasons to want to shut her investigation down. Despite their efforts to thwart her, Morrow is determined to persist. And in doing so, she must confront the crucial difference between justice and law enforcement.

Focusing on this as an audiobook, despite my cred as a devoted audiophile, it wasn’t totally satisfactory. The plot was so complicated—a plus in a print volume—and the characters so numerous that it was hard to keep the story straight. The narration was in part responsible for this, as there a was less sharp delineation among character voices than typical. Glaswegians may well be able to detect subtle differences in characters’ accents (class, etc.), but my American ears could not. Generally, authors stick with a particular narrator for all their books, at least in a series, so it’s surprising that Mina has had several readers, with McCarron her most recent.