In this strange complex of time and space anything can happen

The General Election put a stop to my book and film review posts (and indeed to the watching of films in particular), so here's a stab at catching up.

This book is a sequel to The Vampyre: the secret history of Lord Byron, which I read a couple of years ago (LJ / DW) and really liked, despite not otherwise having much respect for the author. Where the first book was both about Lord Byron as a vampire and a pastiche of Romantic vampire literature, this one similarly features Bram Stoker as a character, is set in the 1880s, and plays around with a mish-mash of relevant literature and lore, including military memoirs of British India, the goddess Kali, Sherlock Holmes, Oscar Wilde, opium dens and (inevitably) Jack the Ripper. It's not particularly closely connected to the events of the first novel, but its vampiric Lord Byron does feature in the sequel, mainly concerned with tracing his descendants from his mortal life and trying to get unscrupulous doctors to investigate whether any cure can be found for his 'blood disease'. He goes under the pseudonym of Lord Ruthven, and his real identity is supposed to be a great mystery which one of the main characters decodes in a massive revelation - a device which obviously did not work for me, or (you'd think) anyone who had read and appreciated the first novel.

Like Stoker's Dracula, this novel is told via a collection of documents and letters, including Stoker's own journal, and we're obviously meant to understand that its events inspired him to write Dracula. He is the busy manager of the Lyceum Theatre during the period when the novel takes place, but befriends a doctor named John Eliot, who draws him into a web of vampiric goings-on. With Eliot, Stoker visits an asylum run by a Dr Renfield which houses an inmate who rips the heads off doves and smears herself in their blood. They also travel to Whitby to unravel mysteries involving Byron's human descendants, with Stoker's journal at that point echoing some of Mina's language from the novel - it is "a most lovely spot, built around a deep harbour, and rising so steeply on the eastern side that the houses of the old town seemed piled up one over the other, like the pictures we see of Nuremburg." Indeed, towards the end of the novel, we jump forwards in time to a point when he has written Dracula, and his correspondence about it with an Indian Professor called Huree Jyoti Navalkar (who seems to be intended as the in-story inspiration for Van Helsing) helps the other characters to work out what really happened during the main narrative, a decade earlier.

The vampire antagonist-in-chief, taking the place occupied by the Pasha in The Vampyre is essentially all of literature and history's female demon-goddesses rolled into one - Kali, Circe, Lilith - and calls herself Lilah for most of the story. There's an interesting gloss on the Kali-aspect of her, whom we first encounter in a fictional border region of India called Kalikshutra. One of the Indian characters carefully explains that the Kali of Kalikshutra is not the normal Hindu Kali, whom he describes as "a beneficent deity, the friend of man, the Mother of the Universe", but rather a quite different being, the "Queen of the Demons". That reminded me strongly of some very similar comments which I learnt from Kieran Foster's talk at the IVFAF vampire festival last year were made by Anthony Hinds in relation to Hammer's planned vampire film, Kali: Devil Bride of Dracula. Having spent time in India himself during the war, Hinds had realised that it would be quite offensive to portray the real-world Kali as an out-and-out demon, and dealt with this in the draft script by revealing that her apparent cult isn't actually anything to do with the real Kali at all, but rather a fraud perpetrated by blood-cultists. It looks like Tom Holland arrived independently at a similar realisation and solution.

Lilah lives in a massive warehouse in the east end of London, which can only be entered via an opium den in the upstairs room of antique dealership run by a certain John Polidori, her abject servant. Inside, the warehouse itself has an impossible, hallucinatory geography of shifting galleries and stair-cases, which weaves together the artistic and architectural influences of all the cultures in which she has ever been worshipped. Just as I'd found Holland's descriptions of the Pasha's castle with its accreted historical layers one of the strongest elements of The Vampyre, I found this warehouse one of the most striking aspects of its sequel too - though he also did a pretty good job on the narrow, foggy streets of the East End. Lilah is more powerful than the Pasha, though, generating the whole architecture of the warehouse as an illusion in the minds of those who enter it, and she likewise has the power (like Circe) to transform people too into whatever she wishes - usually something which she knows they themselves will utterly despise.

John Eliot, the maverick doctor whom Stoker befriends, starts the novel in Kalikshutra, shunning the ex-pat community and investigating the local blood-born disease, but then comes to London to treat the poor and downtrodden of the East End instead. He is partly Sherlock Holmes, leading investigations into Lilah using logic and deduction, and having been taught at Edinburgh by Joseph Bell, while Stoker is his Watson, making naive observations and suggestions which turn out to be of great importance. The Sherlock Holmes stories evidently also exist as fictional works within the novel, though, as one character recommends them to John, and when he has read 'A Study in Scarlet' he remembers Conan Doyle from his university days and realises he must have taken on board Joseph Bell's methods of deductive reasoning. During the middle part of the novel, John treats and helps women with the same names as Jack the Ripper's historical victims, but this is intended to have a dark pay-off. Eventually he is seduced by Lilah and transformed by her into Jack the Ripper - that is, what she judges the antithesis of everything he wanted to be - and is thus able to go out and murder the very same women he had been treating, because they already know and trust him. I suppose it's not the worst way to deal with Jack the Ripper in fiction, since in between his episodes of murderousness he does indeed suffer, as Lilah had intended, with the knowledge of what he's done / going to do. But I still just don't ever want to read about Jack the Ripper, ever at all, and found it very unpleasant indeed to have to be inside his head (as he was narrating it all in the first person in a letter) during those episodes.

Oscar Wilde features as a patron of the Lyceum Theatre, and indeed the novel's title is (sort of) taken from De Profundis, the long letter which he wrote to Bosie from prison, and which was published posthumously. But the relevant line there, in which he's talking about his association with rent-boys etc., reads: "It was like feasting with panthers. The danger was half the excitement." And indeed Holland evidently knew this, as his character of Wilde speaks more or less the same line during a dinner hosted by Stoker: "I prefer a beauty that is dangerous. I prefer to feast with panthers, my Lord." Given all of that, I really can't explain why the book itself is called Supping with Panthers, rather than Feasting with Panthers. (I should add that it does feature the occasional mention of actual panthers, living in Lilah's warehouse, but they're not a substantial element of the plot.) Meanwhile, Holland can't resist the conceit of sending a little literary influence back in Oscar's direction. At one point, Byron, with the insight of a true immortal, gives Oscar the idea for The Portrait of Dorian Gray by observing: "A face that did not age would be nothing but a mask. Beneath its show of eternal youth, the spirit would be withering, a hideous mess of corruption and evil."

In the end, it is vampire-Byron who defeats Lilah by drinking her blood, after which John Eliot / Jack the Ripper cuts out her brains and heart and the whole elaborate interior of the warehouse disappears, leaving behind only the very ordinary abandoned warehouse building it really was all along. Though we're given to understand that she probably isn't really dead forever, and will resurface some time in another guise, her hold over John / Jack does at least evaporate, so that he ends up as merely a vampire.

Overall, worth reading I guess if you like this sort of thing, but it never quite sang to me in the way the The Vampyre did - especially the earlier parts set in Albania and the Pasha's castle. Much like the latter parts of The Vampyre, it felt a bit too beholden to the weight of Holland's historical research, and probably more so in this case for attempting to weave together a wider range of late Victoriana. I'm kind of glad he didn't write any more sequels.

I'm just watching anything with Christopher Lee in it now. What can I say? He has a nice face - and by that I don't just mean that I think he's good-looking (which, of course, I do), but also that because I have been watching his films since childhood, he is also simply very comforting and reassuring to have around on the screen. This is exactly what I need right now to de-stress in between all the conference prep stuff, so I have alerts set up in DigiGuide to tell me when he is on TV and my Sky box primed to record it all. Then, whenever I need an evening on the sofa staring at something mildly diverting, there he is - just waiting for me.

This was shown about a week ago on a channel called 'True Movies 2' - surely a misnomer, because this story at least did not in any way purport to be 'true'. It belongs to a TV mini-series called Sherlock Holmes: the Golden Years, for which the crack is that Holmes and Watson are a little advanced in years, but also now so famous that they are constantly mingling with the celebrities and royalty of the Edwardian era. Hence Lee was able to play Sherlock opposite Patrick Macnee as Watson, both at the age of 69, and there are lots of cameo roles for figures such as Edward VI, Theodore Roosevelt and Lillie Langtry. The mini-series consists of two 200-minute instalments in total - this one, and a predecessor called Sherlock Holmes and the Leading Lady, which I saw some years ago. I wasn't in the habit of writing up all the films I saw on LJ at that point, so there is no past review to link to, but I do remember that I didn't think it was very good. Unsurprisingly, the same applies here.

Both were made by a Euro-pudding-style consortium of British, Belgian, Luxembourgeois and Italian production companies (including - and I am not making this up - Silvio Berlusconi Communications), and filmed on location - in this case, mainly in Zimbabwe. A lot of money has clearly been spent on extras, costumes and expensive vehicles like steam-trains and paddle-launches, but alas the dialogue is lacklustre to the point of banality, the characters are so under-developed that it's impossible to understand their motivations, and the plot is just not Holmesian. Oh, there is some convoluted business about a fake diamond, a real diamond, various murders and a treasure map, but it has none of the precision of a proper Sherlock Holmes story - above all because of the under-development of the characters. For all that we have learnt about them by the end of the movie, any one of them could have turned out to have done what they did or been who they were, so that the eventual 'solution' seems utterly arbitrary.

That said, it isn't a complete waste of time, partly because the location scenery is nice and quite well-photographed (though at a level of definition which makes it all look slightly blurry on a modern TV), but mainly, of course, because Christopher Lee is in it. Even as Holmes, he doesn't exactly get scintillating dialogue, but he plays what he has with a sort of gentle, slightly-put-upon charm that makes his scenes worth watching. And the script does manage to serve up a couple of quite fun moments for him, like when he sits on the nose of a steam locomotive chatting to Theodore Roosevelt while it rattles through the Zimbabwean landscape, or when he has to shoot a pouncing lion on safari at more-or-less point-blank range because another member of the party has deliberately manufactured the attack in an attempt to kill him. Plus he has a nice old-married-couple vibe going on with Patrick Macnee's Watson, who annoys him by snoring in their shared hotel suite and whom Lee's Holmes at one point complains is "worse than a wife". I wouldn't quite go so far as to call it slashy, but there is a touch of the domesticated old Queens about them.

Overall verdict - just about worth it for Lee completists, and possibly for Holmes completists I suppose, but otherwise don't bother.

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I think the second episode of this season's Sherlock fell for me into the category of 'perfectly decent, but not outstanding' TV. Above all, its characters were not seeking to deceive one another on the same scale as had made last week's episode so thrillingly alive with alternative possibilities for me. Oh, sure, there was misdirection early on to the effect that Frankland was a friendly and reliable fellow while Stapleton was an eeeviiiilll mad scientist, but there was nothing on the scale of battle of wits between Sherlock, Adler, Mycroft and Moriarty from the previous story, and the motivations of the regular characters were never really in doubt.

Partly, of course, that's just the nature of the original Arthur Conan Doyle story, and there's also a fair case for saying that the middle episode of the series needs to rein in the pace a little between the sha-bang of the opening episode and what is clearly going to be an epic confrontation next week. But even with that understood, I felt I could have asked for a little more from it. What The Hound of the Baskervilles can offer is a creepy atmosphere of growing tension, and I felt that was missed, too.

Perhaps I wrecked the suspense for myself by reading the lovely thanatos_kalos's write-up of the preview screening shown in Cardiff on Tuesday, so that I knew before the story began that the fearful visions which the characters would experience were the result of hallucinogenic drugs. But I certainly felt that with Sherlock in particular, his attack of the terrors came on too quickly and too intensively for us to stand any real chance of believing that he was seriously facing up to a new and unsettling emotional experience. This would have been far more effective for me if we had seen him experience a few smaller moments of self-doubt earlier on (whether brought about by real experiences or by lower doses of the drug), so that we could believe the full-scale attack was an escalation of genuine fear, rather than obviously something anomalous. It could have been a really amazing moment in the ongoing development of his screen character to believe that he was really experiencing the break-down of his treasured logic and self-assuredness - but it didn't happen for me.

Still, it was great to have Russell Tovey on board, especially in the scene where his outside light kept getting set off, reducing him to a ball of sobbing terror. That really did look like a man who had been slowly and systematically pushed beyond the limits of endurance. And Sherlock's relationship with Watson developed a little bit when he described him as a 'friend' for the first time. Plus I liked the way the flashing light on the moor was at first misdirection (Morse code), then a joke (a different kind of dogging), then a plot device to ensure Watson wasn't exposed to the hallucinogens the first time around and finally the prod needed to help Sherlock figure out that 'hound' might be an acronym. That is definitely getting good value out of a single device.

Problematic portrayals were less of an issue than last week - but of course that's partly by dint of keeping women in the role of secondary assistant characters and not having any ethnic minorities (that I could spot) at all. And meanwhile, there, yet again, is that ridiculous running 'joke' about how everyone keeps mis-reading Watson and Sherlock as a gay couple. I liked this in the first ever episode, because any acknowledgement of queer sexuality on mainstream TV is cheering, and found the prospect of a heterosexual and heteronormative Watson being prompted to rethink his own attitudes by finding himself labelled as gay appealing. But that really isn't how it has turned out. Instead it is just the same childish gag about what a trial it is for a straight person to be continuously mislabelled as gay, like a broken record week after week, and it is REALLY annoying me now. Partly because it is offensive, but also because it is taking up screen time which could be used for more nuanced character development, or more intricate plotting, or - well - anything really.

So now I feel like one of those people who makes others wonder why they even watch a show if all they can do is criticise it. To which I can only give the classic reply to that accusation, which is that there is so much about Sherlock which I do like that it makes the flaws doubly annoying - and meanwhile I have written enough about it previously to feel that I can take its strengths as read now, and don't need to repeat them. In case it needs re-stating, though, I do think that Sherlock and Watson as characters are brilliantly drawn, that the plotting of the adventures they share together is (nearly) fantastic, that the scripts are witty and lively and clever, and that the visual design is absolutely outstanding. I bloody love this series, and can't wait until next week's grand finale. But I still think it could be better.

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I picked up the new Sherlock DVD set yesterday, and snuggled down in the evening to watch the feature I'd really been looking forward to: the unaired pilot. 'Cos more Sherlock is definitely a Good Thing, and it's all we're going to get for another 18 months, too. *sadface*

The pilot is basically a proto-version of A Study in Pink, but less fully developed and only 55 minutes long - i.e. clearly designed for a one-hour broadcast slot rather than an hour-and-a-half one. Most of the script for the scenes which it includes is the same as in the longer version, although there are some changes towards the end, since the plot is slightly different there too. On the whole, the broadcast version is definitely an improvement on the pilot. It is slicker and more immersive, and the extra material generally helps to build the characters, improves the plot or creates more of a sense of ongoing story arcs by setting up the development of things which would happen later in the series. But there are a couple of plot changes which I found detrimental, too - things which had actually struck me as problematic on first watching the broadcast episode, and which now turn out essentially to have been padding added in to a script which would have been better off without them.

Apparently, I can think of no better way to spend my Sunday afternoon than analysing every single difference between the two in great detail. So the rest of this post goes under cuts, to save you all from length and spoilerage...

( The main murder plot )

( Mycroft and Moriarty )

( The identity of the murderer )

( Foot-chases and character development )

( Tracing the phone )

( The cabbie's means of compulsion )

( Acting and direction )

( Costumes and sets )

( Design finesse )

On the whole, then, I'd say the pilot is definitely worth watching if you can - partly because of the things it handles slightly better than the broadcast version, but mainly just for the insight which it provides into the process of how a television programme is developed and improved. Overall, the broadcast version is better, and I can certainly see why it had to be remade to fit in with the rest of the series. But the pilot is none too shabby, and I'm glad that we now have the chance to watch it.

---

1. Somehow, I'm perfectly comfortable with the producers' decision to call the main character by his first name, but feel odd extending that same principle to his best friend. Maybe it's just because 'Sherlock' is a really distinctive first name with rich associations, whereas 'John' could mean anybody. But anyway, it means that when I talk about them as a pair, I now end up saying 'Sherlock and Watson'. It's not very neat, but it just seems to be what I have to do when talking about this particular take on the characters.
2. Oh, OK - maybe sometimes I can manage an occasional 'John' after all. I am nothing if not consistently inconsistent...

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On the second episode, I think we can safely say that Sherlock is ( settling in well )

The plot this time was ( more complex )

On the queer front ( I felt a door had been closed unnecessarily this week )

Finally, ( there is the mystery of the faceless 'M' )

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( Sixth Doctor: Attack of the Cybermen )

That's it for Six's stories as televised, then, but there is just one remaining loose end I want to tie up before I move on.

( The Ultimate Foe episode two: Eric Saward's script )

( A summary of Six )

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So we're back to Tom Bakery goodness with UKTV Drama. Well, except that they last stopped at Robots of Death, and have now picked up again with Horror of Fang Rock, meaning that I had to acquire The Talons of Weng Chiang via Other Means. *shrug* UKTV Drama is a very strange channel.

( Fourth Doctor: The Talons of Weng Chiang )

And, ladies and gentlemen, if I may indulge for a moment, I treat having seen this story as a moment of graduation. It was a pretty random choice of reference to include in the post which started off this whole Who Odyssey back in January - but, nonetheless, it is at this stage that I get to progress from being vaguely aware that The Talons of Weng Chiang features a giant rat in a sewer to having a meaningful grasp of the plot and some actual opinions about it. I claim my Geek Certificate and Coffee Mug of Rassilon, please.

( Fourth Doctor: Horror of Fang Rock )

And now? Well, now, we have a Thing. Which is that I've already seen the next three stories UKTV Drama will be broadcasting, and would have to wait until the end of May to come back in at Underworld. Only to then meet the Key to Time season again two stories later, anyway.

Fact is, though, there's another thing happening here, too, and a very sad thing at that. See, as of now, I have only eleven stories left to see from Tom Baker's time as the Doctor (or twelve if you count the video reconstruction of Shada, which I think I shall). It's my own fault, really, for getting greedy already and skipping ahead of the UKTV schedules. I could have spun things out by watching stories featuring other Doctors in the interim, but no - it had to be Tom. It had to be the piercing blue eyes and the dazzling grins and the bouncing curls and the ginger side-burns and the noble profile and the chocolatey voice and the guh! *swoon*.

So I'm certainly running low on UKTV Drama stories in the immediate present - but also facing the horrible prospect of reaching the end of the Tom Baker era in the not-too-distant future if I don't rein things in pretty soon. I don't want it to end, and I can't begin to imagine the trauma of having to actually sit down and watch Logopolis. But, having thought about it carefully, and considered the alternative possibility of watering down my Tom Baker diet by interspersing his stories with those of other incarnations, I decided - sod that! Fie to delayed gratification, and sensible rationing out of indulgent pleasures! Instead, I am just damn well going to max out on his Doctor, right here, right now, while I'm really into him. Because, frankly, I won't rest until I have, and any other Doctor will merely be Not Tom Baker until and unless I know that I have seen every single one of his stories. Then, and only then, will I be able to find it in me to entertain the possibility of anyone else in the role.

So it's goodbye to UKTV Drama now, because you're just going too slowly for me, I'm afraid. Time to plough wildly headlong through those remaining unwatched stories - and I'll leave bitter repentance of my foolish extravagance for the other side of Logopolis!