Noughties Retro

Way behind everyone else, I've just read Vernon God Little and...well, it's a lot better than most of the dross that gets anywhere near a Booker, clearly. It's funny, it has a plot which slightly gets away from it but is nonetheless recognisable as a comedy adventure, it has moments of real power and insight. But, the set-up is fundamentally untrue. The way in which Vernon, the survivor, is scapegoated for a high school massacre - that doesn't happen, does it? I'm not going to claim expertise on every school shooting but this story is about one of the ones which really catch the public imagination - so we're talking Columbine, Virginia Tech, the major ones. And in both of those cases it was taken as read that the dead kids are the guilty kids. The need for a living scapegoat on which Pierre hangs his plot, doesn't exist (or at least not in the sense of a single schoolchild - people blame Hollywood, or Grand Theft Auto, or Marilyn Manson). And he's got the verve that the book still just about works in a way that something similarly flawed in concept like Asimov's 'Jokester' doesn't. But still, that makes it at best a flawed masterpiece, not the best novel of its year.

And partly because there are so many books I haven't got round to, I may have mentioned before that I don't reread much. Well, not prose, anyway - comics and poetry, more so, because they tend to be quicker. On Monday I broke this habit; John Crowley's 'Great Work of Time' had been bugging me for a while, I think perhaps since I read Stross' 'Palimpsest' (which is about the same length, has some of the same themes, and I generally feel may be influenced by it - or even if it isn't, in my head they're companion pieces). I only read the Crowley a little under two years ago, and I did pretty much remember it, but still...rereading didn't feel like a waste of time. I may do more of this. Though at 70-odd pages, obviously this was a very different proposition to a whole novel.

Thought I'd got another Audrey Hepburn classic taped, but of course because The Children's Hour was on late, that meant some arse in the corner of the screen was gesticulating and totally ruining it. OK, she only took up about a sixth of the screen rather than the quarter used by the red-sweatered gimp on Colonel Blimp that time, but still enough to make it unwatchable. Is this why the apparent villain of the group in C4's new disability comedy-drama Cast Offs is the deaf one (I mainly watched because the writers had Skins and Thick of It credits and, while it's not in that league, it's pretty good)? So I ended up with Black Book instead. A hilarious account of Dylan Moran's drunken escapades in the Resistance A depressing bloody film and no mistake. Lest my posts on Hepburn and Nabokov suggest I always start with the obvious work, I was watching this subtitled Verhoeven film having never seen Robocop or Basic Instinct - but, comparing it to Total Recall and Starship Troopers I am forced to conclude that Verhoeven being realistic is far sillier than Verhoeven doing OTT SF. What could have been a claustrophobic little tale of a Jewish woman sleeping with a high-ranking Nazi (played by Sebastian Koch, who seems rather to specialise in such roles) to help her Resistance friends gets increasingly silly as double-cross follows double-cross while she takes far too long to realise that she should be trusting nobody as a general rule, and in particular not the obvious villain of the piece.