Amanda's blog
Borgen - TV for grown-ups
Blog Category: Uncategorized
Posted on: 14 February 2012
Apart from the News At Ten, I tend not to watch much TV. Of course, there are some shows that were too fun to miss – the first two series of Life on Mars and Spooks, Prime Suspect, the BBC adaptation of Bleak House and Pride and Prejudice, and the new Sherlock series. But by and large, a TV drama has to be really good to wrench my eyes from a book. I spent my formative years with Italian TV in which an episode of Laurel and Hardy, dubbed, was a real treat, and somehow (after a couple of years of overdosing on thigns like Star Trek and The Professionals when I got a TV) that inoculated me against the nationwide slump in front of the gogglebox. I find most British series painfully predictable and formulaic. It’s depressing because it is, potentially, a new art form which, like the Victorian novel, carries the possibility of commanding a higher level of narrative skill than that allowed by film.
Then along came The Killing, and now Borgen, both made by Denamrks public service broadcaster DR, and like millions of others, I sat up. The Killing was revolutionary in that it showed a woman doing a hard, difficult job well; like Prime Suspect it broke new ground in not having its heroine ask for any concessions on account of her being a woman and a mother – but neither did it show her collapsing in the usual way into alcoholism. The plot was in itself gripping, but also opened up in the manner of a Victorian novel to show us the individual lives of the suspects, the grieving parents, the detectives and (a novel twist indeed) the power struggles in local government. Not all of it was plausible, and out of all the various strands, it was this last political element which I found least compelling; so when I heard that Borgen, made by the same company and featuring two of the actors who played Sophie Grabol’s sidekicks, was “like The Killing without the murders” I thought, I’ll give that one a miss, then.
How wrong I was I only discovered a couple of weeks ago. Borgen is TV for grown-ups. It feels like the kind of series I’ve been waiting for all my life. Unlike The West Wing, which a friend pressed on me as a boxed set and which I found risible, it shows a woman rising, by a mixture of fluke, ambition and shrewdness, to become Denmark’s first woman Prime Minister in a Coalition Government. Life followed art shortly after the series was broadcast in Denmark, but that was of secondary interest.
Everything about this series is stunning, from the title sequence, which though clearly influenced by Mad Men’s, captures the heart-breaking joy and idealism of Birgitte, its heroine, as she is first elected, to the attempts to grasp the ungraspable by her spin doctor Kaspar, to the emotional intensity its newscaster Katrine pours into her work as a journalist. Each episode is prefaced by a quote from a politician or philosopher – mostly Machiavelli – to warn us of the corruption of power.
At first it seems as if Birgitte will escape this. She is both charismatic and sensible, a liberal who always follows her instincts even if it seems impolitic to do so; and she is lucky in that her instincts have so far advanced her rather than her opponents. To a British audience, fascinated by the strains on our own Coalition, the parallels are both funny and weird: the Danes seem much more preoccupied by sexual equality and their relations with Greenland than, say, re-organising their Health Service or pursuing bankers for their bonuses. They look like us, only better (there is a striking absence of any ethnic minority in Borgen though the second series of The Killing featured Muslim immigrants) and their language sounds very like ours. It’s like watching a parallel universe, of the kind the liberal intelligentsia of this country loves to point out as superior to our own, not least because Danish TV feels free to portray its own middle class professionals at work and play in a way that the BBC repeatedly cringes away from.
Birgitte is aided in her rise by a man who seems like the perfect husband. He does a fairly serious job lecturing university students about business, and is able to advise her in her early handling of crises. The Nyborgs have no cleaner (improbable in this country) so presumably do all the domestic chores themselves; only when their marriage begins to break down do they discuss getting an au pair or sending their kids to boarding school.
The portrait of the disintegration is painful to watch, and given that I am writing a novel about a couple trying to divorce in the recession, fascinating. I admired Borgen immensely for showing – for the first time that I can recall on TV – Katrine having an abortion and subsequently getting on with her life rather than collapsing into suicidal psychosis. But the toll on Birgitte’s marriage makes you realise yet again how crucial to the Thatcher story is her being married to an older man who had retired by the time she became PM (something omitted from the film The Iron Lady). The husband loses his libido, apparently, and gets it back only when he gets an important new job – which he has to sacrifice due to a conflict of interest with a defence contract Birgitte’s government is trying to pass. The viewer suspects he is having an affair long before she does, but her reaction is amazing: instead of booting him out, she offers an open marriage on condition he supports her in public. It’s the kind of thing we almost expect from male politicians, but seeing a woman offer it in order to keep her job is jaw-dropping.
Several other plot-lines, involving Kaspar’s secret past, and the political horse-trading, are woven in satisfactorily, but the other aspect of this which I find so good is that it actually shows how all-consuming a professional life is, and how in a family, one person has to stay at home for the children. Even in Denmark, where we are asked to believe that the Prime Minister doer her own gardening and school runs, it’s impossible. What hope for us? I don’t know, but I’m gripped.
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TOO MANY BOOKS
Blog Category: Uncategorized
Posted on: 24 January 2012
TOO MANY BOOKS
How can anyone have too many books? If you’re a reviewer, this is a stupid question. Every day, my postman brings a giant, bulging mail-bag to my door, filled with the latest children’s books, and quite a few adult literary novels. I get around 100 books a week, and can only choose two to review – and that was in the days when my column in the Times was once a week. Now it’s once every three weeks, it’s a nightmare.
So this particular blog is what I can and can’t cover. I’m very aware that there are only four other people on national newspapers who have this kind of problem, and that to a number of authors we must seem like gatekeepers. It’s often not obvious even to me as a literary writer why some books get reviewed and others don’t.
Most importantly, I can’t review self-published books (so please don’t send me yours) and it’s not my job to read them – it’s an agent’s, or a publisher’s. I can only review what will be released to bookshops nationally, because the Times is a national newspaper.
For my part, a review has nothing to do with whether the book has had a lot of hype, or even advance praise. It has nothing to do with whether the publisher has invited me to an expensive restaurant (something that only annoys me because the money would be far better spent on placing an advertisement in my newspaper, which would then persuade the editor to allow Books more pages), whether there is a launch party or whether my review copy arrives with a free T-shirt, mug, or sparkly sprinkles. Nor does it matter to me whether a book is inspired by a true-life story, or a centenary event, or a heartbreaking news item. All that matters to me is whether the book is good – so good that whether it’s a picture book, a novel for 8-12s or YA fiction, it beats off the competition.
On the subject of which, I have now made it a rule that I’m not going to review an American book unless it’s as remarkable as Suzanne Collins’s Hunger Games or Where the Wild Things Are. An American book has already sold to its own, vast market, and whatever a British newspaper says about it is just the icing on the cake. American authors, like American movies, are competition for the home-grown, and in these dire economic times it’s British authors who need the publicity. By and large, it’s British authors who think outside convention and come up with something extraordinary anyway. But if I get a press release telling me that the book has already been on the New York Times best-seller list then why on earth am I going to add to this?
I am not going to review books about tweenagers’ OMG dilemmas over boys and fashion, cute animal stories about fluffy kittens, or anything more about vampires, angels, werewolves, ghosts and dystopias in which only teenagers survive to rule the world. Some people confuse books with sausages. I don’t.
Nor am I going to keep reviewing series. There are some I, just like millions of children, am especially fond of – whether this is Anthony Horowitz’s Alex Rider books, or Cressida Cowell’s How to Train Your Dragon. They have done phenomenally well and established themselves as a brand and a bench-mark of quality; but if you want the latest, you’ll have to go to a bookshop to find it, or join the author’s Facebook page, because though I may have given them their first push, they no longer need my help. Of course if a book is really good then I long for a sequel too. But from now on, all I can do is mention it in passing because there just isn’t space.
If, by the way, you happen to think that children’s literature IS a literature, rather than a genre to be on rotation with Crime and Thrillers, then do by all means write to the Editor of the Times, James Harding (james.harding@thetimes.co.uk) and let him know. Nobody else has the power to decide on a rethink, but all the cross and bewildered readers, parents, grandparents, librarians, literary scouts and publishers can change matters should they be so inspired. Meanwhile, I only have 600 words every three weeks. I can slice that into covering 6 books in 100 words – barely enough for three sentences – or 2 books in 300 words or any combination in between.
So that gets rid of about half my mailbag. I have to carry those six sackfuls out of my house myself by the way, so if my postman feels cross, I feel crosser. No matter how often I ask not to be sent them, I still get endless reissues, board book versions of picture books, duplicates and triplicates of paperbacks whose hardbacks I’ve already reviewed (or not). Please, stop these! It’s great for all the local State schools around me, and Oxfam, but a waste of resources otherwise.
The really heart-breaking thing is what to do about the remaining 20 or so books that are really good. So here are some further pleas.
The two things that I, like any parent, look for above all are great picture books for pre-schoolers, and great books for younger children, ideally 6-9s. Books for teenagers are really distractions from the classics that, in my view, they ought to be tackling from 13+. Of course teens need fun and fantasy too, but they aren’t going to pay much attention to reviews, just to their peers. Yet in recent years there has been a rush of talent to address these age groups. While I completely see the point in the case of authors as good as Meg Rosoff or Anthony McGowan, far too much YA stuff is just turkey Twizzlers for the brain. Of course if you get a Twilight or a Hunger Games fan-base going then you’ve hit the jack-pot commercially. But as a critic, what I’d really like is more for the audience that Beatrix Potter, CS Lewis, E Nesbit and Frances Hodgson Burnett addressed. I’d like more original books which are for children with imagination, initiative, a sense of humour and a sense of prose style.
Strangely, this is exactly what I get least of.
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WRITING FOR TABLOIDS
Blog Category: Uncategorized
Posted on: 28 November 2011 WRITING FOR TABLOIDS
Let me start by saying that, although I principally write novels and review them, I do write occasionally for a tabloid. The Daily Mail, commonly called The Daily Hate by the people I know and like, is both one of the most admired and the most hated of the tabloids. Admired because, in among all the fluff and celebrity gossip which is currently being excoriated by the Leveson enquiry, it does break real news stories and employs some of the sharpest pens in the business. Hated because it is widely perceived as everything that a liberal, intelligent person should detest.
Nor am I going to defend that side of it, although Janet Malcom’s famous words about the indefensibility of all journalism is one that should be written up in letters of fire. I write books and book reviews for love, but I also need to make money – not a huge amount, but just the national average minimum wage. Without the odd piece for the Mail, I simply would not have that. In addition, the section for which I write perhaps three or four times a year, Femail, seems to be edited by people who are professional, polite, pleasant and thoughtful. Even if they chop my sentences in half and commit solecisms such as inserting “And” at the start of sentences, they have excellent subs and careful lawyers.
Yes, they have an agenda, as do I. What people never know is the number of times I say “no” to a commission, even if it is financially tempting. I say “no” about five times more often than I say “yes”, sometimes because it’s something I feel is ethically wrong, or because I don’t feel I’m the right person to write the piece.
A long time ago, my father wrote for tabloids like The Express, when it was a fairly respectable newspaper of its ilk. He had little choice: he had given up his job as a distinguished columnist on the Johannesburg Star, as had my mother, as a result of fighting apartheid. Although he was British, his entire career had been founded in South Africa, and he had no contacts in London. Nor had he gone to university, which was the pre-requisite for joining newspapers such as The Times (for which I now write regularly.) He was just a bright, self-educated, brave man who had survived things like being blown up in World War Two, and who had such charm that people like Noel Coward and Gracie Fields adored him. He was completely fearless, never smart, and I’m afraid he tended to be more polite to dustmen than to dukes. (Though he had a life-long loathing of London cabbies and waiters who failed to bring cold white wine.)
But my father also had a strong ethical sense which, unlike many of today’s hacks, he never forgot. He hated “door-stepping” people, and passed up on the story of his career when he found himself on holiday on Capri just as the first whiff of the Profumo scandal was breaking. The Profumos were also there having, as it were, a second honeymoon after Jack Profumo had privately confessed all to his wife and she had decided to stand by him despite the affair with Christine Keeler. My father was rung on Capri by the editor of the Daily Express and asked to ask him about the rumours of an affair were true. But he, having seen how besotted with each other they were, and loathing that kind of thing, said there could be no truth in it, and refused…..
My father had all kinds of ruses with which he got out of asking questions he found despicable. One of them was to ring the Speaking Clock, if his editor was standing over him demanding he call some aristocrat or other to ask whether she could confirm she was sleeping with, say, her valet. The voice on the other end sounded so impeccably posh that when my father said, “She denies everything”, it was believed. In the end, my father left his job before he got fired, because he hated the ruthless blood-lust of the reporting pack. He was asked to “doorstep” some poor person whose son had been killed, and he found he just couldn’t. He told me that he wrote a note and put it through their door saying that he was ashamed of the way the Press were behaving, and walked away.
At the time, he had two small daughters and a sick wife to support, in one of the coldest winters in living memory. He went down with ‘flu, and for a while things became pretty bad. I remember not having all kinds of simple things like sweets and nice clothes for much of my early childhood, which I think was to do with this. We certainly suffered (not for the first or last time) because of his principles. When I think of what must be driving journalists on to commit the deplorable acts of intrusion and spying on people in their private lives, I do feel a grain of pity mixed with the contempt. It’s a terrifying thing to know that you’re only as good as your last story, even if that story is a piece of filth. It takes a lot of courage to refuse.
But then a miracle happened. Somehow, a very distinguished journalist called James Cameron (whose name lives on in the annual James Cameron Prize) and who had also worked at the Express heard about the story, and told my father that there was a job going in Italy, in the Press Office of the UN. So my family were transported out of the cold and grey of London, to Paradise, where he lived for the rest of his life.
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