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The King’s Speech shows Colin Firth at his best as the socially awkward, stuttering and stammering King George VI, better known these days as the father of HRH Elizabeth II. While many of us may be familiar with the slow, grave delivery of the speech, delivered September 1939 and informing the world that Britain was at war with Germany, few will know or remember the story behind the speech. The King’s Speech tells that story in a moving, compelling way, while incidentally providing a prequel to Stephen Frears’s The Queen, with its glance into the curious, dysfunctional affairs behind the scenes at Buckingham Palace.
The Doomsters by Ross Macdonald (Knopf 1958) Macdonald, whose real name was Kenneth Millar, was American-born and Canadian-raised. His most successful character, Lew Archer, is at the heart of this and many other volumes of noir writing. Macdonald is one of the early genre writers revered as both a good crime writer and a literary stylist. Indeed, his prose has moments evocative of Scott Fitzgerald. His weakness, however, is the corny, tough-guy dialogue that so many of his characters spout. Nevertheless, his mysteries have edge and he can twist his plots along with the best of them. In this volume, a runaway from a mental institution turns to Archer for help. He gets it, despite his best efforts to resist Archer’s uncanny ability to read into other people’s characters.
For some technologically brilliant theatre, catch Electric Company Theatre’s Studies in Motion at the Bluma Appel Theatre (till Dec 18.) Kevin Kerr’s play about Eadweard Muybridge, inventor of an 1880’s version of stop motion photography, contrasts nicely with Robert LePage’s Ennogata, another biographical work, part-dance and part-play, about a cross-dressing spy, at the Sony Centre. Here, LePage has gone back to his roots, creating with the utmost simplicity. While neither has much of an emotional through-line, both works are riveting technically.
Today is the 78th anniversary of Proust's death. Coincidentally, I finished reading (for the third time) his second volume, Within A Budding Grove, today. The ending is extraordinary as the narrator examines in minute detail his growing love for Albertine and the end of the tourist season at the beach at Balbec (Cabourg, in real life.)
Benjamin Britten’s Death In Venice as performed by the Canadian Opera Company. I’ve never really taken to Britten’s music, though Death In Venice is somewhat of an exception. It’s also one of a handful of operas I’ve wanted to see live, and can now cross off my list. Unfortunately, the Met’s “Live In HD” experience over the past few years means I may never enjoy a live performance as much as I used to. I’ve been spoiled by the intimacy and quickness of things on camera, as opposed to the static predictability of an opera’s distant unfolding onstage. This production is slow and serious. For better or worse, it feels like “Art.” The first act is visually beautiful but remarkably undramatic, and while the COC orchestra is aurally stunning under conductor Steuart Bedford (very capably matched by Alan Oke’s performance as the novelist, Gustav von Aschenbach), the musical emphasis on atmosphere means it doesn’t ever really jump to life. It’s in the second act where both the drama and the music kick in, as the aging Aschenbach explores his attraction for the beautiful Tadzio, an adolescent Polish boy vacationing on the Lido. While contemplating what this says about his views on art and literature, he somehow manages not to think of what it means in terms of his no-longer sublimated sexuality. An introverted, intellectual libretto, it shines with inner drama if you’re in the mood for some serious contemplation. If not, it will just feel slow.
Returning to an unfinished novel is a little like catching up with an old friend. While the publishing world seems to be in turmoil, and I still have no idea when the third Bradford Fairfax novel is going to come out, I’ve been getting on with the fourth episode, Bon Ton Roulez, a Cajun term meaning roughly, “Let the good times roll.” In the new book, Bradford finds himself in New Orleans not long after Hurricane Katrina, where some very nasty politicians are cooking up a scheme to displace the low-income citizens trying to return and pick up the pieces of their lives. When I visited New Orleans in the spring of 2006, some eight months after the disaster, I was left with an indelible impression of the city in ruins and the sense of loss the people were facing. That impression is strongly making itself felt in this book.
The Nesting Dolls by Gail Bowen (McClelland & Stewart 2010) Gail Bowen is one of my favourite crime writers, with her sly humour and no-nonsense, down-to-earth outlook on life that also happens to spill over into her books. She leaves the impression that we could all do just a little better with not too much effort, and that we would all be that much better off for it. Joanne Kilbourn, Bowen’s protagonist of a dozen books, is made of the same mettle. She spars (lovingly) with her hubby Zack, a paraplegic power-lawyer, and a myriad of lost souls who tumble in and out her life. In The Nesting Dolls, Kilbourn pits herself against the elusive killer of a lesbian mother who leaves her newborn son with the boy’s presumed grandparents right before she is killed. Finding out the who also helps unravel the why, and it’s a doozey of a solution that fooled me right to the end.
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