Bryan Murphy's Blog - Posts Tagged "review"

I think it was Lit Bug who kindly recommended the film "In Time" to me, due to my interest in dystopian speculative fiction and my lack of a wish to live forever. I watched it last night, with pleasure, mainly because the idea is brilliant. Moreover, the image of the digital "watch" on your arm which counts down the very seconds that you have left to live (unless you can somehow recharge it) is magnificent, one I think will remain in film history. I also loved the way they portrayed time-related idioms as having gained overwhelming significance in the language. However, they tried to superimpose on this very promising base a run-of-the-mill action movie which I cannot imagine would have halfway satisfied fans of either action movies or science fiction. It also seemed unhappily designed as a "star vehicle" for the two main characters. The male, Justin Timberlake, whom I'd heard of as a singer, was convincing as a "rough diamond", though less so as the saviour of humanity, and was given a few pithy comments to make amid a torrent of platitudes, as was the leading lady, one Amanda Seyfried, who looked great in her opening sequence, when she just, er, looked, and increasingly less so after she had revealed her whiny voice. Her main talent appears to be sprinting in high heels. I couldn't do that, so I shall cease and desist from badmouthing an actress and end by saying that, although I'm a bit fed up with Manichean attitudes even in my beloved sci-fi, and I wish the director had not wilfully misunderstood Darwin, I'm glad that both the endlessly-persecuted goodies and the evil, near-immortal baddies found reasons to reject immortality.

Amis's prose is always a joy to read, and sweetens the company of the grotesques with which he populates his tales. Yet "Martinland" is a bitter place, where only the weak can be strong, and their strength is never enough to protect them, especially not from themselves. Be careful when you laugh, for the wind will certainly change. Now, which of his works to relish next?

I'm very pleased to host this stage of The Nettle Tree's blog tour. You can find the book here: http://shop.claytonbye

The editors have asked me to comment on one of the stories that I found particularly striking. The Nettle Tree is an anthology that re-defines a genre – the Western – and does so largely by grafting elements of fantasy and science fiction on to it. Perhaps because I am a writer and fan of science fiction, I was most intrigued by John Rosenman's story, “State of the Art”, which, set in the future, looks at facets of our present and our past with humour and deep philosophical concern. Rosenman uses the tropes of the Western to subvert themselves, as technology from the future intrudes and overturns the apple-cart. He leads us to question what we expect from a Western, and why, and also to ponder whether “artificial intelligence” is a contradiction in terms. He achieves this with a splendidly light touch, and gives us the pleasure of seeing the new-style baddies get their old-style come-uppance.

Here are the book's details:
Title: The Nettle Tree
Publisher: Chase Enterprises Publishing
Editors: Kenneth Weene and Clayton Bye
ISBN (print): 978-1- 927915-10- 3
ISBN (eBook): 978-1- 927915-11- 0
Format: Trade paperback and e-book
Pages: 166
Genre: Speculative Western
Price: $17.95 (print) $3.95 (e-book)
The book and pdf e-book can be purchased at: http://shop.claytonbye
It is also available on Amazon in print form and on Smashwords for all e-book formats.

A few years ago, I was at a social gathering in Turin at which two people from Ghana were also present. One of them started churning out negative stereotypes about the English, whereupon his compatriot, a friend of mine, interrupted him with an anecdote of her time in London. She was waiting outside a telephone box when the occupant stumbled out, cursing the machine that had swallowed his money and badmouthing the phone company responsible, too. “Damn them,” he said to her, “they just want to take our money from us.” She now pointed out that in her ten years in Italy, none of the locals had ever so clearly included her as one of “us”. Zadie Smith has now written a whole novel on the question of who “we” are, although “Swing Time” is about much else besides: dance, friendship and parenting are among her themes. Her main character is a British woman of mixed race, whose life is constrained by people disregarding logic and mathematics to decide that in the UK and the USA she is “black”, and in Africa that she is “white” (and “American” to boot). This constant buffeting by other people's perceptions and misperceptions of her does not make her endearing, but it does draw our attention to the range of stronger, well-drawn characters with whom she interacts. Remarkably, Smith has her finger on the pulse of several cultures and subcultures. The only notes that rang false in my ears were an Iranian man identifying with Arabs and a Brazilian talking German English rather than Portuguese English. I was fascinated by the English that the young English characters spoke. I wonder if I'll live long enough in this country not to learn to speak that new variety but for it to come to seem normal, though I guess that if I do, the youngsters will already have changed it again, to keep it out of reach of “us” old fogies. Even so, I expect Zadie Smith's prose will continue to be a joy to read.

I'm halfway through this, and have had more of Heidegger than I signed up for, but it has introduced me to Levinas and helped me to understand the puzzling emergence of identity politics on British and North American campuses. It turns out to be standard generation-gap stuff. My generation of baby-boomers rejected Heidegger's naziness and took up Levinas's concern for the Other and the idea of attenuating the boundaries between Self and Other. And we have become the Establishment, against which the new generations can rebel by reasserting a concern for group identity, with a newspun sense of entitlement to special privileges that the non-academic world does not grant to the groups with which they identify. I wonder what they make of Camus these days.