Frightfest 2013: Thursday 22 August

The previous entry should have been followed by this one around two weeks later but, on 31 August, Pat broke her ankle and looking after naturally became a priority.   This definitely disrupted my days
and did leave me with rather less 'free' time than usual.   By the time the cycling season had finished, it
was mid-October and the switch from 'must restart the blog tomorrow' to actually doing it has taken
rather more time than I expected.
The Dead 2: India
The first of the series was shown two years ago and featured as an analytical session last year though I
saw neither.   The plot is simple - our hero is trying to reach loved ones during a zombie outbreak so the
story line becomes a series of near misses for him while others are less fortunate.   Even had I written
this immediately afterwards it would still have been a rather indifferent reaction.
Curse of Chucky
Here we go again!   The malevolent killer doll returns for a number of imaginative killings with, almost
at the end, a cameo from the iconic Jennifer Tilley.
Having intended previously to stay for the late screenings by staying at an hotel - which was none too
successful - we reverted to missing deliberately the final show of the evening.

Kauffmann, Jean-Paul: A Journey to Nowhere

A French student does voluntary work in Quebec as his national service.   There he meets and falls in love with a local girl whose parents emigrated to Canada from Courland, an area of Latvia.   Although
they consumate their love he leaves her to return to France and they lose touch.   Many years later, he is
a successful writer/journalist and discovers that one of his cousins had a father killed in Courland during
World War II when he was forcibly enlisted into the German army as were many Alsatians, they being
known as the malgre-nous.   Presented with an open assignment by his editor, he persuades him that an
article on Courland would be worthwhile and this book is the result.   It is a mixture of personal narrative covering his time there with his wife, descriptive passages of a number of mansions which had
been built and owned by German descendants of the Teutonic Knights, subsequently dispossessed, some of the relics of the lengthy postwar occupation by the Russians and conversations with some of the present-day Latvians in the region.   There is an overlying melancholy to the book which seems to be a genuine reaction to the state of the area with many of the old buildings in disrepair and the remains of the Russian occupation in a similar condition for the most part.   This is in contrast to the earlier years, in particular the seventeenth century when the then Duke of Courland initiated attempts to found
colonies in Gambia and Tobago and the time in exile for a while of Louis XVIII.   The nineteenth century saw a gradual decline which the novelist Eduard von Keyserling portrays in his works, this despite Libau, the area's main port, being the Russian fleet's home base.   After World War 1 and the
Russian Revolution, the area was independent as part of Latvia until invaded by Russia again in 1939,
then occupied by German troops, many of whom died when encircled during the last years of the war.
Although I read the booking small doses over a period of time I enjoyed it and may well read  the author's earlier work about Napoleon in exile 'The Dark Room at Longwood' and'Desolation Island' about Kerguelen.

Leon, Donna: The Girl of His Dreams

This is the seventeenth Commissario Brunetti novel and something of a change from the earlier ones.
He and Ispettore Vianello respond to a call and pull a young girl from the water.   She is blonde and
has been dead for several hours.   She is a Rom to use the pc term but, possibly because she had been
thieving, her family neither report her missing nor seem interested in claiming her body.   The book opens at Brunetti's father's funeral, a scene which is very eloquently portrayed, which provides the
impetus for a side story as the priest, who had been a schoolboy bully acquaintance of Brunetti's, asks
him to investigate a preacher who appears to be obtaining money fraudulently.   This Brunetti does
and is able to put a stop to the fraud's activities without getting directly involved as his thoughts are
occupied by the girl's death.   it appears she has fallen from the roof of a house which she had been
burgling but his suspicions are roused by the reactions of the family involved.   At the end, he is left with a probable scenario for the girl's death which he is never going to prove, the book ending with
the burial of the dead girl with only Brunetti and Vianello in attendance, her family having since left
the area, apparently having been paid off - but for what?   In some ways the absence of a specific
crime investigation at the centre of the book is not missed as Brunetti's efforts to settle what had happened to the girl provides the thrust of the novel but the overall impression is one of loss - of
innocence especially and of human concern for others.   Well up to the very high standard Donna Leon has set herself.

McGuire, Seanan: Discount Armageddon

Set in the USA where, as elsewhere, there are cryptids, non-human beings such as basilisks, bogeymen, dragon princesses and so on who are hunted by the Covenant, an age-old organisation devoted to wiping them out.   The Price family were renegade members of the Covenant who now try to protect the cryptids while being willing to kill those which endanger human life.   The heroine of the book is Verity who, though fully trained while growing up, has always wanted to be a ballroom dancer and is
now doing this in New York while her family carry on in the Northwest.   To support herself she works in a strip bar as a waitress, the bar being owned by a bogeyman who employs several crypts who can pass as human.   The book tells of a rumour that there is still a live dragon dormant under Manhattan which someone is trying to wake up by sacrificing virgins to it.   Her investigations cross pass with a
young Covenanter who is persuaded to modify the extreme views he has been taught while aiding her in the quest.   The tale moves along at a reasonable pace though the fighting skills that Verity has are a
little hard to accept.  Not bad though I wonder why I bought the book.

Fowler, Christopher: Bryant & May and the Memory of Blood

In new offices and with a slightly changed staff, the Peculiar Crimes Unit takes over the investigation of  a defenestrated baby from a locked room when the culprit appears to be a Mr Punch doll.   The doll is one of a number of Punch and Judy characters collected by the child's father, a rich businessman who has re-opened a theatre which had a reputation for grand guignol.   The child's murder takes place in his apartment on Northumberland Avenue at a post opening night party at which cast, crew and a critic are
present so one of them must be the murderer.   Pressure to solve the case is increased because the new
assistant stage manager is the wayward daughter of a leading cabinet minister.   On the way to solving the case we are given an introduction to the history of Punch and Judy, reflections on changing London townscape and other diversions.   There is a subplot involving the woman who was transcribing Arthur Bryant's memoirs whose death at first appears accidental but turns out to be murder; this sets up the possible theme for the next book as there is a prima facie link with the Hom Office civil servant who has been trying without success to close the unit down.   The book unfolds with the usual switching of
interest between the more straightforward investigative work, the scholarly digressions, the intuitive flights of Bryant, especially, until the denouement which occurs at the end but only after more killing.
Not as elegiac as the previous book, the variations hold the interest admirably producing a further chapter in the pair's life story which is well up to standard - and a very high standard at that.

Stross, Charles: The Apocalypse Codex

Another book about the adventures of Bob Howard who has been promoted in the Laundry, the branch of the Secret Service dealing with the paranormal and other worlds.   As with the earlier books, one has to accept that there are monsters and that magic can defeat them while the normal everyday activities go on with the standard risks from guns and other hazards.   Howard uses an outward appearance of a bungler as a weapon as it makes people underestimate him.   Here, he is teamed up with two agents with greater powers who are decidedly superior in rank (not that he knows this) to deal with an evangelical cult based in Colorado whose leader is about to summon the Sleeper who feeds on human souls by the thousand and whose re-awakening will lead to the end of the world.   What transpires is definitely logical with none of the 'with one leap he was free' elisions that spoil lesser thrillers.   The path to final success is anything but straightforward but Stross keeps things moving and holds the attention effortlessly.   Well up to the earlier books in the series showing a development in Howard's career.

Fables du paysage Flamand

Rather a change as this is a review of an exhibition held at the Palais des Beaux Arts in Lille.   We went there by Eurostar which took around 1 1/2 hours there and near 2 hours back as there was a delay on the way.   The exhibition covered the period of such well-known artists as Bosch and Bruegel as well as others less well know such as Mandyn and Brel which extended our visual knowledge of the period.
The exhibition was set out in a series of themed sections which did allow for comparing the work of the
artists with their contemporaries with a number of them using the Temptation of Saint Anthony as the
theme with one section almost completely devoted to depictions of the Tower of Babel.   The wealth of the pictures did leave me wishing it were nearer at home as it would have taken more than one visit to
appreciate all the works fully.   However, the overall impression was one of delight that the journey had been more than worthwhile in providing an excellent cross-section of the period of Flemish art after that of the great originators Van Eyck, Campin et al.   The catalogue provides a first-rate coverage of the exhibition though, perhaps unfortunately, only in French.

Twelve Trees, John: The Traveller

There are ordinary people, Travellers who are able to enter another dimension and Harlequins whose function is to protect Travellers beyond anything else.   Travellers and thus Harlequins are looked on as destroyers of the status quo, the situation in which governments control and manipulate people.   The increasing use of computers, computer-linked items such as credit cards, cctv systems etc make it much easier to control and to trace the unwanted elements.   This book tells how a girl called Maya tries to deny her training as a Harlequin until her father, recently crippled, is murdered in Prague.   She has to trace two brothers, both of whom may well be Travellers.   To do this, she goes to the USA to find that her primary connection has turned against the basic code of Harlequins to assist a major corporation to extend its power by tracking down and using a Traveller.   One of the brothers succumbs to them while the other does not and much of the book relates his adventures with Maya in evading capture and in trying to find and rescue his brother - not that the brother wants that.   Absolute hokum with a strong undercurrent of paranoia at the way people in general are nowadays caught in the system.

Conrad, Patrick: No Sale

Set in Antwerp which is a first for me, the book is about an elderly professor of film history who is the naib suspect when his alcoholic wife is found drowned.   He is released as there is no firm evidence and he falls in love with a mysterious student who has a strong resemblance to Louise Brooks and Clara Bow.   They have a year long affair during which time other murders occur, all with a firm association with thrillers of the 40s with the method of death and the name of the victim
aping a particular film.   Then the girlfriend disappears but the professor keeps this to himself until a further killing puts him back in the police limelight as all the victims turn out to have been either his
student or have some other connection to him.   The lead investigator believes he is innocent though the professor is beginning to doubt his sanity because of the links.   With the return of the girlfriend
whose disappeance was completely innocent in fact if not in his mind, the killer is unmasked.   What
is so enjoyable about the book is the repeated references to classic films noirs in short chapters with
the references adding to the action and atmosphere even when they stray past film noir into the Dirty
Harry era.   Excellent.

Crumey, Andrew: Mobius Dick

A multi-layered novel which uses quantum physics as its basis with the 'now' story interspersed with
a chronicle from the mid 19th century and another from the early 1920s, both referring to real life people though the history of the latter seems distorted.   The current activity is set in a parallel world where Scotland is a separate country under totalitarian rule.   The main character is a physicist who has been invited to aresearch facility in the Highlands to continue his work while helping to build a
new device.   He is convinced this could spell the literal end of the world by multiplying the number
of possible worlds that might appear, all this based on quantum theory.   Despite the esoteric nature of the plot's basis, the work moved along briskly and held my interest.

Barclay, Linwood: No Time For Goodbye

This is the first book I have read by this author though I have two others (such is the pull of 3 for 2
and other offers).   A teacher with a young family has been orphaned for some 25 years; she woke up after getting drunk and rowing with her parents to find the house empty with no trace of either parent or her brother and has been raised by her aunt.   Receiving a mysterious message takes her back in time with a resolve to find out just what did happen.   Although far from straightforward, the plot does hang together with a slow unravelling and a number of red herrings along the way during which she discovers that trusted friends are not trustworthy and that this leads to murder.   Set in Connecticut and New York State, the book is reasonably well written and comes to asatisfactory
conclusion, part of which I for one worked out ahead of time.

Killen,Chris: The Bird Room

Rather an odd first novel which tells of a typically uncharismatic young man with a lovely girl friend who is surprisingly in love with him.   He has a friend who is on the way to becoming the new artistic sensation.   Not surprisingly, the girl friend takes up with the artist leaving the everyday chappie in a mess of mixed emotions.   Crossing the men's paths is an aspiring actress who makes her way in life by appearing in porn films.   Lightly written with some wit, it left me cold.

The Big Gundown: Sergio Sollima

The final viewing of the Festival for us was, for once, enhanced by the introduction by the aficionada of Spaghetti Westerns, Sir Christopher Frayling.   Considered the director's best film, it started the
Italian career of Tomas Milian as a Mexican wanted for rape and murder.   Chased by Lee Van Cleef at his steely-eyed laconic best, he avoids capture until late in the film by which time Van Cleef has been convinced of his innocence.   The final shoot out sees them kill the real perpetrator while managing to survive.   The scenery providing the stage for the film is spectacular and deserves a
credit of its own while the plot with evil land barons, a Prussian killer and the good guys is s little
hackneyed now but the overall result is one which provides a lot of pleasure.

The Boys From Syracuse: A Edward Sutherland

The film version of the Rogers and Hart musical based on 'A Comedy of Errors' with Allan Jones of
'Donkey Serenade' fame playing the identical twins.   One has come to expect more of musicals after
the major leap forward of 'Oklahoma' and 'Carousel' both on stage and on film so this black and white
effort, though highly thought of at the time and considered important enough for the Library of Congress to restore it, is a bit of a let-down.   The music is pleasant but not the duos best and not enough to overcome the wooden performances, somewhat unfunny comedic episodes and cardboard scenery but it is over 70 years old.

Blancanieves: Pablo Berger

Returning to the London Film Festival's offerings after an unnecessarily long pause, this film was a
definite high point.   Silent, virtually, and in black and white, the story is a retelling of the Snow White fairy tale set in a recent Spain where a celebrated bullfighter is gored when distracted by a camera flash, the incident triggering his wife's giving birth to the heroine but dying as she does so.   The now crippled father wants nothing to do with the child while allowing the nurse who looks after him to marry him (a scarily icy performance by Maribel Verdu).   When the child is in her late teens
she is attacked by her stepmother's lover but escapes though she loses her memory.   Saved by a troupe of dwarfs who have supporting roles at bullfights, she one day saves the life of one of them by
jumping into the ring and distracting a rampaging bull with some classic moves.   This leads to her
becoming the star of the troupe and finally she appears to great acclaim in the ring where her father
ended his career.   A successful performance ends with her sparing the bull (a tradition after a truly
great showing) but her stepmother, in disguise, gives her a poisioned apple which kills her (or perhaps leaves her catatonic) to become a freak sideshow attraction.   Excellent camera work which
enhances the Gothic nature of the story; a very good musical score and well considered performance
make this a film worth seeing again.