Review: Things in Jars

KIDD, Jess, Things in Jars, Canongate Books Ltd., Edinburgh Scotland UK, 2019.

Octavo; paperback; 404pp. Mild wear; covers a little rubbed and edgeworn; spine creased; some mild scuffing to the front cover. Good.

Way, way back in the day, when I was stupid, I spent a bunch of time in the SCA (the Society for Creative Anachronism) pretending to be a medieval person. In my defense, it was the only way at the time that I could easily and cheaply explore two skillsets that I held in particular interest, namely heraldry and archery, but it also meant that I spent far too much time amongst petty politicians with enormous egos fighting over stuff that meant nothing at all. In the SCA, the goal – often stated, rarely achieved – was to re-create the Middle Ages, not as it was but how it should have been, but for the absence of enlightened social attitudes, antibiotics and personal hygiene. Moments when anything at all like this occurred (especially in a place like Australia, with gum trees, for chrissakes!) were few and far between and usually shattered by someone putting their open can of Coke down next to the boar’s head during a feast. It bewilders me now that anyone in the SCA – or any comparable organization - still thinks that a long term recreation of the past is possible when so many people are involved, with wildly varying levels of commitment, but those fleeting moments when it does work must truly be worth the teeth-grinding idiocy that takes place along the way. How easy then, to just write a book about this stuff?

Long-time readers know that I enjoy reading fiction from the past. For preference, I like to read stories that were written in the time in which they were set. The reasons for this are legion but mostly devolve upon the personal belief that only those who have lived in the time of which they speak can truly write about it. This is not to say that there are not any great writers of historical fiction out there today, or that no-one has ever been able to project themselves and their readers into another time and place in order to relate a compelling narrative; anyone who’s ever read a Georgette Heyer novel can tell you otherwise. It’s just that, as a particular writing style, it’s a high-wire act – one misstep and the whole house of cards comes tumbling down.

Sometimes the point of the exercise is to conflate two disparate genres of writing, for the purposes of humour, or intellectual discussion. Thus, we have Lindsey Davis’s Marcus Didius Falco novels which place a Raymond Chandleresque private detective on the streets of ancient Rome; or Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose which inserts an investigative monk with staunchly Twentieth Century attitudes deep within the Medieval Church. These are deliberate points of departure away from the realms of straight Historical Fiction, which more traditionally include such titles as the Horatio Hornblower series of novels by C.S. Forester, Patrick O’Brian’s oeuvre, or – as mentioned - the Regency novels of Georgette Heyer. However, as anyone who’s ever visited Lindsey Davis’s website can attest, attention to historical detail is paramount because, despite the purpose behind the work, one false anachronistic note ringing out in the background will derail the entire exercise.

Many modern writers have chiseled out niche sub-genres of the Historical Fiction format meaning that we now have Historical Crime Fiction and – fuelled mainly by notions of Steampunk – Historical Fantastic Fiction, usually set in a pseudo-Victorian era. There are also further refinements and blendings of these into sub-sub-genres, such as Victorian Occult Detective Fiction, to name but one. Jess Kidd’s book Things in Jars falls squarely into this latter category. Punctilious historical accuracy is still the key issue here however, despite the liberties taken with the scenario and a crucial point, often overlooked, is the audience.

We are wired for genre. Due to our exposure to Cinema and Television and the way these things are marketed (along with Books these days, because the marketing model has been adopted in that sphere also in order to shift units), we have become instinctual recognisers of genre formats. Moments after the opening credits, we automatically spot The Girl; minutes later we’ve copped The Guy; now we know that, but for a Meet Cute, some Screwball Comedy and an almost Tragic Misunderstanding, the rest is Happily Ever After. We don’t even have to think about it. It just happens. If it didn’t, we would feel gypped and we’d complain. A lot. However, that’s just us; what about books written ages ago; what about the impact on their contemporary audience, one without our social programming? Let’s take a look at a sadly misunderstood and poorly treated classic:

Pride and Prejudice is not a novel written for a modern audience. Jane Austen’s concerns were very particular and her reasons for writing the book have been discussed at length by better commentators than I. It has been made into cinematic and televisual iterations time and again and each of those versions is predicated upon the demands of a modern audience and what it wants to experience. Moments after the opening credits, we are introduced to Elizabeth Bennett; shortly thereafter Mr. D’Arcy is revealed. Now we know that it’s just a Meet Cute, some Screwball Comedy and an almost Tragic Misunderstanding along the way to blah, blah, blah. This is what Pride and Prejudice has become: a schmaltzy swoon-fest. But it’s not.

One reason for the novel’s enduring popularity is that it can be streamlined into a Hollywood blockbuster in the manner outlined. It has good bones, in the sense of it being a love story, and a devastating understanding of human and social psychology which allows it to be layered over many social scenarios. Austen was incredibly good at this stuff – the fact that Emma could be re-made as “Clueless” shows just how adaptable her material can be. But being able to do this with the book drags it away from what it originally was – a Regency novel for Regency readers. If you de-purpose Pride and Prejudice, you can do almost anything to it – set it in space; stage it as a puppet show; even cast F***ing! Keira! Bloody! Knightley! (Ahem.) as Lizzie Bennett (unbelievable!), but then you turn it into a Mills & Boon knock-off and that defeats the author’s original intention.

This book is about a woman without any traction in the matrimonial stakes of her culture. We are explicitly told that – in a world where a good marriage is crucial – Elizabeth Bennett has only two things on her side: wit and a pair of fine eyes. Everything else stands in her way. D’Arcy, on the other hand, has and is everything desired in a husband, but there’s no way that he’s going to even consider Lizzie Bennett. We are told in no uncertain terms that the possibility of Lizzie becoming Mrs. Fitzwilliam D’Arcy by the last page is so remote as to be functionally impossible. And yet, it is the magic of this work that it happens, and that we believe in it happening. For us it’s just “Aww – another happy ending!”; for Regency readers it would have been outrageous; a veritable call to arms.

Think about Wickham. He is set up as the villain of the piece, although initially, he is presented to us as Elizabeth’s more realistic option in the property distribution game. He is good-looking and has a solid career and income; his background is a little shady but then so is Elizabeth’s, with many socially awkward details for anyone who cares to scratch the surface. Nevertheless, Wickham is on a roll; he’s making his way; and Lizzie recognizes this. So too, does a Regency reader – we may think of Wickham as a sleazebag on the make, but we’ve been educated to think of him that way. No Regency reader would think badly of him for dropping Lizzie in order to court Mary King and her 10,000-pound inheritance. For us, it’s a sharp stab of betrayal: “you scumbag!” we cry; ‘How could you?” But for a contemporary reader it’s a bone saw chill reminder to them and to Lizzie of her place in society, and the fact that she should not over-reach herself in the purely business world of matrimonial attachment. They would simply nod sagely – as does Elizabeth – and turn to the next page. Even at the end when Wickham becomes Elizabeth’s brother-in-law there’s very little acrimony from her about how it came about – it’s the price of doing business and maybe Elizabeth recognizes that Wickham was just as she was, only less idealistic, more open to getting his hands dirty and quicker to seize the nearest option. This is not to say that Wickham isn’t the “bad guy” of the piece; of course he is, but our perception of him has been heightened by our need for genre and we put him up there along with Darth Vader, Hannibal Lecter and Hans Gruber; contemporary readers dealt in many more degrees of subtlety than we do.

On purely functional levels, Austen’s fiction is securely anchored in its milieu and for modern audiences some references have slid away from us to become hard to understand. In Sense and Sensibility Colonel Brandon confesses to Elinor that he had previously engaged Mr. Willoughby in a duel, although that word is never used and the whole event is so glossed over as to render it practically opaque to a modern reader’s perusal; Regency readers would have spotted it a mile away, however. It’s the same with Shakespeare – many of his jokes, designed to entertain an audience of his day, are now lost to us and only the long-pondered stabs at meaning provided by academics can give us a vague window onto them.

So, what does all of this mean for Jess Kidd and her novel Things in Jars?

Let me say, right from the start, that Ms. Kidd is a fantastic writer. Her prose cracks and spits with all of the verbal pyrotechnics you’d expect of a writer of (so-called) Literary Fiction. There’s a joy in this writing that is completely engaging and a palpable love for the characters that effusively spills off the page. It has many things to recommend it and it’s clear to see why she won the Costa Short Story Award in 2016.

The book retails an investigation in the career of Bridie Devine, the most renowned female detective of her time, set in and around London in 1863. The crime is the abduction and possible murder of a strange child, born with some unusual physical differences, possibly by circus folk looking for a new attraction, or by anatomists desiring an unusual specimen for their collection. The knot of the investigation is a Gordian one, complicated by the fact that Bridie is being haunted by the ghost of a famous boxer – Ruby Doyle – who is hopelessly in love with her.

There are many things to enjoy about this narrative. The sinister villains are truly sinister and villainous and the dark gloomy descriptions of London with its graveyards, slums and rank laboratories filled with the titular jars all lend the appropriate tone. My only problem is that I don’t believe it. Further, no Victorian reader would buy it either.

Bridie Devine – and her towering maidservant and everyone else around her - is presented to us psychologically as a completely modern person with Twenty-first Century values, determined to brush aside obstructions along the way to obtaining her goals. She smokes, she drinks, she looks men straight in the eye – this is all fine; call me a fan. But this isn’t Victorian London. What this reminded me of mostly, was Caleb Carr’s The Alienist. That novel posits a post-Victorian scenario and peoples it with late Twentieth Century players too, for no good reason. The jarring (sorry!) contrast between such characters and the times in which they’ve been set is a problem that I can’t get across. It’s just like that Coke can suddenly balanced on the roasted snout of the boar’s head at the SCA feast – it knocks down the whole house of cards.

And it’s not as if these kinds of constructions can’t work, and work very well indeed. Anyone who has read Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clark will know exactly what I mean. The blending of history and fantasy there is downright perfect; nothing leaps out to break the illusion of reality and all of the characters remain faithful to their narrative arcs and their zeitgeist. My takeaway is that stories like Things in Jars are written by Twenty-first Century authors for Twenty-first Century readers and that’s okay; I just wonder what’s the point of setting them in these far-distant places in time when a single misstep can undo everything that the writer is trying to achieve? Reference Lindsey Davis’s constant online arguments with people who tell her that she can’t use the word “corn” when talking about grain in her Ancient Roman crime potboilers (“corn” is a collective noun for grain of any type, a word which pre-dates the discovery of the New World and the introduction of maize – colloquially known as “corn” – into Europe).

In the final analysis, this is a fun read and a refreshing breath of air in a world too often bogged down with bad writing. The pace is cracking, the characters delightful, the story twisty, murky and engaging. Narratively, it’s a little wayward, and I have to admit that I was more interested in the ghost than the unfolding mystery, but then I kind of felt that the writer was too: Ruby Doyle alone is worth the price of admission here. It’s not a perfect book, but it’s a (literally) bloody fun one and you won’t feel as though you’ve wasted your time.

Three-and-a-half Tentacled Horrors from me.

Review: "Doctor Who" 2020

CHIBNALL, Chris (Producer), “Doctor Who”, BBC TV Enterprises, 2020

I’m not a huge Whovian but, due to circumstances outside my control, I’ve spent my evenings home and inside, so I decided I may as well catch up on current events. I have to say that I’m not overly impressed.

Right from the start I have to say that I like Jodie Whittaker as the new incarnation of the Doctor. I have no issues with a female Time Lord – it just makes sense to me and I kind of wish that they’d taken the plunge sooner: legitimizing the cross-dressing through backstory references is going to be a massive headache for “Doctor Who” writers in the future but that’s their cross to bear. Whittaker is quirky and fey enough to fall into line with fan expectations of how a Doctor ought to behave and she wields a sonic screwdriver like a boss. No problems with the portrayal; it’s her writers who are letting her down.

Let’s get some history here: everybody – as they say – has their own Doctor. Back in the early 1960s, the TV show was launched in the wake of a huge (for the time) BBC marketing campaign. It was posited as a somewhat edgy children’s show designed to expose kiddies to ideas about science and history. William Hartnell’s Doctor (1963-1966) was saddled with a precocious “grand-daughter” – Susan – and his companions were two British schoolteachers specializing in – you guessed it – history and science. The edginess soon took over though and the kid’s aspects of the drama went by the wayside in favour of Daleks and nightmare-inducing storylines. The Beeb soon realized that they had an unexpected money-spinner on their hands.

Patrick Troughton replaced Hartnell as the Second Doctor (1966-1969) and – due to 60s hippiness and anti-establishment sentiment – entrenched the quirky rebel attitudes that became a hallmark of the character, underscored by his annoying recorder. I have only vague impressions of this run – cost-saving measures at the BBC saw all of the original tapes containing the series wiped and re-used to assuage Tory austerity ideals; Troughton only existed in fans’ memories thereafter, until he was brought back by a time glitch (along with Hartnell) in the 70s tale “The Three Doctors”. Serendipitously, tapes of the original Second Doctor series were found in a vault in South Africa in the early 2000s and so some of Troughton’s work has been restored to us and he’s no longer just the crazy priest who gets impaled on a lightning rod in “The Omen”.

(Cost-cutting at the BBC has long been a bugbear of British TV fans and “Doctor Who” wasn’t the only series to fall victim to it, although it’s the most notable. In the Hartnell seasons, film stock was rationed to each episode and, often, bad takes had to be used because there was simply no more film for a do-over: a hallmark of the Hartnell years is the Doctor repeatedly fluffing his lines. Offsetting this were shows where too much film stock had been allocated and there was pressure on the producers to ensure that none of it was wasted – a case in point was the dreary “Sapphire and Steel”, the episodes of which are interminably drawn-out for no good reason other than to waste film. Still, a tight budget can be the making of a piece and – despite a few egregiously laughable missteps – “Doctor Who” has mostly risen to the challenge.)

The show fell more squarely onto my radar during the Jon Pertwee years (1970-1974) and he, for me, is my Doctor. The quirky rebel was still there, albeit with a somewhat foppish overtone, but there was now a core of steel and the Doctor was no longer just a crazy old kook that the bad guys could push around – the Doc’ could now push back. Bond was in the air, so the Doctor had gadgets and a naff martial arts array on call (which, thankfully, didn’t get too strong an airing) and he became more purposeful and proactive in his efforts. The avuncular traits established by Hartnell were retained in his dealings with the new companions, Jo Grant and later, Sara-Jane Smith.

By this time, BBC sci-fi wünderkind Terry Nation had taken hold of the concept and had streamlined the show more in line with his own ideas of how it should proceed. He grounded the Doctor, sabotaging the TARDIS so that the Doctor could move through time and space but only in the vicinity of Earth, providing more focus to the titular character’s rescue efforts. It also allowed him to be somewhat grudging in his attitudes towards humanity in general. On top of this, Nation honed the United Nation’s Time Lord oversight agency – U.N.I.T. – into a useful framework for containing and explaining the Doctor’s activities. Essentially, Nation brought scaffolding to a TV show that had been episodically showcasing a Monster-Of-The-Week vehicle, allowing it have externality, self-reference and to become its own story generating engine.

As good as all this was, it couldn’t last. Changing line-ups in production staff (read: egos) meant that no-one was content to leave alone the thing that wasn’t broken. Enough cohesion had been generated and there was still enough sense on board the production staff to ensure that the Tom Baker years (1974-1981) didn’t go completely off the rails, and there are quite a lot of stellar story-arcs and performances (with the exception of that last episode of “The Talons of Weng Ch-iang”). There were some cringe-worthy moments – Leela – but on the whole the show had built enough DNA that it rolled along almost effortlessly. Then came a problem – money.

By the 80s, the BBC finally worked out that “Doctor Who” was a solid 24-carat cash cow which was making them rich. Budgets for the show had been growing, but now they went through the roof (relatively speaking) and the ease of production saw the show’s charm vanish under a slick sheen of over-production. The later Tom Baker eps are all so veneered and tend to blur into each other, so characterless are they. Too, the stable of writers and designers had just started to burn out – along with the actors: things were grinding to a halt. So, they switched gears (and Doctors) and signed on for another round, although not with as much cash: BBC executives – dour lot that they are – had prophesied the End Times for the show.

Peter Davison was likable enough as the Doctor (1981-1984), what with his cricket flannels riffing off Dorothy L. Sayers’ Lord Peter Wimsey character, but the writers obviously felt that more time should be spent with the companions. Bad move. This Doctor gave us – in what was possibly a revenge move for “Neighbours” and “Home & Away” – Tegan the flight-attendant with the Aussie twang and the ability to “speak Aboriginal” – that was a moment when an entire nation cringed as one. It also gave us the ickily-syrupy Adric (boo!), the first companion to die (hooray!) while conveniently showing us how to kill Cybermen. Of course, we now know that killing-off a character is code for a ratings drop, and soon “Doctor Who” was in free-fall.

Flailing wildly, the writers and producers decided that what we obviously wanted in a Time Lord was someone less ethically and morally upright. No more white-knights; it was time for a Doctor moulded more along the lines of the Master. Along came Colin Baker (1984-1986) and the less said about that the better.

Sylvester McCoy wrapped up a long line of creative misfires indicative of the producers not having a clue about what the fans were after. This Doctor (1987-1989 and 1996) was literally a hodge-podge of previous incarnations, surrounded by too many companions, turning the entire show into almost a ‘Doctor by committee’. In desperation, the show was part-sold off to the Yanks to turn into a movie starring Paul McGann (1996) – not a new concept: a Doctor Who movie starring Peter Cushing appeared in 1965 - which added new layers of horror to the franchise before pulling the plug…

In 2005, the BBC felt that the stars were right and they ponied-up for a re-boot season of the show. The devilishly-handsome Christopher Eccleston stepped into the Doctor’s shoes with a much more urbane metrosexual look and - given the precedent set by the McGann film – embarked on (gasp!) a romance with Billy Piper as the new companion. This iteration was more firmly grounded in the current British zeitgeist and carried touchstones to current events and tropes which viewers could relate to. Companions were no longer Scottish Highland chiefs, warrior-women from abandoned space communities, or interstellar super-geniuses – they were people that average Londoners would run into every day. Everypeople, in short. Add to this the fact that most of the monsters were actively staging incursions into modern European – if not international – affairs, then we could all see that the Beeb had re-discovered its mojo, at least as far as the Doc’ was concerned.

David Tennant showed up next (2005-2010) – after Eccleston decided he was getting typecast and because an upcoming gig as a prosthetic-clad space elf was in the offing – and like Hartnell and Troughton before him, consolidated the role and structured the aesthetics and storylines eventually becoming his own Jon Pertwee by the end of his run. Along the way he introduced the notion of famous guest stars slumming through the narrative arcs and the now-standard Christmas specials. Business was booming, Time Lord-wise.

Matt Smith (2010-2013), seemed set to continue the good times. Unexpectedly though – and Chris Eccelston’s early departure should have been a giveaway – playing the über-Time Lord had become something of a poisoned chalice. Actors began to worry that they would become typecast, or that commitment to the show would mean that they would be forced to abandon other more lucrative gigs. Being the Doctor was a calling, a vocation, rather than just a role, and many of the players called to the part felt that, in these gig-economy times, such a tied-in situation would signal career death. Thespians began to wonder, how long is a reasonable stint as the Doctor? What’s the trade-off? And so, after only three years and with some great narrative arcs behind him, Matt Smith said “toodles”.

Peter Capaldi’s run (2013-2017) seemed a return to form and presented the viewers with some solid fan service, a steampunk edge and some unexpected twists and turns (mainly of the Master variety). However, at the end of his run, Steven Moffatt, who had been valiantly holding things together as producer, decided to call it a day. This major change seemed like a natural jumping-off point to introduce a new Doctor so, with Chris Chibnall producing, the new Doctor – Jodie Whittaker – accepted the keys to the TARDIS.

Of course, the proposal to make the Doctor a woman was met with the usual outrage from the peanut gallery. In a flashback to “Ghostbusters 2016”, there was a great outpouring declaring that ‘the Doctor can ONLY be a man!’; however, by this stage of the game I think it’s pretty clear how much bollocks that position is. Jodie Whittaker has crafted an excellent persona which falls nicely in line with the other incarnations of the character, the only problem is that she isn’t being well-served by her writers and producers. Which brings us to the present:

Once more there’s an unhealthy obsession with the Doctor’s companions. Someone has obviously made the comment that these characters are the gateways for the viewing audience, allowing sympathy with them and the events that surround them; however, this is a dud lot. Graeme is lots of fun to watch and is obviously there for comic effect, but Yaz effectively looks like Tegan in a different frock and Ryan is just TARDIS clutter – why has he stuck around for this long? Surely his Adric moment was due long ago. The focus on these three means that the Doctor is necessarily pushed into the background and she becomes a piece of the furniture rather than a pro-active element of the narrative. She doesn’t act; she reacts; she’s always the last to see the danger rolling off the assembly line and that – to be blunt – ain’t the Doctor.

It feels as if, at the beginning of the planning for this last season, a meeting was held and everyone was asked to nominate something that they felt was “cool”, either location-wise, in a sci-fi sense generally, or in terms of the Doctor. Then they were told to go and write a framework around all of those tentpoles and try to pull it altogether into some kind of shambolic narrative across twelve instalments. Thus, we have Nikolai Tesla for no good reason other than that the Doc wanted to say “hello!”; the gathering of Lord Byron, the Shelleys and Dr. Polidori at the Villa Diodati because…why not?; and a two-part, budget-blowing James Bond riff that meant the sets and effects for the Gallifrey-based conclusion looked more than a little anaemic. None of the stories in this season spring naturally from the substrate and nothing leads organically from the preceding material. It’s all choppy and indulgent, although – I’m relieved to note - the grinding of axes in the background has minimized somewhat from Whittaker’s first season.

Even the opponents are re-works and re-hashes. First there’s the Master, completely ignoring the fact that there was a thundering plotline involving him/her at the end of the Capaldi era narrative. Then there’s the Judoon tromping up the joint because apparently some of the writers like to say the word “Judoon”. And - speaking of tromping – we have Cybermen. Again. And next year they’ve promised us Daleks. Again. You can put a frilly collar on a Cyberman and have him stomp through Gallifrey-as-was, it’s still nothing new. And you’d suppose (and you’d be right) that what the fans want is something new. We even got a Captain Jack Harkness cameo for chrissake! Chris Chibnall is starting to look like the J.J. Abrams of the Whoniverse*…

Most seasons of “Doctor Who” post 2005, have tried to craft an over-arching plotline to be resolved by the season’s end; the 2020 season’s über-plot – the mystery of the Timeless Child – got completely lost in all of the shenanigans of the Doctor’s companions. To the extent that, as the Doctor was prepared to look momentarily bemused by mention of it then brush it off and get back to things, so too were we. Story complications like Ruth Clayton and the immortal Irish policeman who gets mind-wiped in the final episode became moments to go to the loo, or to make a cup of tea, rather than events of any consequence. And the pace was frenetic: there was no time to relax in all of this. In fact, most of the time I was wishing that some 1960s Beeb exec. would step out of the woodwork and say, ‘Here’s another 50,000 kilometres of film stock; make sure you use it all up before the season ends, just like “Sapphire & Steel”’.

So, in the final analysis, it seems that “Doctor Who” is a product of a boom-and-bust popularity tied to network budgetary policies, fan peccadilloes and ebb-and-flow tides of creative helmspeople. When it’s good it’s very, very good; when it’s bad… not so much. The Thirteenth Doctor has had a rocky start, a victim of the very same ‘blue sky thinking’ that re-created her as a woman this time around and which should have been done previously and which should be regarded as a thing of no consequence nowadays. The Doctor is the Doctor, no matter what meat-suit they’re wearing. We have a great Doctor at present; sadly, we also have a dearth of creativity on the scripting and production side of things, a companion overload and the imminent death of at least one of them in the Christmas special ahead. We don’t need a TARDIS to know that we’ve seen all of this before and that we all know to where it leads.

*That’s not a compliment, by the way. In the same way that Abrams only ever re-makes franchise material that has already been done (although, arguably, he does it better) - Star Wars; Star Trek – so too, does it appear that Chibnall is simply a do-overer.