Lionel Shriver, We need to talk about Kevin

 In a series of letters addressed to her husband, mother tries to understand why her son, 15-year-old Kevin, murdered seven of his fellow classmates, a cafeteria worker and his English teacher in a Columbine-style school massacre.

Incredibly well written, drawing the reader into the mother’s reflections on the possible reasons for Kevin’s actions, moving seamlessly between time periods, and subtly instilling doubt into the reader’s mind as to the reliability of the narrator’s perspective.

The September Issue

www.theseptemberissue.com

A documentary shot around the production of the September issue of American Vogue. The dramatic tension is provided not through any expose of the woman behind the editorial mask of Anna Wintour, but through the exploration of her working relationship with her fashion director, another British woman, Grace Coddington. While it might be Wintour’s clarity of purpose and decisiveness that makes Vogue not just a brand but an influential force (as shown in Wintour’s matchmaking of designers with brands), it is Coddington’s creative and artistic vision, as well as her lack of the customary deference to Wintour, that gives the film a heart.

Murder on Air, Whitley Bay Playhouse

Three short Agatha Christie radio plays performed in a radio studio setting with live sound effects.

I’m a crime fiction fan so I went along for a guilty dose of Christie and to have a peek at the new Whitley Bay Playhouse.

These weren’t Christie’s finest works – short stories with the requisite twist in the tale,  coupled with a  less than convincing turn from Roy Marsden as Hercules Poirot in one segment (hard to accept Adam Dalgliesh as Poirot!!).

The highlight was the staging – the links from contemporary radio broadcasts set the period,  the sound effects from the foley artist and from the cast were amazing. These also added a comedic dimension…I won’t spoil the ‘plot’ but if sitting in the front row, beware the flying shards of cabbage used as a proxy for a human skull during a murder scene.

It was good to see the new Playhouse, but none too hopeful to see that I probaby helped to lower the average age of the audience, and that for one of the few national productions that this theatre has attracted, the house was less than full.

CHristopher Brookmyre, By My Enemy

www.brookmyre.co.uk

A Jack Parlabane mystery, against the setting of an assignment on a corporate outward bound course.

Not a standard murder mystery but very witty, very funny and very readable:

See, that’s what I love about your generation. You know these things chapter and verse and can pluck them from your skull on cue. What can we quote? Song lyrics, sitcom gags and philosophical soliloquies that sould pseudo-Shakespearean until you remember they were spoken by Jean-Luc Picard.

…and reading this is now indelibly associated in my mind with a fabulous weekend at the seaside in Whitby. Bliss.

Public Enemies

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1152836/

The story of the criminal career of American gangster, John Dillinger…or the story of the battle between Dillinger and the recently formed FBI….except it was neither of these. It wasn’t really an exploration of the character and motivation of Dillinger, nor did it really deliver an epic battle between good and evil. It was just one episode after another.

A good cast, Marion Cotillard, Johnny Depp and Christian Bale, were nicely shot, but not well supported in script and characterisation.

The best thing about this? The memory of an afternoon spent having a nice lunch and watching this without distraction in a great independent cinema  in Edinburgh.

Martin Amis, London Fields

 

There is a murderer, there is a murderee, and there is a foil.

This is the story of a woman who is seeking to bring about her own murder…or is it the story of writing the story of a woman who is seeking…it’s Amis, you get the idea.

I can’t do better than the Guardian review here:

This book is a cheat. A con-trick. From start to finish, all 470 pages of it, it’s an elaborate tease. A whodunnit without a motive. A meditation on the way the world ends which turns out to be just another metaphor for the writing of fiction.

A con, but an intriguing and well-written con.

Christopher Brookmyre, One Fine Day in the Middle of the Night

http://www.brookmyre.co.uk/

As the publicity says:

The occasion: high school reunion.

The place: an oil rig converted into a tourist resort.

The outcome: carnage.

Dress Casual. Bring your own bullets.

Not a Jack Parlabane mystery which was a bit of disappointment, but very funny and riveting nonetheless. What I like about Brookmyre’s work is his ability to pick up on the detail of group dynamics – whether a school reunion or a ‘bonding exercise’. I also liked the ackowledgement of the cliches of the action movie genre with which this plot nominally accords. Great fun.

Paolozzi and un-Paolozzi

A trip to the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art and the Dean Gallery was the highlight of a recent visit to Edinburgh.

The steel Paolozzi statue of Vulcan,seemingly barely confined by the Dean Gallery, is a favourite, as is the re-creation of Paolozzi’s studio. Add in good cafes and gift shops and it is the perfect (and quiet) place in Edinburgh to spend a lazy day.

I was able to get my Paolozzi fix closer to home with the following statue being outside an office building around the corner from my flat in Newcastle:

No more. Over the weekend, I had the fascinating sight of this bronze statue being removed with the aid of a digger, low-loading lorry and a large number of men in high-visibility jackets  - I am assuming that this was a planned move rather than an audacious art theft – to be replaced by a spiral of supermarket trolleys. A pity.

Harland Miller, Don’t let the bastards cheer you up, Baltic Mill Gateshead

One of those, it’s-raining-outside-I’ll-just-pop-in-to-shelter-from-the-rain choices. Thank-you, Newcastle weather.

Three series of works from Yorkshire artist, Harland Miller:

• the bad weather series (apt!) of large canvases echoing the style of Penguin paperback covers, with humorous plays on words relating to local places (see above);
• the Ripper series, inspired by ripped and weathered posters pasted onto walls during the hunt for the Yorkshire Ripper;
• a set of disfigured and painted typewriters.

I loved so many things about this exhibition. The use and abuse of Penguin iconography and typewriters appealed to the part of me that loves books, texts and fonts. The humour of the ‘book titles’ was straightforward, lighthearted fun. This made the juxtaposition with the macabre Ripper series all the more disturbing. Thoroughly recommended.

A culture revolving around you

…no, not a cheesy new personal mantra, but a quote from the website of O2. Ironic, in a non-Morissette stylee.

Today I parted company with my Blackberry and my temper.  Now, I admit that I’m a teensy bit attached to my Crackberry – heaven forbid I should spend time doing something productive when I could be updating my Facebook status. So you can imagine the horror when the keyboard started to generate random characters…there was a danger of improving the quality of my Facebook posts.

I went along to the O2 store and can thoroughly recommend the experience as a way of seeing large parts of your weekend and faith in the human race destroyed.

The first assistant told me (in her best teenage to old/post pubescent person manner) that my keyboard was malfunctioning because my time zone was set to central Europe – her explanation being that people in Holland speak Danish and that might have an impact on the language (?!). Understandably, I asked to speak to a supervisor.

The supervisor offered me a low grade loan phone while my Blackberry was being investigated, but said I could not be provided with a replacement with equivalent functionality….I would however continue to be charged the premium rate for Blackberry services.

After insisting on speaking to someone who had reached puberty (I may have refrained from phrasing it that way), the regional on-call manager grudgingly offered a temporary reduction in tariff as what he termed a ‘goodwill’ gesture. I think he may use a different dictionary to me…but in the spirit of being down with the kids, I would like to call him a condescending idiot as a ‘goodwill’ gesture.

An increasingly intimidating teenager #2 informed me that I was being condescending . Bless. Hard to remain polite at the prospect of Crackberry withdrawal and in the face of being asked three times for the same personal details that the company already holds as part of my customer record (the details that the shop has no problem accessing when I’m there to upgrade or buy anything).

End result? I am the proud temporary custodian of a Nokia that might generously be described as retro and less generously as antique. Said Nokia does not come with an instruction booklet so its presence in my life is likely to be largely decorative rather than functional. I invested in a box of anti-bacterial wipes on the way home.

A formal written complaint is being submitted – the nice man on the ‘helpline’ admitted he had no idea of the name of the CEO of the company (thank goodness for Google) and that that here were ‘problems’ with email contact. O2 – communication at its best.