Praise of Folly

The Seven-Percent Saline Solution

Erasmus is amused by the further Holmesian evolution in Dr. Gregory House. Just as Holmes would stimulate himself with cocaine when the world was too boring, it seems Dr. House's quest for pain-killers gets stronger when he's bored, as his boss proved with a faux-morphine shot. Well done.

Pull quote: Blade II

In alluding to Blade II below, Erasmus was reminded of a quote from a review by Erasmus's favorite film critic, Stephanus Prædator:

If you're going to make a movie about vampires fighting with automatic weapons in crowded Eastern European go-go joints, this is the way to do it.

Yeah, baby. Read the rest here, if you care to. Although, as he concludes, you're likely only to care to if you fall into a few, narrow groups.

Well, anyway: This movie is for a variety of segmented audiences: children whose souls have been leeched by MTV, folks with IQs under 100 and geniuses with IQs over 150. You normal people stay away: You won't get it, you won't like it, and you'll feel violated by it.

Film geeks will love his opening, though...

And buy Prædator's new book here.

Orcus: Mutatio

While Erasmus is waxing hemophagically, he should mention that he caught Underworld: Evolution the other week. This film is a sequel to Underworld, which introduced us to an undead protagonist played by Kate Beckinsale, she of the raven tresses, the intelligent eyes, the crispy enunciated posh accent, the alabaster caryatid figure...

Excuse Erasmus. He was caught in a bit of a reverie. Suffice it to say that Erasmus has enjoyed Miss Beckinsale (now Mrs. Len Wiseman) for many years. She’s a gifted actress and a lovely woman. So, when, three years ago, previews showed Miss B starring in Mr. W’s Underworld as a black-leather-clad vampire assassin, Erasmus allowed that she could chew on his jugular vein any time.

Alas, Underworld was a rather dull, talky vampire-politics film, with an underwhelming climax. The latter was obviously attributable to the meager special-effects budget, but the former was Erasmus’s real problem with the movie. In it, we are introduced to a world in which vampires and werewolves (too-cutely dubbed “Lycans” from “lycanthropes”) have been at war for some centuries. Events ensue, and Miss Beckinsale’s character, a werewolf-hunter (too-cutely dubbed “death-dealer”) finds herself caught amidst treachery from all sides, while trying to save an innocent caught at the center. It doesn’t hurt that said innocent is a hunky guy for whom she falls. Erasmus didn’t rate the movie, but the visuals aside, non placet.

Erasmus was more than a little surprised to see that a studio had backed a sequel, until he read that DVD sales had surpassed the theater grosses. Apparently, while not great, it was good enough to attract a solid audience. However, when Underworld: Evolution, said sequel, arrived in theaters without critics’ screenings, Erasmus assumed the worst. However, there’s not much out there in pop-culture land, and Mrs. E does like action flicks.

A further surprise ensued. It did not stink. Indeed, Erasmus quite enjoyed the flick. It did not suffer from the glacial pacing of the first one, toned down the politics, upped the action quotient, and added a soupçon of sensuality. (Perhaps, lector, thou mayest argue that Erasmus’s mind was clouded by Mrs. W’s nude scene, carefully shot by Mr. W. And, lector, thou mayest be right.) One still requires a healthy ability to suspend disbelief, particularly with the backstory, but past that, it's good escapist fun.

In the second movie, Selene, the assassin, finds herself trying to protect Hunky Boyfriend (Scott Speedman, who’s really playing The Girl from most adventure movies: he’s not got a lot to do, except assist Selene in the final battle) from both the vampires and lycanthropes who have designs on him; particularly menacing is the specter of the two brothers who were apparently the Ur-vampire and Ur-werewolf. And, interestingly, a third force comes to play: a group of humans who appear to not only be aware of the shadow war between vampires and werewolves, but who have a ship-borne base from which they apparently try and marginalize it.

Erasmus liked a lot of things about the movie, particularly the setting in Hungary. Erasmus is a Hungarophile, and liked seeing the country and hearing the language again. Even better were the Hunnically-clad medieval vampire soldiers in the movie’s long set-up flashback.

In sum, Evolution is as big a step forward as Blade II was to its predecessor (though Wiseman lacks Guillermo del Toro’s genius for the Gothic and sheer mayhem—no criticism of Wiseman, this. Del Toro’s as good as it gets.)

Underworld: Evolution, surprisingly, placet.

Two notes: Selene is probably the best name for a distaff vampire Erasmus has ever heard. It also reminds him of the two very memorable literary characters, Selena Jardine in the late Sarah Caudwell’s brilliant and hilarious mysteries (start here), and Selena Keller in Claire Berlinski’s terrific Loose Lips.

Second, firearms aficionadi will be interested to note that Heckler & Koch is apparently the official armorer of the supernatural underworld. Vampires seem to prefer the elegance of the classic 9mm MP5A3 with retractable stock, while the humans prefer the next-generation UMP and G36. Werewolves decline to use firearms, it seems. Probably because their fur keeps getting caught in the action...

De historicō

Erasmus has spent several pleasant evenings in the company of Elizabeth Kostova’s first novel, The Historian. Erasmus doesn't care to give away any of the book's twists and turns, but it gives away little to say that it broadly concerns historians, Vlad III Ţepeş of Wallachia and his alter ego courtesy of Bram Stoker, Count Dracula the vampire.

As an enthusiast of Balkan history, vampire myths, and Stoker’s novel, Erasmus could not resist picking up the book, and was not displeased. Ms. Kostova’s research was very good. Her writing is quite good, and the story’s twists and turns are quite satisfying. Erasmus found it a thoroughly entertaining, literate, page-turner. (And moreover, her characters visit Budapest and Istanbul, two of Erasmus's favorite cities.) He looks forward to Ms. Kostova’s future works.

By way of criticism, Erasmus will note that in an obvious homage to Stoker, Ms. Kostova has written The Historian as an epistolary novel. While this is clever, the form was already rather antiquated when Stoker took it up in 1897. Dracula's dynamism overcomes the form’s inherent artificiality (and indeed was a bit of a techno-thriller as well for the day, featuring all sorts of high-tech Victoriana like typewriters, telegraphs, dictation cylinders, et cetera). The Historian is generally successful, but one’s suspension of disbelief is slightly tested by the premise’s requirements of huge caches of letters and diaries which make up the book's 642 pages.

Moreover, the first historian and narratrix we meet begins the story when she was 17 or so in Amsterdam in the early 1970s. This frame narrative then proceeds to disappear for huge sections of the book as we learn about the book’s real protagonists, her father and the mother she never knew. Her parents’ story and her own reconnect at the climax, though the frame narrative adds little dramatic heft to the scene which is, alas, slightly disappointing and less dramatic than one would have wished.

Erasmus’s main complaint about the book is the same as he had about another very enjoyable literary entertainment, Matt Bondurant’s Third Translation: dreadful editing. Ms. Kostova should complain loudly to her publishers. Erasmus was poked in the eye by errors in the book’s Romanian, Hungarian, and Turkish, and at least twice the text strongly suggests the main language of the Ottoman Empire was Arabic rather than Ottoman Turkish. Moreover, various characters receive books labeled DRAKULYA, which is an obviously semi-Anglicized version of the Romanian Drăculea (perhaps English by way of Russian or Bulgarian?). Why this bizarre orthography appears rather than the Romanian, or a German or Slavic "Drakulja" is never explained. Along the same lines, Ms. Kostova's editors introduced (or let stand) the Bulgarian Tsarigrad when the Slavonic Tsargrad was more appropriate in some instances.

But Erasmus quibbles. Obviously.

Vampire novels of late have been dominated by either gothic-lite romances or talky political squabbles, both the legacies of Anne Rice, whose Interview With the Vampire and its undistinguished sequels completely revitalized the form. Erasmus also suspects the very popular vampire-politics role-playing game Vampire: The Masquerade compounded these tendencies among writers familiar with it. The Historian is a fine addition to the vampire genre, and a welcome return to the tradition of Stoker. Her villain, and Erasmus won't reveal who he is, is far more akin to Count Dracula than Lestat and kith.

Her accomplishments are all the more impressive as The Historian is Ms. Kostova's first novel. In consequence, Erasmus must say, Ave.

P.S. Erasmus's review is not at all affected by Ms. Kostova's apparent knowledge of his occult work, Sicarii fortunæ. (See page 217 of the Little, Brown edition.)

Where the Truth Lies

Erasmus's four regular readers will remember his shock at learning that the guy who wrote "The Piña Colada Song" is also a hell of a novelist, in addition to his lengthy and impressive curriculum vitæ in a variety of artistic endeavors.

So, as when finding any author with whom he is impressed, Erasmus turned turned to his backlist, which in Holmes' case is one volume, Where the Truth Lies. Erasmus found it to be exceedingly well-written, very well-plotted, and extremely well-crafted as a historical novel.

The history in question is that of the 1950s and the 1970s, in which a young, female journalist going by the name of O'Connor delves into the break-up twenty years earlier of a comic duo who resemble Martin & Lewis very, very strongly. A young woman's body was found in a bathtub at a New Jersey casino right around the time they broke up, and the presumable murder has always cast a pall over their breakup, as well as a spell over the investigatively minded.

The historical details of both the '70s and the '50s seems impeccably rendered, and again, Erasmus is amazed to see how a novelist of this talent has flown beneath the critical radar. (Though it may be Mr. Holmes' '70s-style tinted shades and beard, calling to mind Blue Öyster Cult, et al.)

Erasmus has no interest in seeing the poorly-reviewed cinematic adaption and advises interested parties to read the book before seeing the film (which does feature some excellent actors).

Erasmus does wonder, however, with no little distaste, what the heck Martin & Lewis ever did to Rupert Holmes.

Where the Truth Lies, ave.

Civitas urnarum

Occasionally, when Erasmus is feeling down, he likes to be reminded that there are entire cultures who are more depressed than he. At these moments, Scandinavian mystery fiction is Erasmus's genre of choice. They frequently feature detectives like Maj Sjövall & Per Wahlöö's classic Martin Beck who goes from unhappy marriage to unhappy divorce to sorta-happy relationship. Henning Mankell's world-weary Kurt Wallander isn't as burdened, but he's clearly carrying an existential burden.

So it was with a mixture of astonishment and glee that Erasmus happened upon Jar City by Arnuldur Indriðason. Indriðason's sleuth, Inspector Erlendur (Icelanders use only a given name and a patronymic) has not only an unsympathetic ex-wife, but a heroin-addicted daughter who's pregnant. Ah, the exquisite despair.

Erasmus kids a bit. However, Jar City is an excellent read, though the title refers to a fairly minor plot point. It was clearly an evocative phrase that the English-language publishers liked. Erasmus very much prefers the Icelandic Mýrin, or The Mire, which is in fact a leitmotif in the book.

Erasmus very much enjoyed the book, the plot of which combines an investigation into a an apparently innocuous murder victim's exceedingly sordid past with a twist which can genuinely be described as uniquely Icelandic. Erasmus very much hopes that more of Arnuldur Indriðason's works make it into English.

Placet.

(Typographical note: alas, the edh and thorn do not appear in the work. And Mr. Arnuldur's patronymic appears on the cover with a d-with-bar à la viétnamiènne rather than an edh [ð]. Erasmus apologizes to Iceland and Viking descendants everywhere.)

The Big Over Easy

Jasper Fforde's newest book is an entertaining variant of the conceit he developed in his brilliant Eyre Affair and the subsequent adventures of Thursday Next, a literally literary detective. The Big Over Easy is a police procedural starring DI Jack Spratt of the (ahem) Reading constabulary. Spratt, who has a reputation as a giant killer, leads the investigation of the death of Humperdinck Jehoshaphat Aloysius Stuyvesant "Humpty" van Dumpty, a large egg, ladies' man, and investor. Assisted by DS Mary Mary (who doesn't seem too contrary), DI Spratt has to puzzle out whether he's dealing with accident, suicide, or murder. His path is made all the more tortuous by the inherent difficulties of Nursery Crime, but also by the machinations of Friedland Chymes, the world-famous detective whose ubiquitously published works and prominence in the Most Worshipful Guild of Detectives give him a powerful platform to impede his old colleague Spratt.

The Big Over Easy placet. It's a very funny lark, though the nursery-rhyme millieu gives it less depth and opportunities for wit than do Thursday Next's adventures. Still, Erasmus will pick up The Fourth Bear in July.

Another Layer

While flying about, Erasmus also picked up another novel on which a movie he liked was based.

J.J. Connolly’s Layer Cake is a great read. It’s not the most accessible crime novel, particularly for the American reader, as it’s buried under British criminal argot and East London dialect.

The story’s unnamed narrator is a 29-year-old drug dealer whose goal is to get out of the business by the time he’s thirty. This proves more difficult than anticipated. The characterizations in the book are far better than in the movie, which struggled to contain all the plot put into it.

Connolly’s adaptation for the screen is very good, incidentally: reading the book, one realizes just how complicated a plot he had to simplify. What the movie loses in depth over the book, it gains in clarity of plot. The book is even more tangled than the film.

Connolly’s protagonist escapes the underworld in the book, though not without paying a significant and harrowing price. Also, the book ends with a nice ironic twist akin to the Ocean’s Eleven scene Erasmus cited approvingly below.

If you liked the movie and are up for a challenging read, Layer Cake will repay. If you’re put off by the language, Erasmus might suggest watching the film first, as a sort of crib note, to get the plot right in your head before returning into the book.

Layer Cake, liber, placet.

Cottonwood

Erasmus also picked up Scott Phillips’ Cottonwood, an engrossing historical novel set in the eponymous (fictitious) Kansas boomtown, as well as an interlude in San Francisco. The book is marketed as a Western noir, probably to capitalize on the success of The Ice Harvest and avoid the taint of the “Western,” but it’s a more expansive, literary novel than the tag warrants.

The novel (hardly as sex-obsessed as the PW review) begins in Cottonwood’s earliest days, and follows its saloon-keeper, Bill Ogden, through the town’s early boom days, then his exile after his business partner is murdered while the two of them are chasing a family of serial killers (based on these charmers), and his return, which becomes entangled with the prosecution of two women who are said to be members of the murderous clan.

Phillips does an excellent job of bring the various characters to life and telling a rich, multifacted, entertaining, often lurid tale. Erasmus looks forward to reading Phillips’ middle novel, The Walkaway, which appears to be both a prequel to The Ice Harvest and to feature one of Bill Ogden’s descendants.

Cottonwood placet.

The Ice Harvest: Redux

So, Erasmus finally got some time on airplanes to read a bit, and got through Scott Phillips’ Ice Harvest, the movie of which didn’t impress Erasmus much. The book, mirabile dictu, is much better. Phillips’ Charlie Arglist is a far less sympathetic fellow than John Cusack’s hang-dong criminal manqué. Most tellingly, he’s been dealing coke behind Bill Gerard’s back, the proceeds of which comprise the majority of the money he and Vic plan to abscond with. Moreover, his personal life is rather more sordid and squalid than the in the movie. Most tellingly, in the book, Arglist deliberately kills his partner in crime, rather than passively letting him die. One wonders if Cusack, like many actors, requested that his character be made more sympathetic (and idiosyncratic: the graffito motif in the film appears nowhere in the book). If so, indulging that whim was a signal failure on the part of the scenarist, as was removing Arglist’s meeting with Nemesis at the story’s end.

Just as remaking Arglist into a nice-guy mob-lawyer thief undermines the narrative, so does its playing up Pete van Heuten in order to give Oliver Platt a more comedic, sympathetic rôle. The book’s van Heuten is Arglist’s brother-in-law, not the husband of Arglist’s cold ex-wife who begs him for deliverance from his wealthy domesticity.

Some of the movie’s more dramatic grotesqueries, like Vic’s wife kneeling dead before the Christmas tree, and the black-comic scene with the dying hitman Roy Gelles on the pier, prove to be pure inventions of the filmmakers, and ones which also undermine the reality of the narrative, perhaps reflecting the filmmakers’ desire to venture into Terra Cohen-ita. Unfortunately, their expedition founders and is ultimately lost in the very nihilism they’ve courted.

Phillips’ book, by contrast, is a lovely, dark, satisfying little work of crime fiction, in which a bunch of low-level low-lifes plot, scheme, betray, and murder each other, with only death and ruin left behind. Phillips, it turns out, knows the gods are not mocked.

The Ice Harvest, Liber, placet.