Author: Niall

Arlington Park

There seems to be something about the shortlists for juried awards that invites explanation. When it comes to the Clarke Award, for instance, spectators will quite often — and often quite confidently — pick out “the core sf book”, “the mainstream book”, and so on, as though the shortlist was an act of design. The truth, of course, is that shortlists aren’t chosen with such considerations in mind; but there is still something about the act of shortlisting that divides, rather than unites. As soon as you’ve said that these six books are the six best sf novels (or whatever) of the year, what separates them becomes more interesting than what they share. When it comes to the Orange Prize, we might tongue-in-cheek say that the slots to be filled include “the historical novel”, “the romance”, and “the domestic novel” — and then put Rachel Cusk’s Arlington Park neatly in the latter. But straight away, comparison to, say, The Accidental (which was on last year’s shortlist, and could quite easily be described as domestic, and is enormously different in style and tone) makes it obvious that this apparently-narrow category is, like all literary categories, infinitely divisible.

Conveniently for me, Arlington Park is itself an attempt to make a similar point. It switches between a handful of women, but is set in one place, over the course of one day, a formal choice that says: look at these women, see how they’re all nominally the same but in fact living such different lives. Look how divisible, how capacious, are the categories “wife” and “mother”. The prologue frames the novel with an explicitly panoramic portrait of a generic English city, “its streets always crawling with indiscriminate life … too mercilessly dramatic … to look at that view you’d think that a human life was meaningless. You’d think that a day meant nothing at all” (4-5). But, it is implied, you’d be wrong, and so we begin our tour, visiting Juliet (and husband Benedict), Amanda (and husband James), Christine (and husband Joe), Solly (and husband Martin) and Maisie (and husband Dom) in turn, as they walk their different paths through their Friday, variously taking in a school run, a coffee morning, a trip to a mall (has the Americanism really become so widespread?), a literary club, putting the children to bed, and a dinner party. It’s an uneven novel, sometimes interesting, sometimes less so, but crucially we aren’t allowed to forget that frame. At the half-way mark comes another impersonal panorama, this time of a park at lunchtime, where mothers observe “The whole mechanism of the world, running on, running like a machine … for them, it was a form of agony to watch it … the women were as though snared in the mechanism … every movement caused them pain” (147-8). (Sure, Tiptree said it better and more succinctly, but it’s still a powerful image.) And it’s true: the women of Arlington Park are weighed down by the burdens of marriage and (perhaps particularly) motherhood; but they are stoics, or so it seems at first. The pain never makes them scream.

Closing the frame, towards the end of the book one character experiences “a sense of perspective, of the reach of the universe, of its strange but necessary dimensions. It was this sense of order,” she concludes, “that allowed life in Arlington Park to be what it was” (222). As it is with Arlington Park, so it is with Arlington Park, because the boldest thing about the novel is that most of its characters are boring or unpleasant or both; they represent the smuggest of the smug middle-classes, variously petty, hypocritical, bigoted, bitter, heroically self-absorbed, or some combination of the above (there is the occasional punk hairdresser or peroxide-haired au pair, but such women are distinctly marginal in this town). They refuse sympathy to such an extent that I think Cusk only pulls off the trick — and then only barely — because of the presence of that external perspective, which allows us to acknowledge her women without, necessarily, judging them.

Take Maisie, who as the book’s outsider — she has recently moved to Arlington Park with her husband, in an attempt to escape the London rat-race — might be expected to be someone the reader can take as a guide. No such luck. After another samey day of housewifely ennui, she is so thoroughly ennervated that Dom’s arrival home from work causes her to experience “a vertiginous sense of event” (169); she is so thoroughly dissociated from her life that it feels like a play, as though she and Dom are acting out roles of “husband” and “wife”. But her neurosis has become unreasonable. When Dom offers to get the children ready for bed (because they’re going, like most of the rest of the characters, to a dinner party at Christine and Joe’s place), she says no, she’ll do it; but when he comments on the time (“Did you realise it’s seven-fifteen?”)

She rose, wondering why he didn’t put the children to bed himself if he cared so much what the time was. She guessed the answer was that he had taken her at her word: she had said she would do it. He probably thought there was some important, sentimental reason why, a reason that might even have been himself, tired at the end of his week’s work: if this were so, it struck her as sad that he had to fabricate her generosity towards him out of so little material, or make a point of honour out of something that didn’t really exist. (182)

Bear in mind that Maisie and Dom have just had a reasonably lengthy conversation; that Dom has done the washing-up Maisie created during the day; that Dom has explicitly asked Maisie what’s wrong, and refused to take “everything’s fine” for an answer (but gave up when he didn’t get any further). It is, for sure, impressive that we don’t immediately condemn Maisie for her own stupidity in refusing to talk to her husband — the husband she loves, and who shows every sign of loving her — because Cusk has so effectively conveyed the weight of situation (and perhaps guilt, given that it was Maisie’s choice to leave London) that has put Maisie in this bind. If she’s done so in a rather long-winded and ennervating fashion, well, it could be argued that’s only an accurate reflection of Maisie’s experience. But it’s also an incredibly alienating choice of characterisation, particularly in light of the later strong hints that Dom is not oblivious, that he knows how Maisie feels and is trying his best to be there for her. Maisie’s inability to look up — to see the bigger picture that Cusk reminds us is there, to see the way out of the situation she has created for herself — is, deliberately, infuriating; deliberately pushes us away from sympathy.

The same tension is there with almost every other character. All of them have been trapped, largely by their own choices, into a comfortable life they now chafe against. Some of them despair, some of them have perfected almost Stockholm Syndrome levels of doublethink. But none of them are glossed. All of them come with warts. Amanda’s morbid thoughts are numbing; the rather touching relationship that Solly starts to develop with her lodger, Paola, is soured by the casually racist assumptions she makes when advertising the vacancy. (She advertises for “a foreigner”, because disruptive children underfoot “won’t seem so bad” to them, 114.) The most thoroughly ambiguous character is perhaps Juliet Randall. She nurtures a deep feminist anger about her life, and about what she sees as the casual way in which her husband “[runs] off their joint life as if it were a generator fuelled by [her]” (11), yet never actually does anything about it — never screams out at the pain caused by the world-machine; never, for instance, even talks to her husband about it — and draws only the most extreme conclusions. “All men are murderers … They take a woman, and little by little they murder her.” (It crossed my mind that the confluence of the initials “JR” and this level of anger may not be a coincidence, may be a nod to Joanna Russ and The Female Man, in which all the characters, including a domestically-trapped one are JRs; but if it is a nod, I can’t help feeling it’s a somewhat ambivalent one.) Juliet’s “secret life” is the literary club she runs, one Friday afternoon a month, at the school where she works part-time. Her passion for this part of her life is admirable; her didacticism perhaps a little less so. “They were meant to select the book for the next month’s discussion by committee,” we are told, “but unrepentantly Juliet steered them towards works that represented the truth, as she saw it, of female experience” (154). It’s hard not to feel that Juliet is treating literature, and the reading group, as an echo chamber, seeking validation for her anger, rather than taking the opportunity to look out at the wide world, to see what others have seen. There is a suggestion, late on, that she realises this, that she is going to at last do something to improve her life; but here, unlike with Maisie, Cusk’s characterisation failed me: it’s hard to believe that Juliet really has woken from the nightmare of her life.

This may all sound a little second-hand: it may be meant to. Everything in Arlington Park echoes; everything carries the sense that it has happened before, and will happen again. There’s even a moment of admiration for a plastic bag tormented by gusts of wind, American Beauty-style, although no reference to Desperate Housewives. When Christine, at a coffee morning hosted by Amanda (and deftly choreographed by Cusk, given the number of characters present), exclaims “It’s not what you’d think, it it? I say to Joe, look, it can get really heavy on a coffee morning, you don’t believe me but it can” (70), the reader’s immediate response (or at least, my immediate response) is: oh, it’s exactly what I’d think. Ersatz conversations about ersatz lives. Sure enough, Christine’s relentless positivity (tainted, once again, by various stripes of bigotry) is revealed as something, well, a little more desperate: she feels “the vulnerability of her grasp on the real, the authentic life” (81), except that — oh, black black humour — her version of “the authentic life” is Arlington Park. Christine lives with “dread, the terror of falling into shadow, of going back to where she’d been before” (214-5), and her apparent optimism, which is at first nakedly ridiculous — she claims “the people I see [in Arlington Park] every day are the most diverse, interesting, courageous group of people you’ll find anywhere!”, when everything in the book indicates the opposite — gradually becomes something more tragic. She may not believe in herself, but she believes in her friends, in their lives, in their happiness, or forces herself to believe, and she’s damned if she’s going to disappoint them.

Christine perhaps has more in common with Juliet and Maisie than any of them would suspect (if only they would talk!), or perhaps has just fallen further. They are a category after all, even if divided: all of them are worn down by a daily grind and the resentment it inspires, all of them come to know, to a greater or less extent, that there is more out there, even if it doesn’t know or care about them. Christine’s epiphany, which crowns the novel, actually has some force, despite its drunken belatedness. “You’ve got to love life,” she confides to Benedict, at the party, “You’ve got to love just — being alive.” “But how will anyone know you loved it?” he asks, and Christine replies, with pathetic truth, “Why would anyone need to know that?” (237) If Arlington Park is less than the sum of its parts — and it is; you may have noticed I’ve said almost nothing about Amanda and Solly, and there’s a reason for that — then some of the parts do justify the whole, just about. But it’s a curious experience. We look up from the last page frustrated and fascinated, wanting to scream, both at these women and on their behalf; but, like them, we are too tired.

A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers

Ursula Le Guin is two for two. It was her review of Jan Morris’ Hav that first pointed me in the direction of that wonderful book; and likewise her review that persuaded me to add Xiaolu Guo’s A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers, which turns out to be nearly as good, to my wish-list. It is, of course, a love story, between a young Chinese woman and an older English man. 23 year-old Zhaung Xiao Qiao arrives in the UK one February (2003, I think), nervous and alone, fearing the future, to learn English at a school in Holburn, hardly even understanding why her parents have sent her. A little over a month into her stay she meets a man at a cinema in South Kensington, falls easily and comprehensively in love, and as a result of a miscommunication ends up moving in with him. A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers is Z’s story over the following year, up to the point where her visa expires. It’s presented as a diary-stroke-language-notebook; Z carries with her a Chinese-English dictionary, and later, a Collins Concise English Dictionary, at all times, and often refers to them in her attempts to understand and describe the world around her. Chapter headings (e.g. “romance”) are taken from the latter, with accompanying definitions (“fantasy, fiction, legend, novel, story, tale; exaggeration, falsehood, lie; ballad, idyll, song”), and the whole thing is written in the second person, addressed to the never-named man.

Which inevitably means that the most immediate thing about the book is the language in which it’s written. Here, for example, is part of Z’s first encounter with a full English breakfast:

What is this ‘baked beans’? White colour beans, in orange sticky sweet sauce. I see some baked bean tins in shop when I arrive to London yesterday. Tin food is very expensive to China. Also we not knowing how to open it. So I never ever try tin food. Here, right in front of me, this baked beans must be very expensive. Delicacy is baked beans. Only problem is, tastes like somebody put beans into mouth but spit out and back into plate. (17)

I concede this is probably the prose equivalent of Marmite, but I love it: particularly the innocent directness, the seeing-for-the-first-time-ness of it. Leaving aside the question of taste for a moment, however, there might also seem to be a question of authenticity. On the one hand, the artifice of this sort of writing, bad in very specific ways, is obvious: for example, it’s hard to believe that Z’s grammar would be so bad while her spelling is impeccable (although a few artfully misheard nouns are dropped into the text every so often — “rocksack”, “peterfile”). On the other hand, the book apparently grew out of a diary Guo herself kept when she moved to London (Concise Dictionary is her first novel to be written in English, although her seventh in total), which raises various questions but does at least suggest that the portrayal of the learning process is likely to be accurate. And an aspect that may seem the most contrived — the present tense; bear in mind that these are not Z’s thoughts as she is having them, they are entries written later in her notebook — is a consequence of incompletely translating Chinese thought into English. “Chinese, we not having grammar,” Z explains. “We saying things simple way. No verb-change usage, no tense differences, no gender changes. We bosses of our language” (24). The fact that Guo conveys the difficulties of translation so lightly is one of the most impressive things about the book, for me, and I think you have to respect at least that, even if you find Z’s voice to be nails-down-chalkboard grating. She does, of course, learn over the course of the year, but her position as a naive teller of truths never changes. This, for instance, is another breakfast, in Berlin:

The early morning air feels cold, like autumn coming. Occasionally, one or two old mans in a long coats walk aimlessly in the street, with the cigarettes in their lips. Under the highway there is bridge. By the bridge there is a sausage shop, lots of large mans queue there to get hot sausages. Gosh, they eat purely sausage in the morning! Even worse than English Breakfast. The morning wind is washing my brain, and my small body. This is a city with something really heavy and serious in its soul. This is a city which had big wars in the history. And, I feel, this is a city made for mans, and politics, and disciplines. Like Beijing. (218)

Again, it’s characteristic of Z’s writing — the fresh phrases that seem careless (“The morning wind is washing my brain”), the odd but valid word choices (“Gosh”), the unabashedly obvious observations (“This is a city which had big wars in the history”). There is something memorable on nearly every page of the book. Walking home one night, Z observes that “Also, the robbers robbing the people even poorer than them. In China we believe ‘rob the rich to feed the poor’. But robbers here have no poetry” (42). They may not, but Z does – the poetry of an acute observer, plain in everything from her descriptions of a pub to her consternation on discovering that her man is a vegetarian, to her reaction to a David Lynch double bill. In a number of ways, Z is not an easy character to love — apart from anything else, she is stubborn, and rude – but she is always sharply aware and, at least from a reader’s remove, inescapably charming.

Which is not to imply that this is always a comfortable book, though it is one with an extremely generous view of human nature (certainly in contrast to, oh I don’t know, The Inheritance of Loss). By far the majority of the people Z encounters are good-hearted, even if they sometimes can’t resist teasing her; only twice, during a solo jaunt around Europe, does she encounter someone who tries to take advantage of her, and while the encounters are unpleasant, they are not irretrievably horrific. And if Z is frequently baffled by the world she finds around her, she is not intimidated by it. In fact, she is often indignant in the face of it. “English is a sexist language … always talking about mans, no womans” (26), she observes — although despite this awareness her view of what constitutes a relationship is extremely conservative (at least in our terms; more on this below). Moreover, she’s always conscious of the distance between herself and her man: “You a man of free world. I am not free, like you” (113); “In the West, in this country, I am barbarian, illiterate peasant girl, a face of third world, and irresponsible foreigner” (153); “You are boss of yourself, so you have dignity” (184). Strung together like that, such moments look obtrusive, but in fact they are more often grace notes to scenes about other things. Which is to say that they describe the reality of Z’s life — we’re put in her man’s shoes; we can’t ignore what she says — but not the extent of it. (Again, the contrast with Desai’s novel couldn’t be more striking.)

The fear at the heart of such worries, though, inevitably informs her relationship. Here we come back to love. A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers is built around a distinction expressed with particular elegance, to my mind, in KJ Bishop’s The Etched City, between love that exists “as a mutal sentiment or not at all” and implies “a voluntary blending of identities”, and love that denotes “two travellers meeting, enjoying each other’s company, then parting and moving on.” Z and her man do love, with joy and vigour, but — it becomes increasingly clear — in different ways, ways that have an awful lot to do with their differing backgrounds. To Z, love is a mutual act, a commitment that abolishes privacy and (for example) entitles her to read her man’s diaries, and enables her to blithely tell him that she’s done so. Love is about creating a home, a family, and a future: the three are inextricably related, aspects of an incompletely translated cultural inheritance, and lead to the conservatism I mentioned earlier. Love as security, as community. But the man Z has fallen in love with is more casual — as Z notes, he can afford to be. He is something of a bohemian, an artist who’s drifted through his life believing “the future only comes when it comes”, that nothing is forever; he values his independence. To him, love is about the preciousness of the present moment, not the promise of the future.

In other words, the lovers occupy positions opposite to those staked out by their native languages, an irony that defines their relationship. Z is so engaging that we badly want to see her grow into a more complete sense of self: but we fear that in doing so she will almost certainly doom her relationship, despite the fact that said relationship is the original catalyst for her growth. In fact it is specifically the physical relationship that is the catalyst. Z’s descriptions of sex, whether going right or going wrong, are as refreshingly matter-of-fact as her descriptions of everything else; and though her initial understanding, both of the act and the emotional paraphernalia it requires, is limited, she’s a quick study. She goes to a peep show, and has a lot of sex with her lover, and starts to explore her own body, and along the way she begins to believe in her own independence. More and more, this (as we feared it might) hems her into an absurd, uplifting, heartbreaking paradox: a catch-22 of love. Almost miraculously, Guo finds an honest resolution — one good enough that the other books shortlisted for the Orange Prize are going to have to go some if they want to replace A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers in my affections.

Moar Futures

A comment on an old post that may be of interest:

Futures is the award-winning science-fiction section of Nature, now currently running in Nature’s monthly sister title, Nature Physics.

In response to public demand, Futures will be returning to Nature in September 2007 as a weekly back-page feature, as well as continuing each month in Nature Physics. The Futures column in each journal will forge its own identity: a story in one journal will not be reprinted in the other, although authors are free to express a preference and choose for which journal their story should be considered.

Although contributions are sometimes commissioned, unsolicited stories are welcome for both journals. Each story should be an entirely fictional, self-contained piece between 850-950 words in length, and the genre should, broadly speaking, be ‘hard’ (that is, ’scientific’ SF) rather than, say, outright fantasy, slipstream or horror.

Each item should be sent as a Word (.doc) attachment to futures@nature.com, giving full contact details along with a brief (approximately 30-word) autobiographical squib that could be appended to the story if published. Unsolicited artwork is not considered. Presubmission enquiries are discouraged: instead, prospective authors are advised to read earlier Futures stories in Nature, Nature Physics and selected examples available for free at http://www.concatenation.org/futuresindex.html.

Authors whose stories are published in Nature or Nature Physics will be paid at the same rate irrespective of journal. The payment is commensurate with the brevity of the stories and is probably enough for a meal for two (with wine) at an establishment whose modesty will correlate either directly or inversely with the current sterling-dollar exchange rate, depending on the location of the restaurant. Publication is also subject to signature of a Nature Publishing Group author agreement, terms of which are often negotiable, and specimens of which can be seen on request.

Should you have read as far as this, you might be interested to learn that Futures from Nature, an anthology of 100 past Futures stories, will be published by Tor this November, and can now be ordered from any reputable online bookstore.

This is a public announcement which you are encouraged to disseminate as widely as you see fit.

Dr Henry Gee
Senior Editor, Nature

You know, this may not be a particularly notable year for single-author collections [*], but between this, Interfictions, Logorrhea, The SFWA European Hall of Fame, the Kessel/Kelly Rewired, Glorifying Terrorism and Fast Forward, it’s looking like a fine year for anthologies.

[*] Inevitably I’m now starting to think of books I want to read: David Marusek’s Getting To Know You, Vandana Singh’s The Woman Who Thought She Was a Planet and Other Stories, Ellen Klages’ Portable Childhoods, Kelley Eskridge’s Dangerous Space, and Lucius Shepard’s Dagger Key, for starters. And is Paolo Bacigalupi’s collection coming out this year?

The Inheritance of Loss

If I wanted to give a habitual science fiction reader a novel that would reinforce all their prejudices about the world beyond the ghetto walls, I don’t think I could do much better than to give them a copy of The Inheritance of Loss. Kiran Desai’s second novel starts well enough: the first chapter, with its evocation of a mist-shrouded house in the northeastern Himalayas, builds a world (in exactly the way a good sf novel does, in fact) by carefully layering observation on incident. In the foreground is Sai, 17, reading National Geographic, musing on love and her affair with her maths tutor, Gyan; in the background are a judge and his cook, both stripped of names (except when we get access to their thoughts, later). It is the start of 1986, a few months before the Gorkhaland National Liberation Front organises a demonstration calling for a separate state (the region, we are told, “had always been a messy map”, 9); a few months before two years of disruption and violence. There is a symptom of the troubles to come: a gang of boys come to the house and steal the judge’s guns. The incident is troubling and tense.

A few days and two hundred pages later, a drunk is accused of the theft, arrested and beaten. In between and afterwards there is relatively little present-tense action; the focus is on a succession of elegantly interleaved flashbacks. This structure is actually the best thing about the book, although for Desai to highlight one character’s foolishness by having her express a preference for “Old-fashioned books […] Not the new kind of thing, no beginning, no middle, no end, just a thread of … free-floating plasma” (217) is perhaps a little too knowing for my taste. We dip in and out of the lives of the characters we’ve met, and a few more we come to know, and occasionally take a trip to America, where the cook’s son, Biju, is scrounging a living. For most of its length, this latter strand is extremely effective: every chapter in the novel is a collage of short scenes, most only a few paragraphs long, and the cut-and-paste effect suits the unsettled nature of Biju’s life. He’s squeezed from one to another New York kitchen, every kitchen equally grubby, equally detailed, and equally stuffed to the gills with migrant workers wrapped up in their own schemes and rivalries. Biju himself is consistently dazzled by the world — “How,” he wonders, “had he learned nothing growing up?” (22) — and his life is dismayingly credible; it certainly highlights, for example, the frictionless nature of a not-dissimilar migration in Hari Kunzru’s Transmission.

It’s back in the subcontinent, with the other characters, that the troubles with the novel set in. The beauty to which Desai’s prose aspires is a civilised beauty: long, languid sentences, gentle and descriptive. Sometimes it works; too often, to my mind, it feels overworked. Of Sai and Gyan’s courtship, which starts during tutorials, Desai writes, “how delicious the pretense of objective study, miraculous how it could eat up the hours.” Fine so far. But then: “as they eliminated the easily revealable and exhausted propriety, the unexamined portions of their anatomies exerted a more severely distilled potential” (125). This is, perhaps, an attempt to recast their courtship in the physical-science terms Gyan is teaching Sai, but it seems to me far too coy, far too self-aware to take seriously. Later, a character “traversed along flat main roads” (181): traversed? Really? Could he not, more specifically, walk or run or ride or drive? And earlier, a mother having bid her son farewell “was weeping because she had not estimated the imbalance between the finality of goodbye and the briefness of the last moment” (36): does that really get to the heart of a mother’s grief, or is it — as I can’t help thinking — just a long-winded way of stating the obvious? Worse still is some of the dialogue, notably some of the exchanges between Gyan and Sai. Here is one during a rumbling argument:

She yawned again, elaborately like a lion, letting it bloom forward. Then he did also, a meager yawn he tried to curb and swallow.
She did–
He did.
“Bored by physics?” she asked, encouraged by the apparent reconciliation.
“No. Not at all.”
“Why are you yawning then?”
“BECAUSE I’M BORED TO DEATH BY YOU, THAT’S WHY.”
Stunned silence. (163)

Stunned silence from Sai, at least; snickering from this reader, at such a spectacularly inept — and jarring, in context — depiction of late-teen sulkiness. To be fair, Gyan is not the only character who gets to speak in block capitals. Later on, for instance, we get this

“WHAT ARE YOU SAYING????!!!” the judge yelled. (319)

He’s drunk, of course, and has every right to be angry, but I can’t help thinking that if a writer needs to resort to block capitals and italics and eleventy-one style punctuation to make that point clear then their actual words aren’t doing as much work as they should be. (Or at the very least, they don’t need to tell us that the person talking in block capitals and italics with eleventy-one style punctuation is yelling.)

Maybe I’m being too harsh: The Inheritance of Loss is a very inward-looking novel, with far more internal monologues and passages of description than exchanges of dialogue, which despite the rough patches mentioned above plays to Desai’s strengths. Here is Gyan falling in with the GNLF, just a few pages before the exchange of dialogue above:

As he floated through the market, Gyan had a feeling of history being wrought, its wheels churning under him, for the men were behaving as if they were being featured in a documentary of war, and Gyan could not help but look on the scene already from the angle of nostalgia, the position of a revolutionary. But then he was pulled out of the feeling, by the ancient and usual scene, the worried shopkeepers watching from their monsoon-stained grottos. Then he shouted along with the crowd, and the very mingling of his voice with largeness and lustiness seemed to create a relevancy, an affirmation he’d never felt before, and he was pulled back into the making of history. (157)

This, I think, does convey the tentative fervour of a youth desperate to live a life that signifies: Gyan floating, not walking (or traversing), torn between his longing and the immediacy of the real, that “lustiness” tellingly close to “an affirmation he’d never felt before”: good stuff. But it’s immediately followed by ruminations of a kind repeated by almost every character in the novel at one time or another, on the desire for and impossibility of escape, “free from family demands and the built-up debt of centuries.” Which leads to another reservation.

For the characters in The Inheritance of Loss, escape is impossible and misery is birthright. Sai’s parents — before they die — are filled with the same loneliness as their daughter; the son whose mother was bidding farewell earlier in this review botches his goodbye, and we learn that “Never again would he know love for a human being that wasn’t adulterated by another, contradictory emotion” (37). (The son grows up to be the judge, arranged into a loveless marriage that descends into rape and other abuses.) The cook is an old man with no fulfillment in his own life, desperate that his son do better than he did; this pressure is eventually Biju’s undoing. Sai’s tutor before Gyan is Noni, a spinster who “never had love at all” (68). And so on, for the entire cast. It’s an old story: “Certain moves made long ago,” we are told, “had produced all of them” (199). They are, if you like, variations on an absence of dignity: children, criminals, and buffoons. And too often that’s all they are — or at least the rest is hidden, the civilised sheen of Desai’s prose obscuring the extent of the violence done to their lives by circumstance.

It is not entirely surprising to me that the inhabitants of the real Kalimpong have objected to their counterparts’ portrayal in the book. The cast of The Inheritance of Loss are buffeted and bewildered by the world, with no initiative to speak of, nor (apparently) any capacity to learn; quite often they’re not even paying attention. Sai and Gyan completely miss “the important protest”, which is to say they miss the defining moment of the novel’s historical context. Whatever my reservations about the generosity with which a book like, say, Geoff Ryman’s The King’s Last Song treats its characters, it’s hard not to prefer such an approach to one that ultimately comes to feel capriciously mean. Desai tries her best to convince us that her characters are “just ordinary humans in ordinary opaque boiled-egg light, without grace, without revelation” (259), and that this justifies their fatalism. But the litany of misfortunes that make up the book’s final fifty pages verges on parody, manipulative in the extreme but too obviously controlled to really sting; imagine I ARE SERIOUS BOOK stamped on the cover and you’ll be thinking along the right lines.

It’s not that Desai scrupulously avoids offering an answer, or answers, to the problems of global inequality that gives me trouble — to do otherwise would arguably be presumptuous, and she mines good material from her stance, such as one character’s painful realisation that he can only live a Western life by cutting off his countrymen, “or they would show up reproachful, pointing out to him the lie that he had become” (306). But The Inheritance of Loss denies even the possibility of meaningful change. Over and above the inconsistent loquaciousness of the prose, the near-absence of narrative drive, and the passivity of the characters (a consequence, I can’t help thinking, of the book’s ideologicial fixedness), this is what I expect would stick in most sf readers’ craws. And rightly. Sai’s ultimate epiphany — “The simplicity of what she’d been taught wouldn’t hold. Never again could she think there was but one narrative and that this narrative belonged only to herself” (323) — is pitifully empty, not just because any half-awake reader will have got there at least a couple of hundred pages earlier, if not before they ever open the book, but because Desai has so thoroughly drummed home that there’s nothing Sai can do to change her fate. All Sai’s achieved is to wake up to the same awareness that the rest of the book’s characters have been struggling with: her life does not belong to herself, because the West distorts and robs all those who come into contact with it, now and forever: the end.

Nebula Award Winners

From Locus Online:

Novel
Seeker by Jack McDevitt (Ace)

Novella
Burn by James Patrick Kelly (Tachyon)

Novelette
“Two Hearts” by Peter S. Beagle (F&SF)

Short Story
“Echo” by Elizabeth Hand (F&SF)

Script
Howl’s Moving Castle, Hayao Miyazaki, Cindy Davis Hewitt, and Donald H. Hewitt

Andre Norton Award
Magic or Madness by Justine Larbalestier (Razorbill)

Eh. Admittedly the ballot wasn’t the most inspiring thing in the world to start with, but I find myself distinctly unexcited about this set of results — with the exception of “Echo”, which I liked. I’m ambivalent about “Two Hearts” and “Burn”; and I’ll probably check out Seeker now, although nothing I’ve read about the book makes it sound particularly special. Opinions from the floor?

AMOLAD Redux

As I mentioned in my post a couple of days ago, after the performance I was told that the end of the stage version of A Matter of Life and Death varies nightly. The script that I’d ordered arrived today, and the first thing I did was to look at how the ending was written. As it turns out, it’s different again from the version I saw, probably explained by the “Note on the text” at the start of the play:

This is the text of a devised show. We began with the screenplay of the original film. Some scenes were rewritten and taken into workshops at the National Studio where they were re-improvised and rewritten again. A new draft was taken into rehearsal, where many scenes were once again rewritten in response to the work of the acting and design company. Although some dialogue has been placed in square brackets to indicate that it is optional, this text is probably quite close to what will be spoken during the show’s run at the National Theatre, but even then it will be subject to continual evolution and change and the occasional inspired improvisation on a nightly basis.

So here are the last few pages of the script. Note that one of the differences with the film that I didn’t mention in my writeup is that June is transported fully to the courtroom.

WOMAN [of Coventry]: Don’t you think they should let some of us go back instead of you? A few of us? One of us? Rather than let you go back so you can enjoy falling in love?

PETER: What?

WOMAN: If the rules are to be broken, why shouldn’t they be broken for us?

PETER: You’re right. Some of them should go back.

Can’t be helped about the parachute. I’ll have my wings soon, anyway, big white ones. Bob? So long Bob. I’ll see you. I’ll see you.

PETER jumps

JUNE’S VOICE: Hello G for George. Hello, G George. Hello, G George.

DOC [REEVES]: Stop! We have to do something. His condition’s critical.

SHAKESPEARE: He is dying. That is all.

JUNE: Peter! I love you, Peter. You’re life and I’m leaving you.

SHAKESPEARE: But don’t think that his love will die with him. His love and this story will live to be told again long after he is dead. It is already the perfect love story.

FATHER: Welcome home. You will soon be at peace.

DOC: Peter. Peter. Don’t listen to them.

JUNE bursts into the court room.

JUNE: Enough! A life for a life. I’ll take his place and you can send him back! Take me not him! Take me not him!

She mounts the escalator and starts climbing.

PETER: Stop. Stop her!

He tries to follow.

JUDGE: Restrain him!

JUNE: You’re safe! You’re safe, Peter.

JUDGE: Stop everything!

Everything stops except JUNE running. She collapses. The escalator carries her down and slows to a halt. She is delivered at the feet of the JUDGE. PETER escapes from his restrainers and goes to her. In their unity they are oblivious of the Court.

Now. How does the Court find?

The RECORDER consults with the CHORUS.

RECORDER: For the defendant, your Honour.

Love cannot mend the horrors of the war we’ve fought. But if we are ever to recover our human dignity, then everyone who survives must find a still place in their heart where a new and simple love can grow. This man and this woman have found that already.

JUDGE: Very well.

He writes a new date on the term of life and shows it to the DOC.

Does this seem fair to you gentlemen?

DOC: Ample.

Goodbye Peter. Good luck. Goodbye June.

[FATHER: Goodbye Peter. I wish you the best in love and life. I will wait for you here.]

CONDUCTOR: Goodbye Peter. I’ll get you in the end.

Magically PETER is back in the hospital, JUNE is at his bedside. Enter DR McEWEN and MR ARCHER.

McEWEN: How is he? Were we in time?

ARCHER: His chances are about even.

The BOY takes a coin out of his pocket and flips it in the air.

IF IT’S HEADS:

The room is a normal hospital with busy NURSES and AIRMEN recuperating. They are talking and laughing. A new emergency arrives and the medical staff immediately swing into action: saving lives is commonplace.

PETER: I won my case.

JUNE: I know.

IF IT’S TAILS:

The room is a normal hospital with busy NURSES and AIRMEN recuperating. They are talking and laughing. JUNE is sitting beside PETER’s body. He is dead.

JUNE: Peter. Peter. Peter. Peter. Peter.

ARCHER: I’m sorry. We did everything we could.

[end]

Some notes:

1. Reading this through again, Dr A’s Life on Mars comparison makes even more sense; the confusion of real-world medical emergency and other-world metaphysical crisis is much more intense than it is in the film, and very reminiscent of that series.

2. I have no idea why the script refers to Frank Reeves as “Doc”.

3. June climbing the escalator was different in the version I saw; on Wednesday, she climbed up the stand by the judge, and he told her that she’d proved her love for Peter.

4. I am pretty sure, although not absolutely certain, that the court recorder’s final speech is different. I remember the line about finding a new place where love can grow, but I don’t think he declares a verdict, and I distinctly remember lines about how any finding must take into account the essential randomness of life and death in wartime. I’m not sure if those were delivered by the recorder or by another character. Then there was the coin toss — although, as I say, we were told that on a previous night it had gone to an audience vote.

5. Otherwise, the ending is as abrupt as I remember.

The Inheritance of Links

A Conversation About 28 Weeks Later

The following discussion was recorded after going to Sci-Fi London’s screening of 28 Weeks Later last Sunday. If you haven’t seen the film, I’d suggest proceeding with caution, not so much because there are spoilers — though there are — as because our ramblings aren’t likely to make much sense. If you want actual reviews, here’s the New York Times (liked it) and here’s The Guardian (not so much). Otherwise, enjoy!

Graham: Welcome to this week’s installment of The Third Row Discuss, featuring —

Tom: Theme music!

Ian: Zombies! Arrrrgh.

Graham: — we have just been to see 28 Weeks Later at the Sci-Fi London film festival, my name’s Niall Harrison —

Tom: It’s Sunday the 6th of May, 21:36, Officer Harrison presiding.

Graham: So. It was about zombies!

Ian: It was about zombies.

Tom: But was it really about zombies?

Ian: Yes.

Tom: No.

Ruth: No, it was about people fucking up.

Ian: OK, it was about the military.

Tom: It was about the American military fucking up. And therefore it was about zombies!

Graham: Although for most of the film, the American military intervention was depicted as a positive thing.

Ian: Yes — they were doing their damn best to fix the problem, to fix the infrastructure and set everyone up on the Isle of Dogs. And then they fucked up.

Graham: I’m just thinking: could there possibly be an Iraq metaphor here?

Ian: I think the issue is that it wasn’t the military intervention that was the problem, it was the civilian imperatives that caused the problem — the military weren’t able to cope with the problem because of the civilian requirements. That was the major issue.

Tom: Was it? Surely the problem was that the military response was stupid.

Graham: Or at least disproportionate.

Ian: They brought too many civilians back too early.

Tom: And centralised them, yeah. And did it in a city. Which is quite a difficult place to control.

Niall: But looked quite cool. Which I think is possibly not to be underestimated when considering the development of this film.

Tom: If the whole thing was set near Stanstead Airport — which would be a really sensible place to house refugees — it wouldn’t have looked nearly so cool.

Graham: They were going for all the London landmarks that Russell T. Davies hadn’t yet trashed. (And by the way, I’d like a bet on that Wembley Stadium will have appeared in Doctor Who before the year is out.)

Tom: So can I just check — when did 28 Days Later come out? [2002 — Ed.] Because Wembley Stadium wasn’t finished when it came out. So how did it get finished in the meantime? Zombie builders?

Niall: OK, step back. Was the film GOOD or BAD?

Ian: Good.

Ruth: Good.

Graham: Good, within the bounds of its genre.

Tom: Yeah.

Niall: Yeah, I would have quite happily watched the film about rebuilding the UK after the events of 28 Days Later that didn’t turn into another zombie film, but that wasn’t the film they wanted to make.

Tom: I would too.

Ian: I was hoping that there weren’t going to be any zombies in it.

Graham: But it’s like expecting Sunshine not to suddenly pick off the crew one by one.

Niall: Well, not quite, because I was expecting this to turn into a zombie film, whereas I wasn’t expecting Sunshine to turn into a slasher film.

Ian: That is possibly why it would have been awesome if it hadn’t. It would have been great if we as the audience were expecting at every turn zombies to pop up … and they just didn’t.

Ruth: I like the way at the start, you see the attack on the farmhouse and you think that’s already the 28 weeks later.

Niall: The start did a really good job of reminding us that fast zombies are fucking terrifying.

Ruth: Yes. Although in this they could come out in daylight, and I’m pretty sure in the original they could only come out at night.

Tom: Wasn’t it vice versa? They hid during the day and only went out at night?

Ruth: Are you sure?

Tom: No.

Graham: It’s perfectly plausible for the zombies to have evolved —

Tom: Well …

Graham: — given the film’s approach to genetics, which Tom is about to expand on.

Tom: No, I don’t think there’s any point going over the film’s technical flaws. Because it’s a blockbuster, it has lots of them, and you just have to live with them.

Ian: Well, about the people not succumbing to the symptoms for whatever reason — that happens. People can be carriers, is the basic idea.

Tom: So the dad — Don — why was he infected and chasing them? Why was he different to a normal zombie?

Graham: Because he’s played by a lead actor.

Ian: He wasn’t that different to a normal zombie, he just happened to be following them and was particularly successful at doing so.

Tom: But not at very high speed. And didn’t seem to close in for the kill.

Graham: On another note — Doyle, the soldier, I kept thinking all the way through, “This is a Nathan Fillion part”. You know, non-nonsense, gruff, conscience …

Tom: I see what you mean. He talked a bit like him, too.

[And I’ve just remembered where I’ve seen him before: he’s Jeremy Renner, aka Penn — Ed.]

Niall: A thought: are there any zombie films that are not idiot plots? I was thinking about this, because clearly, for the plot of this film to happen there needs to be a lot of idiocy. But it’s plausible idiocy — idiocy of sentimentality, when Robert Carlyle goes to visit his wife after they find her, idiocy of military overreaction contributing to the situation getting out of hand.

Tom: Yes, both those are horribly plausible.

Graham: And idiocy of not figuring out that Robert Carlyle has an ID card that lets him in to see his wife.

Tom: Well, hang on, the idiocy is that his access all areas maintenance pass gets him into the most serious biohazard areas in the base. Which don’t have guards, incidentally. And aren’t covered by CCTV.

Ian: Basic rule: never kiss tongues with a zombie. Or with someone who might be a zombie.

Niall: What was going on with the helicopter in Regent’s Park ploughing through those zombies?

Tom: Reinforced blades, perhaps?

Ian: Yeah, I don’t really think that would work.

Ruth: Obviously it’s a secret military helicopter that has special technology.

Tom: Also, the distances were slightly annoying. They’re in the Isle of Dogs, and then they escape, and — they get picked up in Regent’s Park? Because it’s … the nearest large open space? So Mile End park, Victoria Park, City Airport itself … they’re no good?

Graham: Nah, Jubilee line to Baker Street and you can walk from there.

Tom: And then the guy says — can’t pick you up in Regent’s Park any more, for some reason I’m not clear on, so you’ll have to go to Wembley! Because that’s nice and close.

Ian: They were going for landmarks.

Tom: But it would have been so easy to do that without getting them wrong. But you’re right, complaining about that is like complaining about the helicopter blades or …

Graham: So, why did they make this film? What elemental truth were they trying to show us?

Tom: If you make a zombie film, people will go and see it and pay money to do so.

Ian: Yes.

Ruth: Maybe they wanted to answer the question about what happened to the rest of the world, which was left hanging.

Niall: How did the first film end? I can’t remember.

Ian: They were in a field with a banner, and we saw aircraft flying over.

Tom: And you can hear radio chatter from the plane and it’s in Finnish. Or so I read on Wikipedia.

Ian: And we saw all the zombies dying of starvation.

Ruth: So you knew that people survived outside the UK.

Ian: They were falling over in the streets, like “rrrgh! Urrk!”

Graham: That’s not going to come over well on the transcript. But thank you.

Ian: [Closer to the microphone]: AAAARGK! RRRAGH! UAARRK!

Niall: At this point we need a third militarised-dystopian-Britain film, to make a trilogy with this and Children of Men.

Tom: I was getting some Children of Men vibes — in particular, save the children because they have the genetic potential to save humanity, and the firebombing of the refugees. So we need a third film with bombing of refugees.

Ruth: Well, I’ll look forward to that …

Ian: This didn’t have the feelgood happy ending of Children of Men, though.

Graham: Can we have the invasion of Britain film that is a rom-com?

Ian: No.

Niall: Why would we want to watch that?

Graham: You know, another rom-zom-com. Zombies find love amidst the ruins.

Tom: Or possibly a romantic comedy about the English civil war — a rom-crom-com.

Niall: Presumably 28 Months Later —

Tom: — and then 28 years later, 28 decades later … 28 kalpas later, the Stephen Baxter far-future installment!

Ian: 28 Months Later will presumably have mainland Europe, Africa and Asia are all destroyed by zombies, and America’s still strong!

Graham: But Australia would be isolated, so it would be a rom-pom-com.

Tom: I hate you so much. But you could probably contain the zombies in Europe. You could protect Africa because all you have to do is hold the Suez canal and Gibraltar.

Graham: If we want stories about the spread of a global epidemic, Blood Music by Greg Bear is a really good example.

Tom: Although not quite the same situation.

Ian: I suppose Twelve Monkeys is somewhat similar.

Tom: Twelve Monkeys Later?

Ruth: That would be the next one.

Graham: Visually, the thing that sits with me isn’t so much the zombies, but just that once in a while you see the figure silhouetted in the distance, and it’s Robert Carlyle in zombie state.

Ian: I think they possibly overused the fact that he was extra-terrifying because he was, like, their dad, but I’ll forgive them for it.

Niall: There was also a lot of use of sniper-scopes and similar, which was very effective.

Ian: The scene going down into the underground was terrifying.

Ruth: It was.

Graham: I got a bit bored of that — it seemed to me to be going on too long. We knew damn well they were going to get down there.

Tom: That sniper-scope thing … have you seen that in films before? It’s an active infra-red scope, which looks very different to a light intensifier, because you have those glowing eyes.

Graham: Climax of The Silence of the Lambs?

Ruth: Yes, she has those reflecting eyes.

Tom: Because the only other place I’ve heard of it recently is on a Paris Hilton sex tape. Which has the eyes. I haven’t actually seen this, but I heard that it was done.

Graham: M’lud.

Tom: Let the record show. It’s just funny … apparently, I read, it’s now a big trend in gonzo porn, to use active infra-red.

Graham: Can we steer the topic away from gonzo porn and towards the happier subject of zombies killing everyone? Actually, the other very specific reference I felt was when they’re heading into the safe zone on the DLR at the start of the film, with the voice telling them everything will be OK — it’s the opening sequence of Half-Life.

Niall: I did like seeing the DLR used as a refugee train. I mean, it’s another London shout-out, but it was a nice touch.

Tom: Because the DLR is run by computers, so it’s almost the one thing you could easily get running if you didn’t have humans.

[At this point, we paused to consume food. There was further discussion, but alas, it was not recorded. We attempted to summarise the important points.]

Ian: So, what we were saying? Zombie movies, subgenre of survival horror, humans are stupid. There you go.

Niall: Humans vs. undifferentiated mass, weak link, and so on.

Tom: There is always a dopey bird who does something stupid for her boyfriend. Except sometimes it’s a man. In the remake of Day of the Dead, there’s the man who’s keeping his zombie wife alive — he’s the equivalent. But I do think they tend to exploit female sentimentality very often.

Niall: Did anyone know anything about the film going in, in terms of the structure? Because — like you said, Ruth, I thought it was already 28 weeks later, and then everyone fucking died. Apart from Robert Carlyle. But even the kid! I wasn’t expecting them all to die so quickly.

Tom: Although the clues were there, because they were clearly still worried about zombies — at first I thought it was just Robert Carlyle and his wife, going through the cupboards of this house, trying to survive. Which I’m sure was intentional.

Ian: Yes, especially since the zombies died at the end of 28 Days Later.

Niall: But it does build up to that moment where they open the door and it’s bright light outside, when you’d thought it was night. I think in the end the film goes into the roll of “sequels that are worth seeing but are obviously not as good as the originals.” Because it did find some new ways to do abandoned Britain shots, but a lot of it was repetition. The Regent’s Park carousel was a nice image, for instance.

Graham: Except not in Regent’s Park. Clearly in a field in the middle of Berkshire.

Niall: That’s because they can’t actually let Regent’s Park run wild for six months.

Ian: There were a lot of shots of “oh my god, it’s London! And it’s empty! Again!” But that is cool.

Ruth: They weren’t as effective as in the first one.

Ian: But the start of 28 Days Later was so awesome, they couldn’t replicate that. Although firebombing the Isle of Dogs was quite good.

Niall: The use of aerial shots was quite good because it built up to the firebombing. You’d have these flat overhead shots, and we’ve seen those in lots of films —

Graham: — and Torchwood!

Niall: — and then they used the same shots for the firebombing of the Isle of Dogs, which I thought was really effective.

Ruth: It also reminded me of The Apprentice …

Tom: In terms of imagery … I think this is similar to what Philip Pullman said about the way he writes books, when he came to talk to OUSFG many years ago. He doesn’t start with a plot, he starts with a series of images he likes and then figures out how to link them together. And that’s exactly what this film was, which is why it makes no sense at all.

Ian: “Should have put that in the original film — oh well, I’ll put it in a flashback.”

A Matter of Life and Death

Here are two stories:

Boy meets girl. Boy is fated to die, but a mistake is made, and he lives. Boy and girl fall in love. The next world sends a conductor to collect boy’s soul: boy appeals the decision. A trial is arranged, and held, with boy’s life in the balance. Boy and girl demonstrate their love for one another. Boy wins his appeal — love is greater than law. Boy and girl live happily ever after.

Alternatively: boy meets girl. Boy miraculously survives a leap from a burning plane without a parachute. Boy and girl fall in love, but boy has suffered serious brain damage. An operation is arranged, and held, with boy’s life in the balance. The operation is a success — boy’s belief in love gives him the strength to fight through. Boy and girl live happily ever after.

The original version of A Matter of Life and Death — the wonderful 1946 film written and directed by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, starring David Niven as boy (Squadron Leader Peter Carter) and Kim Hunter as girl (American radio operator June) — could have been either story, and was in fact both. The Encyclopedia of Fantasy describes it as a “rationalised fantasy”, which is exactly what it sounds like, and indeed an opening title stakes a claim for reality: “this is the story of two worlds, the one we know and another which exists only in the mind … of a young airman whose life and imagination have been violently shaped by war.” But the screenplay never confirms this statement, and in fact puts some effort into maintaining ambiguity as to what is real and what is not. There are multiple scenes set in the “other world” (to all intents and purposes, heaven) which Peter is not in, and which he displays no knowledge of, and which therefore suggest that the other world exists independently of his mind. And in one of the scenes where the Conductor visits Peter, freezing time for everyone else while they talk, he knocks over a stack of books, then puts them back in place while Peter is out of the room. After the visit, Peter expects the books to be on the floor: that they are not acts as confirmation to June, and to Frank Reeves, the doctor in charge of Peter’s case, that Peter is hallucinating, but we cannot take the same certainty.

The new stage adaptation at the National Theatre (adaptation by Tom Morris and Emma Rice, directed by Emma Rice) keeps the same basic structure, but there are many changes; the fact that it provides an answer about the nature of the other world is just one difference. Although there are gestures in the direction of ambiguity (as in the film, for instance, the judge at Peter’s trial and the surgeon operating on him are played by the same actor), the stage version of A Matter of Life and Death is unambiguously a fantasy. In the equivalent visit to the one I described above, for instance, the Conductor knocks over no books, but at the end of the scene Peter sees the spirit of a man who recently died at the local hospital, without having been told of the death. June and Frank note, and briefly discuss, the impossibility. Even more telling is the fact that, while Reeve dies in a motorcycle crash and serves as Peter’s advocate in the celestial courtroom showdown in both versions, only in the film is Peter told of the accident: in the stage version, Reeve just turns up in heaven.

The reason for the change takes a while to come clear. In the meantime, the production is largely engaging: the leads, Tristan Sturrock and Lyndsey Marshal, give solid performances (and Sturrock arguably has an advantage over Niven in that he looks the right age), and have a slightly more modern relationship to work with. Peter and June’s first date is notably less chaste than its film equivalent, and she accepts rather than declines a drink; when asked how the chess game they’re playing is going, June says “Peter’s very good”, and Peter adds, “but June’s winning”, whereas in the film it’s the other way around; and towards the end of the story, June demonstrates the strength of her love for Peter by volunteering to take his place in death (a life for a life) off her own bat, rather than responding to a suggestion by Reeves. While the film is and remains deeply moving, the relationship in the play seems more immediate, more passionate. Other apects are less convincing. As the Conductor, Gisli Orn Gardarsson can’t match the peerless delivery of Marius Gorling; plus, in this version the Conductor is a Norwegian magician rather than a French aristocrat, and some of the lines (“your British weather!”) sound awkward. He comes across as a broad-brush clown. There’s an occasional lack of nuance elsewhere, too — when discussing faith, for instance, in the film June says she doesn’t really know, she hasn’t thought about it, which sets up a wonderful line from Reeves: “I don’t know, I’ve thought about it too much.” In the play, the positions of the three cast members are much clearer-cut (Peter believes, June is atheist, Reeves is agnostic), and the line is gone. And there are a few changes that are baffling in their triviality. In the film, Peter smells fried onions when the Conductor visits (further evidence, for Reeve, that the visits are hallucinations); in the play, he smells burnt toast.

Rice keeps the stage busy — just occasionally, as in the opening descriptions of the awesome immensity of the universe, perhaps a little too busy — and is occasionally inspired. Reeves, for instance, has a camera obscura which he uses to survey the village where he lives (“a village doctor must know everything; you’d be surprised how many diagnoses I’ve made from up here”). In the play, this shows the landscape around the National Theatre — the South Bank and Waterloo Bridge — complete with incongruous country village locals going about their business. Later, a game of table-tennis escalates, thanks to lifts from various members of the cast, into a virtuoso bullet-time (ping-pong-time?) extravaganza — less absurdist than this, but along the same lines. The musical scene-changes are unexpected, and sometimes feel like padding (the play is a good twenty minutes longer than the film), but also add emotional weight to a number of minor characters, such as the aforementioned dead guy seen by Peter, who gets his own solo. Music is also used to mark the transition between this world and the other: an adequate substitute for, if hardly as striking as, the film’s shift from technicolour to black and white.

The heart of the play, as with the film, is in the courtroom, yet it’s here that the changes are most radical. Part of the original impetus for A Matter of Life and Death was paranoia about potential cracks in the Anglo-American alliance: so June is American, and the prosecutor in Peter’s case is the rabidly anti-British Abraham Farlan, the first man to be killed by a British bullet in the American War of Independence. Consequently, the first part of the appeal, in which Farlan attempts to invalidate Peter’s case purely on grounds of nationality, comes across to a modern viewer — or at least to me — as an unnecessarily lengthy digression, perhaps the one duff moment in the film. Eventually, the real issue is raised, the court descends to Earth, Peter and June (summoned by the Conductor while sleeping) prove their love for one another, and Peter is granted his life. (Or, if you prefer, the surgery is a success.) In the play, by contrast, June is British and Farlan is nowhere to be seen. In his place there are two prosecutors: Peter’s father, who died in the first world war, and William Shakespeare.

The effect of this, if you’re charitable, is to considerably broaden the scope of the debate: it is no longer enough to simply establish that Peter and June love each other, it has to be established that they deserve each other. The film, you could say, was about love among the Allies; in the play, there’s a place in heaven for soldiers on all sides of the war (and of past wars), and it becomes a story about the costs of being a soldier. Peter’s father argues that death is what gives Peter’s life as a soldier meaning, that it will be inspirational, that to die is (in effect) to continue his camaraderie with the men he fought alongside. The most powerful moment in the entire production comes when the prosecution calls to the stand a woman killed in the bombing of Coventry. Why, she asks simply, should the rules be broken for Peter? No answer is offered, because none can be. On the other hand, if you’re less charitable, the change in focus leads to a muddle. There isn’t the clear back-and-forth that there is in the film; instead there are a series of more-or-less effective separate arguments (Shakespeare’s are among the less effective, if you were wondering; in fact, his impact on the trial is strangely cursory). The coup-de-grace comes when an unnamed man steps forward and insists that any judgement must take into account the inherent unfairness of war. They decide to toss a coin to decide Peter’s fate, and he dies, turning the ending from an affirmation of the power of love into a bitter reminder that fate is arbitrary and cruel. It’s an ending that forces the viewer to confront the assumptions they have brought to the story — particularly if said viewer has seen the film; an original play that told the same story would probably not be so discomforting.

The work that came to mind immediately after watching the play was Mary Doria Russell’s novel A Thread of Grace — another World War II story, about which Russell has said that she really did toss a coin to decide which of her characters lived and who died. Rice and Morris, it turns out, have taken the concept a step further, in a way that can only be achieved with a stage production: the outcome changes every night. (And, I was told, it’s not always a coin toss; apparently, the night before we saw the play they asked the audience, in their role as the watching host of heaven, to decide, and they chose to let Peter live.) It’s a compelling choice, and I think explains why the play is so much more clearly framed as a fantasy than the film: it has to be, to give the voices of the dead their due moral force, to prevent them from being dismissed as belated pangs of Peter’s conscience, or complications on the operating table. Almost paradoxically, the change reduces the importance of Peter’s operation — the feeling that his fate lies on the operating table is far weaker in the play — yet makes the story more real. But at the same time, it’s hard not to feel that something has been lost. A friend described the film as “innocent without being naive”, which I think is right: it manages to do an almost miraculous thing, dramatise the life-saving potential of love without feeling as though it’s cheating. Rice and Morris’ play is, if you like, more honest about the nature of life and death, and worth seeing for that; but the innocence is gone.