The Power of Television

Along a perfectly decent urban street in our area there is a certain bedroom window that can never be shut, because the cable from the satellite dish has no other means of running to the TV within. Summer's inquisitive bugs and winter's whistling winds don't matter to the occupant, it seems, so long as the supply of visual dross remains constant. And this person is not necessarily an idiot. A pretty expensive car is parked outside. And the place is neat -- not like an idiot's might be.

And then, in town, in one of those old, quaint redbricked terraced houses, which nevertheless looked pretty cramped, the front parlour window is completely obscured by the arse of a huge flatscreen TV. So, this particular parlour harbours a creature who does not pine for natural light. But surely he/she does. Just as the character in the first house surely dislikes the bugs and the cold. Hates them, even, and yet endures the discomfort, year after year. Possibly they pay even more in electricity to light and heat their homes than they do for the privilege of filling their minds with technicolour fog.

That's the power of television.

Beat that, Dickens.

Age Shall Wither Them

Trailing around up town this morning, teeth set in a rictus grin against the chill wind and festive misery, I pop into an AgeConcern UK charity shop to see what Xmas ideas they may be touting. And there, amongst the blunt glassware, chipped picture frames and little china ornaments too hopeless to contemplate, sit three copies of Fifty Shades of Grey. The perfect title . . . about growing decrepit in a drear provincial town.

Review of SIns of the Father by R J Palmer

In a story that moves between medieval England and modern-day America, R J Palmer gives us a tale of personal redemption. Aaron, a contemporary pastor, has lost his faith and is sinking into cynicism when a supernatural event connects him across the ages with a waif who exists both as an autistic child in the present day and as an orphan in the distant past. Furthermore, the child, is possessed by an elemental evil that was conjured by tragedy and obsession.

This outline, taken together with the rather gruesome scenes of violence, might seem to place the novel in the horror genre, but the story’s focus is primarily psychological and its ultimate aim is to describe how faith is regained and justified through first-hand experience of the transcendental.

It’s the sort of book that would scarcely ever get written in the UK, where even talking about God, as Orwell observed back in the Nineteen Forties, produces in the average citizen the same frigid indifference as talking about poetry. To an English audience, Aaron the pastor is almost as exotic as the monks in medieval England whom we meet in the first chapter. Oddly enough, the most vividly described scenes are those set in the distant past. The present day seems less real.

Sins of the Father is written is an easy, colloquial style, but the text would benefit from less non-action narrative and more dialogue. Still, an entertaining and sometimes intriguing read.


Available here at Amazon and here at Smashwords

Dibble Dup

On the radio the other day, a financial commentator got his consonants mixed up so that double dip -- the current euphemism for economic depression -- came out as Dibble Dup.

Since we've started calling the economic depression the Dibble Dup at home, our business interests (I mean my wife's and mine) have made a good recovery. In fact we've grown a lot faster than the UK economy as a whole.

Just a hint, it might work for you.

I'll be putting the reviews back into the enovellareview in a few weeks time and posting new submission details a bit later.

Review of The Telling of My Marching Band Story by Will Todd

Available here and here

"Perfection is made up of trifles. But perfection is no trifle". It took me 15 years before I found out this was a quote from the Renaissance artist Michelangelo and not our Drum Major, Dom. (page 35)

That made me smile. The central character of Marching Band, Will, is a fallible human being, just about scraping through the trials that life throws at him, and in that respect he’s a thoroughly typical guy. The vast majority are not touched by genius, or even madness, and for that reason, the stories of geniuses tend to have a limited appeal. What we love to read about is some underdog, especially a young underdog, beating all the odds. Mr Todd offers a happy exploration of this theme. Will is a freshman, who’s already applied himself to the trumpet for years without outstanding success. And yet, he suddenly finds himself, against all the odds, accepted into his university’s prestigious marching band. He struggles hard to remain a member, falters, comes through a low point and finally snatches triumph from the jaws of failure.

This section of the novel was also fascinating to me as a non musician. Playing the trumpet seems a remarkably tortured affair, far more physically demanding than might be expected. And then the culture of marching bands turns out to be surprisingly combative, with nonmembers able to challenge members for their places.

There is one character who displays a certain amount of unthinking hostility, but on the whole this is an upbeat, cynic-free tale. What makes it a bit odd is that the opening section spends time pondering the story’s existential veracity. In other words, we’re dealing with an unreliable narrator – Mr Todd tells us so. This literary device seems a curious contrast to the noisy, showy, unreconstructed world of a marching band, and the universal, simple story of a child entering the adult world.

Mr Todd is a screen writer and possibly this accounts for his need to analyse his prose. The screen version of this story, however, looks to have been far harder to write than the prose version. You can check this for yourself, because Mr Todd has appended the film script version. No doubt, studying this will be very instructive for those interested in a career in script writing.

All in all, an entertaining and charmingly eccentric YA novel.