Four pieces on Watchmen: #1

[I promise, I will get back to classics-related stuff eventually ...]

Part 2 here

Part 3 here

Part 4 here

This is the first of four pieces of writing about Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ comic Watchmen, reproduced to provide background for some things I will say in an upcoming review of Roz Kaveney’s Superheroes! I’m afraid you’ll find that some of the pieces go over the same ground. And there’s a lot of it all told, so I don’t really expect anyone to read it all.

The first article had a somewhat protracted genesis. It was originally written in 1987 as a Letter of Comment to Fantasy Advertiser, the premier UK comics fanzine, at that time coming out of a long hiatus. It wasn’t printed, for reasons of space (though editor Martin Skidmore said it would have been had he received it earlier). I then rewrote it for the first issue of my fanzine Halo of Flies, which came out in 1988, along the way blatantly stealing a number of points from an article written by Alan Jeffrey for another fanzine (the title of which I don’t recall, and neither does Alan). It was so long in gestation that I ended up adding a short postscript once it finally saw the light of day. It’s quite an angry article, trying to articulate the sense of betrayal I felt when Watchmen concluded. I’d probably be more reasoned about it now, and I don't necessarily stand by everything in the piece below,but I’ve decided to leave the text largely untouched (though with some annotations). I didn’t put proper references at the time for which issues of Escape and The Comics Journal I refer to, and am not sure that I possess the issues concerned anymore (I know I gave away many of my back issues of TCJ).

Geniuses and Fools

“Stupendous genius! damned fool.” – Lord Byron of William Wordsworth.

In 1987 the mainstream [2008: i.e. superhero] comics world was dominated by a comic called Watchmen. You may have heard about it (indeed, this article assumes that you’ve read it – if you haven’t, and don’t want the plot spoilt, stop here). It’s now nearly a year since the last issue came out, but that was followed by the trade paperback, and no doubt the damn thing will sweep the Eagles this year. So at this point I’d like to voice my opinion on “1987’s most talked about graphic novel”. Watchmen 11 & 12 constitute one of the most ill-conceived and appalling endings for a story that I have read in a long time.

Let me expand on this. In these issues, everything that you thought you knew about Watchmen is proved to be wrong, and every effect that Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons have built up during the previous ten issues comes crashing down. At the centre of this collapse is the character of Adrian Veidt.

Veidt isn’t like anyone else in Watchmen. He doesn’t have to obey the same rules as the other characters. Where everyone else’s background is told through flashback, Veidt gives his origin (which reads like something out of Stan Lee’s worst nightmares) in a long expository monologue, cunningly delivered to dead people so that he won’t be interrupted. He quotes that great sage of the twentieth century, Adolf Hitler. He takes on Nite Owl and Rorschach, who have previously dealt with muggers, SWAT teams and prison guards en masse, and soundly thrashes them (actually, he doesn’t; he just hits them a couple of times and they are so overawed by his presence that they give up). And not for him the messy brutal fighting style seen elsewhere; no, his movements are graceful and balletic, and allow him to conduct conversations at the same time. (“Another thing you’ll know if you’ve been in a fight is: you don’t wisecrack whilst you’re doing it” – Dave Gibbons. Well, nothing Ozymandias says is actually funny …) For all I know Veidt also leaps tall buildings and sings four-part harmony. And he catches bullets.

Now this might not seem so incredible at first glance. After all, this is a superhero comic. Elektra catches bullets in Elektra: Assassin. Well, yes, but for all the gritty realism Frank Miller uses, she exists in a world where men stick to ceilings, and exposure to gamma radiation hardly ever actually kills you. In the supposedly realistic world of Watchmen, where there are no Eastern mystics dispensing paranormal powers (or if there are, nobody’s bothered telling the reader) something like this begs quite a few questions. Like, how does he see the bullet, when it’s moving so fast? How did he practise this? (“Okay guys, is the ambulance handy? Right, start shooting!”) How come, when the impact of the bullet is sufficient to knock him off his feet, his hand gets nothing worse than a scratch? What would he have done if the Silk Spectre had emptied the whole gun into him? (Good job she didn’t find a machine gun, eh?)

It’s not as if it’s necessary for him to catch the bullet. He’s wearing body armour anyway, and the bullet catching scene is nothing more than a clever trick Moore thought up one day. He believes it can actually be done, if one trains oneself hard enough. I don’t.

The point is that where the other main characters are inversions or refutations of superhero cliches, Veidt is a glorification of them, hardly developing much beyond the Charlton character Pete Cannon–Thunderbolt, on whom he is based. Moore seems to be aware that the character might be seen as this, and gives him such seemingly clever dialogue as “I’m not a Republic serial villain”, implying that there’s more to Veidt than the cardboard image presented (to be fair, he isn’t a Republic villain; he’s a DC ’50s villain, which means he behaves in exactly the same manner, but has a more colourful dress sense). It has been put to me that Veidt’s characterisation is just a big joke at the expense of supervillainry; if this is so, then it is a joke that completely backfires, ruining the effect of the previous issues – rather like if Stanley Kubrick had gone ahead with the pie-fight ending for Dr Strangelove.

The real meat of the ending is of course, The Big Moral Dilemma; is murdering six million people justifiable if it saves the world? Well, I’ve yet to see anybody come up with circumstances that might justify such action, though Mein Kampf might have something to say on the matter. As far as Watchmen is concerned (in case anyone still has sleepless nights about it), Veidt’s plan cannot be justified, because it is the conception of a madman, and only succeeds through some aberrant behaviour on the part of world politicians. As he relates his scheme, the reader is forced to agree with Nite Owl; it makes no logical sense whatsoever, and nobody in their right mind could really believe that this con-trick would work. Adolf Hitler may have said that any lie will be believed if it is big enough, but he also said it would be a really great idea to round up all the Jews and make toast out of them, and I don’t see that being held up a valid philosophy by many people.

Think about Veidt’s plan for a moment; an aged President, in a world that aggressive American foreign policy has made more full of nuclear paranoia than our own, is in his bunker awaiting Armageddon. Suddenly there is some sort of massive explosion in New York. This could be the first strike; more Soviet missiles could be in the air at that very moment. Does he launch the retaliatory strike? No, he delays, potentially allowing the Russians to wipe out the USA, just on the off-chance that it might be a giant squid that got lost. Then, within an hour of the news, the Russians decide that they’re going to do the decent thing and not take advantage of America’s distress. They’ll even end the war in Afghanistan, to show how nice they are. And does anybody in the White House get suspicious about the speed with which the Russians react, almost as if they knew what was going to happen? No, they’re all too busy discovering peace and harmony and sticking flowers in their rifles. Moore tries to pave the way for Nixon’s behaviour in issue 10 with his refusal to go to Defcon 1, but it doesn’t wash. Much though we might desire it, the real world simply doesn’t work like this. The pressures on Nixon to launch would be too great. I might be more convinced if there was any evidence for a general willingness to believe in aliens, but none is presented (unless we’re meant to take for granted a higher level of belief in such things due to the existence of Dr Manhattan – which doesn’t follow logically at all). Nor is the ‘alien’ any real threat to the world; after all, the fact that this is the first recorded lost alien to explode on Earth might reasonably lead one to the conclusion that this isn’t going to start happening every second Tuesday. On television we hear, “Could further attacks be imminent?” Answer: “We think not”. Then what’s all the fuss about?

In the end Veidt is like his role model Alexander the Great; he has changed the world briefly, but his creation is impermanent, and will disappear rapidly (this irony has probably escaped Moore, who clearly knows more of the myth of Alexander than the historical personage). [2008: That’s almost certainly unfair. Moore does his research, and I doubt he was as ignorant of Alexander as smug classics Ph.D. me assumed in 1988.] Veidt has done little more than push international tensions aside for a while; to erode them would require a lot more manipulation of people’s viewpoints, over a long period. Veidt’s Millennium promotion might have been seen as this, but it looks more like a reaction to events rather than an initiative. When Veidt says “Next, I’ll help (Earth) towards Utopia”, in effect he’s saying, “Hey, I’ve just had this really great idea what I can do next!” He clearly hadn’t put any thought to what he was going to do after he pulled his party trick. Only now does the idea occur to him, and only, it seems. because he’s got nothing better to do. And let us not forget that the crisis point from which Veidt has magnanimously saved the world, was in fact caused in the first place by Veidt’s manipulation of Dr Manhattan (indeed, someone wishing to start World War III in the world of Watchmen could do worse than adopting Veidt’s plan). And what happens when some NASA scientist examines the creature, and discovers its brain is cloned from a human? Well, the Americans will immediately start accusing the Russians of being responsible, and consider retaliation (after all, they can hardly let the murder of six million citizens go unpunished). Once that happens, then the world had better hope that Rorschach’s journal is published; exposure of Veidt will be the only way out of Armageddon.

Are we then to praise Veidt for sorting out his own mess, particularly when it costs six million lives, and is poised to go wrong at any moment? Moore certainly thinks so (“Veidt is the hero of Watchmen. You can’t take that away from him.” – Alan Moore). This is actually far more fascistic writing than the more easily-accused Dark Knight, yet Veidt is supposedly some sort of liberal. I don’t doubt that he sees himself that way, and probably so does Moore. He seems to have been seduced by the attractiveness of the benevolent dictator (and as writer of V For Vendetta, he ought to know better), and has failed to think through the implications of what he’s writing.

And therein lies the problem. Moore’s greatest weakness as a writer, usually generalised as weak plotting, is a regrettable habit of making use of what he sees as good ideas, without considering them properly. This tends to restrict the conclusions of his stories, so that they seem not as the original object of the story, but something reached as an inescapable consequence of the ideas flowing earlier in the narrative; in other words, he is led by his ideas, rather than the other way round. Moore’s endings have often been weak, as ‘American Gothic’ in Swamp Thing demonstrated. (Gosh, so good and evil are different sides of the same coin, are they? I never knew that.) Remember that his reputation in this country was built on Marvelman and V For Vendetta, neither of which have yet reached their conclusions. [2008: At the time of writing, of course. Both eventually finished, V reasonably successfully, Marvelman, or Miracleman as it became, slightly less so.]

Watchmen is merely a classic example of this. Read with a sceptical eye, it becomes apparent that there are many occasions where logic and sense are sacrificed to effect. For instance, a question which always nagged was “Why is Nixon still President?” The usual answer was that the Republicans rode on a surge of nationalism, though in pre-Reagan America patriotism was not the exclusive preserve of the Republicans in the way that it is for the Conservative party over here.

In any case, this doesn’t answer the question. Why is Nixon still President? Is he such a megalomaniac as to hang on to power for twenty years? Are the rest of his party such sycophants as to go along? Has Nixon got the stamina to do the toughest job in the world for so long? Evidently so, and not only Nixon, but also Ford and Kissinger have lasted the pace, and God knows who else. The only reason is that Moore wants to play with the political icons of his youth; it would be like writing a story set in 2000, yet still having Reagan and Thatcher in charge (only less likely). As a second instance, a street gang learns of Rorschach’s being sprung by Nite Owl. “Hey, that’s that old guy who lives over a garage! Must be the same guy!” they all shout, and then jog a couple of blocks, without getting at all tired, to Hollis Mason’s place, no doubt passing dozens of derelicts, women walking alone, and other easy victims for muggers, and beat him to death, just because they were really angry. Mob psychology for the under-fives. Great. Well, Mason had to get killed somehow, didn’t he? Actually, he doesn’t, as his death contributes very little to the story, other than giving Nite Owl a chance for a tantrum. [2008: I possibly overdo this paragraph.]

And so finally we are presented with an ending which makes no sense at all, having been contrived solely to put the Big Moral Dilemma to us. Sadly, once you spot the contrivance, the dilemma becomes meaningless.

This is not to say that Watchmen is totally devoid of good points. The portrayal of a world is, in the main, highly convincing. The artwork is beautiful and finely rendered. John Higgins’ colouring, after a few initial hitches, developed a style of its own (which unfortunately means that everything he has done since looks like Watchmen). And there is some fine writing. Where it reflects Moore’s strengths as a writer, in characterization and dialogue, the script is very good indeed, as good as anything in mainstream comics in the past decade, and is (apart from the first episode) mercifully devoid of Moore’s usual dramatic devices. Yet it magnifies both Moore’s strengths and weaknesses, and in the end the weaknesses drag it down. Dave Gibbons, in response to some people’s complaints about the end, said, as an analogy, that he had heard a lot of really good jokes which had terrible punch lines; that didn’t stop them being good jokes. But he seems to have missed the point the terrible ending is the point of certain jokes. In a story, if the conclusion doesn’t make sense within the terms that have been established earlier, then the whole story collapses. All the fine dialogue and detailed artwork in the run-up is merely gloss. It’s what the story is about that matters. Watchmen is such a story.

Take, for instance, the detective story angle. Moore said once that, beyond all the costumes and the world view, Watchmen functions as a detective story, but in the event it isn’t a particularly good one, because Moore has confused genre conventions, which tend to be restrictive, and lead to cliché-ridden material, with genre requirements, which are necessary for the story to work properly. In Watchmen, once the characters have sifted through the deceits and got to the truth, they are told, “Ha, ha, there’s nothing you can do about it …” Most of the characters walk out on the situation. It never seems to occur to them that, since Veidt has killed everybody else with any idea what was going on, he might just try to kill them as well. Nor does it occur to them that, even if they can’t expose Veidt’s plot, they can kill him [2008: This was one of the points I stole from Alan]. Now this would be fair enough, except that giving up is presented as the right thing to do. Rorschach, the archetypal detective figure, refuses to go along. He thinks himself the only moral man in the world, and in the end turns out to be that, rather like Philip Marlowe in Raymond Chandler’s novels. Unlike Marlowe, however, he walks off and, giving up in the end, allows himself to be killed by Dr Manhattan. Imagine a version of The Maltese Falcon in which the fat man gets away with the bird, which turns out to be real, and Sam Spade is killed by Miss Wonderly in the same way she killed his partner. That would be a very depressing novel, for the requirement of the detective novel is that some form of justice must be seen to be done. There is no justice in Watchmen. The basic message is “You can’t win”.

Ultimately Watchmen fails [2008: I would now have the humility to add “in my opinion”] because it breaks every promise made to us. All the cliches we thought banished were merely being saved to the end. Led to believe that we were getting a real-world comic with superheroes, what we in fact got was a superhero comic with a real-world gloss. Moore still thinks that Watchmen upset the traditions of superhero comics, but it does so only on the surface. The only basic convention really done away with is that of the good guys winning. It also insults the reader’s intelligence, presenting a simplistic solution to a complicated problem (I don’t know what’s going to bale the world out, but I’m damn sure it’s not going to be an exploding squid). Of course, much of the outrage the last issues generate is because it did try to achieve so much. If it was just another hack job nobody would give a shit. But much of Watchmen is very good, yet ultimately it is a great disappointment. This makes it in some senses a noble failure, as if you set out to ascend great heights you always risk a long fall, and establishing the right to fail is important in any medium, but it is none the less a failure.

Which leads us to the most astonishing thing about all this; it took ages for anybody to notice that Watchmen had any flaws at all! For six months after the release of issue 12, I saw hardly an unkind word spoken of Watchmen; the nearest to a negative comment was in Speakeasy, and that dealt merely with some of the trappings, and not with the central theme. In Escape, whose writers really out to know better, it was praised to the skies as “the first great humane act in superhero comics” (whatever the hell that means), whilst over the page Marshall Law, which subverts the superhero genre far more than Watchmen, is slagged off. Not until The Comics Journal published a review that cut right through to the chief flaws of the story did a truly negative view appear [2008: This was probably in TCJ #114]. Admittedly Watchmen had the advantage of appearing during a remarkably quiet period for British comics fandom, brought on by Fantasy Advertiser‘s suspension of publication (now that FA is back, quite a few letter writers have expressed their displeasure at the book), but that doesn’t wholly explain the uncritical praise thrown around, especially that from non-specialist critics, who should surely be less tolerant of the clichés of the superhero.

Is Alan Moore held in such esteem that he can do no wrong? Well, he certainly is at DC Comics, as are many other top-rank creators, such as John Byrne and Howard Chaykin. [2008: Byrne was revamping Superman, in a manner I felt at the time to be over-written and often missing the point of what the character was about, but probably wasn’t really as bad as all that. Chaykin had just done his Shadow and Blackhawk revivals, in which the leads looked and behaved not that much differently from previous characters Chaykin had written and drawn, such a Reuben Flagg.]. This allows them to produce rubbish without anyone actually daring to tell them so. This is a dangerous situation, as constructive editing, rather than simple interference for its own sake, can be an important part of the creative process, whilst allowing creators full rein to indulge their excesses can be a very bad idea. Dave Sim might not agree, but in any case Len Wein and Barbara Randall certainly did nothing to merit their editors’ payments. [2008: That’s below the belt, and I don’t stand by it.]

As for the reaction among comic fans, I think what has happened is this; Watchmen was, as it has been accused of being, the ultimate fanboy comic, the great hope for the superhero fan who wants to be treated as a grown-up, and to whom Dark Knight was just a sick joke. It was to be conclusive proof that you could write adult and mature stories about guys in long underwear. What in fact it does is prove how difficult it is to match mature writing with the basic absurdity of superheroes, and should act not as a sign to new areas to explore, but a dreadful warning to anyone following this path that it’s a blind alley (as well a cautionary tale about the dangers of letting superstar creators get out of control). Nevertheless, the fact that Watchmen is not a new beginning for superhero comics has not prevented people from praising it as if it is, fearing perhaps the end of the genre’s stranglehold on the medium; people trying to grow up and stay kids at the same time. If this is the case, then Watchmen’s failure, if it is accepted, is probably a good thing, if it does loosen the superheroic grip on comics.

Comics are beginning to break out of the ghetto they have been in, but the only way to win true mass appeal is to put the costumes aside, and produce genuinely adult stories (some thing Alan Moore knows very well). I’m afraid that the new readers Dark Knight and Watchmen have attracted to comics are not going to stay around if they enter a comics store to be confronted by Total Eclipse (a fanboy comic if ever there was one), when they should be being shown Maus or The Adventures of Luther Arkwright. I’m not advocating the death of the superhero comic, merely that it should be put in its proper place. If the fans don’t like it, then that’s their funeral. If they are allowed by the companies to hold the medium back with superheroes (and the American companies have a depressing habit of sticking with an established but shrinking market, rather than taking a risk on a potentially much larger market), then it’s the comic medium’s.

[2008: What a self-righteous prig I was back in 1988! My only excuse is that many of us at the time believed that the future for comics lay in breaking away from superheroes, and were rather embarrassed by the genre. I’m a lot less embarrassed about it now. I also have no recollection of what Total Eclipse was, but looking it up, I see it is the sort of ‘event’ cross-over comic Roz Kaveney, Michael Abbott and I discussed on a panel at Eastercon.]

The quotes in this article were taken from an interview in FA 100.

[1988 postscript: After reading the Alan Moore interview in FA 105, it occurs to me that some of the points made in the above article are less than fair on Moore (in particular, the accusations of crypto-fascism). Nevertheless, I stand by most of the points, especially the sheer ludicrousness of the dénouement.]

[2008 postscript: Looking at this again twenty years on, one thing I didn’t get at the time was how much Watchmen is a joke at the expense of the superhero comic. It takes various elements, tropes and clichés, and then mocks them. The trouble is, this isn’t what we were led to expect in 1987 by what Moore and Gibbons said while talking the story up – hence the disappointment that fuels the above piece. Oh, and I don’t much like The Killing Joke either.]

Arthur C Clarke Shortlist

For once, I've read the whole shortlist for The Arthur C. Clarke Award before the Award is announced (on Wednesday). The nearest I've got before to this was in 2004, where I'd managed to read all but two (which, as it turned out, included the winner). It would have been nice if I'd managed to do this before appearing on the Not the Clarkes panel at Eastercon, but at least I'd read a substantial proportion of all the novels by then, even if I hadn't finished three.

As usual, the shortlist has created controversy, with impositions of narratives upon the jury process on flimsy evidence, and noted omissions. I remain surprised at the absence of Ian McDonald's terrific Brasyl. I haven't read the other notable absentee, Michael Chabon's The Yiddish Policemen's Union, so can't really comment; but my partner has read it, and didn't like it much. But as I said on the panel, one of the things to note is that 2007 was a great year for science fiction, and picking just six novels must have been a hard task for the jury.

Matthew de Abaitua, The Red Men. I read the first hundred pages of this at a rush, and as a result, did the novel a bit of a disservice. I couldn't see what it was trying to say, or what the point of the exercise was. It is a little better than that. But, unfortunately, not much. That Snowbooks are too cheap to employ copy editors should not be held against the novel, but in the end its tale of AI copies of people and robots is the sort of thing Charlie Stross does in his sleep. There's nothing The Red Men does that other books on the shortlist don't do better. It most deserves the charge Abigail Nussbaum hurls (unfairly, I think) at the shortlist as a whole, of being not very interesting. I can't see why this is on the shortlist and Brasyl isn't. And I have no idea what the cover quote, "Makes Michel Houellebecq seem like Enid Blyton", actually means.

Steven Baxter, The H-Bomb Girl. There has been a lot of talk about this as a Young Adult novel. I have to say, thinking about it, I'm not sure whether it will connect that well with Young Adults, because they might not understand the world it depicts. I wasn't alive at the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis, but I did live at a time when two heavily-armed superpowers were staring at each other across Europe, and with a feeling that, sooner or later, things would deteriorate to such a point that nuclear war would happen. This was how people saw the world at the time of the TV film Threads (which has heavily influenced Baxter's picture of a post-nuclear Britain), and how the world was until Mikhail Gorbachev's meeting with Ronald Reagan at Reykjavik in late 1986. I'm not sure anyone under 30 can connect with that. But let's leave that aside. This is the best writing from Baxter that I've read since Voyage (admittedly, I've not read everything he's written in that period, but I have seen a representative sample). Everything that annoys me about the use of history in the Time's Tapestry series he gets right here. I'm not even irritated by John Lennon, resistance hero. It helps enormously that Baxter, if not actually writing about his own teenage years, is writing about a time he lived through, and where he grew up. I enjoyed this enormously.

Sarah Hall, The Carhullan Army. This has been often compared to Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, and one can see why. There is the same notion of an anti-feminist dystopia, in which women have no rights over their own reproductive processes. But it's very English as well. It has the same sense of place as to be found in Alan Garner (I could easily picture where the novel is set). There's also more than a hint of John Wyndham's "cosy catastrophes". I also admire the way Hall constructs her narrative presentation in order to skip over the boring bits (and I have realized from a comment somewhere else in the blogosphere that the framing device employed is, like the historical section at the end of 1984, a means of signalling that this oppression will not last). It's very well-written (and refreshingly short), but in the end it's just not quite as good as two other novels on the shortlist.

Steven Hall, The Raw Shark Texts. I quite liked this. As with The Red Men, it reads like a mainstream author toying with sf tropes (and that'll get me in trouble again, no doubt). But it's interesting, if perhaps inconsequential. There 's a definite sense of menace, even if a lot of it comes from slyly-acknowledged lifts from Jaws. And just when the length is getting a bit much, there's a fifty page flipbook.

Ken MacLeod, The Execution Channel. This begins as the novel one might expect from MacLeod, a direct response to the War on Terror and contemporary politics. As such it is well-written and passionate, picking up themes that have been in his writing ever since the first Fall Revolution novel. Then, halfway through, he pulls the rug out from under the reader, with a section that shows this is not quite the novel that was expected. Then, at the end, he does it again, with a spectacular sf twist. When you think back, your realize that all the pieces to accomplish this trick have been in plain sight all the time; we were just misdirected. This is what makes a good novel into a glorious novel.


Richard Morgan, Black Man. My heart sank when I picked this up and realized it was 600-plus pages long. There is a certain point at which sheer length can become oppressive in itself, and, as Mark Plummer wrote in a recent Banana Wings of Neil Gaiman's American Gods, any judgment of the quality of the novel is lost under a sheer desire for it to be over. In truth, Black Man is okay. But it's a technothriller in the Tom Clancy mould (and I bet I get in trouble again for saying that as well); a good example of the genre, beyond doubt, but I don't get much real sense of pushing back the boundaries, except in one section where a Hollywood action version of this plot would have copped out, and Morgan, to his credit, doesn't. But does this outweigh what Graham Sleight identified as being Morgan having his cake and eating it; the hero and his ilk are genetically-modified throwbacks to traits that were eliminated to allow us to live in civilized communities, and everyone in the novel says we should be glad those traits have gone - yet he is the hero, gets all the girls, and is generally presented as admirable.

Two of these novels I found highly enjoyable experiences, rather than just reasonably good, the Baxter and the MacLeod. Of those, I would like to see The Execution Channel win. And that, I must emphasize, would be my opinion even if Brasyl was on the shortlist. But the ending of MacLeod's novel divides its readers - some love it (such as me), some hate it. So I can see, if role-playing a jury (as we did at Eastercon), that a compromise candidate might emerge, in which case I would expect it to be the Baxter, which few people can object to (though Abigail Nussbaum does). I wouldn't be unhappy with that. I'd be less happy if The Carhullan Army won, but could live with it. If The Red Men wins I will be at the head of the queue to call the jury wrongheads.

Ahem!

This entry is approved of by Mary Beard.

Doctor Who, 'The Fires of Pompeii'

It's been forty-three years since a broadcast story of Doctor Who was set in the period of the Roman empire. The length of time between 'The Romans' and 'The Fires of Pompeii' has got a lot to do with the show's abandonment in the mid-sixties of the original plan to feature stories set in Earth's history. Part of the problem was, as Kim Newman has observed, the issue that Donna confronts the Doctor with in this episode. The Doctor saves people - that's what he does. But place him among well-known historical events, and his freedom to save people on a global scale, as opposed to on a personal one, is very much circumscribed. He can defeat the Daleks every time he encounters them, but he cannot, to take three examples from the show's first four years, prevent the Great Fire of Rome, stop the Greeks sacking Troy, or prevent Cumberland's butchers hunting down fugitive Highlanders. As a result, between 1966 and 1989, on the occasions when the Doctor did venture into the past (and they were relatively rare: Patrick Troughton and Jon Pertwee's Doctors only did so twice each, Tom Baker's five times), the stories were what has become known as 'pseudo-historicals', sf stories set in the past (usually some alien invasion). Often these stories took place against a historical background, rather than interacting directly with major historical events - if major events were used, they were often presented as being necessary evils to protect the planet as a whole (e.g. the Great Fire of London being presented in 'The Visitation' as a result of the Doctor defeating the Terileptils).

Under Russell T Davies' revamp of the programme, there has been a deliberate avoidance of stories set on far-off alien worlds. Inevitably, this leads to an increase of stories set in Earth's history. So it's no surprise that they finally got around to the Romans again.

All the stories set in the past since the revamp have been pseudo-historicals, and 'The Fires of Pompeii' is no different. There is an alien invasion, and in order to save the planet, the Doctor has not just to allow Pompeii to be destroyed, but to cause it to happen. In the end, this is actually a cheat as far as answering Donna's question goes. But the show's never really found a better answer to 'why can't the Doctor change history?' over the past forty-five years.

On the subject of cheating, the episode chooses to take a particularly apocalyptic view of Pompeii's destruction. This is probably the way most people think it happened, but the evidence actually suggests that the eruption of Vesuvius took the best part of a day, and, whilst accurate figures are impossible to calculate, a portion of the population will have escaped. It wasn't quite the complete extermination of a whole city that this episode implies. And as for the Romans not having a word for a volcano - well, strictly speaking that's true, but only because what they had was a three-word phrase. They were certainly aware of volcanoes - Etna was active at the time, and there are suggestions in some writers that Vesuvius was suspected to have had a volcanic past.

But this episode isn't a history lesson. Rather, it's a very knowing manipulation of lots of things that people know about the Romans, stuffed full of jokes. It won me over right at the beginning with a comment on how long it's been since the show went into Roman times, and then a direct reference to that particular story. It followed that up with a joke about Mary Beard's dormouse test, and then the best Spartacus joke since Life of Brian. And that's before we point out (as Davies freely confesses in Doctor Who Confidential) that all the character names for Peter Capaldi's family are lifted from the Cambridge Latin Course.

Another point at which I suspect the script is being deliberately knowing is in the opening scene. The Doctor thinks he has arrived in Rome, and only after seeing Vesuvius does he realize he's in Pompeii (why doesn't he consider the possibility that he might be in Herculaneum?). But of course, the sets he has been walking around are Rome, in a way. These are the sets that were originally built for the HBO/BBC series Rome. Credit must go to the production designers and director, who have dressed and shot these sets so that it's isn't immediately obvious that they are the same sets (this becomes plain when you watch Doctor Who Confidential, where the more obvious buildings are not hidden). Production values are high, and it certainly doesn't look like they only actually had 48 hours to film in Cinecitta.

It's interesting to compare this story with the audio adventure 'The Fires of Vulcan', produced in 2000, which was also set in Pompeii at the time of the eruption. It's not unknown for the new series to borrow from audios (Rise of the Cybermen' takes elements from 'Spare Parts', for instance), and the title of the later story is almost certainly an acknowledgment of the earlier one. But beyond that and the setting, the two stories share little. 'The Fires of Vulcan' is an actual historical, and uses historical characters (if sometimes anachronistically). It owes a great deal in terms of structure and scenes to Edward Bulwer-Lytton's 1834 novel The Last Days of Pompeii. In 'The Fires of Vulcan', the Doctor again can do nothing for Pompeii - but he does not try himself to escape, instead believing that he himself is fated to die in the eruption.

Overall, 'The Fires of Pompeii' is an extremely interesting piece of classical reception, and a pretty good episode of Doctor Who to boot. Though I could have done without the stunt casting of Phil Cornwell. And the last shot is utter nonsense.

The things I do for scholarship ...

Working in Reception Studies is often fun. You get to load up a boxed set of Battlestar Galactica and call it 'research'. But sometimes you have to go and see Meet The Spartans.





Sorry, you want more than that? Okay, this film has two, and two only, redeeming features, and they're both under Carmen Electra's top. And that, my friends, is a joke both funnier and more subtle than anything you will find in Meet The Spartans.

I suppose one might concede a word of praise for the production designers, who imitated the look of 300 very effectively (assuming they didn't just reuse the sets, as I suspect they might have). A pity none of that care was taken by the scriptwriters.

Final thought: poor, poor Kevin Sorbo.

What’s in an alias? (A post about Doctor Who)

A note for anyone writing about the 1972 Doctor Who story ‘The Time Monster’: The pseudonym adopted by The Master, supposedly the Greek form of his nom du guerre, is ‘Professor Thascalos’, not ‘Professor Thascales’.

Just about every published guide to the show (e.g. Lofficier’s 1981 Programme Guide, Howe and Walker’s 2002 Television Companion, Cornell, Topping and Day’s Discontinuity Guide, Miles and Wood’s About Time) prints the name as ‘Thascales’. But against this there are three important points to be made.

First, the cast in the transmitted episodes consistently say ‘Thascalos’. Well, actually, most of them sound like they’re saying ‘Thascalus’; but that’s presumably a typical English failure to enunciate vowels properly (I’m sure there’s a technical term for this, but equally sure that I don’t have time to look it up). Certainly no-one is saying ‘Thascales’.

Secondly, this is the spelling Terrance Dicks adopted in his 1985 novelization. If I remember rightly, novelizers were given copies of the original scripts, so Dicks would have the text by Robert Sloman and the uncredited Barry Letts to work with (and Dicks had in any case been script editor of the show at the time). So the probability is that this was the spelling in the script.

Thirdly, ‘Thascalos’ has the advantage that it is the Greek for ‘master’. ‘Thascales’ sounds Greek, by analogy with such evocative names as ‘Themistocles’ and ‘Pericles’, and indeed, it is a Greek word. But it is a feminine and in the genitive case, so means something like ‘belonging to the mistress’; perhaps not quite the message this particular Time Lord is trying to put across.

The error seems to go back to the episode list in Malcolm Hulke and Terrance Dicks’ The Making of Doctor Who. Certainly it’s there in the second edition of 1976 (perhaps someone reading this with access to the 1972 edition could tell me if the same error is printed there). [Edit 04/09/14: Matthew Kilburn tells me it originates in the 1973 Radio Times Doctor Who Special.] In those days printed material on Who stories was limited, and opportunities to check with the original broadcast all but unknown. So Hulke and Dicks was authoritative, and the mistake repeated in work after work.

There are three other interesting observations to make.

1. When the Brigadier doesn’t spot that thascalos is the Greek for ‘master’, the Doctor berates him for his lack of a classical education, in the same way as he had berated Jo Grant the year before in ‘The Daemons’, when she didn’t realize that magister was the Latin for ‘master’. The thing is, thascalos isn’t Classical Greek; it’s Modern Greek. It’s a contraction of the ancient didaskalos, which form can still sometimes be found. (This makes more sense when one see the two words written out in the Greek alphabet and understanding that the delta has shifted from being pronounced as ‘d’, which is what we think was the case in ancient times - but see James Davidson’s preface to The Greeks and Greek Love, which I’ve cited before - to a softer ‘th’ sound. I can see why Modern Greek has moved away from thithaskalos.)

2. It’s Jo who comes up with the answer to the Doctor’s question, and goes to the top of the class. From this the Discontinuity Guide concludes that Jo knows Greek. This seems unlikely given that only a year before it was established that she doesn’t know Latin. Has she been on an intense ‘Languages of the Mediterranean’ course in the meantime? There isn’t really a need for this conclusion. As the Doctor holds class (in typical Pertwee fashion), Jo is seen thinking, before saying ‘I get it! “Thascalos” is Greek for “Master”.’ To me, it’s plain that, rather than drawing on any linguistic knowledge, Jo has worked it out; she knows that Greek matters are in the air, and that the Master has previously hidden under a classical alias, and that the Doctor thinks that if only the Brigadier knew the classics, he’d know what the name meant. (Of course, if I was in charge of an international intelligence organization and knew that my no. 1 priority threat had an m.o. of using versions of his nom de plume, I’d make very sure that there was a team of analysts translating every name they came across, but that’s another issue.) From these bits of information Jo deduces the answer the Doctor has already reached. In the novelizaton, which may well be working from a script, Jo says ‘I get it! I bet “Thascalos” is the Greek for “Master”’ (emphasis mine), which makes it clearer that she is confidently guessing.

(The Discontinuity Guide has a few odd ideas like this. They are the source of the notion of two Dalek histories, one before the Doctor changed everything in ‘Genesis of the Daleks’ and one after, about which the authors of About Time are rightly sceptical. But then the Discontinuity Guide is meant to be humorous.)

3. ‘I am the Master. You will obey me.’ Such is the evil Time Lord’s mantra. So you’d think that when he used translations of his name into Latin or Greek, he’d take a name that meant ‘master of slaves’. But he chooses not to be the Reverend Dominus or Professor Thespotes. Instead he takes on names which mean ‘master’ as in schoolmaster. Is this an accident on Sloman’s and Letts’ parts? Once might elicit no further comment – but to choose the same meaning twice? It’s worth noting that Letts and Dicks have explicitly stated that they named the Master by analogy with the Doctor – a Master’s degree is the next qualification down from a doctorate. So I think Letts was having a sly joke with the chosen pseudonym.

2008 University of London Festival of Greek Drama

The University of London’s Festival of Greek Drama has been going on since 1987, and acts as an umbrella for the King’s and UCL Greek plays, as well as lectures and, sometimes, other productions. This year it has afforded the opportunity to see three tragedies in three weeks, representing the three main Athenian tragedians. So I’ve chosen to blog them all in a single entry, rather than separately

Sophocles, Oedipus Tyrannus

2008 King’s Greek Play, Greenwood Theatre

Performance seen: 6 February 2008

I had once evolved a theory that student/youth theatre groups couldn’t really do Greek tragedy (and yes, I know I start every discussion of a student production with this theory). Recent productions of Orestes and Medea have persuaded me that this judgement was in error. I realized that it was based on a couple of dreadful productions of the Oedipus Tyrannos (one of which you can read about here), and a couple of ropey Antigones. Against that, I’ve seen some not-too-bad productions of Trachiniae, and one of Ajax which I recall being okay, though it was nearly thirty years ago and I had little to judge it against at the time. So perhaps it is not even that youngsters can’t do Sophocles, but that they can’t do the Theban plays.

Of course, it’s not just students that this affects. The status of the Oedipus as the recognized foremost example of Attic tragedy means it is the first choice of any theatre company wishing to demonstrate that they can tackle the genre, and therefore where many prove they can’t. Not for nothing did the makers of The Band Wagon choose Oedipus Rex when they wanted to poke fun at the dreariest, most portentous production of a play imaginable.

Unfortunately, the 2008 King’s production does little to convince me to change my mind on this point. It’s not that it’s particularly bad, though there are a couple of elements that I really don’t care for. It more that the individual bits of the staging don’t hang together as a whole, and everyone seems to be in a different production to everyone else.

At one end is Bryan Kitch (Oedipus), who gives a nuanced performance. If he is a little muted at times, that’s at least partly because the rest of the cast give him so little to work with, the one exception being Eleanor Hanham as Jocasta, who, after a bit of gurning, finally hits the right emotional note in the last lines before she leaves the stage. Oedipus and Creon are costumed alike, in silk pyjamas and floor-length tunics that are open at the front and expose a lot of bare chest (so nothing slashy there, then), but the difference in tone between Kitch’s performance and Miles Galaska’s as Creon is quite jarring.

At the other extreme is Simon Willshire, as the Priest. His performance is the sort of amateur dramatics that is often parodied, being all about reciting the lines, but with no investment of emotion in the performance.

Then there’s the Chorus. When they first enter, the people sitting next to me are suppressing their giggles. I was at first annoyed at the gigglers, but after a moment I could see their point. The Chorus here are like a parody of the worst excesses of nineteen-seventies arty theatre workshop formalistic interpretive dance expressionism and Significance, all black-clad, Meaningful Looks and exaggerated Expressive Movements. Only Charlotte Murrie, Deianeira in last year’s Women of Trachis, is memorable. She has sufficient stage presence to always draw one’s attention.

But even the worst Oedipus often has some good ideas. The National Youth Theatre ended with a festal scene, reminding the audience that Oedipus’ banishment lifts Apollo’s curse from Thebes. A UCL production concluded with Oedipus crouched at the front of the stage, but lit from the footlights, so that he cast a far larger shadow on the backdrop than the elders of Thebes, symbolizing the shadow Oedipus’ legacy will cast over Thebes’ future.

Here the neat idea is that every time someone recounts prophecy, they do so in song. That’s certainly an interesting notion. Modern productions always have a problem with the role of music in Greek theatre, because modern musical theatre is not generally associated with tragic themes, unless it’s full-blown opera. So credit to King’s for trying that. But it’s one of a number of ideas that don’t quite come off. Another is casting women as the shepherds - it is a little jarring when the Theban old man is neither aged in appearance nor a man.

On the other hand, the production can’t be blamed for the failure of the stage hangings to collapse as they should have; ending on the distraught Oedipus and cutting the final Chorus is probably the right thing to do (though I doubt King’s are the first to do that); and it’s nice to see surtitles back (even if sometimes moderately lengthy speeches are reduced to a handful of words).

I should emphasize, as I usually do, that I know these are not professional actors and director, so it is unfair to hold them to professional production standards. And I did see this on the first performance, so it may have improved over the next two nights. (And my opinion is not shared by everyone.) But in general, student productions can, and should be, better than this.

Aeschylus, Agamemnon

2008 UCL Classical Play, Bloomsbury Theatre

Performance seen: 12 February 2008

To demonstrate my point, I need look no further than this year’s UCL play. Again I saw this on the first night, but where King’s had yet to form a coherent whole out of disparate parts, UCL hit the ground running. Well, it’s more like a gentle stroll, but at least they know where they’re going.

I’m slightly surprised that UCL have returned to the Agamemnon so soon. Their last, not too bad, staging of it was in 2002, and in between they have only staged one tragedy, Medea. The corpus of Greek drama isn’t that small.

The first thing one notices, as the Chorus enters whilst the audience settles, is that the production is masked. This is a risky strategy, which can come off, but doesn’t always. The UCL Oedipus in 2000 was masked, and that was awful.

But here the masks work. They give anonymity, and uniformity to the Chorus. Members of the Chorus can play the Watchman in the first half, and Agamemnon in the second, and the switch of the cast can be done invisibly in the interval.

I wonder if the masks also allow the cast to leave their own personas behind, and project themselves into their roles more. Certainly, this production is full of good performances. The Chorus enunciate clearly, and perform well. Minor criticisms can be made - Luke Davies as the Watchman may be a bit quiet, Hugh Viney as Agamemnon a bit wooden, and Sam Smullen’s Herald weakest of all (oddly, as he has the most stage experience). But none of these are bad, and on the other hand, there are two staggeringly good performances. Mimi Kroll as an ebullient Clytemnestra has presence that dominates the whole theatre. And Jessica Lazar as Cassandra gives a portrayal largely lacking the sort of psychobabble that mars many interpretations. She does strip down to her underwear, but at least there’s a justification of that in the text.

Which brings me to Jamal Saleh’s new translation. It’s really quite good. The language owes much to Shakespeare and the King James Bible, and manages to be both comprehensible and bring a nobility to what is said. It does tend to be a bit prolix, which emphasizes that Aeschylus’ individual scenes are a somewhat overlong. This, combined with a hesitancy on the part of some cast members in delivering their lines, drags things out rather, so that it took over two hours, including interval, to get through what is not actually a very long play in relative terms. The credit for a script editor suggests that some judicious cutting took place. A little more wouldn’t have gone amiss.

All this - the masks, the Chorus speaking for the most part one at a time, the language, even the net motif on the stage dressing, foreshadowing Agamemnon’s death - shows a production that is very traditional in its approach. It reminds me strongly of Sir Peter Hall’s 1981 version of Tony Harrison’s translation, almost as if it was influenced by that. The Hall/Harrison version was staged before most of the cast and crew were born, but I wonder if they had access to a recording of it.

Very occasionally the traditionalism doesn’t work. Rolling the bodies of Agamemnon and Cassandra out on the ekklema was powerful in Hall’s production, because it was in the centre of the stage - here it’s to the side, and easily missed. But overall, there’s nothing wrong with a traditional approach done well, and that is what we have here. It may not be as good as the Medea of 2006, but it’s clearly better than 90% of student/youth productions, and superior to quite a few more lauded professional productions (such as the NT’s Trojan Women).

Since 2006 UCL’s productions have been under the aegis of a Classical Drama Society. I find myself wondering if such a formalized set-up would benefit King’s. Admittedly, last year’s King’s play, though flawed, was better than UCL’s Acharnians. But King’s has never in my experience delivered anything as good as this or the 2006 Medea.

Euripides, Bacchae

Royal Holloway Classics Students, Jane Holloway Hall

Performance seen: 22 February 2008

At the very least one has to admire the Royal Holloway students’ courage in tackling Bacchae so soon after the memorable Alan Cumming production. Wisely, they don’t take the National Theatre of Scotland version on directly. For a start, the pyrotechnics of the latter are wholly impractical for RHUL.

Instead, they apply a series of solutions that are often diametrically opposite to those taken by John Tiffany. This may or may not be deliberate. For a start, instead of visual stimulation they go for an aural approach, with an effective music score underlying the action.

At the centre of the play is the ambiguous figure of Dionysus, existing in a zone of indeterminate gender. The National Theatre of Scotland dealt with this by casting an androgynous man, and have him act effeminately. RHUL cast an androgynous woman and have her act like a man. This is a splendid performance by Madeleine Taylor, the best thing about this production. She is confident and commands the stage.

Emphasizing Dionysus’ masculinity allows Pentheus to be rather more camp, which at least makes more readily explicable his willingness to dress in women’s clothing. My companion on the night felt that the male members of the cast shouted, whilst the women rushed, suggesting a degree of nervousness, though I myself thought that nobody was actually bad, and Mirjam Frank as Agave conveyed her madness without making it seem laughable.

This is the most ‘cheap-and-cheerful’ of the three productions. Royal Holloway do not have the same tradition of mounting Greek plays, and where King’s and UCL play in mostly full theatres, RHUL has a half-empty sports hall. That the hall was half-empty is a shame.

It sounds patronizing to say that this has the feel of a school play, but what I mean by that is the sense of enthusiasm undimmed by a recognition on the players’ part that they aren’t the most professional cast in the world. It would be fair to say that this is quite a conservative production, with the cast in Grecian dress, and a three-person Chorus that stands and recites rather than moves. But there’s nothing wrong with a conservative production done well, as this is. If the humour of the play is rather lost, the deus ex machina is not marred, as Cumming’s was, by divine petulance (and RHUL recognize that Dionysus in his full godhood requires a costume change). This wasn’t the best production of Euripides that I’ve seen, but at least I didn’t come out thinking ‘What was the point of that?’

Arthur C Clarke Award 2008

This is off my usual topic, but I feel entitled sometimes to talk about sf criticism here.

The shortlist for the 2008 Arthur C. Clarke shortlist is out. This is usually a sign for collective knicker-twisting by the British sf community, and this year is no exception.

What is interesting is that this year, the controversy is as much about the Administrator's statements to the press as about the choice of novels. Here are a couple of statements from the Awards website that haven't gone down well:

Featuring visions as diverse as a dystopian Cumbria and a future Hackney, time-travel adventures in 1960’s Liverpool and an alternate world British Isles in the throes of terrorist attack, through to tech-noir thrillers and a trawl through subconscious worlds where memories fall prey to metaphysical sharks, the Clarke Award has never been so close to home and relevant to the British literary scene.

and

The Clarke Award has always been about pushing at the speculative edges of its genre. It’s one possible map amongst many, never the whole territory, and this year’s shortlist stands as both the perfect introduction to the state of modern science fiction writing as well as a first tantalising glimpse of possible futures to come.

Over on SF Crowsnest, he says:

In many ways the Award isn't so much about picking the 'best' book of the year (although we are still very good at that too) and is more about pushing at the edges of our genre.

Taken together, this has generated a lot of comments, complaining about the rejection of looking for the 'best' sf novel (though the front page of the website still said until this morning that it was for the best book, and I don't think the jury have turned their back on that), that pushing the boundaries of the genre wasn't what was understood to be part of their remit, that the emphasis on Britishness is insular.

The thing is, I think there's confusion here. It's easy to assume, that because Hunter is the Administrator of the Award, that these are the criteria that have been set for the jury, or that the jury have set for themselves. I don't think that's the case. As I understand it, the Administrator's job is to handle the paperwork for the award, including press releases. I don't think it's part of the role to set narrow criteria for the jury, beyond the obvious (published in Britain in the preceding calendar year, submitted by the publisher for the award). And what the jury decide amongst themselves is meant to be confidential - so I don't think we can assume that Hunter is passing such information on. In the end, I read Hunter's comments as his personal views, rather than official ACCA policy - they are a reaction to the shortlist, not an explanation for it.

So, the comment on the Britishness of the novels should not be taken as meaning that novels not set in the UK were automatically rejected. Rather, it's Hunter trying to find something that ties the novels together in order to make them an attractive package.

And the remarks about genre-pushing are merely putting into words what everyone has always assumed was the Hidden Agenda of the Clarke Award anyway. It is true that the juries have never felt themselves constrained by what is published as science fiction (though that they deliberately avoid works that are published as sf is a canard disproved by study of the shortlists over the years). And it is also true that members of the sf community have been complaining about this since the Award began (except last year, when people complained about mainstream books that were left off).

And there's another point. People always talk about the Clarke juries as if they are somehow Outside the Community, as if people that we otherwise consider sensible upstanding sf fans degenerate into demented maniacs the moment that they go into that jury room. I think they deserve a bit more respect than that.

As for the shortlist itself, I've known (but have had to keep secret) what was on the list for a few weeks now, as I'm on this year's Not the Clarke Award panel at Eastercon, so maybe I've had a bit more time to consider the whole thing. Certainly, when I saw the list, I was gobsmacked by the absence of Ian McDonald's Brasyl. And there are three novels there which I simply hadn't heard of. But such is always the way with the Clarke. And I assume that the jury had their reasons.

Oh, and of the two novels I've read so far, the MacLeod is glorious, constantly reinventing itself as it goes on. And whilst there has been a bit of fuss about the YA label applied to the Baxter, this seems to be obscuring the fact that it's better than anything else I've read of his since Voyage.

I'll have more to say about this at Eastercon.

The Greek Myths

Last month left-of-centre broadsheet The Guardian issued a series of booklets retelling the Greek myths. These were written by James Davidson, author of the much-fêted The Greeks and Greek Love. I don’t get the paper regularly (for economic, rather than ideological reasons). But friends do, and I collected a full set a couple of weekends ago, and read them all on the train. You don’t need to do this, as they are online here.

It’s a slightly curious collection. For a start, Davidson has an individual prose style, often ready to abandon the tones of academe. Sometimes this works and is funny: ‘Deianeira wondered what it was about her that monstrous creatures found so attractive’ (No. 3: Thebes, p. 18). On other occasions, such as when Helen, reunited with Menelaus, says ‘Tell me, how are the children?’ (No. 5: The Trojan War, p. 22), it’s just a bit banal.

But it’s his choice of myths to retell that most had me raising my eyebrows. True, Davidson only has ninety pages for a topic that could easily fill out a book-length study (and often has), so some selectivity is inevitable. I’m not surprised that Bellerophon is gone completely, the only exploit of Theseus is that with the Minotaur, Achilles’ concealment amongst the women of Scyrus is overlooked, and there’s no place for more than a brief allusion to any homecoming from Troy other than that of Odysseus.

But it does seem odd that all reference to Jason’s father Aeson, and the usurpation of his kingdom by his brother Pelias, is gone. Removing this requires Davidson to devote space to another motivation for Pelias’ murder, one different from that most commonly known (and one I have as yet not tracked down in my mythology text books, though I’m sure Davidson has an authentic source). Why not keep the version familiar through the likes of the 1963 film?

When it comes to No. 5: The Trojan War, ‘odd’ no longer seems adequate. In Davidson’s version, the Iliad is missing. There is not a word about the wrath of Achilles, his dispute with Agamemnon, or about Patroclus. Hector’s death is there, but not the immediate lead up to it or the ransoming of his body. In the Iliad’s place is a tale of Achilles’ lust for Troilus, drawn from late Latin sources. It’s almost as if Davidson is deliberately choosing little-known variants. That may help him set his own stamp on the stories, but may not have been in the mind of whoever in The Guardian commissioned the booklets.

The danger in such a work as this, as Mary Beard noted when reviewing Nigel Spivey’s Songs on Bronze, is that it creates the impression that the way the stories are presented in the work concerned is in some way canonical, and the ‘true’ version, something which, in Beard’s words, ‘amounts to reconstructing a narrative which never really existed, directly against the grain of the mythic culture of Greece’. A common question students in myth courses ask, when presented with variant accounts, is ‘which one is right?’ It takes a long time to get to grips with the idea that, as Beard notes in her introduction to No. 6: The Odyssey, these are constantly evolving stories, and no one version should take precedence over the others.

So it’s particularly odd that what is ostensibly an introduction to Greek mythology (though some of it us possibly actually Roman - for instance, there’s a strong case for saying that the legends of Echo and Narcissus were first linked by Ovid) should choose in some places such outré versions. There are plenty of forewords by luminaries such as Michael Wood or Neil MacGregor, but what is missing is an afterword where Davidson explains his rationale. Some of it is obvious - Eros is a driving force throughout the stories Davidson chooses, and no doubt the chapter on Achilles from The Greeks and Greek Love will shine light on his motivation for selecting Troilus - but some of it remains obscure.

I don’t want to come across as being too negative about this. Anything that gets people reading Greek mythology is good, and it’s an interesting idea for the Guardian to do this. I just find it curious in its selection.

Katie Mitchell's Trojan Women

Euripides, Women of Troy

National Theatre
Performance seen: 12th January 2008

Katie Mitchell's new production of Don Taylor's version of Women of Troy (I avoid the term 'translation', as Taylor did not work from the original Greek) has received a number of very favourable reviews (e.g. in The Independent, Time Out, and the Evening Standard). So why didn't I like it?

The production begins with the Chorus (all given individual names in the programme) already on stage. Immediately the prologue, featuring Poseidon and Athena (a rare case of a deus ex machina at the beginning of a play), is cut. I wasn't too surprised by this - Michael Cacoyannis' film version does it, and modern productions can be uncomfortable with actually seeing the gods. But it changes the tone of the piece. Euripides' play is a warning against hubris - the destruction the Greeks have visited upon Troy will be visited on them in turn. This was an important subject of debate in fifth century Athens - Thucydides says the same in the context of the fate of the island of Melos in 416 BC, the event that is often thought to be the allegorical inspiration for Euripides' play. Removing the prologue makes the play an examination of the fate of women in a defeated city, with the Trojan women as victims whose abusers have no signalled comeuppance.

That's not where my problem comes, though. The women are in 1930s ballgowns, looking for all the world as if Hercule Poirot is about to summon them and expose the murderer. I don't have an issue with such modern dress productions, and putting aside the Balkans/Afghanistan/Iraq contemporary war setting that is often found in modern productions of Greek tragedy is refreshing. But these people have had their city and families destroyed around them, so I would expect that the ballgowns would at least be ripped and dirty. But, whilst a couple of the Chorus have bruised arms, their ballgowns are pristine, their make-up perfect, not a hair out of place. This undercuts the play's horror - I felt that, even in the pyrotechnic destruction of the set at the end, Mitchell's production never quite conveys the calamity that has happened to its subjects. As Michael Billington notes in The Guardian, there's something missing from the emotional landscape of the production - only towards the end did I feel it starts to connect with the heart of the text.

I agree with Billington that the words are key. So it is a shame that the dialogue is often difficult to hear. The cast don't project as well as they might, and they have to compete with a constant low hum that is meant to represent the sounds of the docks where the production is set. The action takes place inside a two-level warehouse. The Chorus are at stage level, but above are the offices where Helen is imprisoned. She is constantly seen prowling to and fro, a device which keeps her in mind, but it often distracting.

Though I can be enthusiastic for Anastasia Hille's Andromache, who shows the appropriate level of panic, I'm much less so about some of the other performances. Kate Duchêne's Hecuba seems anodyne in comparison to, say, Katherine Hepburn in Caccoyanis' version. Talthybius' role is split between two actors, both of whom seem quite muted.

And then there's Sinead Matthews as Cassandra. I generally find depictions of Cassandra unsatisfactory. I think this is because so often they try to explain the character in terms of modern psychoanalysis, and I don't think Cassandra's madness can be explained that way. She is insane because she is cursed by Apollo, so that she sees the future clearly, but cannot get anyone to believe her. Reading that through a diagnosis of 'manic depression' doesn't always help. Matthews is hampered by having to compete with shouting and fire alarms, but even so she could be clearer. And I knew almost immediately that she would demonstrate her madness by ripping all her clothes off (similarly, I was not surprised when Helen ended up in nothing but her knickers).

There's also one oddity. Before each choral ode, there is dancing, which beings with muted music, before being overwhelmed by the sounds of the Jazz Age. For me, this device (which Mitchell apparently also used in her production of Iphigeneia at Aulis) just doesn't work (see the review in The Stage, which characterizes these as a distraction). When most of the production is so naturalistic, impressionist moments like this are confusing (and if the production is prepared to embrace impressionism, why ditch the gods?). Further confusion is added when departed characters such as Cassandra and Andromache come back on stage, though I can see the point of reintroducing Menelaus and Helen, to underline the assumption of most productions that Helen will seduce her husband and escape punishment (though the very best production I ever saw, that of Andrei Serban in 1992, concluded Helen's scene with her being stripped, raped by a bear and executed).

This is far from being the worst production of a Greek tragedy that I've ever seen, but it is one of the weaker versions of Trojan Women. But perhaps I want something different to everyone else when I see a Greek tragedy. And this didn't deliver it.

Women of Troy is on until 27th February.

Seduced

I went to the Barbican's exhibition Seduced: Art and Sex from Antiquity to Now. I went primarily to see the Graeco-Roman stuff. Actually, there wasn't that much in this section that was new to me, but then I've seen this sort of thing before. And I regret the absence of the funniest Roman erotica I've seen - oil-lamps in the shape of a satyr, where you light the end of the penis.

Although I would have laid out the sleeping hermaphrodite so that it was approached from behind, making the male genitalia a surprise, the exhibition makes good use of the space available. The only thing I could complain about would be the reconstructions of the secret cabinets from Victorian museums. Not only were these dimly lit, making the labels hard to read, but in one most of the objects were described as 'undated'. Fair enough, they can't be tied down to a precise century, but they could at least have said what culture (e.g. 'Roman') they came from.

As for the rest, there were amusing bits, such as the surrealist happening organized by Jean-Jacques Lebel, which involved two models being spanked to 'La Marseillaise' (and I may never look at a leek the same again). I was interested to find a Renaissance painting of Minerva, Lavinia Fontana's Minerva in the Act of Dressing. This is the only example I can immediately think of where this particular goddess is used in an erotic image.

There were signs warning that the room you were about to enter contained images of sexual activity, which we mocked. But then I did find the Mapplethorpe photographs disturbing - not so much the photo with a bullwhip up his bottom (do not click if you are disturbed by such images), but one of a clamped and bleeding penis. I don't particularly like Jeff Koons' erotic work, most of which seems to be an excuse for him to be photographed having sex with an Italian porn star, but his work can't be excluded from an exhibition like this. And I was delighted to find that, when bored with landscapes, J.M.W. Turner would dash off some porn.

Seduced is on until January 27th.

Changing one's mind

Happy 2008 to anyone still actually reading this. I realize it's been over a month since I last posted here. If I was the sort of person who made New Year's resolutions, then I'd probably promise to make more posts this year. But don't hold your breath.

I got pointed to a webpage where 165 people were asked the question, "What have you changed your mind about? Why?" The contributors are mostly scientists of one description or another, though there's a piece by James O'Donnell that explains why he no longer cheers for the Romans, which I recommend. Reading all the contributions, I found myself thinking about what I've changed my mind about over the years. I certainly believe that the ability to change one's mind in the face of new evidence, or new interpretations of old evidence, is an important characteristic of an honest thinker.

Like O'Donnell, I have changed my mind about the Romans, and especially about the Empire. Once I believed that Augustus was a great man, who rescued Roman civilization from the chaos of the Late Republic, but no longer. Certainly I still believe that he was a highly effective ruler in terms of what he sought to achieve, and for some people life was better after he came to power - provincials undoubtedly appreciated the end of the licensed extortion and asset-stripping that characterized most provincial administration under the Late Republic. But it shouldn't be forgotten that what Augustus introduced was a military dictatorship, an inherently corrupt form of government. The likes of Caligula, Nero and Commodus were inevitable products of the system, not aberrations. And all emperors, even the 'good' ones like Augustus and Trajan, curtailed individual rights and suppressed, often ruthlessly, freedom of thought and expression. Just ask Ovid.

What else? There was certainly a time when, had you told me that there was a difference between sex and gender, I'd have looked at you as if you were mad. But then I didn't know any people who had refused to allow the sex they were born into to determine how they would behave. This year I wrote a short paper for my students explaining exactly why the two aren't identical, and why biological sex doesn't necessarily dictate gender roles (in which I used Ovid's myth of Iphis and Ianthe, just before I found out that Ali Smith had written a Canongate Myth volume around the same legend); that paper is now going to be available to all the students on the course throughout the country.

One thing I've really come to comprehend better this year, and emphasize more to students, is that there's no such thing as 'Roman attitudes'. Where once I would happily have said 'the Romans believed ...', and at the most pointed out that this meant élite male Romans, now I underline that one would have been every bit as likely to find a range of different opinions if one conducted a straw poll in the Roman Forum as if one did the same on Oxford Street. Take, for instance, Roman attitudes to sex. The HBO/BBC Rome series (of which I got the complete boxed set for Christmas, which means I really ought to get around to watching it some time) presented a Roman society in which people were happily having sex all the time. Just before the series aired Tom Holland wrote in The Times criticizing this - the Romans weren't so liberal at all, but rather prudish. I blogged that at the time, saying that I thought Holland overstated and oversimplified the case, and pointing to Ovid as an example of a different attitude to sex (basically, in the Amores and Ars Amatoria, the message is if the opportunity comes along, take it, and here's how one maximizes those opportunities). Holland's not wrong to say that Romans held the opinions he ascribes to them. What is wrong is the implication that this is how all Romans thought. Ovid and Cicero did not think the same about sex, anymore than Juvenal and Hadrian thought the same about Greeks. All one can do is point to general trends of thought, whilst highlighting that these were not universal. Which is actually quite liberating for a teacher - asked to reconcile two apparently contradictory attitudes found in ancient writers, one can simply respond "those two people didn't think the same on the subject."

But sometimes you have to rethink those prevailing opinions. For about a decade, I have believed, and been telling people, that in the ancient world sex was not generally considered a participatory act between equals, but something done by the powerful to the powerless, e.g. men to women, adults to younger men, free men to slaves. With a single article, James Davidson has blown that out of the water. The key quotation is "the ancient Greeks talked of sex not as an act of aggression, but rather as a 'conjoining' or 'commingling'". That sent me to the dictionaries, and indeed, one common, perhaps the most common, Greek word for sexual activity is συμμείγνυμι (summeignumi). The sun- prefix definitely implies doing something in equal co-operation with someone else, as does the fact that the common form is in the middle voice, rather than the active (doing something) or passive (having something done to one). This immediately put Davidson's book, The Greeks And Greek Love on the list of books I must read soon. So far I've got no further than an introductory "Note on transcription and pronunciation" (which features one brilliant comment: "Anxious readers may be comforted by the fact that pronouncing ancient Greek properly is extremely difficult, so nobody ever bothers"), but I am looking forward to it (there's a favourable review by Oliver Taplin in The Guardian).* I may not be wholly prepared to give up the idea that sex was sometimes in the ancient world an expression of power - after all, it remains so often enough today. But I can no longer say that the Greeks had no concept of sex as an act of equals, since such a concept was hardwired into their language.

You may now all speculate why most of the examples I've used relate to sex.

* I have to take issue with Taplin on one point. Criticizing Davidson's reading of a homosexual affair into Homer's portrayal of Achilles and Patroclus, he says, "there is no call to bring sex into it; and to do so Davidson has to turn a blind eye to the night in book nine where they both bed down with women." Taplin may be right about the first point - there's certainly nothing explicit in the Iliad - but, as I wrote in a piece for CA News back in 2005, their sleeping with women is irrelevant unless one assumes that heterosexual activity a priori rules out the same individuals engaging in homosexual relations. Whilst conservative thinkers have believed, and still do believe this, an open-minded glance at the history of human sexuality quickly shows that it's nonsense.