On A Kiss Before Dying, complexities of book-to-film adaptation, and the world of noir

I’ve been thinking about books, especially in the crime and suspense genres, which are highly resistant to being filmed – or at least resistant to being filmed faithfully. In other words, it may be possible to turn the basic plot into an excellent movie, but the nature and method of its suspense would be unlike that of the book, because of fundamental differences between literature and cinema.

Consider one of the best crime novels I know of: Ira Levin’s A Kiss Before Dying, which was filmed twice in America (in 1956 and 1991) and loosely adapted by Bollywood for Shahrukh Khan’s star-making Baazigar. In each case, the film had to make significant departures from the source material; to understand why, here’s a plot outline of Levin’s novel.

(Note: no major spoilers – most of what I’m about to reveal is contained in the first dozen or so pages, and I’m not giving away the central twist.)

A young man, a gold-digger, has been romancing a girl named Dorothy, the daughter of a rich entrepreneur. For reasons I won’t get into here, he decides to kill her, and the first third of the book (approx. 90 pages) is about the carrying out of his scheme. Throughout this segment, we are privy to the furious ticking of his mind – his anxiety when things don’t go as planned, his careful anticipation of glitches, even his self-congratulatory smugness. The narrative is in the third person, but we are as close to his inner state as it’s possible to get; the writing is so taut and intense that even as the reader condemns him morally, it’s hard not to feel personally invested – even implicated – in his actions.

But here’s the rub: we only get a bare-bones description of this man (he’s blond, blue-eyed, very handsome), and most crucially we never learn his name. He is referred to simply as “he”, and though that might sound forced or gimmicky, it works here because Levin so masterfully ties us to his protagonist’s consciousness. (After the first few pages, “he” becomes as precise a pronoun as “I” would be in a first-person narrative; the word can only possibly refer to one person. Some readers might not even realise that they don’t know “his” name until quite late in the story.)

Levin’s reasons for doing this become apparent in the next part of the book, as Dorothy’s sister Ellen starts making private enquiries about the men her sister may have been involved with at the time of her death. She encounters a few of them, and of course she learns their names. But the reader is flummoxed: we are now seeing things through Ellen’s eyes and it’s possible that the killer is one of the men she meets, but we have no way of knowing who it is. Because of the shift in perspective, the person we knew so intimately in the first section of the book is now a stranger to us.

This, then, is the set-up for the novel’s major twist. Like all of Levin’s books, A Kiss Before Dying is made up of several ingeniously constructed moments of suspense – but the revelation of the killer’s identity is the pièce de résistance. 

Given this summary, I’m sure you can see why A Kiss Before Dying is so difficult to film exactly as it was written. A movie (at least a movie that uses a conventional narrative structure**) would have to show us the murderer’s face right at the beginning – which means that when Ellen begins sleuthing, the viewer wouldn’t be in the dark about his identity. The film would have to generate suspense using other methods, perhaps by changing the story’s focus or chronology, or by keeping us initially uncertain about the man’s intentions. (The book dives straight into his psyche by opening on this classic pulp-fiction note: “His plans had been running so beautifully, so goddamned beautifully, and now she was going to smash them all. Hate erupted and flooded through him...”)

I wrote in this post about another Levin book I love, The Boys From Brazil. His best work creates an almost tangible sense of paranoia, which transcends conventional ideas about “suspense” writing. I can read The Boys From Brazil and A Kiss Before Dying over and over and discover something new each time, long after their major plot secrets have been revealed; these books are lessons in how to construct a story by putting together little details, and I think any budding writer – even one with “literary” rather than “genre” aspirations – can learn from them.

But there’s something else to be said about A Kiss Before Dying: in addition to being an excellent suspense novel, this is also a fine entry in the tradition of American noir literature of the 1930s, 40s and 50s.

One of the essential themes of noir is the discontent that can lead people into a life of crime – the gnawing sense that the world is an inherently unjust place and that there’s a better life to be had, if only you can reach out and seize the moment. (Eventually, of course, even minor transgressions lead into mazes and cul de sacs, and the best-laid plans unravel.) The killer in A Kiss Before Dying is first and foremost a social menace and an opportunist, but he is also a small-town lad obsessed with a giant copper-manufacturing corporation that is making much more money than it knows what to do with – and there is a sense in which his story can be read as subtle social commentary.

This makes an interesting contrast with the Shah Rukh Khan character Ajay in Baazigar. Such were the imperatives of mainstream Hindi cinema in the early 1990s that this psychotic “hero” had to be given an elaborate back-story to partly justify his murderous acts. (As a boy, he watched his family being driven to ruin by the businessman whose daughters he now targets. As an adult, he earns a quasi-heroic death scene in his adoring mother’s arms; any Hindi-movie leading man who passes thus can automatically be considered redeemed on some level.) The protagonist of A Kiss Before Dying doesn’t have a dramatic revenge motive of this sort, and there is no attempt to turn him into a sympathetic character – but Levin does permit the reader to think about the personal circumstances and ambitions of an intelligent young boy from a family that’s struggling to make ends meet; a boy who has little interest in the mundane jobs he has to hold down, and who comes to believe that he deserves better. Where might his sense of the unfairness of things lead him? It's a classic noir question.

Where the dragon bears down on the lambs

Martin Amis once wrote with admiration about another fine practitioner of popular fiction, Thomas Harris – specifically about Harris’s first two Hannibal Lecter novels, Red Dragon and The Silence of the Lambs: “Lecters I and II are thrillers, procedurals of pain and panic, and they involve the reader in various simplifications and unrealities. But Harris maintains human decorum too. His prose is hard and sober and decently sad as he takes us to the place where the dragon bears down on the lambs.”

That last sentence applies to parts of A Kiss Before Dying too. There are moments of unexpected poignancy here: in a casual description of the things packed by a giddily romantic, gullible young woman for a honeymoon she will never go on; or in the betrayal felt by another lady, a loner, who discovers that her emotions have been toyed with. Even some of the throwaway passages are revealing: when a girl, a side-character, ends a mostly subdued letter to a murder victim’s father with a frivolous reference to the current fashion trends in her college, we get a glimpse into the inner world of a student who wants desperately to fit in.

Levin was just 23 years old when he wrote A Kiss Before Dying. This is credible if you look at the confidence and audacity of the book’s structure, and the many risks he takes; only a (very precocious) young writer with nothing to lose would try some of the things he does here. But when you consider the real feeling expressed here for the lonely-hearts and misfits who make up the victims (and occasionally the wrongdoers) of the noir world, it’s staggering to think that this book could come from such a young person. At 23, even as he wrote a bloody good page-turner where our point of identification is largely with the killer, he also found a way to evoke sympathy for the lambs that get preyed on by dragons.

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** One avant-garde approach to filming the first section of A Kiss Before Dying would be to let the killer’s eyes be the camera – so that we see everything from his viewpoint and never get to see his face at all. Something like this was done in the 1940s Hollywood film Lady in the Lake, but needless to say it’s a gimmicky technique, and if it isn’t well-executed it can easily become laughable or just monotonous.

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Important note: if you plan to read A Kiss Before Dying, do avoid reading about it on Wikipedia or even the plot summaries on Amazon.com – some of these rather foolishly give the killer’s name away. And if you do buy it, I'd recommend this lovely-looking Pegasus edition, available on Flipkart.

[Some related posts: Noir's arc - an anthology of American noir writing; Levin’s The Boys From Brazil; Thomas Harris, monster-maker]

More opening credits: Jaal, Chhupa Rustam and Bombay Talkie

(A follow up to this post)

I had a memory of seeing the 1986 film Jaal in a movie hall, probably Green Park's Uphaar: it was a standard-issue potboiler starring Rekha, Mithun Chakraborty and (surprise surprise) Jeetendra in yet another Special Appearance. But what I didn’t remember – until reader Ahmad Tookhi brought it to my attention – were the opening credits of that film. I won't go so far as to say this sequence represents the acme of creativity and artistic ambition in 1980s Bollywood, but it comes close enough. Watch for yourself (it goes on till the 3.40 mark).

Vinod Mehra was a dependable actor at most times, but I think he deserved a special Filmfare Award just for keeping a straight face during these scenes. What must it feel like to see “Colour Consultant”, “Dress Designers” and “Makeup” neatly printed on a door that’s just been slammed in your face? I also enjoy the way he subtly draws the curtain aside so that “Anand Bakshi” is fully visible, and how he appears to have a breakdown on seeing “Annu Malik” written on the wall. (And I wonder how Tanuja felt about having her name written on the road and then coolly stomped on.)

But here’s another inventive title sequence, from Vijay Anand’s 1973 film Chhupa Rustam. (The “money shot” begins a little after the 5-minute mark.)

Have to admit, this is a one-note concept compared to Jaal. Besides, watching it made me dizzy. (It also made me think of Dev Anand’s train reminiscences, as described here.)

Finally, on a less corny note, here's the video of one of my favourite title sequences ever – the beautiful opening of Merchant-Ivory’s Bombay Talkie. Do keep the volume turned up; Shanker-Jaikishan’s music is ethereal.

(I wrote about the sequence, and the film, in this old post, but the video wasn’t online back then.)

How Richard Dawkins might explain a tennis coincidence

[Did this for my Sunday Guardian books column]

“Look into a mirror for a lifetime,” said the poet-filmmaker Jean Cocteau, “and you see Death doing its work.” Having watched nearly half of the eleven-hour match that John Isner and Nicolas Mahut contrived to play at Wimbledon last year, I’d say no mirror is necessary.

If you follow tennis, even casually, you may have heard about the gasps of astonishment at the Wimbledon draw ceremony last week when Isner and Mahut were again drawn to play each other in the first round. This has opened the conspiracy-theory floodgates. Their 2010 match, soul-annihilating though it was, probably got more media coverage and public attention (especially outside sporting circles) than any Slam final. “Arranging” a sequel could be good for ticket sales – so was the draw rigged?

Personally I doubt it: the draw process is a transparent one and the ceremony very public. But the rhetorical question “What are the chances of such a thing happening just randomly?” continues to be asked by tennis fans everywhere – the implication being that this couldn’t have been a coincidence; that organisational (or occult) forces had to be at work.

Actually, the odds aren’t close to astronomical. I won’t bore you with the calculations, but keeping in mind that Isner and Mahut were both among 96 unseeded players, the chance that they would play each other works out to something like 1 in 140, or 0.7 percent. Improbable, yes, but hardly mind-boggling as these things go. Even if you calculate the chance of their meeting in the first round in successive years, you don’t get wildly unlikely numbers. (In fact, the coincidence of the same two players meeting in the 1st round in consecutive Wimbledons has occurred eight times since 1970.)

My favourite writings on the phenomenon of coincidences and how the human mind can get excessively excited about them are in Richard Dawkins’ Unweaving the Rainbow, specifically in the chapters "Hoodwink'd with Faery Fancy" and "Unweaving the Uncanny". Dawkins begins with a simple enough incident: a four-digit personal code number issued to him by his college was exactly the same as the safety code he had just chosen for his bicycle lock. The probability of this happening is 1 in 10,000 – seemingly very large odds – but as he points out, “the number of people in the world is so large compared with 10,000 that somebody, at this very moment, is bound to be experiencing a coincidence at least as startling as mine. It just happens that today was my day to notice such a coincidence.”

Each ordinary day that you or I live through is an unbroken sequence or events, or incidents, any of which is potentially a coincidence. I am now looking at a picture on my wall of a deep-sea fish with a fascinatingly alien face. It is possible that at this very moment, the telephone will ring and the caller will identify himself as a Mr Fish. I'm waiting...

On another occasion his wife bought an antique watch as a gift for her mother, then discovered that the watch had her mother’s initials – “M.A.B.” – engraved on the back. Many people I know, if faced with this situation, would hasten to invoke supernatural causes (presumably because the invisible pink unicorn in the sky has nothing better to do with Her time than spring pleasant little surprises on randomly selected homosapiens), but Dawkins takes out the phone book, checks the frequency of names beginning with M, A and B and then sets about his calculations. It turns out that if each of the 55 million people in Britain bought an engraved watch, we could expect nearly 20,000 of them to experience a coincidence of this magnitude.

Much heft is added to Dawkins' argument by the concept of the PETWHAC (Population of Events That Would Have Appeared Coincidental), a term he coins to show how the pattern-seeking mind can make coincidences appear even more remarkable than they are. (If his wife had discovered the initials of her mother’s maiden name on the watch, or her own initials for that matter, it would have seemed just as impressive – but it would also mean a broadening of the PETWHAC, which would further increase the probability of a coincidence.) Public “mystics” and “psychics” dine out on this sort of gullibility and pattern-seeking all the time.

(More about the PETWHAC here)

Incidentally the title Unweaving the Rainbow comes from John Keats’ observation that science had destroyed the beauty of the rainbow by “explaining” its colours. Dawkins’ response is that the natural world as revealed by scientific understanding can be beautiful and awe-inspiring. “Disarming apparently uncanny coincidences is more interesting than gasping over them,” he says. Whether or not you agree with him, I’d say analysing mathematical probabilities is much more interesting than watching another Isner-Mahut match. Even if you hate maths.

[Here's an old post on Dawkins' Climbing Mount Improbable. And a little more about Unweaving the Rainbow in the postscript of this post.]

Update: Just realised that the Serious Men post I linked to above was written on this day exactly a year ago - now there's another good coincidence for you! (And I swear it wasn't planned.)

Outside of a dog...

A shout-out (or woof-out) for How Cheeka Became a Star and Other Dog Stories, which is the first publication in Natraj’s Wagging Tales series. This is an extremely well-produced and designed book, full of nice illustrations, cartoons and dog-related trivia. The contributors include a few professional writers/journalists like Ruskin Bond**, Pavan Varma and Jug Suraiya, but also people from other fields such as actress Gul Panag and Jay Panda – most of whom have this in common: their lives were, at some point, taken over by a canine friend, sibling or child. The result is a varied (if slightly random) collection of short pieces ranging from full-fledged reminiscences to enjoyable trifles like Maneka Gandhi’s "Why do Dogs Go to Heaven?"

The book’s title comes from advertising executive Sneha Iype Varma’s account of how the Vodafone pug became a household name. I felt ambivalent about that one, given how the pug craze led to a surfeit of irresponsible impulse buying by that hideous breed of humans who are prone to abandoning pets. But the more personal stories here – such as Nafisa Ali Sodhi’s “Born Again” and Shirin Merchant’s “Price of a Life” – should be of interest to most animal lovers. Personally, I could relate to Dhiraj Nayyar's Editor's Note about his tentative steps into the world of dog-dom, since I wasn't quite a "dog person" myself - in the sense of having developed a really close bond with any one dog - until three years ago. But since then...

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** Ruskin Bond’s story is the one he wrote for the Tehelka Excess special that I co-edited in 2008

Speech therapy and love in The Lost and Forgotten Languages of Shanghai

[Did a version of this review for Biblio]

In a typically candid piece for Vanity Fair magazine recently, Christopher Hitchens reflected on one of the most painful aspects of his bout with cancer: the deterioration of his vocal chords. “Deprivation of the ability to speak is like the amputation of part of the personality,” wrote the man who has been among the smoothest, most eloquent public speakers of his generation:

To a great degree, in public and private, I “was” my voice. All the rituals and etiquette of conversation, from clearing the throat in preparation for the telling of an extremely long and taxing joke to trying to make my proposals more persuasive as I sank the tone by a strategic octave of shame, were innate and essential to me.

Ruiyan Xu’s novel The Lost and Forgotten Languages of Shanghai centres on a similar loss. The victim, Li Jing, isn’t a public figure like Hitchens, but he’s a smooth-talking businessman whose professional success depends on his ability to influence clients. Understandably, then, his world turns on its head when a freak accident – caused by a gas-pipe explosion in a hotel – leaves him with a peculiar form of aphasia where he can no longer speak in Chinese. Li Jing can still talk with near-fluency in English (which was his first language because he had lived in America until the age of 10), but that’s small comfort – the continuation of a meaningful relationship with his wife Meiling depends on his being able to converse in his native tongue.

Without this ability the two of them are, for all practical purposes, strangers, stealing glances at each other from across a room, wondering if they ever knew each other at all. (Not being able to say her name right feels like the worst betrayal, as if his stupid brain is determined to elide her from his syntax, from his memory. As if she isn’t his to hold on to anymore.)

Enter Rosalyn Neal, an American neurologist brought to Shanghai on an eight-week fellowship to help Li Jing get back to normal. Rosalyn has demons of her own – she recently underwent a painful separation from her husband – and travelling to a new country is an escape from the haze that her life has become. However, she finds the going less than easy in Shanghai. (The foreign city and the exotic patient had only been abstractions before, but now they are real and waiting, with their own thorny demands.) With much at stake in her patient’s professional and personal life, she is expected to be a miracle worker, but the depressed Li Jing has retreated into a world of silence. Nor do Rosalyn’s expressions of frustration and short bursts of temper go down well with people from a less emotionally demonstrative culture. Soon she comes to resent both Shanghai and Li Jing for shutting her out.

But at the same time, the introduction of Rosalyn energises the novel and brings its themes into clearer relief. When she does make her breakthrough with Li Jing, there’s a ring of deus ex machina about the situation – it’s a little too neat and contrived – but it leads to personal liberation for both of them. For Rosalyn, the breakthrough coincides with her discovery of the expat community in Shanghai and the formation of a new circle of friends. One senses that, like Li Jing, she had become withdrawn – that she needed to open up and reach out to others instead of feeling sorry for herself. And soon we see the parallels between their situations: here are two people who are – in different ways – trapped in a strange world, with little means of communicating with others. This prepares us for the turn that their relationship will eventually take.

Meanwhile, circumstances have forced Meiling – a books editor – to enter the corporate world in an attempt to salvage her husband’s now-headless company. She handles this responsibility with composure, but soon she must also deal with the unusual intimacy that seems to be forming between Li Jing and the American woman – an intimacy that she herself is partly responsible for, since she insisted on Rosalyn extending her stay in Shanghai and moving into their house.

The narrative now starts to move between these three people, so that we come to understand their separate fears and insecurities, and the hold that memory has on each of them. Their dilemmas are all moving in their own ways: particularly compelling are Li Jing’s recollections of coming to China for the first time as a child with the American name James, struggling to adjust to the new setting and the new language – and his shifting relationship with Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, which he had loved as a boy and could barely recognise as an adult. But near the end of the book, a subtle change also occurs in our perceptions of the two women. Rosalyn, who in some ways was our entry point into the story as well as its putative hero, becomes less sympathetic – perhaps a little too hedonistic and self-absorbed – while Meiling, who has been a distant figure, slowly grows in stature. Her recollections of the early stages of her relationship with Li Jing are revealing and help make her a more accessible, sympathetic figure.

He was the gregarious one at the centre of their social group ... How he seduced her was with words ... Conversations accumulated between the two of them until one day she discovered that his words had built an entirely private universe between their two bodies.

****

Stylistically, The Lost and Forgotten Languages of Shanghai doesn’t begin on a promising note. Xu’s writing is initially strained and over-descriptive, with jerky sentences and awkward phrasing (all he wants is just to find a way out). I thought her account of the hotel’s collapse was exasperatingly florid.

The ground shifting like a pre-historic animal. Fire in the kitchen stretching out its wings, flapping, frantic. Fissures mutate in the walls, mapping out an eventual collapse [...] On the facade the metallic swans glare through the smoke, their bodies adrift, desperate to hold on. One of them loosens its hold on the other, breaking the heart in between their necks, swinging its body downward with reckless velocity and swinging back the other way, its upside-down head like the pendulum of a clock, swerving through a wide arc just above the doorway.

This sort of detail might be understandable in a disaster novel like The Towering Inferno, but it’s out of place here, given how incidental the explosion is to the actual meat of the story. Even if the swans are intended as an elaborate metaphor for the fissures in Li Jing’s world, the writing at this point is overblown.

There are other small irritants. When Li Jing is lying in bed, struggling to deal with his condition, we are privy to his tortured thoughts about being unable to say “Meiling” despite understanding the syllables and hearing the tones in his own head. But then we get a sentence – “A synaptic collapse between the frontal lobe and the operculum” – which strikes a false note in a passage meant to be describing Li Jing’s internal perspective; it’s an if an omniscient narrator has suddenly intruded with medical terminology for our edification. There is also an unconvincing episode where a visitor to Li Jing’s hospital room – ignorant of his condition – goes on talking for a few minutes without realising that he is getting no response.

These are weaknesses, but as Xu slips into the natural flow of the story and focuses on the interconnected lives of her characters, her writing become smoother. Some of the book’s best passages are the ones that make little observations – without underlining the point too thickly – about the centrality of language in our everyday lives. Thus, when Rosalyn chances to meet another southerner, we are told in a throwaway sentence that she is so happy that she (perhaps subconsciously) lengthens her drawl. At another crucial point, she addresses her new friend (and potential lover) Danny as “Ben”, which is her ex-husband’s name.

I also liked the perceptive use of a translator named Alan, whose detachment becomes a counterpoint to the fraught lives of the central figures; his placid and emotionless renderings of tense conversations are amusing, but they are also pointers to the importance of tone, pitch and enunciation, and how complicated the business of talking really is. With all its little flaws, Xu’s book is a graceful reminder of the countless ways in which we are defined by our ability to speak: the stressing of syllables, the injection of feeling into an abstract or innocuous sound like “um”, even the slips of tongue that reveal hidden places in the mind. This is a story about language and speech, but it’s also about other things we take for granted, and the delicate threads that hold some of our strongest relationships together.

On Philip K Dick and the "vile" Victorians

[Snippets from my Sunday Guardian books column]

“We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold,” goes the famous opening sentence of Hunter S Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Immediately after this the near-delirious narrator sees enormous bats swooping around in the sky above his car and hears a voice screaming, “Holy Jesus! What are these goddamn animals?” The voice is his own, but he doesn’t know that. Never mind. This is just the start of an unforgettable road trip where the line between what is real and what isn’t soon becomes irrelevant. The labyrinths of the drug-addled mind are so much more interesting than anything Las Vegas can offer – or perhaps it’s all the same anyway.

Philip K Dick’s A Scanner Darkly begins on a comparable note, recounting absurdities in a seemingly calm and collected narrative voice. “Once a guy stood all day shaking bugs from his hair. The doctor told him there were no bugs in his hair.” The guy in question, a relatively minor character named Jerry, is addicted to a drug called Substance D (for Death), and after some extensive "research" he's figured out that the bugs are aphids and that they are in his lungs as well. Naturally it makes perfect sense to stand under the shower all day with his dog (who also has the bugs).

The partly science-fiction world of Dick’s novel is populated with dope addicts as well as narcotics agents trying to convict them. But can you really tell one from the other? The agents wear identity-concealing “scramble suits” (which turn a wearer’s body into an amorphous blur) and even their superiors don’t know their real names. Besides, their jobs require them to engage in the sort of substance abuse that can quickly disorient their minds. So what happens when a narcotics agent named Bob Arctor is assigned to spy on the activities of a suspected drug dealer named... Bob Arctor?
 

Arctor is understandably confused by this development, and by the suspicion that the two halves of his brain are concealing things from each other. (If he can’t trust himself, how can he possibly trust anyone around him?) At one point, contemplating his dual role as the watcher and the watched, he wonders, “Which of them is me?” In Dick’s hands even this profound philosophical query is laced with wryness. He was a genre writer – and one of the cult heroes of modern science-fiction – but his best books are every bit as demanding as high-quality literary fiction. They deal with questions of identity, with the paranoia of being an individual in a cold, corporation-dominated world, and the ways in which people interact with technology. If he were alive in the Internet age, I’m sure he would have written some fascinating stories centred on social networking and virtual role-playing.

P.S. In addition to being one of the most imaginative novelists of the last few decades, Dick was astonishingly prolific. As A D Jameson pointed out in this masterful skewering of Christopher Nolan’s film Inception, Dick wrote dozens of far superior “psychological/postmodern/mind-fuck narratives” – and even produced five novels in a single year, 1965, including the excellent The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch.

****

A straight history and a “horrible history”, best read side by side

One of the best books I’ve read about a historical period is A N Wilson’s The Victorians – a sprawling, magisterial account of seven decades that came to shape the modern world in so many ways. Wilson examines the political, social, scientific and cultural developments of the Victorian era – and their resonance for our lives today – in detail, and his mini-biographies of figures like Robert Peel and Charles Stewart Parnell make a fascinating tapestry. This is the sort of biography that wins highbrow literary awards, gets multiple mentions in “Books of the Year” lists, and is described in blurbs as “a magnificent portrait of an age” – all of which is well-justified.

But now consider another book about the Victorians that is never likely to be feted thus, though it provides its own special insights: The Vile Victorians in the “Horrible Histories” series. The series motto is “History with the nasty bits left in”, and true to form this wicked little book is a collection of unsavoury facts about epidemics, infant murders, gruesome sports and military disasters, mostly related in a faux-scandalised tone; there are stomach-churning anecdotes such as the one about the young Queen Victoria walking by the Thames and wondering about the pieces of paper floating in it. (Hundreds of sewers used to empty untreated waste into the river.)

You start reading something like Vile Victorians in a very particular mood – perhaps you want something that’s easy to flip through, or perhaps you’re in a masochistic mood. And indeed, the tone of much of the book is deliberately mean-minded and the drawings are a little juvenile (though a few are genuinely funny). But it would be a mistake to think there’s nothing to be learnt from it. When I read about “the vile Victorian Dr Meyers” and his infernal Tapeworm Trap (a small metal cylinder which had to be swallowed by patients – eventually resulting in the deaths of more humans than tapeworms), I was convinced it was a made-up story until I looked it up and discovered it was true. There is much good trivia here, even if the presentation is offbeat (to say the least).

At times – as in the short story “The Monster of the Mine”, which illustrates the horrors of children being made to work in coal mines – the book’s tone becomes almost sympathetic. It doesn’t last though. The very next page is about another manifestation of Victorian cruelty to children – by giving them “vile” names like Abishag and Lettuce!

[Some earlier odds and ends from my weekly column: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5]

Heard a good story?

(Thoughts on form, content and other bothersome things)

My latest Yahoo! column is one of the most difficult pieces I’ve written in a long time – and possibly one of the most self-indulgent and pedantic. But these are notes that I've wanted to put down for a while, and I think the topic should be of interest to most serious film buffs. Here's the piece - if you have more thoughts on the subject, do write in or comment here.

P.S. Think the column is long? It was twice this size before I started editing it in desperation.