Edward Woodward (1930-2009)

I first heard of Edward Woodward when we were living in America and The Equalizer was on television. Apart from my parents, the only English accents I heard regularly were the ones on television – you know, how Americans thought we talked in the 80s; the Joan Collins/Stephanie Beacham type – they were good for playing the cold-hearted bitch on soap operas it seemed – or the stuffy housekeeper Mr Belvedere type.

I was desperately missing tough gritty English accents and so I loved The Equalizer immediately. Edward Woodward was a British former secret agent or something who was now working for the Americans and cleaning up the stuff that they couldn’t (often involving pesky Ruskies) like a slightly more contained Michael Caine – he didn’t blow any bloody doors off that I recall. Actually, I don’t recall much about it at all apart from the voice, the fact that he wore a long gangster/football manager coat and looked like he couldn’t run to save himself. And yet, curiously, I loved it!

I later discovered that he was a very fine actor and a pretty good footballer. He apparently played for both Leyton Orient and Brentford and studied at RADA. He trod the boards as a real Shakespearean actor in Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet in the West End in the mid 1950s, before taking his talents to Broadway and Australia. It’s rare for an actor to be so well received on both side of the Atlantic so that’s a fair testament to his appeal.

Him Outdoors rates The Wicker Man (1973) as one of the scariest films ever – he says there’s atmospheric tension and a horrific final scene that makes you question human nature – I’m too scared to ever watch it. So Edward Woodward’s versatility spanned stage, film, TV and even musical comedy; High Spirits (1964-1965) won three Tony Awards.

However, I remember him most fondly because he features in one of my favourite jokes.

Q: What do you call a man with a tree on his head?
A: Edward
Q: What do you call a man with three trees on his head?
A: Edward Woodward
Q: What do you call a man with four trees on his head?
A: I don’t know either but I bet Edward Woodward would
Q: Why has Edward Woodward got so many ‘d’s in his name?
A: Because otherwise he’d be called Ewar Woowar.

Apparently this is a Morecambe & Wise joke, but I first heard it from a friend whom I ever afterwards called Ewar – that’s how he is programmed into my phone. He disappeared into the mountains for a while and I hadn’t seen him for a couple of years, until I saw someone who looked a lot like him running around the Southern Bays in the Harbour Capital Wellington Marathon.

I yelled out “Come on Ewar” and he grinned (grinned, I tell you, at about 30km into the race) and laughed, “No one’s called me that for a while!” I was riding my bike and he kept pace with me chatting for a bit. Perhaps he shouldn’t have done that. He came fourth in a time of 2:49:57 (30 seconds behind the chap in third). I wonder what Edward Woodward would have done.

Books read in May

The following are short reviews of the books that I read in May. The marks I have given them in the brackets are out of five.

Pynter Bender – Jacob Ross (4)
Pynter Bender is born sightless, two days after his twin brother, Peter. He is raised by his female relatives in Grenada, in the Caribbean who believe he is bestowed with magical powers. They love and hate with a fierce passion. When Pynter’s eyesight returns to him, he tries to illuminate their metaphoric blindness, by proving that there can be tenderness and that love and violence don’t have to go together. Women are all powerful in this novel, but they still cannot tame their men.

The men are surrounded by the tall sugar canes and they work the land, hemmed in by the sea which they fear. They feel they are still slaves to the owners of the island and they ‘walk’, leaving the women behind as they explode in violence and recrimination. Revolution or education seem to be the only ways to escape this troubled island. Pynter will not hide behind hope or optimism but wants to face things with knowledge. He has to find his own voice to tell his own story, which is not like the government or the education authorities or the politicians or the military who all speak volumes in this novel.

Boys mysteriously disappear, picked up by the soldiers and the men seek revenge, but Pynter refuses to yield to aggression. He is almost a Christ-like figure in the face of Leninist views. Although drawn into the civil war, Pynter knows that anger and hatred only destroy a person from within. Do you nurture the hatred and the hurts, or do you allow yourself to move on? Is it weakness or maturity not to seek retribution?

Jacob Ross writes with a beautiful, descriptive, lyrical mixture of poetry and politics. When Pynter hears chicken hawks, “Their cries reminded him of bright sharp things – knives and nails and needles.” This novel is full of bright sharp things but introduces the prospect of something softer that can smooth off the rough edges and produce a pearl from the grit in the oyster.

Ill Met By Moonlight – Sarah A. Hoyt (3.8)
This is a preposterous but rather fun Elizabethan fantasy weaving elements of elfish legends and Shakespearean sonnets and plays into a finely crafted folklore. The background is earthy and real, full of details of bread making and ale brewing, although the fanciful speech and Shakespearean quotes sprinkled throughout seem to work because we accept that fairies or elves speak in an ethereal way.

The forest is established as the seat of myth where the young Will Shakespeare encounters strange creatures, magical worlds and – straight from the realm of fantasy – a knife inscribed with ancient designs that glows with a bright blue/white fire when elves are near. He naturally explains such things away as a midsummer madness or a wild dream.

Much of the novel is simply a story of a young man growing up in a repressive society and learning to be a man. He considers going to London but he has no trade and knows intelligence is no substitute. His imagination is stirred by a royal pageant where he is seduced by the dancers, the plays and the tableaux – in fact, the wonderful world of theatre. Real life is full of debts and hard work, but this fantasy world offers irresistible riches.

Hoyt fashions a novel explanation for the bewitching dark lady; she is an elf who changes from male (Quicksilver) to female (lady Silver) form and has ‘glamoury’, a power that humans are largely unable to resist. Shakespeare is a mere mortal and of course falls for him/her, which allows the author to hint at the homosexual content of some of the bard’s great works. She incorporates aspects of much of the cannon – of course Midsummer Night’s Dream with the magical and otherworldly aspects, but also Hamlet with revenge for the unnatural death of the parents and the spurned advances of a young beauty (Ariel). She alludes to Romeo and Juliet with the feuding fairies resulting in death of friends in fatal duels, and even MacBeth with equivocating creatures and over-reaching ambition.

If nothing else, her interpretation is original. Academics have puzzled endlessly over how a provincial boy became the world’s greatest playwright. This is certainly not a scholarly explanation but is an entertaining one.

Shakespeare’s Wife – Germaine Greer (4.4)
The prospect of rampant feminist Germain Greer taking on one of the least known and most derided of literary anti-heroines is an intriguing one and it doesn’t disappoint. It is no surprise that Greer launches a spirited defence of Ann Shakespeare, née Hathaway. More than merely defending a much-maligned woman, she also attacks the (male) fanciers of William who despise his wife without knowing anything about her. “The Shakespeare wallahs have succeeded in creating a bard in their own likeness, that is to say, incapable of relating to women, and have then vilified the woman who remained true to him all his life, in order to exonerate him.”

Greer debunks all the theories against Shakespeare’s wife – she was too old; she was ugly; she trapped him into marriage; there are no records of affection between them; he spent a lot of his time away in London; he wrote the sonnets clearly pining for some other lover, etc. Shakespearean scholars generally accept that Ann had nothing to do with the publication of her husband’s work and certainly didn’t inspire any of it. Greer discounts both of these assumptions. She suggests that Ann was actually quite a catch, and explores some of the occupations that she might have done, including brewing, farming or some involvement in textiles.

As well as a defence of Ann, Greer also questions the commonly held theory that the Shakespeare family were Catholic and afraid of persecution. The biography also contains a lot of interesting background information and social setting. There is lots of information about marriage, domestic arrangements, employment prospects, medical practices of the day, the treatment of syphilis and the brewing of ale. There are also some fascinating anecdotes about land enclosures and protests that may or may not have involved Ann Shakespeare.

Greer is happy to admit that most of the positive things she has to say about Ann are based on conjecture and speculation, but are “probably neither truer nor less true than the accepted prejudice.” Her spirited defence of Shakespeare’s wife is no more or less than I would have expected from one of the world’s leading feminists.

Little Michael

I bought a car a couple of weeks ago, which made me feel terribly grown up. I took it for a test drive with the dealer and had to make knowledgable conversation about revs and miles per gallon (except he called it kilometres per litre, which was a totally different figure, but I nodded sagely nonetheless as though I knew what he meant).

I kept the car overnight and drove it along some winding back roads with hills and single lane bridges. I thought this might help me experiment with the acceleration, the suspension, and the torque (thanks Top Gear). It's a manual so I get to change gears when I choose, not when the engine feels like it, and the brakes are solid and secure without being either too spongy or sensitive.

It's got a good stereo and the CD player works. I tuned to Radio New Zealand National and popped in a Minuit album. When I turn the music and voices off the car is quiet -there are no rattles and knocks or other noises to pretend to ignore. It fits nicely in my garage. It's not white or silver and it's not a Subaru Legacy (these were definite no-nos on my anti-wish list).

So I took it down the lake, where I experimented with some Top Gear style photography - these are the results. I realise I still have a long way to go, but I think we can agree that it looks pretty damn stylish on the shores of Lake Wakatipu, can we not?

As we all know, every car needs a name, so I've called this little beauty Michael. It's small and perfectly formed with great acceleration and a tight turning circle, but it's the wrong red. Am I still grown up?

You Don't Bring Me Flowers...

Him Outdoors doesn’t buy me flowers. I complain about this but it makes no difference. He thinks they’re frivolous and he simply can’t see the point in them. He says ‘If I suddenly bought you flowers, you’d think that something was wrong.’ I wonder how many men use that lame excuse – trust me; we wouldn’t. I love flowers and I like to have them in the house, so I buy my own.

But he buys me other presents – usually what he considers to be practical gifts. He bought me some new headphones because I have to transcribe recorded interviews and the headphones I had pressed too hard against my ears and made them hurt. He bought me a polariser for my camera because he knows I love the vivid colours of Central Otago and am always trying to capture them in photographs.

He buys me beer and wine (also frivolous I know, but he can see the point in that), particularly beverages with names relating to things and places I like. He buys me winter cycling gloves because he knows how much I hate being cold. Once he bought me the boxed set of the Clash singles on vinyl – no special occasion; he just knows they’re one of my favourite ever bands.

He doesn’t really ‘do’ birthdays, anniversaries or what he calls commercial holidays – we’ll go out for a meal and a drink on each other’s birthday, but there are generally no gifts involved. The gifts are thoughtful little touches, and they come throughout the year, when he thinks of them. He’s not the sort of person to buy something and save it for three months until the official celebration is at hand – he would only have lost it or forgotten where he put it by then.

I remember the first Christmas present he ever bought me; it was a blender. We didn’t spend Christmas Day together and I unwrapped it in front of my family. My mother cast a dubious glance at it – to her it was as offensive as an iron or a hoover. ‘He bought you a what?’ But I was a student and living off home-made potato and leek soup. I really needed a blender and he knew it would save me time and effort, rather than having to mash and mix all the vegetables by hand. It was incredibly touching and the sign that I had found a kind and thoughtful man.

So I don’t mind if I have to buy my own flowers. It’s a small price to pay.

Eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month

Today is Armistice Day. Lest we forget. In all the football matches I have watched over the previous days, the minute’s silence has been impeccably observed by home and away fans alike. It is an opportunity to remember and give thanks to all the men and women of past and current wars who have given their lives to defend our shores and our freedom. Whatever your thoughts on war, you cannot but honour those who have died or suffered injuries on your behalf.

Once the whistle blows, the rivalries are intense; passions are ignited and tempers flare. My dad says he remembers watching games at Highbury as a young lad where 60,000 men stood shoulder to shoulder and there was no animosity – they’d seen enough of fighting. The war claimed the lives of nine Arsenal first team players, the most of any top flight club. Children were passed carefully over the heads of the crowd down to the front where they could get a better view of the match. No doubt they were collected by their parents later.

This is one of the reasons it disgusts me when media advertising refers to sport as war and tries to drum up jingoistic comparisons with battle. It’s a whole different ball-game. The day is not really marked in New Zealand – they commemorate Anzac Day instead. However, the poppies blooming on the breasts of the BBC newsreaders and the English football managers, and many of the crowd are the reminders on this distant shore, brought to us by the media, so they perhaps they are on the same side after all.

When I was about 12 and a member of the Red Cross, I participated in a march down the high street to commemorate the war heroes. As we stood in frozen silence at the cenotaph, I fainted (I have since learned to wiggle my toes which keeps the circulation flowing while feigned immobility). I felt shamed – they gave their lives for me and I couldn’t even stand still for a minute!

There was a Penguin book club at the time where you could send off 50p for the latest titles. I took my 50p to school and dropped it in the collection box. When mum asked me where my book was and I told her I had bought a poppy instead she was bemused – ‘But you could have got both for that money!’ I burst into tears and sobbed, ‘But that was all I had to sacrifice.’ There was nothing mum could say to that, but I can still feel the fierce love in the hug she gave me.

Wasps

Wasps, ha! What are they good for?
Absolutley nothing. Am I wrong?
They hover and bother around the jam
Drowning in beer and tyrannizing ice-cream;
Buzzing with menacing irritation
Approaching with waves of Doppler effect.

They invade picnics, like live grenades
causing otherwise mild-manner folk to shriek and flap
Batting the striped terror into the faces of
Friends and loved ones – save yourselves!
A mate used to trap them in old coke cans
And when they were dizzy with sugar,
He pulled off their wings – dicing with death.
Iain Banks had the right idea.

We shall fight them on the beaches;
We shall fight in the fields and on the streets.
At least bees are useful making honey –
They even sound funny as they bumble their way
Through hives and combs – neat and furry
With nectar encrusted feet.
And they only sting once.

I once asked my father why wasps existed.
With typical trauma-inducing paternal reasoning
He replied, ‘Well, why do you exist?’
I’m still not sure. What am I good for?

Books read in April

The following are short reviews of the books I read in April. The marks I have given them in brackets are out of five.

A Special Providence – Richard Yates (3.9)
This is a tale of a mother and her son in which Alice relies on Prentice in a way that cannot be healthy and copes with setbacks by simply pretending they’re not happening. She likes to play the victim, and she avoids reality by making sculptures and living in a fantasy world. At times the novel reads as though it is floating on a cloud of valium. As a 1940s American divorcee, maybe Alice is drugged up, but hers is more probably an alcoholic fug.

In this world, men go out to work and women stay at home, keeping house and raising children in stifling suburbia. Women have long boozy lunches where they get through “round after round of relaxing Manhattans” and then drive home. Alice punctuates this inertia with impulsive gestures and hysterical pronouncements. She likes to imagine her life as a drama almost as if she has cast herself in a film or television adaptation of her life.

Prentice inherits some of this theatricality and when he goes to war he uses it as an opportunity to prove something. He feels worthy during the war and sad when it is over. “The war had ended too soon. The purpose had gone out of his life. There was nothing for him to do now but exist from day to day, enjoying the peace and the luxury that he felt he didn’t deserve.”

Existing from day to day is mind-numblingly dull in this suburban American lifestyle. The Stepford Wives element is painful and heart-wrenching to read. I feel for this generation. They may have lived in the land of plenty materialistically, but the souls of the nation are impoverished.

Sea of Poppies – Amitav Ghosh (3.5)
Nominated for the 2008 Booker Prize, this novel received favourable reviews in the more intellectual press, although I don’t understand why. The novel is diverting, but not exactly deserving. Hailed as a Salman Rushdie with a touch of Dickens, he is more like a Bryce Courtenay: not that there is anything wrong with that if you want to create a sprawling saga, but it’s not exactly literary fiction.

In the first of a planned trilogy, a boat called the Ibis is loaded with ‘coolies’ and criminals from Calcutta and shipped to Madagascar where it is intended that they work on the sugar plantations. After a rambling 533 pages, they have not reached their destination and a mutiny is planned. In other words, it’s far from plain sailing.

One of the main problems is the host of characters who may be colourful, but they are not credible. It is as though Ghosh went to a pick and mix store of stock personalities and chose one of each. The novel is packed full of detail of customs and culture from the growing of poppies and the processing in an opium factory to the court cases and burnings on funeral pyres. There are many threads to the story but none of them stand out and the result is a tangled mess.

The other issue, and it is a big one, is the language. In conjuring up some pirate seafaring patois, the author has created words whose meanings you have to guess or look up on the internet (he has his own site dedicated to it) like Lewis Carroll’s nonsense speak or some ghastly fantasy novel. I’m sure it’s all very clever, but I can’t be bothered looking up a translation – I’d really rather know what the author was talking about. Swathes of the novel are completely nonsensical.

There are some fairly obvious metaphors within the novel – the main one being a theme of equality. When the passengers are crammed into the hull of the Ibis, they are literally all in the same boat. Many of the characters assume disguises and new identities – a major theme being the possibility of reinvention or reincarnation. “They were all kin now; their rebirth in the ship’s womb had made them into a single family.” The most appealing part of the narrative is the description of the camaraderie that develops, particularly among the women on board the ship, banished below decks for the duration of the voyage.

For everyone in this story, the poppy seed is the guider and decider of their fate, and the nature of opium addiction is examined at length. Scatological violence, cruelty and perversion pervade the novel but everything just seems a little too hard; a little too hopeless which inures the reader to the suffering and lessens the dramatic impact. This first part of the trilogy concludes on the verge of the Opium Wars, so will I read the others? Probably, but I won’t be making it a priority.

Revolutionary Road – Richard Yates (4.3)
As is my wont, I had to read this book before I saw the film. It is a heart-breaking work of subtlety and dissatisfaction with characters and situations so commonplace and real that they are still powerful 50 years on. Frank and April Wheeler live on Revolutionary Road, a suburban enclave where housewives raise perfect children and have cocktails and dinner waiting when their husbands come home from work. They believe they are above this version of domestic bliss and they mock it with wry smiles and plans to move to Paris, but ultimately they discover their road leads to nowhere and they are as trapped as everybody else.

The novel commences with a disastrous amateur play. The precise descriptions are brilliant and it soon becomes apparent that everything is a façade and everyone is acting a part – some are just better at it than others. Frank’s career aims are decidedly modest as he sleepwalks through his “deadly dull job in the city and deadly dull home in the suburbs”. He looks for fulfilment elsewhere but, despite having the perfect family complete with beautiful wife, admired and coveted by all the neighbours, and the clichéd affair with his secretary, he doesn’t know where to find this self-affirmation.

His marriage to April is part of his projected persona. They don’t know, or care to know anything about each other, preferring to deal in the abstract. Frank wonders, “Was his wife unhappy? That was unfortunate, but it was, after all, her problem.” He has no idea and little interest in her daily existence as though she only comes to life in relation to him.

April’s dreams and ambition were all curtailed when she fell pregnant and their lives were changed irrevocably. When she discovers she is pregnant again she is horrified that they will have to cancel their plans to move to Paris. Frank considers his wife unnatural for not wanting another child, suspicious of her demeanour and afraid this means she might harm their existing offspring.

It is a brutally misogynistic world where women are expected to endure and if they are not entirely satisfied, there must be something wrong with them. April is born ahead of her time and unable to do anything about society’s expectations. “It is an enormous, obscene delusion – this idea that people have to resign from real life and ‘settle down’ when they have families. It’s the great sentimental lie of the suburbs.” She is simply drowning in suburbia.

In this neighbourhood numbed from reality, the residents merely tread water, doubtless assisted by Valium and Prozac to help them sleepwalk through their muffled underwater world. It is a horrifying idyll and I read it with my eyes wide open and tears of frustration on my cheeks. If the film is even half as good, it deserves the Oscar accolades.

S. – Slavenka Drakulić (4.5)
S. is a fictional everywoman who became pregnant after being repeatedly gang raped by soldiers in a Serbian prison camp. Now in hospital in Sweden she contemplates her feelings for the baby that she wishes was still-born. She looks back on her time in the camp with a sense of detachment. She was made to feel like an object when placed in the ‘women’s room’ where “She was in a storehouse of women, in a room where female bodies were stored for the use of men.”

From the moment a soldier enters her ordered world as a school-teacher and makes her leave, get on a bus and transports her to the camp, her life ceases to be her own. It is as if she is merely watching it, and this feeling of paralysis pervades the novel. It is almost bleaker to talk in generalities and assumptions like whispers because things are too terrible to mention out loud. The women don’t talk about rape because if word got around that they had been defiled they would not be able to go back home to their villages, their husbands or parents.

S. learns quickly to live only for the moment and not worry about anything that doesn’t directly affect her. It is amazing how resilient people can be and how they can adapt to even the most horrific situation. All she wants is to be left alone and survive through to the next day. She and the other women want the men to go out into the field and shoot people, turning their attention away from them.

Despite the romantic notion that women band together in times of stress, S. finds this is not the case. The first lesson of survival in the camp is selfishness; you must do whatever you can to survive; if you share food you might starve. They quickly learn to fend for themselves. “If she survives, she will survive alone, in spite of, rather than together with the other women.” They are all afraid, but only for themselves. They make decisions which have nothing to do with right or wrong, and everything to do with staying alive.

Their memories will breed hatred – their lives have been destroyed, but the future is even bleaker because the sons will seek revenge and the cycle of war will perpetuate. This is a harrowing novel and a female companion to The Tenth Circle of Hell. It may be only 200 pages long, but it is powerful and painful and gives a voice to a generation of silent women.