The Rosie Project

Written by: Graeme Simsion

Published by: Penguin Books LTD (2/1/2014) 352 pages

'I'm not good at understanding what other people want.' 'Tell me something I don't know ...' Love isn't an exact science - but no one told Don Tillman. A thirty-nine-year-old geneticist, Don's never had a second date. So he devises the Wife Project, a scientific test to find the perfect partner. Enter Rosie - 'the world's most incompatible woman' - throwing Don's safe, ordered life into chaos. But what is this unsettling, alien emotion he's feeling?

I have to be honest, ‘The Rosie Project’ is not the sort of book I would normally have looked twice at. As regular readers will probably have picked up, I’m of a more fantastical bent, and as the summary suggests, the book is a romance – normally the one genre I avoid if I can help it. However, there are a few advantages to my current place of employment, specifically in this instance the occasional promotional copy of a book being donated to the staffroom, and something about the book appealed.

 I’m happy to say that I’m glad I did indulge that whim; ‘The Rosie Project’ is an absolute treat.

There’s more to Don than the summary suggests. He’s incredibly intelligent, a talented chef, although he prefers to stick to tried and tested recipes to maximise efficiency, a gifted martial artist, highly – almost obsessively – organised, but cripplingly socially awkward. It quickly becomes apparent that he registers somewhere on the autistic spectrum, although it isn’t entirely clear whether he himself recognises this. Rosie is a part-time barmaid; she smokes, she’s perpetually late, vegetarian and far more concerned with finding her real father than romance – although given how unsuitable a prospective wife she is, that’s of little concern to Don.

From the gleefully mischievous opening line – “I may have found a solution to the Wife Problem”, a sentence open to all kinds of interpretation and delivery – it’s a story that will have you chuckling throughout, even on occasion breaking out into fully fledged belly laughs. Both Don and Rosie are witty, but they also get into a wide variety of madcap scenarios, partly as a result of the quest to find her real father, which involves a surprising amount of illegal activity, and partly as a result of the chaos Rosie drags around with her. A chapter with the two of them working the bar at a posh party is glorious.

More importantly though, the romance itself is exquisitely handled. Even though at least one party has absolutely no idea that they are actually engaged in a romantic entanglement, it is a thoroughly heartwarming story, which managed to move even my stony heart. True, the participants are pretty familiar to anyone with a reasonably grounding in popular culture – Don is sensitively handled, but will immediately bring to mind Dr Sheldon Cooper of ‘The Big Bang Theory’, or Abed Nadir of ‘Community’, if not the more literary Christopher, of ‘The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time’; Rosie, on the other hand, is a textbook example of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl, attractive, chaotic, various issues but with a warm-hearted view of the world. However, there is absolutely no harm in familiar ground done well.

It isn’t a complex story, or even a terribly original one in broad strokes. It’s classic romantic comedy, beat to beat, and it came as no real surprise to me when I found out that it had started life as a screenplay. The ultimate conclusion will be even less of a surprise, but as they say, tropes are not inherently bad. It may be a familiar destination, but the journey is a delight.

Iron Council

Written by: China Miéville

It is a time of revolts and revolutions, conflict and intrigue. New Crobuzon is being ripped apart from without and within. War with the shadowy city-state of Tesh and rioting on the streets at home are pushing the teeming metropolis to the brink. In the midst of this turmoil, a mysterious masked figure spurs strange rebellion, while treachery and violence incubate in unexpected places. In desperation, a small group of renegades escapes from the city and crosses strange and alien continents in the search for a lost hope, an undying legend. In the blood and violence of New Crobuzon's most dangerous hour, there are whispers. It is the time of the Iron Council.

 

The third and perhaps final instalment in Miéville’s Bas-Lag cycle (he’s been busily working on other fiction since, but calling it a cycle suggests space for continuation), ‘Iron Council’ is perhaps the most normal book he’s written, at least of the ones I’ve polished off; this is something of a mixed blessing, in practice.

On the positive side, it’s an infinitely more accessible book than either of its predecessors. True, with Miéville, accessible is a distinctly relative term; the Bas-Lag cycle consists of ‘Perdido Street Station’, a deeply unsettling tale of dream-eating moths in the weird dystopia of New Crobuzon, ‘The Scar’, a tale of pirates trying to harness the power of the titular crack in reality, and of course, ‘Iron Council’ itself, a tale of political revolution. Think of it as ‘Les Misérables’ with magic, insect people, walking cacti and eldritch abominations and you’re not too far off. Such a description might not fit traditional ideas of ‘normal’, but you’ve got to put it in context.

Told from the perspective of three characters of differing ideologies and involvement in said revolution, it’s a novel that takes no prisoners, but beyond the outlandish settings and characters the tale itself is familiar, and Miéville crams in various different facets to it. For much of the book, the revolution itself is side-show while two of the characters cross the world in search of the titular Council, telling both the story of the quest to find it, and flashbacks to its origins in Bas-Lag’s industrial revolution (readers of previous instalments in the series may find some of the chronology a little confusing at first – ‘Iron Council’ is set twenty years or so after the first two books, with the flashbacks apparently taking place at some point prior to or concurrently with those books). The tale of the Council is easily the more interesting, in large part due to somewhat more interesting characters – the main character in this section is one Judah Low, a self-declared ‘bard’ of the Council with a penchant for creating golems out of whatever comes to hand (grass, dirt, corpses…) who will have you going back and forth on whether he’s a visionary bordering on sainthood or an aloof, self-righteous git – and definitely more interesting locales, a fair chunk of the storyline being set within a region of the world where reality has worn a little thin, and standing in the wrong place can result in interesting times.

This is not to say that the New Crobuzon set plot-line is lacking, particularly; it is simply a more traditional tale, and much of the essential weirdness of New Crobuzon itself is sidelined in favour of the politics. The main character for this section, Ori, is engaging and well written enough, but is a relatively generic frustrated activist taking part in the traditional revolutionary activities of murder and destruction.

This is where the relative normality of the book becomes a mixed blessing. Miéville has three major strengths as a writer, his ideas, the writing itself, and a willingness and ability to tackle bigger themes than the average fantasy, and in ‘Iron Council’ the ideas simply aren’t as distinctive as in his other works. Consequentially, the themes are exposed to more intense scrutiny, and you may be left wondering whether he is taking an attitude of deliberate vagueness to prompt the reader to think or whether he is simply paying lip-service to those lofty ideas. Or possibly whether he’s just that much more intelligent than you, which is a feeling I’m familiar with from his previous work.

In addition to arguably drawing attention to other flaws though, there is a more immediate problem, in that the different plot lines are neither given enough room to breathe nor meshed together terribly well. While both are linked thematically by discussion of revolution and freedom, they spend too long apart, only coming together in the final hundred pages or so, at which point everything is wrapped up pretty swiftly, but not necessarily satisfactorily (in some ways, this is an issue in all three Bas-Lag books, but because ‘Iron Council’ is a somewhat lesser book overall, it is much more obvious here).

However, the most obvious of Miéville’s strengths is in full force once more. He is truly an astonishing writer, with a slightly odd style that at once stands apart from proceedings, almost more descriptive than anything else, but never failing to involve you with the characters or the plot. Even in the areas of the novel that are weaker in terms of plotting, there’s a hypnotic quality to the writing that perfectly fits the beautifully, weirdly grotesque world of Bas-Lag, and in general terms I would have little hesitation in saying that Miéville is probably the finest fantasist, on a purely technical level, since Mervyn Peake.

Ultimately, any issues with ‘Iron Council’ are more a consequence of Miéville’s own high standards. He set the bar incredibly high, especially with the marvellous ‘The Scar’, so to follow up with a merely very good novel is no bad thing at all.

American Hustle

Starring: Christian Bale, Amy Adams, Bradley Cooper, Jeremy Renner, Jennifer Lawrence

Directed by: David O. Russell

Written by: David O. Russell and Eric Warren Singer

When con-artists Irving Rosenfeld (Bale) and Sydney Prosser (Adams) are caught out by up-and-coming FBI agents Rich DiMaso (Cooper), he makes them an offer; if they’ll help him entrap some bigger fish, they can get on with their lives without charge. Soon though, the new hustle is spiralling out of control, and they’ll have to think faster than they ever have before to get out of it alive.

‘American Hustle’ has all the makings of an instant classic. Russell is a smart, talented director, most famous for ‘Silver Linings Playbook’, the unexpectedly brilliant comedy about love, grief and mental illness. The cast list is genuinely outstanding. And it’s based on a true story, a classic tale of American politics and corruption, the first time video was used to capture illicit dealings. It’s been nominated for many of the big Oscars – best picture, best performance in all four acting categories – and several of the ‘lesser’ ones such as costume.

I can only assume that the board at the Academy felt that it was a pretty thin year in those categories. For a film to pick up that many nominations it needs to be a truly astonishing work of art, but ‘American Hustle’ barely achieves adequacy, never mind greatness.

Normally, I can apportion the blame for a bad film amongst various people. With this though, the fault seems to lie pretty squarely with Russell himself, given that he pulled double duties as director and co-writer. The script is the main problem; while mostly perfectly serviceable, it does occasionally drift into absolute howler territory. Quite which of Russell and Singer thought the line “You’re nothing to me until you’re everything” was anything other than first draft material at best should be ashamed of themselves, and they have a tin ear for naturalistic banter – unless you enjoy watching people tell each other “This is bullshit!” “No, you’re bullshit!”, I suppose.

A lacklustre script can be covered up if the story is good though, and this really isn’t. In fairness, Russell and Singer are perhaps hampered in that regard; as I said, it’s based on a true story, albeit loosely. The first shot of the film is the caption “Some of this happened”. So perhaps I shouldn’t criticise them for the needlessly convoluted plot, since presumably that’s actually what happened, and they’d get more flak for trying to alter history to better suit the film than the other way around. However, there are ways and means of working that to still make an engaging story, and they’ve failed miserably in this instance. Again in fairness, convoluted plotting is part and parcel of the con-movie genre. Nobody wants to watch a film where a bunch of criminals sit down and plan something and it all goes perfectly to plan. Watching them try to marshal the chaos is part of the fun. Here though, there’s no point in trying to pay attention to stay one step ahead to work out the puzzle, as it all gets reworked every twenty minutes or so regardless. Again, hampered by real life I suppose, but it still renders most of the first hour more or less pointless.

But hey, if the scripts weak and the story un-engaging, we can still rely on some cracking performances, right? Well…up to a point. All of the cast are perfectly fine, although it might take you a while to see past the wigs. The problem is that you don’t care about any of them. Bale invests his character with more than the script really deserves, delivering a rather nuanced performance of a rather sleazy, pathetic individual with hidden moral depths, but the rest of the cast are short-changed. Adams does her best, but Prosser is a character constructed from so many different facades that she doesn’t have much genuine personality, and while this is deliberate and acknowledged on screen, the fact that she’s deliberately bland and distant doesn’t make it ok. Cooper’s DiMaso is simply annoying at best, and intensely dislikeable at worst. Renner’s politician actually is somewhat interesting, but by the time he gets any significant screentime I had already lost interest, and his performance isn’t quite good enough to drag you back in. Lawrence is engaging, but that’s purely for the fact that her character is a massive screw up who manages to introduce a note of chaos to proceedings everytime she comes on, whether that’s destroying a microwave or cheerfully engaging a room full of mobsters in conversation, and it’s in no way an Oscar worthy role (she’s been nommed for supporting actress).

It isn’t impossible to make a film about unlikeable people and still make something entertaining, as Scorsese has shown with ‘The Wolf of Wall Street’ in recent weeks. You just need to do it well, and this hasn’t been. In essence, based on the content of the film, I’m just not convinced the story needed to be told. It’s a fairly uninteresting story about political corruption, the only quirks being the involvement of con-artists controlled by the FBI and the fact that before the operation to uncover corruption, there wasn’t any corruption to find, DiMaso being so determined to bag himself a big fish that he goes out of his way to bribe one of the few decent politicians in the state to do so. It’s not exactly Watergate, as political scandals go.

All of that said though, the Seventies appeared to have been recreated perfectly, and some of the hair-dos were works of art. But that shouldn’t be the highest praise I can offer to a film with these credentials.