Review : Undiscovered Country by Lin Enger

April 23, 2013April 14, 2023 ~ duane ~ Leave a comment

It’s always an amazing experience reading a Hamlet adaptation. How much of the original story will be kept? What will be cut, and what new material will be added? How will the author make the transition from Shakespeare’s world to the new setting? Will the final result be little more than a “modern language” novelization of Shakespeare, or a legitimate literary work?

All of these questions floated through my mind when Bardfilm recommended Undiscovered Country to me. Jesse Matson is hunting in the woods of Minnesota when his dad, Harold, dies from a seemingly self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head. That is, of course, until Harold’s ghost appears to Jesse and claims that Jesse’s uncle Clay is actually the one that pulled the trigger. Uncle Clay, of course, quickly makes the moves on Jesse’s mom Genevieve and we get the whole backstory about jealousy between the brothers, Harold’s position of power over other men in the neighborhood (he’s some sort of local politician? I lost that thread in listening to the audiobook).

There’s a girlfriend character, but is she Ophelia? Her dad is certainly not your normal Polonius if this is the case. What about Horatio, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern? There are a variety of supporting players but I couldn’t draw you a map.

Once upon a time (bear with me for a moment) Stephen King wrote two books pretty much simultaneously – The Regulators and Desperation. These two books are in a parallel universe to each other, where all of the characters appear in both stories, just in completely different context. Steve is a sheriff in one who dies in the first few chapters, but in the other book Steve is a married insurance salesman with kids who ends up the hero (I made up all of that, as a non-spoiler example).

Reading Shakespeare adaptations like Undiscovered Country always makes me think of that King experiment. Jesse’s girlfriend Christine shows up and I spend the rest of the story thinking, “Ok, is she going to betray him? Go crazy and kill herself? What about her father, where is the Polonius character?” The great thing is that all or none of that might be true, and I have no idea. None of it *has* to be true. I haven’t actually finished the book yet, so I have no idea which parts are and are not.

One interesting angle leaps right out at you from the first chapter — this story is written in the voice of Jesse from ten years down the road, writing about what happened to him when he was younger. So, right off the bat, you know that whatever’s about to happen, our Hamlet survives. How does this change the story? DOES this change the story? I haven’t finished it yet, so I have no idea whether the rest is silence for our narrator or not.

Completely outside all of our Shakespeare baggage, this book works as the story of a young man coming to terms with the death of his father. By telling it from his perspective we see that *he* thinks he’s the one in complete control while everyone else either falls to pieces around him (his mom), is just an innocent who doesn’t understand (his girlfriend), or is in on it (uncle Clay). There are several great scenes where the author manages to knock Jesse entirely off his game and make him question just how much control over his situation he really has, and I love those scenes. At one point he bursts in on the sheriff with some “evidence” of Clay’s guilt. The sheriff calmly hears him out, then asks patiently, “Do you feel better just getting that out, or do you need me to be the sheriff now?” When Jesse informs him that of course he needs to be the sheriff now, he learns very quickly that he’s not the one making the rules here, and that everything is not going to go his way. The famous “Hamlet and Gertrude bedroom scene” also plays out similarly, where Jesse barges in with complete confidence about what he’s going to say and what’s going to happen next, and gets another that he is a child dealing with adults.

I’ve not finished the story, as I mentioned. So far I love it. I love that I have no idea how closely we’ll follow the Hamlet story – whether Ophelia will go insane, whether her father will play a role, whether our Hamlet is still going to end up dead even though he’s narrating the story. I can’t wait to find out.

This year’s Shakespeare Day Celebration is sponsored in part by Shakespeare Is Universal: Shakespeare truly is for everyone, and nothing demonstrates that sentiment better than his most famous quote of all, translated here into languages from around the world. In celebration of Shakespeare’s birthday, show that you believe his works are just as relevant, powerful and important as they’ve ever been!

Review : Shakespeare Shaken

April 23, 2013April 14, 2023 ~ duane ~ 3 Comments

I enjoy the idea of Shakespeare as graphic novel. The medium allows a huge amount of interpretation, from how you edit (or rewrite) the text to how you represent your story visually. Then you need to decide whether you’re actually retelling Shakespeare’s story in this medium, or if instead you’re merely drawing on Shakespeare for your inspiration and taking the story in a completely different direction.

Shakespeare Shaken, an anthology from Red Stylo Media, is firmly in the latter camp. Thirty “graphic works” are presented, each taking a slice of Shakespeare’s work as inspiration to produce a wide range of work from single page vignettes to comic pieces to lengthy murder mysteries.

This is a pretty violent collection, I have to say that up front. I’m not normally a follower of graphic novels (if they’re not Shakespeare) so I’m not sure what the standard is in this regard, but many of the stories I found uncomfortably gory with heads blown off and blood spattered over multiple panels. I thought some worked, some didn’t. Is it an audience thing? The regular readers of a collection like this want their blood, so the artists deliver? I suppose that also explains all the nudity 🙂

There’s a fair share of comedy as well. How about Falstaff as a professional wrestling manager? And I loved the idea of a Romeo and Juliet who survive the final act and are now struggling as a young dysfunctional couple (Romeo keeps texting Rosaline, and Juliet keeps pretending to kill herself to test whether Romeo will join her).

What I like is the amount of imagination that’s gone into the whole “inspired by Shakespeare” premise. There’s plenty of Hamlet/Macbeth/Romeo+Juliet to go around, but also a number of attempts at the sonnets, the Dark Lady, and even the authorship question. Some pieces rely heavily on original text, and some deal with the meta idea of Shakespeare as a person and a writer, taking place in his world rather than the world of his plays. A few appear to have nothing to do with Shakespeare or his works at all, and the reader is left to figure out where the inspiration came from. There’s a science-fiction gladiator story that takes Sonnet 130 as its inspiration that I wanted to like, I just didn’t understand it.

If I have one major disappointment with the collection it is not the blood and gore. I get that this is not for everybody. My problem is that many of the stories seem to stop so short I’m left wondering whether I skipped or missed some pages. A great example is the piece that would otherwise be my favorite, “Brave New World,” which is told one page at a time and spread out through the rest of the book, like serialized installments. I liked the visual style, I liked the pacing, I liked how the story was progressing…and then it just stopped. I know I didn’t miss anything because in this particular piece it said on every page 1/8, 2/8, 3/8 … and I kept thinking “How is this story going to progress in just 8 pages?” Well, it doesn’t. Not much.

There’s a lot here, and I admit that I haven’t had the attention span to read every single story yet. First I flipped through looking for those inspirations that interested me (such as The Tempest / Brave New World). Then I started working back and forth through different pieces, looking to see which would catch and keep my attention.

There’s something for everyone in a collection like this. There’s steampunk, robots, reality tv, murder mysteries, zombies…you name it. It’s a little short-attention-span for my taste, but I suppose we need to think of it more as a sampler of each artist’s work. Find the style and vision that works for you, then go hunt down more by that author?

Review : So Long, Shakespeare!

April 23, 2013April 14, 2023 ~ duane ~ 2 Comments

When news came out a few weeks back about a new “Star Wars in the style of Shakespeare” book, Bardfilm and I were alerted to another author’s existing effort in this space. Tom Brown’s So Long, Shakespeare was pitched to me as a book about Star Wars crossed with the authorship question, and I made the author promise me that it ended the right way before I’d review it. True story. 🙂

I enjoyed the book, and there’s at least one moment where I swore, loudly and repeatedly, at my car’s stereo speakers as they played the audiobook at me, I was that upset with something that was said. That either says something about how well Brown knows how to push buttons, or how easy mine are to push.

The story starts with Joe Seabright, an obvious George Lucas clone, who made his fame and fortune penning five space opera films heralded the world over as the greatest space saga ever conceived. Legions of fans buy the merchandise, attend the conferences, and see his movies over and over again. His company JoeCo has invented new ways to film and present his movies, and his fortune has allowed him to build his own city, JoeTown. Every time one of his films come out he’s a shoe-in for the best special effects award and best musical score, but the best picture award eludes him.

So far it screams George Lucas / Star Wars, and you don’t even have to suspend your disbelief that much. Even when the story opens with Seabright in tears, so upset over yet again failing to win his Oscar, you can imagine Lucas doing the same thing.

Then it gets crazy. I’m not going to say you need to suspend disbelief for this one. You need to lock up disbelief in a glass case with David Blaine and Kris Angel and suspend it a half mile above New York City, without airholes, for the duration of this ride.

Everyone who works for Joe has an intervention to let him know that the weakest part of the stories has always been the writing. He sucks, worse than he could ever imagine. No fear, however! There’s a solution. JoeCo has enough brainpower on staff that one of their scientists has managed to extract the “muse” gene from DNA and replicate its function (in pill form, no less). So you get the DNA of the person whose creative streak you wish to emulate, take your pill, and you can immediately write (or sculpt or paint…) in the style of that person.

Bring on the Shakespeare! Why not? The guy that made his fortune writing space battles naturally thinks that he’s almost Shakespeare anyway, and just needs a little boost. Oh, of course you have to accept that in this world there’s a DNA database of all the greatest people in history, Shakespeare included.

Let’s just say the results do not go as expected, and it’s not long before the authorship question (and an entire committee of people who’ve made it their lives’ work to have the debate) comes up. In response to the DNA method of reproducing creativity comes a mathematical formula for measuring creativity, and a quest to find not merely a replica of history’s greatest creative mind … but the greatest *living* creative mind. Shakespeare vs … who? [ Hey, Disbelief, how you doing up there in that cage? Can you breathe? Is David Blaine annoying you yet? ]

This is science fiction first and foremost, it’s not Shakespeare scholarship, and you have to approach it that way. I found it fun. I did figure out the mystery before it was revealed, but there were plenty of times that I thought it was going to go one way and it didn’t. Most importantly, it all works out. There are plenty of times when you’ll think the author took the easy route, or is going to follow the story through to a particular conclusion, and you’re almost always going to be wrong.

I still refuse to legitimize the authorship question, even after discussing it with the author (who is probably listening and may jump in on the comments :)). I did not come away from this book thinking, “Yes, I have new insight into the question.” Nope. I was a Stratford man when I started that book, I was a Stratford man when one of the book’s characters used the expression “Stratford half-wit” and I let out a stream of curses that only stopped when I reminded myself that this is a fictional character saying this, that no real people think that :), and I’m a Stratford man at the end. That doesn’t mean it’s not a fun book that I think Shakespeare geeks who are at least part science fiction geek would enjoy.

Review : The Wednesday Wars

April 23, 2013January 23, 2023 ~ duane ~ 3 Comments

The Wednesday Wars plays out like a Shakespeare geek’s version of the hero daydream.

Think back to when you were a child. Surely at one point or another we all dreamed the hero daydream, where bullies backed away from us in the halls, teachers and adults praised our genius, teammates carried us around on their shoulders after we singlehandedly won the big game. You know the drill. All that stuff that would never happen, we just hoped that maybe someday. I remember, and this will seriously date me, that I would someday appear on Johnny Carson because I was just so very precocious, and Johnny would be amazed at how smart I was at such a young age.

Our narrator, seventh-grader “Holling Hoodhood”, has to read The Tempest … and takes away from it the knowledge that most of Caliban’s lines are Shakespearean curse words. So he spends the rest of the book muttering “toads…beetles…bats!” when he’s angry at the situation, sometimes going so far as to shout “The red plague rid you!” at his enemies.

Do you know what happens? Do the bullies of the school all point and laugh and call him an even bigger nerd, knock his books down and give him a wedgie? Oh no, patient reader! In this hero’s daydream the bullies think that these newfangled curses are cool, and it’s only a matter of time before Shakespeare is heard up and down the hallways. I wish!

There’s an even funnier scene when our hero needs a favor from a grownup, who just happens to be in charge of the upcoming Shakespeare show. “What I need,” says the grownup, “What would really save the day? Is to find a 12year old boy that knows his Shakespeare!” Because, you know, that happens. 🙂 And then there’s the scene where he gets to play ball with the Yankees. Yeah.

Much of this story’s structure has been told before. A middle school student growing up in the 60s, having to deal with the teacher that hates him, the bullies that want revenge after he “takes one out,” an older sister who threatens death if he ever comes into her room….you know, the usual. If that’s all it was, I’d have no interest in this book. It is still a young adult book, narrated in that voice, and I found it overly redundant in many points. It’s cute in places (like when Holling’s most pressing concern over his Shakespearean debut is the fact that his costume has feathers on the butt). But his obsession with these things, while in character for a 12yr old, tried my patience on more than one occasion.

What makes this book special is Holling’s relationship with his teacher, Mrs. Baker, who has him working through Shakespeare as part of a special extra assignment. There are bits in the beginning (as noted with Caliban’s curses) where it’s amusing to watch him get into Shakespeare, but it’s not long before they’re taking on bigger and more important issues like “The quality of mercy is not strained” from Merchant. All this is set against the backdrop of the Vietnam War (Mrs. Baker’s husband is missing in action, and Holling’s older sister is considering becoming a flower child).

It’s here that we go from “hero’s daydream” to “Yes, yes, I wish life was more like this.” Everything that happens to Holling has happened and will continue to happen to all young adults at this stage of life. I’m jealous of him because he’s got Shakespeare (and Mrs. Baker) by his side. I mean, come on, he takes a date to Romeo and Juliet … and she likes it! In middle school!

All kidding aside there is a wonderful story being told here, in particular as the narrator’s relationship with his sister evolves. I’ve heard that there might be a sequel in the works, and I’ll definitely put that one on my list as well. I want to live vicariously through this kid.

Review : A Thousand Acres

March 22, 2013July 18, 2017 ~ duane ~ 2 Comments

Bardfilm and I have been discussing “modern adaptations” lately, and I asked for the distinction – did he mean modern setting but original text, or modern language? For this particular context he meant the latter. Since I don’t normally seek out such movies I went out and found one – the King Lear adaptation of the book of the same name, A Thousand Acres.

Jason Robards plays our Lear (“Larry”, as it becomes apparently quickly that the author’s gone with a whole first initial thing) to his daughters Michelle Pfeiffer (as “R”ose), Jessica Lange (as “G”inny) and Jennifer Jason Leigh (as “C”aroline). From that point it’s harder to tell who is who because unless I’m missing something the first initial game goes out the window as Colin Firth’s Jess is plainly the bastard Edmund. As you can see, though, the cast is first rate.

For any “modern adaptation” of this sort that’s clearly only taking inspiration from Shakespeare and not trying to tell his story, I look for a couple of things. How much direct homage to Shakespeare is there? How much of the original story remains? How much new material does this story provide?

In other words does the end result produce something standalone, while still showing respect for the original? It’s very tricky to strike a balance, because every time you diverge from the source material you’re going to have audience like me asking, “Oh, really? So you think you’re about to tell a better story?” and you need to bring it. Safest not to change the story too much, but instead to bring new elements that Shakespeare never touched upon.

How does A Thousand Acres do? It’s not bad. The connection to the source material is clear, and more than minimal. Larry runs the farm, and wants to retire and divide it up amongst his three daughters. R and G find this a great idea, but when C so much as says “Let me think about it” he disowns her on the spot. I mentioned Jess as the bastard character who does all the bastard things, sleeping with the sisters, getting into a fight with his father (Pat Hingle as this sort of Kent/Gloucester combination character), but he’s not really the architect of all the bad that happens. There’s even a nice big storm for the daughters to send their father into.

Other than those story elements the similarities are few and far between. In this story, R and G (makes me think of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern when I say that :)) are actually the good guys, if you can believe it. It’s a very complicated story. Nobody in town likes them because the people think the daughters conspired to steal the farm from their father. Meanwhile the daughters have both got some deep dark secrets that reveal their father is not the nice man he seems, and is well deserving of their hate.

I found the story too confusing to follow in many parts, and that’s one of the reasons that I often dislike modern adaptations. You try to add your own material, but then to really develop a foundation in that material you have to stray farther (further?) from the original, and eventually you hit walls where you can’t go more in any direction. Same here. There are some obvious places where R and G are talking and it seems like the most obvious thing in the world to do is for them to go talk to C…but they can’t. That’s not how the story went. In fact we never really even get C’s side of the story – this is Goneril’s movie, if I have to pick a central character.

The whole thing is additionally complicated with the addition of husbands and children, alcoholism and terminal illnesses. There’s a whole lot going on in this movie besides the Shakespeare. And it’s all set in this weird sort of Tennessee Williams sounding world where full grown women still call their parents “Mommy” and “Daddy” which, when coupled with the deep dark secrets that we learn, is all the more uncomfortable.

See it if you get a moment, if for nothing else than to have something to talk about the next time somebody trots out one of those lists that contains nothing but Lion King, Ten Things I Hate About You and She’s The Man. But don’t go out of your way for it.