Reading: Five Red Herrings

When I first wanted to read Sayers, and asked for advice on where to start, several people told me to avoid Five Red Herrings, with the result that though I picked up a second-hand copy years I ended up skipping it when I was reading my way through the books (easily done, when there was more Peter/Harriet in prospect) and didn't get round to it until now, six years after reading all the rest.

Actually, I rather liked it. Not as much as the Harriet Vane books, of course, and not as much as Murder Must Advertise or the The Nine Tailors, but at least as much as any of the others. I could have done with fewer phonetically-rendered Scottish accents, but it was a nice twisty mystery with a cast of interesting and three-dimensional characters (I found myself particularly enjoying one rather stroppy potential suspect who I couldn't help seeing as a dead ringer for one of my stroppier academic colleagues). I doubt I'll return to it again and again, but I enjoyed reading it and have definitely read worse books.

On the "worse books" front, I put Five Red Herrings back on the shelf yesterday morning and, prompted by a vague thought inspired by the excellent recent Radio 4 adaptation of Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit that I should read more Jeanette Winterson, picked up Written on the Body, which I had tried to read in about 1994 and couldn't get on with, thinking that maybe I'd have more success now. I got so pissed off with it I had to stop reading halfway home because I simply couldn't bear to carry on. I may have been very wrong about very many things when I was 20, but "Jeanette Winterson's writing is all style and no substance" clearly wasn't one of them. Also, it's basically literary PWP, and I actually have no interest at all in that.

Films

We went to the cinema twice this week, to see two very different but very good films.

Eye in the Sky is a film that I might not have gone to see if I hadn't known it was Alan Rickman's last film; I suspect I'd have thought that "thriller about drone warfare" didn't really sound like my kind of thing, but I'm glad I did go (though still sorry it was Rickman's last film). It's not actually an action film, however much the trailer may have tried to make it look like one (most of the action moments in the fim are in the trailer): it's a thoughtful, intelligent film about the way technology has changed combat, and about the extent to which it's possible to accept collateral damage in preventing greater loss of life.

The second film was The Brand New Testament, a Belgian comic fantasy that was very Terry Gilliam-esque in places. The premise is that God is an abusive arsehole who is only interested in ways to make people's lives miserable (an interpretation that reality does provide a certain amount of textual evidence for) and who controls the world from the apartment in Brussels where he lives with his downtrodden wife and rebellious ten-year-old daughter, until the day when the daughter, Ea, hacks her father's computer, sends everyone on earth a text message telling them how long they have left to live, and escapes to the world, to follow in her brother's footsteps by gathering six new apostles and writing a brand new testament. It's a film about love, and at heart the message is very simple: that only love makes life worth living. I found it very sweet, moving and uplifting.