J D Davies

I don’t usually have film reviews in this blog, but then, they don’t usually make films about my historical period, i.e. the ‘Stuart age’. But the arrival in cinemas of The Favourite, the much-hyped film of Queen Anne’s relationships with Sarah Churchill, Duchess of Marlborough, and Sarah’s cousin Abigail Masham, was an opportunity that couldn’t be missed. Starring, in the respective parts, national-treasure-elect Olivia Colman, Rachel Weisz and Emma Stone, The Favourite continues the somewhat unexpected resurgence of interest in the last Stuart monarch, following the West End stage production of 2017 (which I reviewed here). Of course, this by no means redresses a balance tilted overwhelmingly towards the same old stories about the same old monarchs – looking at you, Henry VIII plus the divorced/beheaded/died brigade, Queen Victoria (yawn), the current monarch, gawd bless her (soon, of course, also to be portrayed by Dame Olivia, gawd also bless her), and, above all, Elizabeth I and Mary Queen of Scots. Our screening of The Favourite was preceded by a trailer for the latest film featuring the last two, and it was good to see that the filmmakers had resisted the temptation to include a historically impossible meeting between them –

OK, yes, scratch that, they meet.

I’ll review said film when it comes out, but I think it’s a fair bet to say that in terms of my critical opinion, it’ll have to go quite some distance to recover lost ground (although David Tennant as John Knox is surely a case of Casting from Heaven).

Anyway, The Favourite is certainly no straight take on the reign of Queen Anne. I praised the recent play for the way in which it didn’t compromise over including the complex and (let’s be fair) sometimes quite boring political contexts of the time. The film doesn’t compromise, either, but in precisely the opposite way. Union with Scotland? Sorry, what, exactly, is this ‘Scotland’ of which you speak? Religion? Forget it. Two Houses of Parliament? Hey, guys, that’s a bit inconvenient, let’s merge them into one. The biggest issue of the age, the question of Hanoverian versus Jacobite succession? Not a peep. Yes, we get some politics, but it’s pretty superficial stuff, with such anachronisms as the titles ‘Prime Minister’ and ‘Leader of the Opposition’ thrown into the mix – and you might imagine the reaction of a naval historian of the age to the line about reinforcing Marlborough with an army division to be sent across in ‘a boat’. Having said that, some might detect a subtle political agenda on the part of the film-makers. To a man, for example, the Tories are portrayed as effeminate, preening, powdered fops who make Jacob Rees-Mogg look like the Incredible Hulk; by contrast, the Whigs may have, yes, wigs, but otherwise they’re normal-looking solid chaps who just happen to, umm, race ducks. (Horatio, the ‘fastest duck in the city’, even earns a place in the cast list.) Then again, could there possibly be any hidden political agenda whatsoever in portraying a head of state as a petulant, neurotic child-adult, or in having the central political debate centring on whether or not Britain should unilaterally withdraw from a continental alliance? Nothing to see here, move along now.

No, The Favourite focuses overwhelmingly on the relations between the three central characters, and in this respect, it’s quite outstanding. Colman’s queen may, indeed, be petulant and neurotic, not to mention afflicted with what must be the most gruesome case of gout in history, but she’s also deeply sympathetic, especially when it comes to the seventeen rabbits who wander freely, and remarkably continently, around her bedroom – each representing one of the children she lost. (On this point, at least, the film’s accuracy to the historical record is unflinching.) Weisz’s Sarah is as domineering and serpentine as one suspects the real-life duchess must have been, while Stone’s slow transformation from ingenue – outwardly, at least – into an arch-intriguer capable of outmanoeuvring even Sarah is arguably an even more nuanced and impressive performance than Colman’s, although the latter is bound to scoop all the awards. I praised the play for keeping ambiguous the question of whether or not the women’s relationships were sexual, but the film has no such modesty.

Director Yorgos Lanthimos deliberately shoots the film from unexpected and often disconcerting angles, sometimes employing such devices as fish-eye lenses, which creates an unsettling sense of dislocation. This serves to emphasise one of the film’s biggest departures from historical accuracy, the sheer emptiness of the internal spaces. In reality, the queen’s court would have been full of people, with flunkies and courtiers galore in permanent attendance. Here, vast staterooms are empty for much of the time, with barely a footman or a guard in sight, let alone a lady in waiting other than Sarah or Abigail. Of course, the lack of bodies may simply have been a consequence of the filmmakers’ budget, but it serves to emphasise the strangeness, isolation and emptiness of the queen’s life, bereft of the children who should have been running around the rooms in question instead of the bunnies. (One might also be forgiven for thinking that all seventeen children must have been immaculate conceptions; there is no mention whatsoever of Anne’s husband, Prince George of Denmark, although the chronology is deliberately vague, encompassing the period from 1704 to 1713 within what’s presented as no more than a few months at most.)

Finally, though, it has to be said that the film is very funny indeed, with some brilliant laugh-out-loud lines. The tone is set by one of the first lines in the film, when a servant comments about the state of the highway: ‘They shit in the streets around here,’ she says. ‘Political commentary, they call it’. Some may find The Favourite too rude (c-bombs abound), too strange, or simply too far removed from their preconceived idea of what a historical film should be like – apparently there have been quite a few unhappy punters walking out of showings. Maybe these particular moviegoers will be happier with Mary Queen of Scots, or else with something like Frozen Fast and Furious Avenging Transformers of the Caribbean XXVII. For my part, I reckon that Horatio, the fastest duck in the city, deserves a spin-off franchise of his own, as the role of racing ducks in history has undoubtedly been unfairly neglected.

Attention, good people of the United States of America.

I know these are strange and testing times in your wonderful land.

I am told, for example, that Franklin Delano Roosevelt might no longer be your President, that your government has been shut down since 1789 last month, that I Love Lucy is no longer the mainstay of your TV schedules, and that a baby called Ruth is no longer running home.

However, these trials are as nothing to that which awaits you in this new year of 2019. Yes, my transatlantic friends, your mighty border wall is being built in the wrong place, because, ready or not, I’m coming your way – and coming from a completely different direction.

Seriously, I’m absolutely thrilled to announce that I’ll be attending, and presenting at, the Historical Novel Society North America conference in Maryland in June. (Full details of dates, location etc can be found here.) This is all down to my friend Gillian Bagwell, author of such terrific books as The Darling Strumpet, Venus in Winter and The King’s Mistress, who successfully pitched to the conference organisers the idea of a panel featuring myself and Jeff Shaara, one of the conference’s two guests of honour. The multiple prize-winning author of fifteen novels, spanning conflicts from the 1770s to the Korean War, Jeff is probably best known for his novel of the American Civil War, Gods and Generals, which was made into a film starring Robert Duvall as Robert E Lee. While I haven’t yet read the book, I’m probably one of the relatively few people in the UK who has the DVD sitting on his shelves!

(The American Civil War has been an interest of mine since childhood, but then, so has American history as a whole. The period from independence to the civil war was effectively my second specialism at college, which is why I don’t particularly want to go to see Hamilton – I already know all the spoilers.)

With Gillian as our moderator, Jeff and I will be talking about ‘The Way of the Warrior’, trying to unpick such issues as defining ‘the warrior’ (something more than just ‘a soldier’?), the ways in which novelists write about war and warriors, and the often tricky judgement calls that novelists have to make when doing so (such as, how gruesome should one be without having one’s readers retching violently?). It should be great fun, and hopefully thought-provoking too.

I’m also looking forward to catching up with as many old friends as possible, with making some new ones, with attending lots of the other panels (sooo much choice!!), and to exploring the area. The conference venue looks to be a stone’s throw, or rather a short ferry ride, from the likes of Mount Vernon, Arlington National Cemetery, and Washington DC itself, so I’ll definitely be going into full ‘British tourist abroad’ mode. Having been brought up in the 1960s on a diet of both Western B-movies and classic British war films, I’ll look forward to tipping my bowler hat respectfully to everyone I meet and greeting them with the cheery local salutation, ‘howdy, pardners!’, uttered in my best Laurence Olivier accent, permitting very slight movement of my stiff upper lip as I do so.

See you in June, America!

(Unless you’re still shut down then, of course, or I can’t get out of the UK after Brexit…)

A very Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to all readers of this blog, and of my books!

Here, demonstrating that family arguments and excessive consumption of the hard stuff have been Christmas ‘traditions’ for ever and a day, is Samuel Pepys on 25 December 1661…

In the morning to church, where at the door of our pew I was fain to stay, because that the sexton had not opened the door. A good sermon of Mr. Mills. Dined at home all alone, and taking occasion from some fault in the meat to complain of my maid’s sluttery, my wife and I fell out, and I up to my chamber in a discontent. After dinner my wife comes up to me and all friends again, and she and I to walk upon the leads, and there Sir W. Pen called us, and we went to his house and supped with him, but before supper Captain Cock came to us half drunk, and began to talk, but Sir W. Pen knowing his humour and that there was no end of his talking, drinks four great glasses of wine to him, one after another, healths to the king, and by that means made him drunk, and so he went away, and so we sat down to supper, and were merry, and so after supper home and to bed.

This blog will return in the New Year, when I hope finally to be able to provide up to date information on the progress of my new Tudor naval fiction trilogy!

A confession: I have a Kindle. While the world is generally united on the merits of the computer and the physical book, it’s split down the middle on the subject of Kindles (note: other e-readers are available), which is undoubtedly the Marmite of the literary world. Shaun Bythell, the famously – nay, mythically – grumpy owner of one of my favourite bookshops on the planet, located in Wigtown, Galloway (and called, with typical Gallovidian understatement, The Bookshop), detests the device so much that pride of place on the walls of his shop goes to a terminally deceased, expired, gone-to-meet-its-maker Kindle, which he shot.

(Yes, you did read that correctly. Incidentally, his book, Diary of a Bookseller, is an absolute hoot, although it also has many profoundly serious things to say, and is well worth a read in any format whatsoever.)

Don’t get me wrong, I love physical books, as the state of my house and, above all, my office reveals at once. The big advantage of the Kindle, though, is its portability. Would I take the 800-plus pages of C J Sansom’s mighty new title, Tombland, of which more anon, to read on a train or a flight? Definitely not. But my Kindle adds virtually no weight to my backpack, and even fits into some coat pockets, so it really is a boon for those who travel a fair bit.

One of the other big pros of a Kindle (sorry, Shaun) is that it encourages one to read more, and more catholically, then one would otherwise have done; in other words, I’ll happily take a punt on something outside my usual comfort zones that costs £1.99 on the Kindle, when I’d think more than twice about buying the same title in paperback at £8.99. This isn’t simply on cost grounds, either, and indeed, with my author hat on, I know that this is the economics of the madhouse for my profession – and, yes, for me, personally. (Not entirely, of course: the logic, or rather the optimistic fantasy, is that so many people will become hooked on your one heavily discounted title that they’ll snap up the rest at full price.) But my bookshelves are literally groaning under the weight of the titles I bought between about five and forty years ago, read for a maximum of about fifty pages, and then abandoned with a vague promise that I’d return to them some day, a bit like the promises you make to yourself every 1 January that this really will be the year when you finally arrange to meet that old friend who sends you Christmas cards but who you haven’t seen in decades.

(Of course, I really should despatch said books to a charity shop. But the ‘old friend’ analogy applies here, too – after all, even if you don’t meet him or her this year, you’ll still send keep that friend on your Christmas card list, and will still make the same promise next December.)

So the Kindle saves space, but the relative cheapness of the books bought for it means it’s possible to be a lot more selective, nay, ruthless, in one’s reading. I used to make it a point of principle that if I started a book, I’d finish it – except of course for all the ones mentioned above that I, umm, didn’t finish. But then I came upon one of the wisest expressions ever coined by mankind, namely, ‘life’s too short to read bad books’. And in this respect, the Kindle is a godsend, especially its relentless statistics – the percentage already read, and the estimated time that reading the rest of the book will take. I work on ‘the 20% rule’, namely, that if I get to 20% and am still interested in the story and characters, I’ll finish it. (There are exceptions: I recently got to about 75%, thought ‘why am I still reading this garbage?’, and went out in a belated attempt to get a life.) However, there are intermediate stages. Many titles have perished at just 10%, some even at 5%, and here are some of the reasons why.

1/ Anachronisms – Some recent examples of howlers that have led me to abandon ship somewhere between 1 and 10%:

• So you’ve set a novel in the pre-1914 Austro-Hungarian Empire, but think Slovenia was an independent state at the time? Try Googling ‘historical maps of central Europe’. Or just ‘history’. (Conversely, I stuck with the otherwise excellent First World War thriller which jarringly used ‘Benelux’ instead of ‘the low countries’ – the first use of the former term was in 1944.)
• You’re a highly acclaimed bestselling author, but you think that milk bottles during the Second World War had use-by dates on them? Mais non.
• You’ve written a thriller set against the backdrop of the late Victorian royal family, but use completely wrong forms of address for pretty much every titled character in your story? Does the word ‘Debrett’ mean nothing to you?
• Above all, you’ve set your story in, say, twelfth century Italy or fifteenth century England, and yet [a] your characters never, ever, go to church, and [b] your dialogue could have come straight out of a script for Eastenders? (‘How ya doin’, ‘enry V, me old mucker?’) Bye bye. (Even the aforementioned Mr Sansom, one of the titans of the genre, was recently criticised on social media for his constant references to ‘lunch’ in the mid-sixteenth century, when no such meal existed. A fair cop, although I think it’s more than offset by what must be the first extensive uses of the words feodary and escheator in a bestselling novel…)

No doubt some of you are thinking that those who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones, and are even now thumbing through your copies of the Quinton books to find some of my howlers. This would be another fair cop – there are plenty out there! – were it not for the possibility that some devious authors might also plant such slips deliberately, perhaps for narrative reasons, perhaps to see if their readers are awake and paying attention (and even if I just made that up to cover my back, how will you ever know…?). For example, although it wasn’t a slip as such, I moved the date of Easter 1662 in Gentleman Captain, simply because I needed to. Did anybody object? Come to that, did anybody notice? Nope.

2/ Not interested – I’m generally a tolerant soul when it comes to grammar (misplace an apostrophe, though, and you’re toast). But there are a very few linguistic errors that get me reaching for the metaphorical equivalent of Mr Bythell’s shotgun, and one of them is the modern habit of using ‘disinterested’ instead of ‘uninterested’. OK, I know that modern usage is generally more forgiving of this than I am (even Oxford says it’s fine, and who am I to argue with my old alma mater?), but in this one specific instance, I’m on the side of the dinosaurs.

3/ The Curse of the Folder – Actually, this should be one of the advantages of the Kindle, i.e. the option to organise titles into suitably titled folders (a bit like the way in which your physical books really should be arranged on suitably organised shelves, but aren’t, and never will be). I always have about a dozen titles in my ‘Current’ folder – the immediate ‘to read’ list, the ones which, I tell myself, I’m going to read next. Except I never do. Something new comes along, and always seems a bit more interesting than Title X, which has already languished in the ‘Current’ folder for months. Maybe years. And will probably still be there, at 0%, in months or years to come.

For all its foibles, then, I’m a fan of the Kindle, and the evidence of recent years demonstrates that far from bringing about the death of the physical book, it’s actually co-existed with a resurgence of the latter. After all, many in the 1950s and 1960s predicted that TV would mean the death of radio, whereas instead, the two have complemented each other and gone from strength to strength. So, sorry, Shaun, I won’t be joining you on the next Kindle shoot.

***

I’ll be having another blog-free week next week, but on the following Monday, i.e. 10 December (December?!?! How on earth did that happen?),I’ll be making a really important and exciting announcement. Watch this space!

Posted at the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month, one hundred years on.

Words are largely superfluous. Here, with minimal captioning, are some relics and memorials of the ‘war to end all wars’, encountered during my travels over the years.