Public libraries and the lockdowns

My local public library was closed for several months earlier this year because of the coronavirus restrictions.  The online reservation service was not available for a while after they re-opened; now that it has been reinstated there are so many rules and restrictions that for me library visits are just not worth the trouble.

I don't want to have to deal with the welcoming committee at the door with their demands for contact details for Test and Trace, not to mention the compulsory face masks and hand sanitising! Reserving books would entail letting them know in advance what time I am coming to collect them, which doesn't appeal either.

I took two library books out just before the first lockdown started; they were automatically renewed so I didn't have to pay any fines for non-return. Taking them back when my library re-opened in July is the only time I have visited the place since March.

Some people max-ed out their library cards just before the first lockdown started so as to get a lot of reading material in before holing up at home; I have been filling the gap with online and downloaded material and by reading some of my own books one last time before donating them to charity shops. 

Former library books: a slight digression

My local library has book sales from time to time, but I have never seen anything I want. When it comes to buying books, there are much better sources.

Many of the books I have been reading during the lockdown were second hand and came from charity shops or eBay; ironically, many of them were ex library!  I bought them either before I re-joined the public library because I had no choice but to pay for reading material or after because they were not in the online catalogue. 

The Polar Express: a controversial Christmas film

The Polar Express (2004) is a film about some children who take a ride on a magical train to the North Pole to visit Santa Claus and his elves.

It was the first film I ever saw in an IMAX cinema. I went to the drum-shaped BFI one at Waterloo, which has the biggest screen in Britain. This was my Christmas treat for 2004.

I think that this was the first time I ever saw  'uncanny valley' CGI characters too, so there were three new experiences in one outing.

The snowy landscapes in The Polar Express were beautiful, but the film as a whole was rather eerie; it had a weird and dreamlike atmosphere that made me feel uneasy. I did not like the hybrid animated/human characters either: they gave me the uncomfortable, something isn't right, feelings that some robotic people in this world do, people who seem neither dead nor fully alive, people who seem more like ghosts or zombies than real people.

The film was in 3-D; the roller-coaster swoops of the camera made me dizzy!

The friend who came to see the film with me had much the same opinion of it: the IMAX experience was great apart from the times when we had to close our eyes because the vertical drops made us feel seasick, but parts of the film were rather disturbing.

With hindsight, even the 'normal' scenes in The Polar Express, children in their homes for example, seem like fantasy; they look like an alternate version of reality similar to the one in the film Coraline (2009). 

Stella Gibbons’s My American and writing: Part III

There comes a time when Amy Lee changes direction: she stops producing tales of heroism and adventure and joins the school of domestic realism. 

The  reasons given for this drastic transformation are rather contrived and not altogether convincing. I suspect that this element was introduced mainly for the sake of the plot and to make some points; Stella Gibbons could also have used it to clear up some unfinished business of her own .

From danger and death to domesticity

As a child Amy Lee scribbles non-stop, producing exciting adventure stories such as Pharaoh’s Curse: A Tale of  Ancient Egypt and The Wolf of Leningrad: A Thrilling Story of The Russian Revolution purely for her own enjoyment. The books she reads fire her imagination and provide the ideas for her stories.

As a young woman, she writes exciting adventure stories for publication.  She may not have any first-hand knowledge, any personal experience, of the sort of people and action that she writes about, but her readers love her work. She becomes a best-seller; her books are made into films and this gains her world-wide popularity.

After moving to America, Amy Lee changes track and writes a very different kind of story for a whole new constituency of readers:

“Her stories of family life communicated (because she herself felt it) to the passing of an examination or the breaking of a betrothal the excitement she had once given to escapes from death and last-minute rescues, and she charmed her readers by showing them the variety and interest of every day.”

So what happened here? Why did Amy abandon her heroic avatars? Why the farewell to adventure in favour of embracing mundane subject matters? One of the reasons given is that Amy's adventure stories lack moral values; they are in some ways unethical, unedifying and unwholesome, something that she is unaware of until she visits America and comes in for some direct criticism. She also cools off after experiencing danger, death amd great fear at first hand.

John Christopher’s Guardians: Part IV

One criticism I have of The Guardians is that it ends just when the most interesting and exciting part of the story is about to start. Perhaps John Christopher was intending to write a sequel but never got around to it!

I also find the final part of the story and the ending disappointing and unsatisfactory. What we get seems just an outline or a summary when compared with the early chapters. 

There is a lack of balance and consistency of approach in that while it takes two thirds of the book just to get the young hero Rob Randall out of his old life in the Conurb of London and into his new school in the County, some of the most crucial developments in the story are covered in just the last few pages. Perhaps there was a mad rush to beat a deadline or there was a problem with exceeding an agreed word count.

The detailed description of’ Rob’s escape from the awful boarding school and journey to the County is not balanced with equally detailed accounts of his subsequent experiences up to the point where he learns something terrible about how the Guardians of the County deal with dissidents. 

The Guardians 

After the revolt has been put down, a patrol of Guardians comes to the house looking for Mike. Even though the Giffords insist that Rob knows nothing and was not involved in the uprising, they take him away for questioning.

He is ‘interviewed’ by Sir Percy Gregory, the Lord Lieutenant of the County. Sir Percy reveals that he has known all along that Rob is an imposter:

“You can, of course, no longer be treated as an ordinary member of our society. You are not one, after all. You are a Conurban, posing as County. You are listed by the Conurb police as a runaway from the boarding school at Barnes. So I don't mind telling you that this society is not so haphazard and unorganized as it seems. Things are investigated and checked: thoroughly. We had the boy from Nepal and the absentee from the boarding school matched within twenty-four hours of the first automatic query.”

Rob realises that it is useless to say that he knows nothing at all about the plot. He tells Sir Percy everything he knows about the dissident schoolboys, but he doesn’t mention Mike’s recent visit to the Gifford home.

Stella Gibbons’s My American and writing: Part II

Stella Gibbons's romance My American contains much writing-related material. The previous article contains extracts that describe the writing process; this article is mainly about the relationship between Amy Lee, adventure stories and Stella Gibbons herself.

There are some autobiographical elements in My American: some of what Stella Gibbons says about Amy Lee, her childhood, her inner states, her imagination and her stories applies to Stella herself. 

Stella Gibbons and adventure stories

Reading about Amy Lee's early tales of danger and adventure such as The Hero of the Desert and The Mummy's Curse reminded me of something I once read about Stella Gibbons: she liked the books of Sir Henry Rider Haggard very much indeed, and more than anything else she wanted to write similar stories.

Her nephew and biographer Reggie Oliver said this:

“Amy as a writer is Stella, but without her sophistication or intellect; and to create her character, Stella projected her immature, adolescent self into Amy’s adulthood. Amy writes romantic adventure stories of the kind that Stella wrote at the age of twelve, based on Rider Haggard and Ouida.”

Amy Lee's early stories certainly sound just like the sort that Stella Gibbons wished she could write. She must eventually have come to realise that she had no talent for creating such stories; she had to settle for describing ordinary people shopping at the Archway in north London as opposed to colourful characters searching for King Solomon's mines in Africa! 

It makes sense that if Stella Gibbons couldn't do in real life something she very much wanted to do, she would do it vicariously in fiction. This may be a second-best substitute and form of compensation, but it is better than nothing – for both readers and writers.

John Christopher’s Guardians: Part III

Rob Randall learns to cope quite well with life at his new school, but then some unexpected problems arise in the form of his friend and schoolmate Mike Gifford's attempts to recruit him into a revolutionary group. 

Changing places

Rob's arrival in the County is responsible for a big change in Mike's attitude towards the Conurbs and their inhabitants.  Up to this point his view of the other side has always been the typical aristocratic one of denigration and dismissal:

“Like everyone else in the County he knew a little about the Conurb: enough to be contemptuous of it. It was the place of the mob, where people dashed around in electrocars, crowded together like sardines, listened to raucous pop music, watched holovision and the bloodthirsty Games - for the most part watched the Games on holovision. 

It was the place where everyone ate processed foods and liked them, where there were riots and civil disturbances, where no one knew how to behave properly, how to dress or exchange courtesies, how to speak English even. It was the place one knew existed and, apart from thanking God one did not have to live there, preferred to forget.”

Rob's personality and his achievements in his new life cause Mike to revise his opinions and think along different lines. He asks Rob many questions about his earlier life, the people he knew and the Conurbs. He sounds Rob out on the subject of possible changes in the relationship between the Conurbs and the County. Rob sees nothing wrong with the existing system that keeps them divided, and even if there were areas for improvement he thinks that no one could do anything about it. Even if something could be done, would the County want hordes of Conurbans pouring in and ruining everything?