James Cameron’s Dark Angel: a sinister scenario

I watched James Cameron’s Dark Angel series when it was first shown on UK TV 15  or so years ago. I thought that it was very good indeed despite the violence and a few other things such as gruesomeness and overuse of the evil twin meme.

I got the DVDs recently as part of an exercise to recreate the best of the past. After watching them just for the stories a few times, I came to realise that some elements of the underlying scenario could apply to more people than just the X5 group of genetically enhanced characters featured in the series.

Many aspects of the lives of the X5s will seem familiar to some people, especially those who think of themselves as being different in some way. 

People who feel like the X5s

Such people may have been brought up without caring parents and in Spartan surroundings; they may have been brainwashed and tested to the limits of endurance in childhood; as children, they may have been isolated, essentially hostages and prisoners in a harsh and brutal environment albeit not necessarily a physical one.

Such people may feel that they were selectively bred, raised and trained for a mission – even if they don’t know or can’t remember what it is.

Such people may feel that they have escaped from the past but are separated from others like them. All the time, they are pining for the company of their own kind. Unlike the X5s, they don’t know who their people are.

They may live among the normals, passing as one of them and apparently integrated into society but knowing that they are very different on the inside. Their wiring, abilities, experiences, outlook, requirements and goals are just not the same as those of the normals.

Like the X5s, these people may be flawed.

Elizabeth Taylor’s Angel: witches and writers

Elizabeth Taylor’s novel Angel has inspired two previous articles:

Angel’s Imagination covers the ways in which a very strong, active imagination can be a liability in everyday life.

Angel’s Life and Personality describes Angel and her life mainly in modern-day, this-world terms.

Much of Angel is familiar not only because I have read the biographies of Ouida and Marie Corelli that were the source of some of the material in Elizabeth Taylor’s novel, but also because it reminds me of what I have read, and sometimes written, about other people of interest.

Angel Deverell has many characteristics and events in her life in common with both fictional witches and real-life creative writers.

Angel and some fictional witches

I had read only a few pages of the book when Diana Wynne Jones’s young witch Gwendolen Chant came to mind. They have selfishness, an abrupt manner and single-mindedness in common. Gwendolen wants to rule the world; Angel wants to dominate the world.

There is a scene in Angel where she visits her publisher at his home; she ignores his wife. This reminds me of something I quoted about C. S. Lewis’s witch Jadis in the article about Gwendolen Chant: 

“In Charn she [Jadis] had taken no notice of Polly (till the very end) because Digory was the one she wanted to make use of. Now that she had Uncle Andrew, she took no notice of Digory. I expect most witches are like that. They are not interested in things or people unless they can use them; they are terribly practical." 
From The Magician’s Nephew

Both Gwendolen and Angel are quick to take offence and become furious when thwarted. Both hate to see others in possession of things they want for themselves. Both are outraged when they don’t get the recognition they think they deserve.

Neither girl is interested in academic achievement; they just concentrate on their one obsession to the exclusion of everything else, with Angel exercising her imagination and Gwendolen her magical powers.

Elizabeth Taylor’s Angel: her life and personality

Angel Deverell is the main character in Elizabeth Taylor’s novel Angel.  She has provided much more article material than I was expecting. After describing how she lives in her imagination rather than in the real world, we will now cover something of her life, personality and behaviour.

We left Angel at the point where her lies have been exposed and she escapes into illness and her imagination.

Angel Deverell becomes a romance writer

When her mother confronts her, Angel faces blankness and despair and longs for death, seeing no other way out.

When certain people feel that all avenues are closed and cry out on the inside for a miraculous deliverance, something may hear them and come to their rescue, offering what seems like a possible way out…for a price. It may even be that the avenues were deliberately closed, so that the victim chooses the path that they were intended to take all along.

Angel remembers something that for once made her feel happy: it was when she wrote an essay. She decides to write a book. It comes easily: the words flow effortlessly because she just gets some of her fantasies down on paper. Angel’s imaginings are all very visual, pictures seen in the mind’s eye. The words and narrative are not important to her.

Angel has never grieved over any human beings and doesn’t care that a neighbour’s daughter might be dying, but she cries over the funeral she writes about. Seeing real life as unreal, treating the inner world as the real world and the outer world as just a dream is yet another occupational hazard for people with very strong imaginations and unsatisfactory lives.

Angel refuses to return to school; she won’t look for work either: she disdains the suggestion that she could get an office job. She will write books and become rich and famous!

Elizabeth Taylor’s Angel: her imagination

I first heard about Elizabeth Taylor’s novel Angel when it turned up in the results of a Google Search for “Marie Corelli”. 

I had never read any of Taylor’s books, but I got a copy from my library after reading in reviews that Angel was based in part on the lives of the Victorian romance writers Marie Corelli and Ouida. I had read biographies of both of these best-selling writers and was curious to see how much of their biographical material had been used in Angel.

Much of the book is very familiar; I recognised many elements from the biographies. Angel Deverell, the main character, is obviously a composite of Marie Corelli and Ouida. Some of the descriptions of her personality, behaviour and events in her life were taken directly from the biographies.

Angel Deverell is a classic textbook case. She is a type of person who appears in the human race from time to time. I see them as a kind of witch. They may get what they wish for, but the price may be very high and it may all turn to dust and ashes.

Reading about Marie Corelli’s, Ouida’s and now Angel’s life has confirmed some of my ideas about sinister unseen influences that might be at work in people’s lives. There is a lot of material of interest in the book; it will take more than one article to cover it.

Angel Deverell and the dangers of too much imagination

We first meet Angel when she is a schoolgirl of 15. Her colouring is striking, but she is not beautiful. She is not very good at her lessons either, although she can fool people who know much less than she does into thinking that she is a good student.

The only attribute Angel has that is above average is her imagination, and she uses it all the time. It plays a much greater part in her life than her senses do. To Angel, her experiences are a makeshift substitute for her imagination.

She concentrates very hard and visualises her ideal life, one of nobility, glamour and splendour, very clearly. She daydreams whenever she can, as she dislikes the people around her and the environment she lives in. She wants, and feels entitled to, something much better.

The Gap in the Curtain: John Buchan nails it once again

The Gap in the Curtain is not one of John Buchan’s best-known works. It is not a story of excitement and adventure either: no thriller, it has a supernatural or paranormal theme and has been described as borderline science fiction. 

The Gap in the Curtain features the lawyer Sir Edward Leithen, another of Buchan’s heroes and narrator of the story, and Professor August Moe, a brilliant physicist and mathematician. 

The story starts with a dinner party. Leithen, who is extremely tired from overworking and close to the end of his tether, had been in two minds about accepting the invitation. He feels a little better when he notices that several other guests around the table are not looking too good either: they seem nervous, under the weather, ill, tired or even exhausted:

“I was free to look about me. Suddenly I got a queer impression. A dividing line seemed to zigzag in and out among us, separating the vital from the devitalised. There was a steady cackle of talk, but I felt that there were silent spaces in it. Most of the people were cheerful, eupeptic souls who were enjoying life... But I realised that there were people here who were as much at odds with life as myself...”

Being positive can occasionally backfire

I have learned from experience that our inner state often determines our experiences, so we can definitely change our lives for the better on the outside by first changing ourselves for the better on the inside.

I have given examples of how we can be our own worst enemies; I have also stated that distress signals can attract predators.

We benefit from being calm and positive; good feelings often boost our immune systems and act as a protection - except when it all backfires, as happened to me recently although in a very small way.

I went to collect something that I had ordered and paid for online. I had visited this store many times in the past, and always found the service fast and good, even at Christmas.

On this occasion, I stood at the collection desk and waited and waited for someone to come. I got the impression that I was being overlooked deliberately.  I could see that the place was busy. Many people were waiting to order and pay at the other desks; I guessed that taking more money takes priority over dealing with people who have already paid.

I reminded myself that it was warm inside and that I was not in a hurry. I knew it was important not to sound angry or self-pitying, so when someone eventually came to help, instead of saying anything about being ignored I just said calmly and pleasantly that I had been wondering whether I had gone invisible as no one had come for a long time.

The assistant, a young man, immediately said, “That’s because you look so contented”!

I was stunned, but it made sense. They probably learn to recognise the sort of people who will get angry and make scenes or go online and post complaints and bad reviews.

I have learned to save it for the big one and not get upset by minor inconveniences; I was pleased to get such positive feedback for my attempts to improve my inner state.

Today is the 80th Anniversary of Rudyard Kipling’s death

Rudyard Kipling died on January 18th 1936, in hospital in London, not long after his 70th birthday. Incidentally, January 18th is also the date on which Kipling got married – in 1892.

He might have lived longer if the source of his suffering and illness had been correctly diagnosed and suitably treated much earlier.

I was amused to read that Rudyard Kipling's death was prematurely reported in a magazine to which he immediately wrote, "I've just read that I am dead. Don't forget to delete me from your list of subscribers."

King George V, who was also born in 1865 and who was a personal friend of Kipling’s, died two days later, on 20th January 1936. He too might have lived longer, but perhaps by a few hours only, if he had not received a certain treatment: his death was deliberately speeded up with a lethal injection from his doctor so that the announcement could appear in the morning papers.