Somnopolis

You can keep your James Bonds and Jason Bournes…my favourite secret agent is Harry Palmer. A dry, deadpan public servant, who is just as likely to conduct a top secret briefing with his superior officer while pushing a shopping trolley down an aisle looking for a can of soup. His ordinariness, his failures and class makes him more recognizable to me. Michael Caine’s glasses even give Palmer the appearance of a bookish clerk, who deals with Cold War espionage from 9am until clocking out time, in the finest tradition of the British public service.

Which brings us to Charles Stross. Some months ago on Facebook I was moaning about not having read a decent sf/fantasy series that explored new ideas. Tom and Pol Rua both recommended I try out Stross. I started with The Family Trade, which amused by setting a fable about a woman from our world travelling to an alternate earth against the backdrop of cut-throat free market capitalism.

This mercantile Narnia showed how Stross can perform a decent enough literary mash-up, but I was hoping for more. The Atrocity Archives, an early science fiction novel by him, manages by catapulting a low-level public servant with proficient IT skills into the world of Lovecraftian counter-espionage. Cthulu dimensions bordering our own have been discovered decades ago and a secret Cold War is still underway between rogue states and the British government to take advantage of these eldritch powers. Our hero Bob Howard is pitted against Nazi dark mages and demons disguised as office receptionists, but at the end of the day he still needs to maintain his flexi time-sheets.

It’s a fantastic updating of Lovecraftian ideas, sidestepping the urban fantasies of Gaiman or Charles de Lint, by setting the conflict between flawed humankind and creatures from the dungeon dimensions in a white-collar world of bureaucratic procedure and IT speak.

I like that Stross takes this further than similar attempts from other creators, such as Chris Carter’s X-Files, Mike Mignola’s Hellboy, or Sergei Lukyanenko’s Night Watch. The essential Britishness of the setting, with its Harry Palmer-like understated heroism, makes it more interesting. It also neatly ties in with the fatalism of Lovecraft, whose heroes rarely escape with their lives, or sanity. Here Stross pulls the rug from beneath us by preferring anticlimactic resolutions to Howard’s missions. The theme is retained that humans are in the end incapable of comprehending anything outside of our own world. The Cthulu Elder Gods are beyond our understanding and so the procedural manner in which these incursions into reality are treated is an effective way of avoiding the existential nihilism that would often destroy Lovecraft’s scholarly adventurers.

I also like how Bob Howard is an unrepentant geek and know-it-all. What could potentially be a painful exposition-filled briefing scene between the hero and his spy-masters instead becomes an acronym filled info-dump of techno-babble. It’s not often clear exactly what Howard is talking about, but then he is in the end a bureaucrat and jargon is his first language. The reader is challenged to try to keep up, as there is no condescending narrative voice on offer to explain what is going on (although it is generally clear regardless).

Harry Palmer versus Cthulu Elder Gods and CCTV deathrays. Charles Stross, I thank you.

Night Watch has been seen and liked. Many reviews that I have read – and my own sister for one – have commented that this Russian film plays like some strange pop video. Now it could be argued that it is a reaction to the Wachowski’s and Peter Jackson. Medievil battles with juddering camera work? Check. Flashy shots incorporating CGI and life-action. Big Check. There’s a lovely sequence where we follow a bolt from a crashing plane all the way down to earth on its descent.

Still the humour and urban grit of this film is all Mama Russia’s own. The pessimism of the story’s set up felt appropriate to the locale as well. Yes we have the traditional battle between Good and Evil, but here they have come to a compromise which has resulted in the creation of the Night Watch (and the Day Watch, which we have yet to see). This eponymous ‘police’, organisation dresses like electricians and issue licences to vampires and witches to allow them to victimise humans. Then they launch sting operations against the very same ‘Others’, they have just licenced. So here the battle between Good and Evil has become bogged down in bureaucracy. How must Comrade Lenin feel, preserved in his glass tomb? The Matrix sequels ended with a similar compromise and were widely derided as being rubbish. Night Watch scored a major box office hit in Russia. So there you are.

Now I’m sure I’m becoming repetitive, but vampire hair stylists….for some reason I found that hilarious.

AS for what else happened last Friday….can I just say that match-making is evil and should be accountable to the strictures of capital punishment. Couples, Jesus!

Crazy Russian vampire film? Yes please. I know so little about this, yet I am so full of enthusiasm for it. Some poor chap approached me in work and mentioned that he had a credit card. I immediately demanded he purchase the dvd of the flick for me off eBay (lot linked below).

Right, forces of Light and Dark come to an accord, blah blah, metropolitan city populated by vampires and shape-shifters, a future messianic child will change the balance….blah blah blah, so far, so ‘Underworld’ (yeech).

But here the city is Moscow, not some Canadian city dressed up in New York drag. We have gangs of undead unleashed on the living thanks to a power cut that plunges the city into darkness. And…and well Tarantino likes it, so it can’t be all bad.

It’s made it into my ranking of “Films to be Excited About” – Land of the Dead, Serenity and now Nochnoy Dozor. Go see.

I wonder if the book is available in English?

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0403358/

http://www.themovieblog.com/archives/2005… (this link includes the trailer)