Dispatches from the Ward

For the past three weeks I've been penned up in hospital, and for the foreseeable future at least, it looks like I shall remain penned up in hospital. It's nothing overly serious, just something that requires an awful lot of anti-biotics and an operation that carries a very minor risk of death and a much more overt risk of letting whatever is crawling around inside of me spread to other parts of the body. I don't usually like to get overly personal in this blog (a decision that I'm not sure is to its merit or detriment) but it's been a curious thing, life on the ward. I've fallen into a steady, completely rigid and entirely predictable routine. Observations at half six. Cup of tea at seven. Medication and breakfast at around eight.  IV line at ten. Observations. Dinner. More observations. Medication. And so on and so forth until it becomes hammered into your brain and you become somewhat agitated if these things arrive more than half an hour outside their usual, allotted time. You know that no matter what time you fall asleep at night, a nurse will be around somewhere in the region of half six-seven o'clock to take your blood pressure. You know if you wander off the ward, you must be back by five or you'll miss food and drugs and then by God! Will you be in trouble. It's an environment that I'm sure is designed in the best interest of the body, but I can't say it's been working wonders on the state of my mind.

Many of my friends have said that, if nothing else, at least I can get some rest. Some have even expressed how they'd like to be the ones lying around, getting time to read, not having to do the cleaning, being fed two free meals a day, etc. And I'm sure it sounds lovely from the outside, but I have to admit I'm not finding it terribly restful. At the end of the day, this isn't a hotel. It's not a private sanctuary where you can close the door, put your head down and snooze the time away. You're staying in the workplace of dozens of people, and their job? To observe and make sure that you and every other patient on their ward is stable and in the best health they can be. Even as I'm typing this I can hear drifting yet clear conversation, nurses walking backwards and forwards, trolleys rattling, doors slamming, and even if you manage to drift off amidst all this - I assure you it will only be for a quick cat nap as they will wake you up. Wake you up to do observations. Wake you up for medication. For food. I saw one poor chap being woken up to take a cup of tea. Now I love tea, in fact free and constant tea (seven times a day, no less!) is one of the big perks of being here. But sleep is more important than tea here, and there are times I don't think it would hurt for the staff to step back and leave people be.

Of course, there's more ways to rest than sleep. But unless you enjoy staring out of the window (assuming you're in a single ward as the four beds have no view at all) or make a friend on your ward, the only recreation to be had is that you bring yourself. Unless, of course, you're willing to pay. I may sound like I'm whinging and groaning, but I can fully understand the need for constant checks and observations, for making sure people are eating and getting the treatment they need in a timely manner in a way that isn't doing more harm. The above paragraph has it's roots in doctors and nurses doing their jobs, and it's hard to begrudge them but at the same time, it's hard not to yearn for just a single night and morning of peace to recover properly. However, the lack of recreational facilities truly is vile and the reasons those facilities are lacking comes straight from the minds who'd like to privatise the whole NHS and have done with it.

You see, there's a little machine by my bed. An innocuous little screen that glows brightly, day and night, and even has another screen emblazoned on it! A happy, smiling cartoon screen with it's arms thrown wide as if to give you a hug. Do not trust this screen! This screen is Lucifer in electronic form! You see, this screen provides certain services. You can watch television, surf the internet or even rent movies. Providing you're willing to pay. The price for the internet is two pounds for twenty-four hours, which actually doesn't sound too bad, until you realise that the hospital filters block most sites you might wish to visit (something there was no warning of in advance of you spending the money on it) and I'm not talking about anything naughty or obscene. I'm talking about Youtube. Or any kind of video service. It also seems to be incapable of loading any site more complicated than Google or Facebook properly. I attempted to visit Cracked to give my phone a rest and was presented with a plain white screen with dozens of blue hyper links on it, and somewhere, if you squinted really hard, was the article you were looking for.

The movie rental is perhaps the least of the offenders. The selection is pretty shallow, containing sequels to movies but not the originals they followed from, but it's two fifty for twelve hours and you'll no doubt find something you want to watch. The television though, the television... More than eleven whole English pounds for three days of television. Three pounds for two hours, and somewhere over five for a day. You might be willing to swallow this cost if you're in for a week or less, but having been here for three, that would be almost seventy pounds for the privilege of watching mostly terrestrial television and it amounts to the NHS letting whoever makes these stupid bedside machines hold their patients ransom. And if you, understandably, have better things to do with your money I guess it's books and newspapers for you! Assuming you can get them yourself, or have family who can bring them to you.

Of course, even if you can are mobile, like I am, there's nowhere to go regardless. There's a Costa, a Smiths and a canteen. Outside the grounds are mostly dedicated to the hospital and its sister buildings, and there are few places to go where you don't just find yourself wandering the same paths to nowhere day in, day out. As you can imagine, this lack of sleep, combined with a general restlessness and a feeling that every day is the same is an environment that's rather counter productive to writing these blogs. Most of my inspiration comes from fleeting thoughts based on things I've absorbed around me, some dismissed out of hand, others ruminated on. I often take the dog for a walk in the forest beside our home, and while I stroll down the pavement I build my points in my head and refine how I'm going to present them. Sometimes those blog ideas dismissed out of hand pop back into my head and start to form a life of their own, and I suddenly find that yes, yes I do have something to say on that issue and it is most definitely worth writing about.

Naturally, none of that structure exists here and without the seeds, not even tiny saplings will grow. So I've decided that perhaps a different approach is needed. A new structure. The one thing I can do here, above all else, is read. I've read upwards of seven books while I've been here, which is nice in its own way, but also puts a rather sharp focus on one kind of entertainment and there are days I do just shrug whatever I'm reading aside and become a little sick of it. Too much of a good thing, I suppose! But one thing my mind has latched onto lately is fiction set in the late 1800s to the early 1900s, and of late my brain has especially latched onto reading quasi-sequels to War of the Worlds. I'm not sure why, perhaps in such a structured environment my brain is seeking a structure, a common thread of it's own. I find them a pretty odd phenomenon, so as such I'll be sharing my thoughts on them with you in some kind of splinter segment of Cover to Cover I think. I've also been musing, lately, on the use of historical figures as fictional characters and where the line between respectful homage and plain disrespect lies. So perhaps they'll be something on that in the future. I suppose what I'm trying to say in a long winded manner is, I hope you like books because by God there's going to be a lot of talk about them in the future.

Now before I close off, I just want to say that despite this blog perhaps having a dour aspect,I mean no disrespect to the staff who work so hard here, or the institution itself. The nurses that work the ward are, for the most part, a lively and jovial lot who are happy to talk to you and take jokes well. That alleviates a lot of the more depressing aspects of being here, but they're also extremely busy, so there are days when you will only see them in passing. All I'm trying to put across is that hospital is a pretty restless and far from ideal experience no matter how well the staff take care of you. There's a lack of freedom, a lack of control of your own personal affairs, a lack of privacy for the most part that can weigh very heavy on a person's mind. I salute the work the staff of the NHS do, and I don't think I could be in a better place for the procedures I need, but at the same time, I hope that others reading this never have to have more than a fleeting experience with that good work.

Super Heroes on the Small Screen (Or how comics are invading your TV!)

Over the past decade superhero movies have become so prominent that they're pretty much synonymous with the Hollywood blockbuster. Just this year we've had Captain America, Amazing Spider-Man, X-Men and later Guardians of the Galaxy, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Sin City shall be upon us and those are just the big guns, leaving aside more stealthy adaptations most people probably assume aren't drawn from comic books such as I, Frankenstien and ones with tenuous links to their original works like 300: Rise of an Empire. This doesn't seem to be changing any time soon, with Marvel claiming they have plans well into the next decade and Warner Bros/DC finally pulling their finger out of whatever orifice they've had it in these past few years and deciding they need to make a concentrated effort to catch up. I personally can't say I approve of the method they're going by to catch up, but I guess it's nice to finally seem them get over the self-inflicted wound that was Green Lantern and do something.

Looking at the television schedules lately, it looks like the comic book adaptation isn't happy with it's lot as the king of cinema and it's coming for the smaller screen. We've already seen this in dribs and drabs, with The Walking Dead continuing to shuffle on, the wildly entertaining Arrow bursting into its second series with a gusto and Agents of SHIELD - A much maligned show that I'll happily defend to the death, coming to an initial close and all set up for a second series as well. True it had a slow start, and the initial few episodes suffered from characters who carried all the traditional Whedon stereotypes and very little of the associated charm, but over time it's built itself into a thrilling mammoth of a series, and I hope they can carry that momentum forward into their much deserved second outing.

TV series based on comic books are often mooted, but like so many movies of the same ilk (anyone remember the proposed Magneto or Silver Surfer spin-offs? The Flash movie that was rolling around in development hell with Wonder Woman post DC crawling into a hole when anything without a bat in it wasn't working out for them?) they often fall flat on their face. Despite their best efforts, Wonder Woman will have to remain Lynda Carter on the small screen for awhile longer and the often talked about Fables adaptation (canalised as it was into Once Upon A Time) seems to constantly wind up off and on the table as the years roll by. But something extraordinary happened these past few weeks. We got trailers. A whole host of trailers.

I already covered Gotham in a previous blog, but in the same rough time span we saw a glimpse of what was to come for two other DC properties that are coming soon. These are The Flash, based on DC's première scarlet speedster, and Constantine, the smarmy, no nonsense demon hunter who you wouldn't want to trust with your daughter. Or anyone else. Possibly not even your worst enemy. I have to admit, I'm very excited for both of these, but let's take a look!

Well... I have to admit I have mixed feelings on this one. The man they have playing Constantine, visually, is spot on. The only way you could get a better representation of the character is inventing a time machine and stealing 1980s circa Sting. There was also a moment in the trailer that made me jump out of my skin, immediately followed by a 'Feck me that's gross!' which is exactly what you want from something relating to Hellblazer. However. However. I can't help but get a nagging feeling about this. Maybe it's how the trailer is cut, but this does have the whiff of... Well, let's not beat around the bush, there are parts of it that reminded me of Charmed and other rather dubious 90s shows that featured heavily signposted plots and relationships and passable acting from anyone who didn't have a major role. That scene with the mum talking to her daughter is a prime example, and made me cringe a little. But the information landfill that was the conversation with the angel he had was pretty bad too.

I also can't seem to get used to Constantine himself. Everytime I've seen him he's either been stand-offish or extremely sarcy and enigmatic, yet here there's something of the cheerful jokester and emotional guardian to him. Again, this is snippets and not a whole representation, and it's true that even though he's terrible - Constantine does strive to be a good person. The inherent tragedy of the character is that for as much good as he tries to do, more people around and close to him seem to suffer. That'll take anyone off the rails, and maybe this version of the character just hasn't suffered enough yet. But I think it'll still take me awhile to get used to him.

I was also going to complain about the accent. I'm not sure where the accent comes from, and can only assume it's Matt Ryan's own, but it's... Very Welsh. With possibly the slightest hint of Irish (making him all the more jaunty!). However, considering Constantine is supposed to be a scouser, it could've been far, far worse I suppose. C-C-Constantine Vision! Demonic runes to me, demonic runes to you, and other jokes that will be lost on our international friends. I'm sorry guys. It happens sometimes.

That being said, the idea of starting the character out in an asylum is pretty inspired (and the chaos that goes on there looks fantastically fun!) and some of the supernatural elements were pulled off well. But on the whole I think I'll be stepping into this one a little cautiously, not only because of everything listed above, but because compared to the other two trailers released recently - This looks to be the less polished of the lot, and I was really hoping for some fantastically visceral and creepy set pieces from this one.

That said, it could really surprise me, and hey! At least there's no Keanu Reeves in sight!

Now this is more like it! I have to admit, I've been looking forward to this one for awhile and from the glimpse above it doesn't look like it's going to disappoint. I instantly fell in love with Grant Gustin during his cameo on Arrow, and the team behind that show has won an awful lot of good will with me over the course of its run. Like Agents of SHIELD, Arrow got off to a rocky start but soon pulled itself out of the rut with compelling plots featuring the mysterious island and John Barrowman. Seriously, John Barrowman is a power player of this series, and I'm over the moon he's coming on full time for series 3.

The minds behind that series are some of the few over at Warner Brothers I trust to deliver me compelling, comic book action I actually enjoy and from the trailer above? It seems like they've got the foundation for something good. On the downside there seems to be a lot of elements from more current comic book lore creeping in, Geoff Johns' ridiculous grimdark origin story for Barry Allen, for example, which doesn't even fit the television version of the character from what we've seen of him.  But I did love the slight glimpse we got of Thawne! He looks fantastic. It also seems like we're going to get a set of Rogues who instead of relying on tricks and costumes and their own personal charm are going to gain actual powers from being mutated by roughly the same force as Barry himself.

I can't say this doesn't rub me the wrong way, mostly because if that's the connection they are going with then guys? Hey guys, Speed Force doesn't work that way! But I'm not despairing quite yet. Arrow's treatment of heroes and villains alike have been slightly off kilter to their comic counterparts, but the personalities and quirks always shine through in the end and it's wound up being the most faithful and exciting series for comic book fans lately. Deathstroke and Deadshot seem to come more and more alive and in line with their characters the more we see of them, for example, and even Count Vertigo as a deranged drug pusher worked in it's own way. Besides, having everything neatly tied together (much like Oliver's Island list) makes for better TV I suppose. Ultimately the important thing about the Rogues isn't going to be their powers or how they came about, it's going to be their personalities and if we ever see them band together in a dysfunctional family. That'll make or break them, and I urge the creators not to screw it up.

Other than that, I have to say I'm very impressed. From a technical point of view, it's certainly the trailer with the most eye candy. While Constantine barely looks polished in places, Flash looks slick from the outset and the special effects are beyond passable. Barry's movement, for example, just looks like it was torn right from the pages of the comics and is masterfully done while the super speed stunts look impressive in themselves, though I have to wonder how many bones Barry broke pulling off some of them.

The premise and performances seem solid as well. Barry being backed by STAR labs makes more sense than him jobbing it alone (Ollie can afford his hobby, a police scientist? Perhaps not!) and opens up a whole new element of the TV universe for them to explore. Hopefully this element doesn't get in the way of Barry's superhero antics and personal life, as if I'm honest that's what I really want to see, but it's an interesting addition none the less. Weather Wizard's power set seems spot on too, even if there's little in the trailer to distinguish him from ever other cackling super villain on Earth, and from the brief glimpse we got of her the lady they cast as Iris West seems perfectly charming in her own right as well. So we'll hopefully be spared the initial teething pains of Ollie's family being the most grating thing in the world in the early episodes of Arrow.

Of course, the show itself could be awful and the trailer only the very best, hand selected portions of the lot (it certainly had a better editor than Constantine's!) but I'm optimistic. The ultimate question, I suppose, is if it's going to turn out more flash than substance?

So there you have it. Walking Dead, Arrow, Agents of SHIELD, Gotham, Flash, Constantine and then of course the Netflix Marvel shows, the proposed Sandman television series and many others beyond that we'll either see... Or we won't. Comic books are coming for the small screen in a big way, and hopefully they'll wind up on par with the kind of movies we're being treated too now, and not the TV equivalents of Catwoman.

From Cover to Cover: Howl's Moving Castle

Hello, and welcome back to From Cover to Cover! My monthly segment where I check out a book suggested by my readers and give my impressions of it. This month the suggestion comes from Heather, who has rather reluctantly suggested a couple of rather interesting titles that I am very excited about checking out. She's also mentioned perhaps suggesting some more Young Adult titles in future, which could be an interesting change of pace. I've not read any YA for quite some time, but from the outside looking in it seems there's a lot of exciting ideas brewing over there if nothing else! For this month though, we'll be covering something I only knew as an animated movie (and was greatly surprised to find it was an adaptation of a previous work) until it was suggested to me.

Howl's Moving Castle is a 1986 fantasy novel written by Diana Wynne Jones. It takes place in the land of Ingary, a place that is bound by magic and fairy tale logic. The main character, Sophie, is the eldest of three sisters - Meaning that by that very fairy tale logic, she is damned to attempt to seek her fortune and both fail the hardest and suffer the most for it. Just as she resigns herself to a quiet, dull life making hats it seems this prophecy suddenly comes true, when she inadvertently wrongs the Witch of the Wastes and is turned into a old crone. Disgruntled and distressed by this turn of events, Sophie flees the hat store she was due to inherit and manages to find herself on the bizarre, moving structure that is the castle belonging to the Wizard Howl. Despite Howl's fearsome reputation for eating young women's hearts, Sophie finds herself locked into a seemingly impossible deal to regain her youth, and must find a way to prove her worth to the Wizard while settling into a peculiar new life with the castle's other residents. 

Okay, before we even break into the contents - Can we stop a moment and just admire how beautifully put together that cover is? It's a wonderfully eye-catching piece, that you can go back too after you've read the book and continue to admire all the story elements that reside within it. I don't usually talk about covers in this segment, because of how region and edition specific they are, but that one is gorgeous. A quick glance at Wynne Jones' bibliography reveals that  many of her other books have covers that are just as wonderful (at least, attached to the UK editions I'm looking at), to the point I don't think I've seen such consistently good cover artwork for one author since Josh Kirby's beautiful work for many of Terry Pratchett's books.  

Cover aside, it's difficult to know where to begin with this one. On the one hand, Howl isn't exactly a meaty book. It's prose is far from complex, the ideas it presents are very in line with much of Neil Gaiman's work - In that it's attempting to tell a modern story, with fairy tale sensibilities - and it's a remarkably quick read. I picked it up early in the afternoon, and I finished it that very night. But I wouldn't really have it any other way. Howl is a delightful read, from start to finish, with many high points and only a few, perplexing moments that made me pause at the time, but in hindsight lock together nicely.  

I can not say enough wonderful things about the characters of this book. At the start of the book, the main character, Sophie is a defeatist who doesn't so much let people walk over her, but is so resigned to people walking over her that she doesn't really give them a choice but to walk over her. It's a negative trait that could have so easily been played up to form her one and only character quirk, and I'm sure other authors would have had her sulking around the hat shop, sighing dramatically, wondering aloud why she must be the one who suffers but Sophie never really sinks into unreasonable self pity. It's the difference between being resigned and miserable, Sophie is resigned to her fate as the eldest of three, but that just means she's willing to give up any dreams of her own happiness to do what she can to secure the happiness of others. It's akin to a parent giving up their plans for the future to raise a child, and it makes her very endearing from the start. 

Later on, when Sophie is turned into an old crone, her persona changes. She becomes stubborn, determined and wildly outspoken in the way old people are - She's still, at her core, that defeatist who truly believes as the eldest she's going to mess everything up - But being given a new identity, with only a handful of years to live if she doesn't regain her youth, many of Sophie's inhibitions are shed. Yet it feels natural. For all intents and purposes Sophie is an old woman, with all the problems and benefits that come with being one. It makes perfect sense that her change in circumstances would effect how she'd see the world, and it's a surprisingly nice touch that there is a shift to her mental as well as her physical axis, and it's all the nicer that it's done well. 

All the other characters, big and small, are given much the same care and attention. Calcifer is initially presented as a rather dangerous and potentially devious fire demon, ayet while his relationship with Howl is constantly in question, he's a surprisingly relatable and human character for not having any legs and not leaving the one spot for the entire novel. The same with sane, sensible Michael, Howl's apprentice. On the surface he's the only person with his head screwed on properly in the entire castle, however he has his own little secrets and despite the fact that at times he seems to be the only one holding Howl's operation together, can still get into a mood and slink off. Howl is perhaps the hardest character to pin down in the book, I want to argue that he eventually becomes the simplest, but there are things that happen towards the end of the book that give him a whole other layer so that wouldn't be fair. 

The point that I'm slowly snaking too is that every main character feels like a real human being, and is fun and engaging to read about. While the side characters are also given their own quirks and can sometimes surprise you by not quite being the people you either thought, or assumed, they were. In fact the characters with the least amount of characterisation going for them are the villains, who never seem to have quite the same presence as everyone else. Then again, given that villains in fairy tales never amount to much more than cackling, sneering vehicles for making the main character suffer, I can't help but feel this is intentional. 

I found the more general description in Howl to sometimes be a stumbling block. It often felt sparse and could sometimes be unclear and at times doesn't paint a hugely vivid picture of what the book is presenting to you. It didn't really sink in for me that the castle had the shape of a giant moving chimney until another, similar castle was mentioned later in the book, for example. There also seems to be a reluctance to really aggrandise anything, Wynne Jones chooses never to really make one area feel very special or 'magical', and very few people feel any grander or more special than those you might meet in real life. Yes, you're aware that Mrs. Pentstemmon is a formidable magician by reputation, but upon meeting her she's much more like a stern head mistress or a stately lady whose respect is not easily earned. This is something many of the witches share in common, making magic seem more like a craft, business enterprise or hobby than a mysterious art form that oozes allure. 

There's a certain charm to this though, that I really enjoyed. The fairy tale tropes and magical influences that would stand out like a sore thumb in our world, are just normal every day occurrences in this world, and going to apprentice for a witch is just as normal and sane a career path as going to work at a cake shop - Providing you're the right daughter for the job. I felt this grounded the land of Ingary, making it feel more familiar than most fantasy worlds. At times it felt less like a fairy tale kingdom and more like a stroll around a village fete. It also allowed the stranger, more quirky moments, such as Howl covering himself in slime or the battle between Howl and the Witch, to stand out more keenly against the backdrop without having to be overly grandiose to compete with how wonderful and fantastical the word is. 

Charm is definitely the right word to describe Howl in general. It's a very charming tale, that despite the descriptive passages that perhaps don't paint as vivid a picture as other authors would with their own, creates a very realistic and believable world and then fills it with fun, witty, enjoyable characters and just shouts 'Go!'. The story it tells is also fairly well sewn together, although there are times where you think you can see the threads showing. The first appearance of the Witch of the Wastes is very sudden, very jarring and makes little sense and there are other moments like that throughout the book that make you ponder if the author hit a wall and just threw something in to keep the story moving along. But to Wynne Jones' credit, her novel is much more well crafted than that, and things that are problematic at first are eventually given reason and explanation and they all satisfied me very well. 

The one thing that initially bothered me, and I thought would bring the whole thing unstuck, was the ending. It's very swift, and very convenient and features the culmination of something that perhaps had been bubbling a little too far below the surface to be obvious. So seeing it come to a resolution almost felt tacked on. However, I slept on it, and came to realise that unlike other endings that simply leave me thinking 'Is that really it?!' Howl's did at least tie everything up nicely, I know where these characters are going even if I didn't get to say farewell. 

Another thing struck me very quickly afterwards. Howl is, at it's roots, a fairy tale. It never really rubs this in your face by making very oblivious allusions to famous tales, or populating it's world with characters from them like some other works of fiction, but it weaves the tropes into it's setting rather nicely and when all is said and done once the magic spells or wicked curses have been undone, fairy tales do tend to rush to the end very quickly. It's what the phrase 'And they all lived happily every after....' is designed for. Think back to Beauty and the Beast and how much time we spend getting to know the characters, mapping every step of their journey, and when the curse is broken? Everyone is human again, sing us out Mrs. Potts! I can't help but feel that the ending is designed to mirror this, and even though there's a strong part of me who's grown to love these characters and wants to know more, those last few lines are just wonderful. They put a smile on my face, and were oddly touching, and if I can close a book smiling and touched I'd say it's a job well done.

So, we get down to the rating. Ultimately Howl's Moving Castle is a very charming story, with very memorable characters and a very positive theme that I realise I didn't talk about much above, but seems to touch on the majority of the characters. At it's core, Howl is about imprisonment and how we choose to cope with the things imprisoning us. This does not have to mean being physically trapped, although in some cases that certainly does apply, but also being free from the mental, emotional and societal bonds that things such as our birth, standing in the community or even we ourselves place upon us. Sophie lives under the rain cloud of being the third child, and much of her journey boils down to if it's right for her to accept that or not. Calcifer is physically imprisoned by the magics that he and Howl weaved together, but freedom in the conventional sense could mean his own death. Howl is perpetually on the run from anything that seeks to tie him down, yet at the same time often finds himself backed into a corner or in abject misery because of his own flaws and personality issues. Howl is, at it's heart, about how the characters choose to either hide, or overcome these things and it certainly made me think on the kind of barriers that I create for myself. 

With all this being said, I come to something I've often thought of since I started this section. What would a book worthy of a five monkey rating look like.  I always assumed I'd just know it when I saw it. Ultimately as I sit here, racking my brain for more to say, I can't think of many bad points to pin on this one. There are a few oddities in the E-book, with some rather lovely looking illustrations shrank down to thumbnail size while each chapter heading is bold, underlined, hyper-linked and takes up the whole page. But that's on the publishers head, and is more to do with presentation than the actual content of the book. I also found that UK publisher Harper Collins considers this a children's book, which I can see, as it's most definitely accessible to everyone. But at the same time, Wynne Jones takes far better care of her overall narrative and presents far more interesting characters and scenarios than most adult fiction. Much like The Graveyard Book is one of my favourite Gaiman works (and also worthy of a five come to think of it) Howl's Moving Castle  is a very solid book where the enjoyment gained makes what nit picky flaws there are instantly forgettable.

So you know what, I'm doing it. Howl's Moving Castle gets the full five out of five monkeys, and I'm very much hoping the follow-up Castle in the Air is able to cement Diana Wynne Jones as an author I can be genuinely excited about. 

That's all for this month, come back next month when I'll be  looking at Wes Craven's début novel The Fountain Society.  

Tiny Bat Adventures! Gotham gets younger.

Sometime in 2010 comic book team Jeff Thomas and Celeste Green were commissioned by DC comics to create an animated series called Gotham High. The premise was a pretty simple one, take the basic premise of Batman and all his allies, enemies and general world, deage them all to teenagers and make them attend high school together.

It's not really my cup of tea, but it looks like it could be a fun, campy take on some of the characters. Plus when you think about it, Batman's whole wheelhouse is psychological drama and what better hot bed of psychological drama to throw the likes of poor, deformed Cobblepot, intellectually isolated E. Nygma and the positively split in two Harvey Dent than a high school setting. It had potential, and the artwork is particularly beautiful if you wish to check it out (the image above is thanks to the Batman wiki, which I'll link to shortly) but sadly was buried under a cascade of other Batman projects in the pipeline.

If your interest is piqued I suggest heading to Jeff and Celeste's blog for more art and the aforementioned Batman wiki for a potted synopsis.

But if you're really despairing at the loss of this show, then never fear! For Fox seems to have taken this idea and ran with it for a live action feature it's own!

Ladies and Gentlemen, allow me to introduce you to Gotham the latest attempt by DC to tell one, drawn out origin story for their heroes because they presumably want to save the really good stuff for their movies?

I really don't know, and I don't want to judge the series entirely from its trailer. However, there is a very clear albatross around this shows neck and it's part of the reason I brought up Gotham High above.

You see, Gotham has a lot of potential because it was already walking on fairly proven ground. A television show about Gotham city police department? That's essentially live action Gotham Central and that sounds awesome. Even if young Gordon doesn't particularly scream 'Jim Gordon'. However this show has done something particularly strange, they've decided to mix it up with the origin of young Bruce Wayne too.

This doesn't really need to be a problem by itself either. Having a sub-plot involving a budding relationship between young Wayne and Gordon is a pretty alluring idea, the problem is that where there's a baby Batman? There are baby villains too! And by goodness that trailer is pushing more than I'm comfortable with.

The fact that it reminded me of Gotham High is a white flag in itself, as this show is seriously setting itself up to be a serious drama on par with other show like Arrow and Smallville and we're essentially having seven to fourteen Bruce Wayne (I'm guessing, as traditionally Bruce loses his parents about seven, but they may want to up his age for television purposes) and his entourage of occasionally weird looking, tiny villains plaguing his life before the bat suit is even a thread between its tailors fingers.

I can't help but think this will lead to convulsions and awkward situations later down the line. If nothing else the show is going to have a very strange tone for it and I really can't help but think that they'd all have done a whole lot better abandoning the prequel angle entirely and just having an adult Commissioner trying to lead his team of detectives against the Riddler's latest perplexing puzzle. Racking their brains to solve a crime that spans the entirety of the city for clues before time runs out!

At least, that sounds more fun to me...

In The Flesh - A more complex take on the walking dead.

Zombies, eh? For decades they've been the obsession of horror aficionados and just regular obsessives alike. What self respecting human being who's seen Dawn of the Dead or 28 Days Later doesn't have a zombie survival plan? Doesn't have that one building in their area they look at and think 'Yeah, I could probably gather up everyone important to me and hole up in there!' For the record, Shaun of the Dead led to me keeping an old cricket bat by my bedside for years. You know, just in case. Well, I've got good news for anybody waiting for the flesh eating apocalypse with bated breath, it already happened, and we seem to be coming out the other side okay! Or at the very least, it happened to our media.

For years it seems like the shambling vestiges of humanity have been shuffling, walking and running at a variety of speeds across our popular culture. Exploding into television, comic books, movies, literature, you name the medium, it got a taste of the undead. Not even Jane Austen was safe! In the midst of all this insanity, even the BBC jumped on the bandwagon with a three episode television drama called In The Flesh. Airing on BBC3 in March last year, I think it's my favourite piece of zombie related media that I've ever been exposed too.

The series takes place after 'The Rising', and featured a world where the uprising of the undead had actually been quelled (for the most part) and humanity were back on top again. Instead of taking all the zombies and lining them up to be put down like rabid animals, their condition came to be treated like a mental illness. They were given drugs to control the blood lust, make up and contacts to hide the ravages of being a walking corpse and then returned to their families and communities after an intensive psychological course had taught them how to behave like regular human beings. Of course, this is a world where people had spent years locked in a vicious kill-or-be-killed struggle with the walking dead and the men and women who pushed back the hordes and kept their communities safe by killing them off like the vicious, predatory beasts they were are still praised like heroes. So not everyone is particularly happy to forgive, forget and have them back.

The premise alone is pretty great, but how it was handled elevated it above that into some truly engaging television. It featured very complex characters, including a main character who was as meek and mild as you please, yet still struggling with what he was and what he did during his time as wild undead. This becomes even more of a struggle when his best friend, a soldier killed in Afghanistan and found wandering around the foreign country and brought back home, is refused to be allowed to acknowledge that he's dead because his father is the leader of the local militia that pushed the zombies back from their small village in the first place. In denial, he treats his son as a war hero who survived, one hundred percent alive, even though anybody with eyes, ears or a decent sense of smell can tell otherwise.

These kinds of characters allowed the story to touch on both sides of persecution, and explore the various aspects of what it's like to persecute and be persecuted very well. The persecuted, even though there is a very strong argument that they had no choice in what they're being persecuted for and truly had no control over it, are often left felt like they deserve every bit of it and there are definitely pressures in society that back this up. Of course, this doesn't apply to every undead character in the series. For example, a trend springs up where the a few zombies shrug off the make up, shrug off the contact lenses and just decide to start walking around au-natural. Even though it potentially leads to a much harder time for them.

On the flipside, the persecutors aren't just there as a bunch of utter bastards for us to shake our fist at as we sympathise with the zombie protagonists. True they can can often be a big sack of knobs, but you can understand their fear and their reluctance. While our main character, and most of the other zombies we meet, may appear cured, it's not a clean cut, black and white situation and there are certainly still wild zombies wandering the woods. When they capture them they're supposed to turn them over to the government, but if you'd seen people you loved being chowed down upon by the grinding teeth and cold, splintered eyes of the undead, would you want to just save everyone the trouble and put a bullet in their brain? Of course, it goes deeper than that. As with most groups that hold a grudge against another, hypocrisy is rife. As I mentioned above, the leader of this militia is one of the most ardent supporters of putting them all back in the ground that we meet, but when his own son turns out to be one of them...

I feel like this series has a lot to say to anybody who has ever felt like they've been an outcast, for whatever reason. It also doesn't hurt that all these characters and elements were pinned together by a story that I wound up finding absolutely riveting. In the last episode there was an excellently executed twist, that I feel like I should have seen coming but didn't because I'm kind of dumb like that, which revolved around the main characters death and put a lot of the themes of the series into a whole new perspective. Not to mention it just took me completely by surprise and felt absolutely perfect. It's one of the few times I've had to pause a TV show to digest and wrap my head around what I'd just seen, but I commend them fully for it.

And I honestly thought that would be it. Some of the best, most thought provoking and relevant drama that the BBC has produced in years, gone after three episodes. I thought that if the zombie trappings hadn't put people off, which I wouldn't blame them after years of not being able to look anywhere without seeing a walking corpse chewing somebody's guts out in the corner of your eye, the decision to hide it away on BBC3 would. BBC3 is a channel that's long been fading away into irrelevance, assuming it had any to begin with, and if it wasn't for Being Human I'd never have realised this show even existed. At the time I saw no buzz for it, nobody seemed to be talking about it and I thought this was just another piece of quality entertainment that had slipped under the radar.

Turns out, I was wrong. Much to my surprise and delight, the BBC have commissioned a second series for In The Flesh and it begins to air on Sunday 4th of May at 10pm both in the UK and in the USA. It's going to be six episodes long, and among other things is going to be picking up the storyline involving 'The Undead Prophet', an extremist group that urges the undead to shrug off not only their make up, but also the drugs that keep their condition under control. I'm hugely looking forward to it, and I urge you all to catch up with series one and jump right on board! Because while BBC3 itself might be going down the pan, I wouldn't mind seeing In The Flesh shuffle on forward for a few more years to come.