Hag-seed

To make good on my promise to myself to read more from certain lovable authors, I ditched the John le Carré novel and started in another Atwood novel; Hag-Seed. Now this is not just any novel; Hogarth is doing a series of Shakespeare-retellings by contemporary authors in contemporary settings, and Hag-Seed was inspired by The Tempest. Or rather, not just inspired by, it is basically the story of The Tempest, including a thwarted theatre director, who aims at getting revenge through staging The Tempest. This sounds very forced, and it probably could have been in the hands of a lesser author, but the novel is actually brilliantly constructed.
Before we get into that, let me get this out of the way; I have never read The Tempest, nor have I ever seen a staging of it. It was one of those 'we won't go there' plays during my studies, and it isn't one of the plays that ever shows up at the local theatre (or not-so-local Shakespeare theatre). There is apparently a film version with Helen Mirren as 'Prospera', but I managed to miss that too.
So, no prior knowledge of the play or the story, although I did read up on the main plotlines and themes on Wikipedia (I found out in the end that there is a short synopsis at the back of the novel, but I'm one of those people who stays very far from the final pages of any novel). Also, the main theme is pretty obvious from the get-go; revenge. The main character, Felix/Prospero, has been thwarted out of his profession as artistic manager of a Shakespeare festival, and now that he has fallen low, he wants his revenge. After an exile of twelve years (not unexpectedly the same amount of time elapses in The Tempest), he finally sees his chance when his former enemies visit the prison in which he now works in a Literacy through Literature programme. It isn't hard to persuade the juvenile delinquents to work with him to get his revenge, and the end result is somewhat disturbing, but also a very entertaining read.
The 'actors' are asked to add their own thoughts, scenes and songs to the play, resulting in some very nice raps (I never thought I would ever write the phrase 'very nice raps'), which gives a triple layer to this retelling (the original play, the novel-as-the-play, and the 'modernized' version they perform). Again, this might have been very forced, but even though you can see what will happen way in advance, the plot never gets in the way of the story. One funny thing that happened was that I kept thinking the play was set in England, and it took about a third of the book to realise it was actually set in the US. Somehow, 'Shakespeare festivals' feel like something Britain-only, and the whole novel oozed Britishness to me. (And then it turns out that Margaret Atwood is actually Canadian, so I have been putting her novels on the wrong shelf of my bookcase for years!)
Anyway, it's a great read, maybe less so if you're not a Shakespeare/theatre geek like me, but even then the whole development of the main character and his young actors will still bring a smile to your face. Amazing, how something that should have been very heavy and deep with Literary Meaning, can still be so very light and pleasant.

The Bridge

The wonderous world of Netflix means that people who otherwise would only watch tv for very special moments (New Year's Eve, The Great British Bake-Off, and Sherlock) can now follow tv series they wouldn't usually be able to fit in their time or daily routine. For me, a great example is The Bridge, a Swedish/Danish series that is now in its third season. This season has been shown on Dutch telivision about half a year ago, but I only found out around episode 4, and there was no 'rewatch' online. But, the first two seasons were on Netflix already, so it was just a matter of waiting until the third would appear too.

Now I am not usually a detective/crime series person. And The Bridge is very detective-y, and with lots of blood splattering around to boot. The first season starts when a dead woman is found on the bridge between Copenhagen and Malmo (this American-made website doesn't let me put accent marks on letters), exactly in the middle, so half of her is in Denmark and the other half in Sweden. As it turns out, she is actually two women; half of her is Danish and the other half Swedish. The image of the two policemen pulling her body apart is one you get in the first ten minutes of the series, and it is just a small example of stuff to come.
What follows, of course, is a search for the killer. Because the bodies were found in both countries, the Swedish and Danish police have to work together. The Danish detective is Martin, a lovable man with an equally sweet wife and couple of kids. The Swedish detective is somewhat less lovable: Saga Noren is a distant, highly analitic, socially awkward stereotype of the mentally unstable detective. Only she isn't unstable. She has come to deal with her personal quirks in a very good way, and her superior, Hans Petterson, knows exactly how good she is, and what he can ask of her. Only Martin, warm and sociable, cannot quite cope with her at first. But inevitably, they become a great duo, and Saga Noren has become somewhat of a cult hero.

So why do I watch The Bridge, and not for example The Killing or Midsummer Night's Murders or Law&Order or CSI (although I did watch that for a while, about ten years ago). Well, partly because it isn't flashy American. They don't have a grainy photo of part of a fingerprint which they then enlarge 100 times to get a perfectly pixel clear image to run through their database to find the killer. They use their brain, they discuss theories around their photoboard, and they talk to a lot of people. Sometimes half of an episode is made up of Saga talking to possible suspects without them actually getting anywhere. But then, three episodes later, a small, seemingly insignificant detail during that conversation will move them in the right direction.
So, it's a social, intellingent series. But on the other hand, it is very modern. It is set in the here and now; they do use modern technology, and people behave in a way normal people would. It isn't the small, isolated world of British villages, this is big cities we're talking about, with homeless people, drug dealers, and all sorts of dark secrets. Added to that, this series isn't afraid to kill off it's main characters, so the fear you feel when people start shooting is genuine. This puts it smartly between the sleepy British detectives and the flasy American ones, in the middle of the real world.

I've just finished watching season 3, which I won't tell you too much about as it would inevitably contain spoilers. The overall theme though, is 'family', which is quite unusual for a detective (we generally get a bit of the detective's family life just to know why they are so distant/cold/tired/depressed, but not more than that), and it introduces a couple of great new characters which I have come to love. They're already busy developing season 4, so I hope we will see more of them, then.
The only downside is that there are only 10 episodes per season (still a lot more than in a regular Sherlock season, but still). Although, as they say, less tends to be more.