ed_moore's Reviews (345)

Carol Churchill’s ‘Not Not Not Not Not Enough Oxygen’ is a dystopian play about a future for London where environmental apocalypse has led to space being limited and the city being coated in a thick smog, nature is absent and oxygen is a luxury that people must buy and spray out of a can. I picked this up as I have time to kill and filtered my TBR by shortest just to knock something off, and having written an essay on Churchill’s plays last year the short descriptions and blurbs of it I have read pretty much encapsulated the whole plot. The lack of empathy of the characters is interesting, establishing an apocalyptic reality where nobody cares for anyone else and charity is frowned upon, for a shortage of oxygen means childbirth is heavily sanctioned and others dying is only to the benefit of the self. Vivien’s scripted lines were repetitive, almost attempting at writing a stammer though I don’t know if this was Churchill presenting a disability or some sort of effect from an absence of oxygen and attempt to preserve words. It was very similar in mood to ‘Far Away’ and I liked it for that, though reckon critical reception of the play would be more engaging than the play itself, as I found with other of Churchill’s drama that I have read. All in all it was an easy knock off my TBR.

‘Happy Days’ focuses on Winnie, a woman with her legs buried on a huge mound who relies on her non-communicative husband Willie, just to know what someone is listening to her. It is a play made of of a repetitive cycle of mundanity, but like I mentioned previously this works a lot better in Beckett’s plays as oppose to his prose. There is a foreboding sense of finality throughout however despite Winnie’s sweet but also sad optimism in life. Her dependence on Willie is desperate and she finds joy from him even saying a word to her each day, but in some way as Winnie is trapped in the mound Willie too is trapped with her, in a loveless marriage and circumstance. In Beckett’s usual tone it is an absurd setting which you could read so much meaning from, alike to the other works I have read by him in the last couple of days I am focusing on the aspects of dependency as a consequence of disability in my analysis of it. I was a little disappointed by

the role of the revolver however, the stage directions expressed an importance of this prop yet it failed in conforming to ‘Chekov’s gun’.

Instead the play remained stagnant in its conclusion, a typical Beckettian absence of hope or change. 

‘Rough for Theatre I’ is a short play by Beckett that looks at dependency dynamics between a blind man and a man in a wheelchair, who come together in a liminal apocalyptic setting and offer one another joint-dependence to better function. In its short duration it treats this dynamic as a satire, and looking at the futile futures of the men A and B as they have no capacity to earn and therefore contribute in the economy and wider society. Hence the exist in their own enclosed space, placing value on the irrational and ponder why despite having no function to society they continue living. 

I did quite enjoy this little read, though it is extremely barebones and more so than other Beckett’s as it is solely in draft. The ending seemed to play into the satire but also didn’t really make sense with the tone of the rest of the play, or what exactly is happening in the plays conclusion being clear at all. It does however look like it’ll be extremely helpful for my essay. 

This book was basically comprised of the feeling of emptiness that makes up Beckett’s short plays mixed with the stream of consciousness style of the modernist era. ‘Molloy’ read with the same struggles I have with Virginia Woolf and the excerpts of ‘Ulysses’ I have attempted. Not only was the read difficult though; nothing happened. ‘Molloy’ captured Beckett’s essence of futility and absence within his short plays, but it works and is impactful in them because they are short plays. ‘Molloy’ lacked any of that impact and was extremely repetitive and hard to follow. It looks at the protagonist Molloy’s disability as he struggles to walk and forgets a lot, but in forgetting with the stream of consciousness form there is often a lot that just isn’t described. There was an instance with the protagonist of the second perspective, Moran, where he said “I was violent with my son that night but have forgotten the details”. Beckett did however choose to include details in numerous scenes of masturbation however… 

The characters who we were stuck in the heads off weren’t even very interesting. Molloy was insufferable and Moran was just such a flat and dull character. 
I did not have a good time with this one though did appreciate the references to Dante.

“It was the cold and calculated slaying of so many ounces of silver against so many ounces of blood” 

Murikami gave me remorseless cat murder, Capote gave remorseless dog murder. ‘In Cold Blood’s focus however was the lives of Perry and Dick, the murderers of the Clutter family, following their brutal raid and shotgun murder of the family during a November night in Kansas, 1959, narrating the actions of the killers following their deed and trial and eventual execution. Capote played with the readers sympathies to an extreme degree in his narrative, the murder so heartless and yet framing Perry to seem so led on by his remorseless partner in crime and regretful of his actions. Then you remember that this is a true crime, this happened and these two men hung and you find their actions sick and harrowing, Dick especially you loathe with your whole being Capote does him no favours, but somehow Capote keeps toying with your sympathises. 

With this being true crime yet written in a novelised format of the thriller the plot twists and draws were interesting. The murderers were established from early on, it was never a question of who was the killer, but instead the desire to learn the motive. Admittedly this motive was a bit disappointing when it came to it after so much build up, but its true crime hence this is only providing the true motive. Some bits of background and interviews I found dragged a little as Capote attempted to flesh out the narrative though also at points despite its genre was so beautiful and poetic in its writing, and particular descriptions are simultaneously incredible and harrowing: I note the scarecrow with the dead woman’s dress, the counting of coyote corpses and Perry’s nightmares about the gallows. I also particularly loved how Capote traced the ripple effect of the crime and its impacts on the thoughts and actions of those close to the victims and the inhabitants of their village. 

‘Not I’ by Samuel Beckett is a short play that consists only of a monologue performed by a floating mouth. It is the rare outburst of a woman who lives most of her life mute, triggered by some ambiguous event to relate her sufferings. Like most of Beckett it is bleak and has so many possible interpretations yet no clear explanations, but it does really get you thinking. The disembodiment of character is effective on so many levels, with the fractured speech and the role of the speech disability, an ongoing buzzing, the mouth being the only visible body part and a character narrating who seems to exist on the plain between life and death. It was a really fascinating short read but weighing it up against the others of Beckett’s short plays I have read I would say I preferred it to ‘Krapp’s Last Tape’ and ‘Footfalls’ but is nowhere near as disturbing and thought-provoking as ‘Rockaby’. The bleak images and stagecraft in each thought are equally seared into my brain. 

Though in final note … why … were there … so many … ellipses …

‘I Who Have Never Known Men’ is a speculative dystopian with a harrowing concept; 40 women not remembering what happened for them to be taken or the early years of captivity, but living guarded in a cage situated in the bunker with no knowledge of who their captors are, what they desire, or what happened on the surface that led to their captivity. The nameless narrator knows even less, having been taken as a child therefore having no prior experience of the world before the cage and having never known a man, the few male guards never interacting with their prisoners. After years, a chance event leads to their freedom and the women must seek answers to what led to their circumstance and learn to survive in an apocalyptic world they have had no experience of. 

The amount of questions and the dystopian setting this book created were really engaging and it was therefore a powerful concept, however some of the tropes used and the lack of answers I found frustrating. The protagonist being a woman who has only lived in captivity meant her knowledge and thoughts were extremely limited and hence was a little flat a character with nothing backing her motivations. The book also used tropes of writing to a reader the narrator believes doesn’t exist, and many comments from the narrator to foreshadow coming events as she is writing her past experiences but these were either frustrating ‘you wouldn’t believe what happened next’ in style, or not at all subtle ‘little did she know this is how she’d die’ in their tone. While some things such as this were made so obvious, somehow the extent of ambiguity was a fall-short, as there was so little knowledge that the protagonist and therefore reader had that despite an interesting and ambiguous setting and ending leaving the reader wondering how these circumstances came together, we get so little clues throughout the book that it is impossible to even piece together ones own theory. The concept was great and there were some wonderful passages and commentaries on survival, purpose of life and the passing of time, just wish it was expanded a bit more, especially during the early phase of imprisonment. 

George MacDonald’s ‘The Princess and the Goblin’ is a fairy tale about the meeting of Princess Irene and the miner Curdie and how they save one another from tunnel dwelling goblins who threaten to establish themselves among human royalty. The characters weren’t quite as ‘stocky’ as usual in Fairy Tales, Curdie had a bit of personality to him but Irene was just an unflawed princess. She does cry at absolutely everything for no reason though of which got very tiring. 

I read this to look at Victorian common ideas on goblins in order to have a basis for my essay on Tolkien and did find that much of Tolkien’s goblins are reciprocal of the goblins of fairy tale. MacDonald’s story does however have a very basic plot and no real motivations behind the aims of both the goblins and ‘heroes’. I preferred it to ‘The Golden Key’ also by MacDonald as it was much more coherent, aside from the inclusion of the mysterious grandmother as her existence and position in reality remains unclear and unresolved. In the nature of fairy tale I must just sit back and expect this, being a children’s story at the end of the day, though with a surprisingly harrowing ending image. 

Leo Tolstoy’s ‘Anna Karenina’ is a brick on the Russian upper circles marriage affairs and love lives. The titular protagonist Anna is really not a person to root for in these matters however, she is an adulteress with no care for her husband who she frames as the wrong one regarding child custodies and divorce, when in reality she leaves him for Vronsky very early in the book and doesn’t seem to see anything through his eyes or have any remorse. The book also follows the relationships of two other couples quite closely and I have seen a few reviews claiming the book could’ve been titled ‘Konstantin Levin’ rather than ‘Anna Karenina’ as he plays a larger role and honestly I agree. 

This book really wasn’t my sort of thing, it was worse than ‘War and Peace’ (which I didn’t enjoy either) as it was very similar but just without some interesting war parts. It was quite Austenian in plot and style as there is a lot of upper class marriage gossip and very little happening. It also had dragged out scenes (the lawn mowing scene was highlighted to me) that equate to the infamous Paris sewers scene of 'Les Miserables' but such really don't bother me and I didn't mind in either book. The ending wasn’t bad, also serving as more backing to the ‘Levin’ title claim, and saved it a little, but ultimately the first 33 hours of the audiobook were largely uneventful. It does however get Wanda Mccaddon points because she is a brilliant narrator. 

‘Crime and Punishment’ follows the moral conflicts of the impoverished law student Raskolnikov after his double murder of an elderly pawnbroker and her sister. It is a bleak tale of suffering on the poverty line of Petersburg, as Raskolnikov faces hardships and the feeling that the world is against him. In writing, it reminded me a lot of a Dickensian level of detail, and many ideas are reminiscent. It was a dark and gritty story that matched the pessimism of Kafka’s writing. The map of Petersburg at the front did spoil a main plot point for me which was irritating as it’d have been extremely poignant if I didn’t expect it, and the use of metaphor in said moment was so strong. The moral ambiguity of Raskolnikov, believing himself justified to a degree but also plagued with guilt, and then at the same time being a murderer, really had you questioning who was the antagonist. In some cases I saw Porify as such but then he’s just doing his job, and then Svidirgalov is both an awful person but such a poignant character that can’t be seen as an entirely morally ill antagonist. It’s a brilliant exploration of the morally grey all in all.