Cry of the Children by J M Gregson

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As we start Cry of the Children by J M Gregson (Severn House, 2013) the twenty-sixth in the Lambert and Hook Mystery series, Chief Superintendent Lambert, along with Detective Sergeants Bert Hook and Ruth David, is confronted by a case of abduction. Lucy Gibson is seven-years-old and a slight underperformer in school. Her “uncle” takes her to the fair. He thinks he has his eye on her as she goes on a ride but, when it stops, there’s no sign of her. So, in the best traditions of barkers who puff the wares of the different side shows on fair grounds, “Roll up, roll up! Test your detective strength on a Golden Age style child abduction and murder mystery. See the ex-husband as he huddles in his boarding house. Be amazed by the new man in the missing child’s life who may have something to hide. Look warily at the old paedophile as he lurks in his house near the abduction scene. Be worried about the slightly slow but powerful woman who took a baby in the past. Allow your prejudice a moment’s freedom when you see the Irish roustabout with sometimes more than voyeurism on his mind. And speculate on whether the mother would have a motive for spiriting her own child away.”

Although I’m approaching the review with a note of levity, this should not disguise the profoundly disturbing nature of the crime under investigation. To abduct and kill a defenceless child is one of the worst forms of homicide. Because we’ve grown less trusting as a society, parents are now more vigilant. There’s less tolerance for those who do not fit the prevailing standards of normality. So, for example, single men who spend time in play areas for children or near schools quickly become suspect and individuals with mental health problems can find themselves excluded from social activity when their behaviour triggers a prejudiced response. For the police, the list of suspects quickly comes down to the missing parent who has a motive to take the child, locals with criminal records indicating some predisposition to “attack” children, and those individuals in the community whose behaviour has been picked up in gossip. It’s all about motive and opportunity.

J M Gregson

This is a story told by the omniscient author and, in this instance, I feel it places a slight barrier between the reader and the emotions of the characters. The technical problem, if course, is that once you open the door to different points of view, it’s easy to let slip the identity of the killer(s) before time. That’s why the classic police procedurals and detective stories tend to use a single character detective as the point of view. The result in this case is an admirable example of a puzzle to solve with a limited number of suspects. None of them have properly verifiable alibis and all have the means to commit the crime. In different ways, the individuals are either the usual victims of prejudice or unsympathetic for some reason. To keep the necessary distance, the characters are only lightly sketched, barely rising above stereotypes. So, I only empathised with one of those in the frame. I didn’t really care which of the others might have done it (assuming the more sympathetic person didn’t do it, of course).

Putting this together, Cry of the Children is a carefully constructed problem with the waters suitably muddied to ensure the reader does not get a clear view of which suspect(s) might have done it. We do get to see more of the series detectives and their narrative arcs advance. But it’s not as involving as other books of this type. So this book is for you if you want a puzzle to solve with absolutely everything in the investigation laid out for you to see. Ignoring the descriptions of what the suspects themselves are doing, you have a fair chance of working out who did it.

A copy of this book was sent to me for review.

The Croods (2013)

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Now with me being what’s politely called a senior, many of you might say I’ve got no reason to go and see a film intended for children. The cultural gap between me as a reviewer and the intended audience is just too great. This will just be an excuse to beat an already dead horse to death. And to some extent, you’d be right. So let’s seize this opportunity and get on with the beating. The Croods (2013) is the latest animation out of DreamWorks and features some interesting voices set against one of these fantasy versions of the past. Superficially, it asks us a number of pertinent questions. In a world with so many perils, do we only survive because we fear injury and death? Take driving as an example. Every minute we’re on the road and in motion, there’s a serious risk of an accident if we fail to keep a proper lookout. Indeed, if a caveman was suddenly to be transported through time and deposited in the middle of our “safe” world, he would probably be dead in ten minutes because he would not understand enough about when he sees to avoid all the hazards we take for granted and avoid. It would be exactly the same if we were suddenly to be moved back to the time there was only the one continent. Yes that long ago. Before continental drift broke up Gondwana into the world mapmakers know and love so much today. Back then, even if we came equipped with supreme American football skills, going for breakfast would probably see us dead, if not from the little critters, then certainly from the big kitty who sees humans as like big mice. In that world, survival is not fun. In fact, nothing is fun in the sense we would understand the word. Hypervigilance is required at all times and curiosity is forbidden.

Emma Stone and Ryan Reynolds as the hope for the future

So now, following in the footsteps of The Flintstones, comes the Crood family. Papa Grug (Nicholas Cage) has all the right instincts for survival in an unchanging world even though the results are somewhat paranoid and dysfunctional (he’s a prehistoric Chicken Little with a constant fear the sky is falling). Through dumb luck, he’s come up with what seems to be the right formula because everyone else around him has died. This family is the only group of survivors in this area. But when I say “dumb” luck, the formula is really stupid and the film mocks his efforts as all the family go through the requisite contortions for survival. We are continually shown that there’s a vast gulf between not dying and living with an optimum quality of life given the environment. Ugga (Catherine Keener) and her mother, Gran (Cloris Leachman) go along with it because, so far, living in a cold dark cave has been safe even if they do have to huddle together to stay warn. That the Dad is later shown as dumber than monkeys is cruel. This does not deny some more politically correct humour. As we go on, there’s a wonderful Looney Tunes episode and one or two really nice sight gags.

In the midst of all this, the teenaged Eep (Emma Stone) is a problem. Not only does she insist on her own ledge in the cave but she’s also prone to wandering off and not paying proper attention. Then the Prometheus arrives with fire. He’s called Guy (Ryan Reynolds) and he’s come with news of the end of the world, i.e. he’s the first with the theory that the tectonic plates are moving. And, as if our family needed evidence of the need to change, an earth tremor blocks the entrance to the cave. When the big kitty appears, they have no choice but to move into the jungle. Fortunately presenting them with fire accidentally provides them with popcorn which keeps them alive long enough to see the advantages of a cooked bird to snack on. That’s after they discover rubbing fire against dry grass does not extinguish it — an understandable mistake for the uninitiated.

Nicholas Cage as the Dad leading cautiously

Once we get into the jungle, we’re shown this is a world of beauty if only they have eyes to see it. Or to put it another way, it’s a bit like an animated version of the countryside in Avatar (unintentionally, of course). By the time they’ve finished their journey, they’ve acquired a “dog” called Douglas and are at one with nature. Particularly when they see the stars — per ardua ad astra — and decide to shoot for the sun and a bright new tomorrow.

Explicitly, the film asks what Dads are for? To keep the family safe, of course. Dads may not have an idea in their heads but they are strong. And if you want a message without sentimentality, don’t go to films like this. Family films with children in mind have to promote family values and that means, despite all appearance to the contrary, wayward teen daughters must finally be able to admit they still love their fathers even though, in real terms, the daughters are modern and their father are, well, like cavemen. More seriously, films like this are reinforcing patriarchal stereotypes. Even though we have a Mom and a Mom-in-law, they are there merely as butts for jokes. For most of the film, they are shown as dependent followers. If a problem crops up they look to the man for its solution. If there’s a chasm to cross, they wait for him to throw them across, even though he gets left behind. Yes, noble self-sacrifice is alive for a brief moment in this prehistoric fantasy.

However, if we look beyond this appalling gender stereotyping, I suppose what the film typifies are the difficult choices the older generation has to take in a changing world. They’re supposed to be the ones with the accumulated wisdom and should be able to guide the young towards a better world. But even that’s a challenge. How do you decide whether to brainwash the children into being wholly dependent on their parents for all decisions or to train them to be independent and open to new things? There always comes a point when parents have to stop protecting their children and let them make their own mistakes. Personally, as a message, I think the result on screen is heavy-handed and uninspiring. Children will no doubt like the pretty colours and some of the jokes are quite amusing (although the mother-in-law is verbally beaten to death), but I can’t see the film as even remotely interesting. As an ironic aside to this review, I should mention The Croods has already taken more than $500 million worldwide which just goes to show that brainless and, at times, mildly offensive children’s films can make a lot of money.

Battle Royale or Batoru Rowaiaru, バトル・ロワイアル, 大逃殺 (2000)

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The question to start us off is whether a state has any obligation to act rationally. It’s conventional to believe that democracy is one of man’s greatest achievements, enabling the people to listen to the arguments made by politicians, and then vote on who has the best solutions to current problems. The one(s) securing the most support then have a mandate to implement the solutions. Except this assumes all the competing points of view are rational, or that the rational groups seeking power have enough support. There are always cultural groups who take extreme positions. If they are in the majority, they win the elections and claim the right to impose their solutions on the minority. Because of this, dogmatic points of view can prevail until the next elections. If those opportunities to vote are separated by years, it allows the group in power to consolidate its grip and, if policing and military power is under their control, begin eliminating the minority.

The class receive their briefing

 

Battle Royale or Batoru Rowaiaru, バトル・ロワイアル, 大逃殺 (2000) is based on a novel by Japanese writer Koushun Takami. It deals with the position of the least protected group. Although states always assert that the children have absolute protection under their laws, this assumes the adults consider the children worth protecting, i.e. there’s sufficient population growth. With no right to vote, children’s welfare is always at the whim of authority figures. This is an alternate history in which Japan has become part of the broader alliance calling itself the Republic of Greater East Asia. Suffice it to say, this is an authoritative regime that fears the possibility of rebellion. Feeling that the young are out of control, every year the government randomly selects a group of students from a single classroom. They are isolated on an island and encouraged to kill each other until only one survives. The intention is to use this annual selective cull as a warning of the power of the state to kill whenever it wishes and without having to justify itself. The selection of children for this purpose is intended to terrorise. Potential rebels are aware the selection of the annual group can always be manipulated to ensure their own children are included in the annual fight. Indeed, in this film, past winners are included in the current batch of victims to skew the outcome.

 

Insofar as there’s a primary character, it’s Shuya Nanahara (Tatsuya Fujiwara). We start off in his school where things are not going well. His father has been unable to find work, feels useless and has committed suicide. This came as something of a shock and left our young man alienated. But, thanks to his best friend, Yoshitoki “Nobu” Kuninobu (Yukihiro Kotani), he begins a slow process of rehabilitation. As an indication not all is well in this society, Nobu attacks their class teacher Kitano (Takeshi Kitano) with a knife, but runs away before he can be identified. Noriko Nakagawa (Aki Maeda) hides the knife and keeps the small group safe. Unfortunately, when the class is whisked away to the island to fight it out, Nobu is one of the first to fall. This leaves Nanahara and Noriko to try to survive.

Takeshi Kitano as the teacher whose class is selected

 

The substance of this film is therefore an allegory, somewhat following in the footsteps of Lord of the Flies by William Golding. To make any society function, there’s a conflict between the need to co-operate and selfishness which fuels anarchy. There’s strength if otherwise weak individuals pool their resources, but individuals can quickly regress to a more primitive state in which their desire for power over each other simply results in the deaths of many. Obviously this film is different in theme because this island is not a paradise lost. It’s intended by the state to be the death of all but one. However, among the children, there’s still a very clear line of demarcation between the leaders and the led, and between those who want to co–operate to maximise their chances of survival, and those who form temporary alliances with a view to killing as many of the others as possible before they must turn on each other. Then the film considers all the reasons one person has to kill another. It can be for fun, or out of self-defence, in anger or out of love. If you look at the motives claimed for killing, everyone is capable of inventing their own justifications for taking the life of another.

 

When it comes to showing the killings, this is not a film that pulls its punches and it deserves an adults-only rating. However, it’s clearly distinguishable from films like the original Straw Dogs (1971) which portray violence as sadism or for more erotic purposes, i.e. in a rather more disturbing way. This is more a cinema vérité style, simply cataloguing each death as it occurs and showing the countdown to the ultimate winner as if in some reality game show. Some of the events are genuinely tragic as motives are misunderstood and fear prevails. Others show the possibility of hope for the individuals and, by extrapolation, for the human race. That despite all the chaos, some can rise to the occasion and show a certain nobility of purpose. As a final thought, because I prefer not to spoil the interest in watching how the drama unfolds: we can accept that the state itself will not bend in individual cases, but that does not deny the possibility that officers of the state cannot show compassion or perhaps merely a desire for it all to end. Perhaps in another life a teacher can reach out to a girl in the class and somehow inspire her to great things — or perhaps that’s the wrong way round — perhaps the girl persuades the teacher that not all youngsters are the same. Some may not deserve to die. Put all this together and Battle Royale or Batoru Rowaiaru, バトル・ロワイアル, 大逃殺 proves to be a fascinating and thoughtful film. I hesitate to say it’s exciting. That’s not its intention. But it certainly holds your attention as the deaths mount up.

 

For a review of the sequel, see Battle Royale II: Requiem or Batoru rowaiaru tsū: Rekuiemu or (バトル・ロワイアルＩＩ (2003)

 

Secret Histories: A Repairman Jack Novel by F. Paul Wilson

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There is, I think, a misconception among publishers that the so-called young adult market requires a significantly different way of writing. At one level, those who specialise in childhood development try to impress us with studies of vocabulary growth along an age profile. Children know this number of words at different ages. Their ability to comprehend complexity in sentences develops at this age. This is bringing the appearance of science to bear for educational purposes, indicating aspirational norms for each cohort moving through the schooling system. Different forms of test are then used to measure the extent to which language and comprehension skills are being developed.

Frankly, I have no time for this. Average numbers for words held in vocabulary fail to reflect the actual distribution of results. Many children have vast numbers of words at their disposal. Others lack the environmental stimuli to develop a comparable resource. By imposing targets on the education service and then testing students against those targets, you are dumbing down. Instead of challenging children to learn ever more words with new and stimulating lesson plans, you expect no more than these core words at the given age (remembering, of course, that every age is spread over a twelve month period).

As a marketing genre, I suppose it is convenient to package some books as being suitable for children to read because of their content. Nanny publishers make value judgements based on the prevailing cultural norms and decide that children should be protected from some themes. Except that, when you review what is currently shown on television as suitable for children, you find it is often dark and violent with all kinds of interesting sexual subtexts in play. Then through the lack of parental supervision or as a response to peer pressure and natural curiosity, children gain access to “adult” content through libraries, VCDs, DVDs and the internet.

I find the idea of “young adult” patronising. Children develop at their own pace. If the content is sufficiently interesting, they will be motivated to read. If the vocabulary occasionally stretches them, that is good because it is teaching them new words. Let us take nothing away from the authors who write the best of what appears under this label. Within the limits laid down by the commissioning editors and marketing departments, most do a magnificent job. There is some excellent literature out there that just happens to be packaged in a strange way. In fact, this labelling is often counterproductive because many adult (and some child) readers harbour a prejudice that anything classified as “for children” must be beneath their interest. Yet marketing departments continue to build their dedicated imprints, probably hoping that, in due course, these readers can be weaned on to genres with more adult sensibilities. This is somewhat ironic because, if they are already readers, they should be reading anything that looks interesting rather than something packaged by genre.

All of which brings me to Secret Histories: A Repairman Jack Novel by F. Paul Wilson (Gauntlet Press, 2008). As a fan of Wilson’s writing, I was interested to see some of Jack’s backstory. One of the principal fascinations of reading is to explore the author’s vision for the main characters. Repairman Jack has been a stalwart for eleven books. Now we get to see him as a child. Appropriately, Jack is growing up in the Barrens so we remain firmly in the more general mythology underpinning The Adversary Cycle. But Wilson (and the publisher Gauntlet Publications) have decided to label the book as “young adult”. I think I shall probably excuse Gauntlet as an innocent bystander in this decision. It is more likely that Wilson’s eye is more firmly on breaking into the growing YA paperback market, hoping for crossover sales into the full Repairman Jack series and Adversary Cycle.

The nearest model I can come to as a perfect approach is The Bottoms by Joe R. Lansdale. This is a magnificent piece of writing that looks very firmly at adult issues through the eyes of an eleven-year-old boy and his younger sister. It won the Edgar Award for best novel. If any proof was needed that you can write an adult book from the pont-of-view of a child, this is it. Yet, Wilson has decided to pull his punches just enough to creep under what he perceives the bar to be for entry into the YA category.

Frankly, I think this was a mistake. The style is self-conscious. One of Wilson’s consistent virtues as a writer is that his prose is very simple and direct. It sucks a reader in and bustles along at a steady clip. He makes it look so easy. Except in this case when he is consciously trying to make the writing simple and direct. More worryingly, there is a sense of editorialising at several points where self-imposed language constraints and plotting decisions lead to pallid results. All the cast of characters that you would expect does put in an appearance, but it all lacks the genuine feel. This all feels like Jack as a very weedy beanstalk. If only Wilson had created a Lansdale masterpiece to add to the Repairman Jack canon. As it is, it looks as though we have two more books to go to get Jack all growed up. The only thing I can find to say is excellent about this book is that it is mercifully short. YA’s attention spans are short, you see.

This probably for the die-hard fans who want to delve into the “origins” story.

For all my reviews of books by F. Paul Wilson, see:
Aftershock & Others
Bloodline
By the Sword
The Dark at the End
Dark City
Fatal Error
Ground Zero
Secret Circles
Secret Histories
Secret Vengeance