Verse or Worse

At a recent Brownies meeting (Brownies are junior Girl Guides) where I’m an apprentice leader, we armed the kids with clip-boards and question sheets so they could charge round asking questions of the grown ups in the room.  We steered clear of imponderables such as “What is the meaning of life?” (Besides, anyone who’s familiar with A Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy knows it’s 42) and Hard Sums as this was meant to be for fun.

One of the questions was “Recite a poem”.  I must admit I fell back on Baa Baa Black Sheep but it did make me think about poetry, as such.  Now, in the privacy of my own home, I must admit to a bit of poetry.  When all the kids were reposing themselves and it was time to get up, I would, if the mood struck me, weigh in with a bit of Omar Kyhayyam:

Awake, for morning in the bowl of night,

Has flung the stone that puts the stars to flight,

and Lo! (this is poetry. You can use words like Lo!) the hunter of the East has caught,

the Sultan’s turret in a noose of light.

It made me laugh and sometime made the kids laugh too.  It also led to some very odd looks when one of them would ask, in company, “Mum, what’s that poem you sometimes shout in the morning?” private declamation of verse being thought of as strange.

However, most of the time, I tend to talk in prose.  Unlike, I may say the characters in a Golden Age detective story, written in 1939, that I’ve just read.  The author had gone to Oxford and seemed determined to prove it. None of the characters seem to have a thought that someone else – a poet – hasn’t thought first.  Quotations pepper the text like birdseed and, should you miss them in the text, there’s quotations at the head of every chapter, too.  It’s all a bit much.

Did anyone ever really talk like this?  I like Lord Peter Wimsey but he's is far too addicted to poetry.  If I was Charles Parker, his far too patient side-kick, I’d be tempted to put a green baize cover on the man.  Harriet Vane’s no good; she encourages him and, what’s more, breaks into poetry herself.   However, at least Lord Peter gets on with catching villains There’s also  – to come more or less up to date –  a dickens of a lot of poetry in Star Trek, The Next Generation. The trouble is with excessive verse, it that it can’t half sound patronizing.  Either that, or the writer isn’t convinced of the value of their material and wants to beef it up, to fool the reader into thinking that what they’re reading is Literature.

Agatha Christie very, very occasionally used poetry.   Very, very occasionally, but usually if Poirot is quoting something, such a familiar phrase, he mangles it, so instead of feeling “All at sea” he feels “All at the seaside” which is funny and makes us feel all friendly towards him. It wasn’t that she didn’t know any poems or couldn’t afford a dictionary of quotations. it’s just that, like salt in cooking, she knew enough to use it sparingly.

Good old Agatha Christie.

 

 

 

Sherlock and Robert Goddard at Crimefest

It was Crimefest at Bristol last weekend, an excuse for lots and lots of crime writers and readers to get together with each other.

One star of the show was definitely Robert Goddard, who’s a very funny man and a very polished – but genuine – speaker.  I did like the way he described writing a bit of historical fiction.  In certain types of historical mysteries, the hero or heroine can’t set foot outside the door without describing everything they see in meticulous detail.  So, for example, if they cross a market, there’s jugglers juggling, jesters jesting, bears being baited, dwarves dwarfing, to say nothing of all the stall holders shouting odd phrases in Medieval at each other.  Scatter a few more boils, skin diseases and people with more severed limbs than we’re used to, and you have the average Medieval market.

On the other hand, when the hero or heroine of a book set nowadays crosses a market, it’s just a market.  Now, of course you can go to town on a modern market, with its many-coloured canopies and stall holders bellowing about their amazing products and the smell of bacon frying and sausages sizzling, jostlers jostling and the flocks of hopeful pigeons but, unless there’s a reason to – that is the H or H is actually looking for someone or something – why would you? Sometimes, he said, a market is just a market.

Exactly.

The other star turn was by Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss of Dr Who/Sherlock fame and I loved the way they described the genesis of Sherlock.  They’re both dyed in the wool Conan Doyle fans and, in many discussions on many train journeys up and down to Cardiff, Dr Who’ing together, (and yes, the character of The Doctor owes a lot to Sherlock Holmes) decided that their favourite screen incarnation of the Great Detective was Basil Rathbone.  Now, the thing about the Basil Rathbone films was that they weren’t set in Victorian London, with foggy streets and rattling hansoms, but made Holmes and Watson contemporary.

Conan Doyle’s Holmes was edgy, cool, energetic and up to date, a scientist and a man of action.  Also – and this has been sadly overlooked in many recent screen adaptations – great fun to be with.  Why not, they reasoned, bring him slap up to date so as to do real justice to the character?  So they did.

Sterling stuff.