***~~ (3/5)

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Perhaps it isn’t fair to review a first novel written in 1957 from the point of view of 2001, but at least it’s interesting.

Spirited sorority star Beth takes high-strung newcomer Laura under her wing, with results that can be predicted from the title by anyone familiar with 1950s terms for gay people. What follows is a drawn-out love triangle with the two young women and a fraternity hunk, tinged with a sense of inevitable doom.

If that summary sounds like I didn’t enjoy it, it’s giving a false impression. The mistakes the characters make pile up and not all plotline leads where you’d think, which keeps one interested and keeps one reading. There are no easy solutions and only a couple of happy endings. On the whole the novel was an enjoyable mix of tragedy and pleasure, and an interesting look into 50s sexual politics.

The picture painted of American colleges of the time was one where sex occurred all the time, but was never discussed except between trusted friends and always secret, despite the social expectation of constant dating. Attention is drawn to this when Beth and Laura’s roommate Emmy is caught and humiliated by the sorority. The behaviour of the interested male characters towards the women also strikes me as particularly heinous – even that of the supposedly wonderful Charlie. The punchbag male of the novel is Bud, an irresponsible musician with a roving eye, but I find dashing Charlie much more disturbing. Charlie doesn’t take no for an answer. Charlie thinks it romantic to hold Beth by the neck until she stops struggling. The passages describing his “easy authority” and how much Beth loves to be “commanded” by him certainly made me squirm. I knew this about 50s romances and it’s not like the idea of the sexy rapist doesn’t survive to today, but it doesn’t make it any more pleasant to read.

Certain familiar and expected patterns occur in the characterisation and attitude towards queerness, but there was nothing painful about how the novel finished. Inconstant Beth makes her decision, and both she and especially Laura have grown as people because of their affair. Laura’s queerness doesn’t disappear, nor does she go mad or kill herself or go to ruin or to a nunnery. The central story was of growing up, of Laura shedding her nervousness and pettiness and the self-harming habits that she used to cover her inner turmoil with in exchange for true inner strength. It was uplifting, even for me, an openly queer woman in the 2000s who’s had remarkably little hassle over it, and who can use that word for herself without anybody being particularly shocked – much less taking it like a slap in the face, like Beth does.

That’s not to say that there weren’t issues with the writing and plot points. Especially in the beginning of the novel point of view seesaws wildly between the characters, and although this gets less as the novel goes on – or perhaps you get used to it – it’s a little disorienting at first. Many tropes appear and are dealt with, and many coincidences are a little too convenient, too dramatic, like scenes in a movie rather than a novel. Odd Girl Out needs to be taken for what it is – a first novel, a tragic romance, a novel written in the 50s and sold cheap with likely very little editorial finetuning. If you can manage that, it’s a very enjoyable novel. If you also manage to imagine being a gay woman who has never read anything about gay people before that didn’t say they are unmentionable, horrible, dirty and wicked, it’s tremendous.

***~~ (3/5)

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The year is 1962. Bobby Blanchard is fresh out of college, and fresh out of dreams since a nasty fall disqualified her from professional field hockey. Instead, she’s taken a post as the Games Mistress in the exclusive Metamora Academy for Young Ladies. Behind its tall gates await spooky mysteries, learning experiences and true – and not so true – love. As the tagline says, “She schooled them in field hockey… and desire!”

I won’t deny I enjoyed this novel immensely, though it wasn’t without some guilt. I barely notice how I miss stories that focus on gayness and women with no straightness or men to upstage them until I come across something like this. On a purely personal level, I found Bobby Blanchard deeply satisfying.

Even as I say that, I can’t deny its faults. All the women may be gay, but they’re also all white. The sole non-white character, the Japanese exchange student Misako/Mimi, barely has lines, and is used by the school’s Young Integrationists Club as an example of how pro-integration Metamora is. Is this conflation of Asian American experience with the African American a parody? I can’t tell. I suppose you could excuse the lack of non-white characters because of the pulp genre, or say it’s because of the exclusive environment the novel is set in and the segregation that still separated the races in 60s America, but that doesn’t make the novel any less white-white-white.

One character, the juvenile delinquent Angle, reads rather like a trans man, but this – ahem – angle is never developed. Of the three gay men (two of them merely strongly implied to be so) who appear in the novel, only one does not strike you as a stereotype. It’s most striking when a character that appeared in an earlier novel by Monica Nolan and was described as “brooding” turns out, now that we know he’s gay, to love fashion and dancing and teasing Bobby about her love life. If Nolan can write such varied and differently beautiful female characters, even if many of them, too, were partly based on stereotypes, why does this variety end when it comes to gay men? Is the lack of non-white characters truly necessary for the genre and setting, or just moral cowardice that prevents writing about the delicate subject of race in the 60s? I guess I won’t know unless Nolan’s next novel in the Lesbian Career-Girls series is a black/white romance, which was a sub-genre of original lesbian pulps.

From a story-telling point of view, the novel suffered from having too many named characters to keep track of, and an over-use of “the (adjective) (noun)” to describe people. There’s nothing wrong with this kind of description unless it appears several times in each page, as it does here. Nolan’s habit of describing people by their profession as often as by their name also gets to be such a quirk it distracts from the narrative. However, I have no complaints about her use of cheesy lines, especially to describe sex and arousal. Those are part of the pulp genre and hilarious, adding a great deal to the novel’s humour, which is never very up-front. This isn’t an over-the-top parody so much as a genuine genre novel, just written decades after the genre’s heyday and infused with modern sensibilities, including a lack of shame over sexual orientation. I much prefer it that way.

Let’s talk about what I liked. The novel’s mystery plot unfolded so slowly it would not have maintained its interest on its own, but it did not need to. Other plots involving the formation of the Metamora field hockey team, Bobby learning to become a better teacher and use her brain, the drama and competition among the girls, the mistakes made and rectified in guiding the students to learn, were quite enough to keep you interested. The shape of the plot reminded me of the Harry Potter series, as if the school setting with its houses, factionality and prefecture weren’t enough, but it worked. The novel sells with a single idea – she’s gay, she’s a gym teacher – but there’s a story there as well as character development that doesn’t solely revolve around Bobby’s sexuality, or Bobby herself. Instead of dropping a gay character into a straight environment to create friction, pretty much everybody in Metamora already is gay and the friction lies elsewhere, in the much more universal problems of teaching, learning and growing up – and mysteries, of course. Who among us wasn’t called to solve the case of a ghostly cyclist or a disappearing locket while in our teens? I only wished it could have gone on longer, and tied up more loose threads.

In conclusion, I recommend this book to pulp fans, lovers of light literature, and anybody who wants to read a book that is not about men or straight people. You may have to forgive a few things, but it’s worth it.

***~~ (3/5)

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1910 is another more or less standalone entry into the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen comic series by writer Alan Moore and artist Kevin O’Neill. I say “comic” because as this instalment is fairly short it would be a bit cheeky to call it a graphic novel, but any comedy you’ll encounter will be predictably dark.

In 1910, Mina Murray*1 and Allan Quatermain*2 appear surprisingly in their prime (a fact explained only in the epilogue), working with A.J. Raffles*3, Thomas Carnacki*4 and the immortal Orlando*5 to try and prevent a predicted apocalypse presumably engineered by the magician Haddo*6, and miss out on a very commonplace drama going on in a dockside drinking hole, slowly leading up to a catastrophe.

The story offers the same kind of name-dropping 19th/early 20th century pulp fiction fanfic as all the other instalments, this time wrapped in Penny Orchestra lyrics and the theme of violence, poverty and, you guessed it, rape.

Much has been written about Alan Moore and rape before, but it’s prevalence here and the specific philosophy in which it is wrapped is still worthy of notice. Loosely following the events of song Pirate Jenny, Captain Nemo’s*7 daughter Janni accepts work as a waitress, gets brutally raped, and retaliates spectacularly. That is the core of the story, with the League’s Gentlemen mostly mucking about, relieving internal tensions and making literary allusions in the background. Alan Moore’s paraphrased translation of Pirate Jenny and Janni’s initial rejection of her father’s legacy appear to place the blame of her rape partially on her, though her rage in its wake is treated sympathetically – as ultra-violence so often is. In the final stages of the story the Whitechapel Murderer sings a song at the gallows accusing government and poverty of being the true sinners, rather than prostitutes and their johns – which is fair enough – or “priests with wandering hands” (a jolly way of saying “people abusing authority to sexually assault others”). In the midst of death and destruction, the whores and the killers sing, “mankind is kept alive by monstrous deeds”. Powerful stuff, if borrowed, and it adds up to a eulogy for personal might as opposed to governmental regulation.

Moore’s own sexual attitudes seem to be shining through elsewhere in the text. Plenty of time is spent dwelling on the sailors’ groping of Janni even before they rape her, and Raffles comments with disfavour on the apparent sexual triad of Mina, Allan and Orlando, exhibiting discomfort at the existence of the “He-She” which, aside from being transphobic, is somewhat at odds with the suggestion of Raffles’ own bisexuality in the novels*8. Moore further makes a point to say that Orlando annoys Mina while he is male, thus confining Orlando’s lived bisexuality either to titillating cis female bisexuality or to the image of the effeminate gay man. (Orlando is assumed gender-fluent as well as able to change his/her physical sex, which is compatible with Woolf’s novel.) Indeed, throughout the story he appears as a foppish, silly, self-centered and prattling stereotype of a gay man. His position in relation to Mina and Allan, too, seems to be that of a kinky addition to their true love couplehood.

It’s also noteworthy that in the written-word epilogue Orlando has a re-imagined primordial youth in which she talks about being a rapist – saying how, had he met a woman as beautiful as the one he later became, he would have raped her. Is this an attempt at normalizing rape, downgrading Orlando further, or just a scintillating throw-off line to keep the presumably rape-happy reader excited?

While there’s nothing as overtly pro-rape or rape-apologist in the text as in Moore’s Watchmen and Promethea, it’s hard to miss the suggestion that violence against women is not only horrible and humiliating to the victim, but also natural and instinctive to a man, and necessary for the propagation of the human race; female homosexuality is bisexual titillation for a primary male lover, and male homosexuality distinctly normative with bottoms and tops, and also slightly off-putting.

None of this balances very well with the fact that the League is led by Mina, a resourceful, intelligent, powerful, honourable, charismatic woman, that Janni takes power for herself in spite of her father’s misogyny and her own mistreatment, or that Moore himself has spoken out against sexism in comics. There’s an overlaying feminist message strongly undermined by an anarchic, violent, rapey and heteronormative one. Moore seems entirely aware of the instincts he’s catering to – but does it anyway, without apology, explanation or much criticism.

There is no doubt that Alan Moore is an exceptional author and carries the distinction of gracing the medium with intelligence, vision, complexity, erudition, a sense of history and a general assumption that your readers are not idiots. Even this rather mediocre and unoriginal instalment has a certain dark power that is definitely attractive, as well as voicing an unconventional call for criminal anarchy against an unfair state. Do its issues with gender roles make it worse than the bubblegum sexism and righteous violence that we get in mainstream comics? The dreadful answer is, probably not.

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*1 Dracula, Bram Stoker, 1897
*2 King Solomon’s Mines, H. Rider Haggard, 1885
*3 The Amateur Cracksman, E.W. Hornung, 1899
*4 Carnacki the Ghost Finder, William Hope Hodgson, 1913
*5 Orlando: A Biography, Virginia Woolf, 1928
*6 The Magician, W. Somerset Maugham, 1908
*7 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, Jules Verne, 1869
*8 Open to debate, I suppose, but you need pretty thick hetero-goggles to ignore it.

***~~ (3/5)

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Perhaps it’s a mistake to even attempt to review a P.G. Wodehouse novel. If you’ve read one, you have a pretty good idea of what they’re all like, and you’ve probably already decided whether or not you like them. I happen to like them.

In case you’re one of the people who haven’t read one, they are light comedies with plenty of mix-ups and broken engagements, clever language and inanely blathering young gentlemen. Pip-pip, what ho, stiff upper lip and so forth. Eminently charming – somehow only made more attractive via the passage of time, though this may only be true to people used to overlooking early 19th century race and gender fail and the occasional touch of classism. As much is inevitable.

A Man of Means consists of a series of six short stories that originally appeared in The Strand in 1914, a chronological and a consistent whole that – perhaps due to the co-writer C. H. Bovill – read as particularly snappy and satirical for Pelham Grenville W. The theme might have been the corruptive power of sudden wealth, but turned in the end into a light farce on greed, in which a simple and innocent young man, Roland Bleke, learns to avoid traps laid by mercenary characters after his prize winnings. The most biting of these depictions is the unscrupulous stock broker whose operation eerily resembled that which led us to the global financial crisis almost a 100 years later. He ends up losing while Roland gains via the vagaries of the stock, and Roland never even realizes that he was being used. The most oppressive and dare we say sexually charged of the stories is an affair where Roland finds himself engaged to a beautiful dancer from a fictional South American state, who turns out not only to be after his money to finance her country’s royalist revolution, but also married.

The stories read easily and segue into each other seamlessly. For a fan of P.G.’s, this makes pleasant light reading. I’m almost ashamed to say how little I was bothered by the exoticism and classism, when there was so much simple and clever delight to go with it. At the same time, I do not whole-heartedly recommend this to anybody who happens to come from a South American country, or any nation torn with internal conflict.

***~~ (3/5)

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Dorian Gray (Ben Barnes) is a young, innocent country gentleman who arrives in London and becomes the subject of a campaign of corruption and induction into cynicism by the highborn, civilly sordid Harry Wotton (Colin Firth). As Dorian commits sin after sin, a beautiful portrait drawn after he first arrived in the city begins to show the signs of his wounds, his age, and his wanton lifestyle, while he himself remains young and beautiful.

The film stays quite true to the original story by Oscar Wilde. Filmed in beautiful smothered colours, with a powerful score, it draws in the viewer much like a pretty but inconsequential painting might. Nothing in the storytelling distracts from the tale. Firth and Barnes do justice to their parts. Firth strikes the right note both as a wicked man on the edge of middle-age, and as a responsible elderly father. Barnes manages to play an innocent, a hedonist and a villain, all, though the transition between these states is not always smooth. The script fails to marry these extremes into a logical continuum, and the effect is a somewhat disjointed storyline.

In this film, Dorian’s corruption comes across as something not only created by Harry, and also for Harry. Dorian’s embracing of sexual excess (for which he seems at first downright reluctant) and cynicism, and his eventual focusing on Harry’s progressive daughter (a delightful brief turn by Rebecca Hall) as someone who can save him from himself, are tied up with Harry in what could be a fixation on Harry as a substitute father or as a longed-for lover, or both. The final conflict between them brings this into clear focus, and also juxtaposes their inverse moral (or social) development.

As it is based on a novel from a period of Victorian double morality, sex and violence are shown as equivalent sins and indelibly linked. Dorian’s first crime is cheating on and then abandoning his pregnant, low-born fiancée (Rachel Hurd-Wood), and that keeps haunting him a long time after, even when direct murder doesn’t. A life lived “for nothing but pleasure” leaves his picture gnarled and monstrous, suggesting venereal diseases, which could be construed as Mother Nature’s punishment for the Biblical sin of promiscuity. This doesn’t pack quite the punch these days as it used to, but the film does make an effort to describe the key change in Dorian as cruelty. The final message is a surprisingly Christian one: Dorian cannot be absolved while he still fails to confess his sins.

Although I found the film enjoyable and a good central moral dilemma, whether you think it’s legitimate, is always going to be fascinating to watch, the film may be too sombre for some tastes, and it is a bit too shallow considering the psychological potential of the setting. Nonetheless, it was a better than average and a fairly faithful adaptation of a classic novel in a pretty, easy-to-consume package.

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Bechdel test:
1. It has at least two female characters,
2. who talk to each other
3. about something other than a man.

I think this may be a pass! Correct me if I’m wrong, but I think a young lady and her mother talk about correct presentation at her coming-out ball, before Dorian screws them both for a bet. It would be kind of hard to have a more faily pass, though.

***~~ (3/5)

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Prodigal son Lawrence Talbot (Benicio del Toro) returns to the country house of his estranged father (Anthony Hopkins) after hearing his brother has gone missing, but finds he has come too late. His brother’s dead body was found in the forest, mauled by a strange beast, which the villagers say is a demon. Lawrence promises to find the cause of his brother’s death.

This film is pretty much exactly what you’d expect, right down to the wolfman makeup reminiscent of Lon Chaney’s, the Oedipal issues, the analogy between the transformation and sexual arousal and/or “lunacy”, cobwebbed manors, a joyless virgin/mother figure as a love interest, angry mobs, rooftop chases and copious amounts of gore. The plot may have been altered from the 1941 original, but the elements are all there.

That it is just what you would expect is both the film’s charm and its letdown. We’ve all seen this before, and even if we haven’t, we’ve probably learned about it via cultural osmosis, but it’s comforting in a nostalgic way to see it again without he taint of modern film conventions, save for the improvement in visual effects. This, however, also leaves the film rather serious and oppressive, and full of dated moral lessons*. The only glee to be found is that apparently put into depicting the bloody mess the lycanthrope leaves in his wake. Forget about dreams of sex and power. In The Wolfman‘s world, those things are evil, and will see you destroyed.

Benicio del Toro’s soulful face and nuanced performance is perfect for the role, but Anthony Hopkins steals the show with one simple stratagem – by delivering his lines, whatever they be about, nonchalantly, mildly. His Mr Talbot brings into perfect balance the distant father, the maniac and the good, law-abiding victim of circumstances. Emily Blunt as Gwen, Lawrence’s dead brother’s fiancée, Lawrence’s love interest and his mother ‘s lookalike, doesn’t have much to do but be pure, honest and unhappy. Hugo Weaving does an excellent turn as a cold, efficient detective on the trail of the killer, a character that could have used a lot more screen time. 

The most chilling moments, perversely enough, are offered by the scenes of Lawrence’s incarceration in a mental asylum, and the “scientific process” (mental and physical torture) to which he is subjected. 

If you’re a fan of classic horror movies, you’ll either hate this as an inferior copy or enjoy it as a shiny fan creation by someone who obviously shares your love for the genre. For everyone else, it’s worth it for the performances, and as a fresh look into cinema history and the thematics of Victorian and early 20th century horror – but don’t expect a joyride.

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* Not to imply moral lessons are dated by definition; just all that shit about how having a stiffy will turn you into a sociopath. Did I mention how problematic it is to conflate sexual arousal and wanting to rip a woman’s throat open?

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Bechdel test:
1. It has at least two female characters,
2. who talk to each other
3. about something other than a man.

There was the love interest (Gwen), the dead mom and the gypsy fortune teller. It may be there was some dialogue between two gypsy women, but I’m not sure.

***~~ (3/5)

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Alice Kingsley (Mia Wasikowska) faces a choice that will affect the rest of her life – whether or not to make an advantageous match with a man she does not particularly like. Instead of deciding, she takes a moment to follow a white rabbit, who leads her down a rabbit hole and into a crazy world from her childhood dreams – one that now needs her to fight its battle against the Jabberwocky and the Red Queen (Helena Bonham-Carter).

I don’t usually give an extra star, or as I do now, half a star, just for visuals, but in this case it was worth it, just for the unbridled invention involved in creating the costumes and wigs, creatures and landscapes. The visuals were strange, colourful and gorgeous, from the insanely coloured nobility to the subtle purples of the Cheshire Cat and forests at nighttime, and the brilliance of the White Queen’s palace and the greys of battlefield. The story, unfortunately, was not worth three on its own.

Considering that the film concerned a return to Wonderland rather than a retelling or transformation of the original, far too many events remained unchanged. Iconic scenes such as Alice shrinking and growing and her meetings with the Caterpillar and the mad tea party happened almost exactly as they did in the original. It seemed that the scenes were worked in just because they would be expected, rather than because the story required it.

The central external conflict in this new story also failed to impress a sense of gravity, as the only political difference between the Red and the White Queens (the White Queen played to a creepy, funny, excellent effect by Anne Hathaway) was that the latter seemed a little nicer, had a normal sized head, and the people seemed to prefer her. I was not left convinced she would implement any significant social improvements. The underlying story, which was of Alice finding her assertiveness, played out in the background, and ended up in her taking control of her life in a way that it’s hard to believe would actually be possible considering the era and her age.

No-one should be surprised at this point that in a Hollywood movie – one based on a Victorian novel, no less – looks equal goodness. The fat twins are funny and the court full of malformed freaks is the one that’s evil, whereas the pretty women in white dresses are the embodiment of virtue.

In order to fully enjoy this film, you will have to ignore silly, even cringe-worthy decisions by the filmmakers, as well as some cliches and repetition. Be prepared for those, however, and you may be in for quite an enjoyable ride.

***½~ (3.5/5)

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In an undefined past in an undefined part of North America, young Kenai, a member of an undefined tribe, receives his totem and loses his older brother on the same day. Rejecting his totem, “the bear of love”, he hunts down and kills the bear he blames for his brother’s death. His brother’s spirit then turns him into a bear, so he can learn the lesson of his totem. The rest of the film concerns Kenai’s quest to turn himself back into a human, while being chased by a hunter and bonding with a lost bear cub.

I have mixed feelings about this one. I’m bothered both by the fact that Kenai’s tribe is undefined, and by the oddness of having a “bear of love” and an “eagle of guidance” as totems, rather than just a bear and an eagle. Who came up with these associations? Setting the story in the past and being unspecific about the nation Kenai’s tribe may have evolved into over time does give the writers a certain amount of freedom, but if they thought that would stop the movie from still being somewhat incorrect and/or offensive, they weren’t right. (See more discussion on this here.) On the other hand, I’m thrilled to see a Disney movie starring an (however vaguely) American Indian tribe that isn’t Pocahontas.

The film is absolutely gorgeous, with beautiful wilderness vistas and attractive character designs for both human and the animal characters. Aside from the pop songs slapped here and there on top of the film, there are surprisingly few cringe-worthy elements, the others worth mentioning being somewhat offensive Canadian stereotypes in the form of the two comic relief moose, the lovefest of bears feasting on Nemo’s relatives (all other animals talk and are sentient, but a slaughter of salmon? Cute!) and bears having human-like eyes only when we’re meant to identify with them. The pop songs are pretty dreadful, though.

The good stuff includes some laugh-out-loud moments, the aforementioned beautiful animation, a better than usual attempt at portraying a non-Anglo culture in a non-stereotypical way (perhaps because it was made up, simply borrowing material from several cultures), the basic lesson of love and responsibility being quite manly actually, and the warning against the mistake of prejudice (unless it’s fish).

The weight of Kenai’s transgression and the loss of Koda’s family struck me as unusually harsh for a children’s film, but I find that to be a good thing – allowing fake deaths to become an animation cliché in the recent past has been, I think, a mistake. Children’s stories are not meant to be brainless and light. The best stories for children are about growing up, about identity, ethics, responsibility, and quite often a parent’s death that leaves their child vulnerable, forced to come into their own. These stories are hugely important, and making that death a ploy to provoke a fleeting emotional response is downright deplorable.

Brother Bear is a story about finding your own identity and about the worth of compassion, and that, I believe, along with the comparative lack of cringes, makes it one of the better Disney feature animations of the noughties.

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Bechdel Test:
1. It has at least two female characters
2. who talk to each other
3. about something other than a man.

***~~ (3/5)

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It’s pretty clear what Gregory Maguire’s schtick is – find a well-known story and derivate the heck out of it. He writes a very specific kind of pro-fanfic, which challenges the accepted interpretation of a beloved tale by injecting realism, death, sex and grime and telling it from a different viewpoint.

He’s not the only one. Emma Donoghue’s Kissing the Witch springs to mind, as well as Neil Gaiman’s short stories Snow, Glass, Apples and The Problem of Susan – not to mention countless of examples from non-pro-fanfic writers. Maguire is special in writing almost exclusively within this genre, and for having shot to success thanks to that one musical inspired by his Wicked.

This one takes the story of Cinderella to Holland during the infamous tulip mania in the 17th century. Iris and Ruth are half-English daughters of Margarethe, who arrives penniless from England to her family’s home town and through many travails marries far above her station to the father of a beautiful, shy child who never steps foot outside the house. Iris, the protagonist and the “clever” sister, manages the passions of the people around her and dreams of becoming a painter. Ruth, apparently mentally disabled, hangs around in the background. Clara, the Cinderella sister, is spoiled and wilful, constantly clashing with her mother-in-law and convinced (perhaps accurately – no spoilers) that Margarethe did away with her natural mother. Eventually, Clara must be pushed and shoved by Iris into her happy ending – though the true resolution depends upon a change in Clara’s heart.

Central themes in the novel include aesthetic fascination with both heavenly beauty and deformity, mistaken impressions, riches and poverty, and sexual awakening. They are rather hammered in, and tend to be more noise than signal, but put together, they make a compelling mix.

You could say the novel was too orchestrated, too stylized to flow naturally, but personally I tend to like my fiction stylized. The one discordant issue that most hampered my enjoyment of the novel was the handling of the character of Ruth. Maguire had already raised my ire in Wicked by representing the disabled Nessarose as unrealistically helpless, spoiled, a burden and, in case that wasn’t enough, evil. Here we have the apparently mentally disabled Ruth, who may be some undefined variety of neuroatypical, but she’s presented as monstrous, animalistic, impaired – even beyond that being just how the people around her see her. But wait, she’s also faking it! And dangerous! If that doesn’t get a bingo in some ableist bingo card somewhere, I’d be surprised.

The most compelling character for me was Margarethe. If she was evil, her evil was a very human variety, and Maguire affords her a certain degree of sympathy, pointing out from the start that her anger and her malice arise from fear, and her fear arises from her intimate understanding of poverty, of the basic helplessness of a person without connections. Maguire’s habit of forcing the reader to be critical of the idea of evil and evil in other people is the thing I most appreciate about his writing, and it’s what I keep coming back for.

If only he realized his own ableism and filed his criticism of the concept of evil to an even finer point, Maguire would likely be one of my absolute favourite writers, and this review would have given him at least a star more.

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An alcoholic insurance investigator teams up with five world-class criminals to play Robin Hood, ripping off big companies and corrupt, powerful figures to help out the little man.

The name of the game is sting. Or possibly con. Swindle. Heist. Think Ocean’s 11, Once a Thief or well, The Sting, in a handy job-per-episode serial packaging. With quirky, nigh-superpowered characters pulling off labyrinthine cons, the show is definitely entertaining, suffering only of a lack of an overreaching arch. The premise of the show doesn’t vary much from one episode to the next. Character growth throughout the first season is subtle at best, but is replaced by the slow reveal of details of the characters’ pasts and personalities. Leverage is still more character-driven than your regular cop show (such as Law & Order or Cold Case).

It’s a question of taste whether or not you mind this. I generally prefer shows that would not function if the characterization was switched around, but I have to admit that Leverage is entertaining, and its characters are not dull. Nate, the mastermind, has a need to control his surroundings that is challenged by his drinking problem. Sophie, the grifter, keeps the group together but is herself torn between the excitement of the heist and trying to live a normal life as a terrible, terrible actress. Eliot, the hitter, struggles with his need and talent for violence. Parker, the cat burglar, lives on the edge, unable or unwilling to connect with people. She and Hardison, the hacker, seem to be the only ones who truly enjoy their lives; Parker needs nothing but the thrill, and Hardison unlimited access to the best technology money can buy. These disparate personalities’ interaction (and Sophie’s acting) provides the humour of the show, which is necessary for that fun experience that is so central to heist stories.

The only episode of the first season which I felt really got its hands dirty with characterization was episode 10, “The 12-Step Job”, in which Nate gets enrolled in rehab as a part of the con. Sophie uses the opportunity to challenge his addiction, to no avail. Though Nate’s issues are addressed in the first episode as well as the later in the show when his ex-wife is introduced into the plot, this was the episode I thought went beyond cliché to show the mastermind as unreliable and potentially dangerous. That sort of thing is why I prefer character-driven shows: the main character cannot always be trusted to save the day, or even himself.

The shows politics are ambiguous. Corporations and the rich and mighty are presented as the villains and crime an acceptable antidote to their machinations. The Leverage team shaves their income off the top of the heist while also doing right by their clients, which leaves them in a curious moral situation where stealing something is only okay if the person they’re stealing from is considered morally reprehensible. Once on the job, the team shows no mercy, ripping down their marks with an occasionally disturbing – and sometimes heartening – degree of glee. There are few things more interesting than moral dilemmas, though this adds to the whole delicious mix.

In conclusion, it’s not deep, but quite a lot of fun.