Swedish social realism with vampires

[nineveh_uk]

Edited to remove tedious whinging on the subject of $%*&$ colleague. Short version: My limited patience thins yet more.

Let the Right One In was interesting and well worth the read. I liked the vampire mythology, which managed to be both original and not excessively complicated (and didn't feel the need to drag in everything it hadn't used and explain why. Garlic isn't mentioned once) and the vampire’s inevitable failure to take account of everything you’d think a vampire would have learnt after a couple of centuries was quite nicely accounted for. There’s an amusing sweep at the Anne Rice “Oh, I suffer so, but still kill people” type, which manages not to come across as unbearably smug because it fills an important potential plot-hole. The protagonist managed to be an ‘odd’ 13 year old without being annoying or unconvincing, and the “why the hell doesn’t he just tell someone” sense of things was adequately accounted for.

But… There’s always a but. The type of book that annoys me most is the book that could have been really, really special, but isn’t. The book when the author has taken the easy route rather than the route that could have lead to a better piece of art. Why is the vampire’s helper a paedophile? It adds nothing, means nothing. Yes, it’s a way of making him vulnerable in the first place, of explaining his devotion to the vampire, but there are other means of doing that that don’t scream cliché. If it’s meant to raise questions of what it is to be a monster, it fails. It’s hard to argue that a bit of indecent exposure is morally equivalent to serial murder. The grey suburbs, lacking all sense of place, unfortunately lack sufficient presence that we can feel their lack of sense of place. They might as well be in Copenhagen or Oslo, and I don't mean this as a tribute to their successful portrayal. Much the most interesting strand of the novel is the depiction of the fragile community of drinkers who meet in the Chinese restaurant, where the failure of lives to interconnect becomes genuinely moving rather than merely par for the course Scandinavian social realism. It is in this strand, too, that the horror is most effective and unsettling, whereas elsewhere it falls into that all too common trap of the last third of horror books, the gross-out. All in all, whilst the ideas are interesting and much of the writing is excellent, I’m not sure that Stephen King didn’t handle related themes to greater effect thirty years ago in Salem’s Lot. At least it sounds as if Let the Right One In has been much better served as a film than King’s work was.

And finally, bear convicted of stealing honey.

Comments

[white_hart]

Well, given that the chap who used to do the job in English decided he'd rather come and look after student admin for us, I suspect that your division must be a particularly grim place to do that kind of a job.

Did you find out about the budget?

[nineveh-uk.livejournal.com]

You'd think that eventually the rather high staff turn over would start to tell them something, and yet...

The budget, however, is good news - our local schedule seems to be a bit earlier than yours, and the present incumbant is in the middle of it and will have it done. To which I can only say Phew!

[white_hart]

I think your division must do budgets very differently, then, because my understanding is that PRAC won't even be agreeing the draft allocations until next week! Although I suppose if you have a less delegated structure departments could do all their work before that and then central allocations could be slotted in by the division...

[nineveh-uk.livejournal.com]

I don't have to have the bit of paper that explained it all, but I think that your second sentence applies. And of course the faculties don't actually have very big budgets, and staff costs dwarf everything else.

[white_hart]

Yes, that makes sense. We are rather more delegated and have a budget of £8m including research centres.

[dolorous-ett.livejournal.com]

I think you were well within your rights to complain about your colleague. She'd promised, so she should deliver. Quite simple, really.

The vampire book definitely sounds worth a go - I can tell it's a near miss at something much better, but it sounds a lot more interesting than, say Night Watch.

[nineveh-uk.livejournal.com]

I feel entirely vindicated as far as my emotions go, but I could whinge about work on LJ forever so am trying to keep it down! [And also I cannot manage to be gracious when someone else has taken ages over their stuff, so that by the time I come to do my stuff, at the end, I haven't time, and guess who will get blamed if we don't get the stuff in in time, rather than the person who could have sorted it out at, say, Christmas? And I've got just the same thing from another source on my desk today, except that it is something that was "urgent" THREE BLOODY YEARS AGO.]

The vampire book is indeed worth a go; it could have been more, but is still worth reading, unlike, in my opinion, The Time-Traveller's Wife.

[wellinghall.livejournal.com]

Whinge away, and have a *hug*