Reviews

Barbara Kingsolver and Trotsky

The Lacuna is a 2009 novel by Barbara Kingsolver about a young Mexican-American man, Harrison Shepherd, growing up in the early 20th Century. During his fictional life, spent back and forth between Mexico and the USA, he encounters real events and people, such as when he sees the Bonus Marchers beaten and gassed off the streets of Washington DC in 1932, makes friends with Diego Rivera and Frieda Kahlo in Mexico City, and back in the US finds himself in the firing line of the McCarthy Red Scare. 

It’s a great novel that deserves all the praise and prizes that it got. In this brief post I want to zoom in on one interesting feature: its depiction of the Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky. Trotsky, who lived in exile in Mexico city from 1937 until his murder in 1940, occupies a prominent place in the story. His depiction is something I’m going to praise but also criticize. 

Kingsolver, who cut her teeth writing about miners’ strikes, treats the workers’ leader Trotsky with great sympathy. He appears to Harrison as a short, strong man with the dignified appearance of an older peasant, who is passionate about animals, nature and literature as well as politics. He employs Harrison as a secretary and, when he stumbles upon the young man moonlighting as a writer, gives him precious encouragement. An exile from Stalin’s Soviet Union, Trotsky is more melancholy than angry. Harrison is a witness to Trotsky’s murder and is haunted by the experience. 

As an example of how she depicts Trotsky, in his affair with Frieda Kahlo (they did the dirt on their respective partners, Natalia Sedova and Diego Rivera), Kahlo comes out looking a lot worse than him. Harrison is Kahlo’s friend and confidante, and he judges her more harshly, probably because he knows her better; Trotsky is up on a pedestal and largely escapes judgement.

Trotsky, Natalia Sedova arriving in Mexico, escorted by Kahlo

Kingsolver is interested in Trotsky but far more interested in Kahlo. We see Kahlo’s sharp edges, we are invited to judge her at times. But I guess this is because the author decided to make her a central character, to spend more time and energy on her. Trotsky gets comparatively less attention from the author, so we get a simpler picture of him. This is all fair enough. But this leads the novel into some avoidable missteps. 

Self-portrait by Frida Kahlo

Funerals

It’s not impossible that Trotsky would have employed Harrison as a secretary. Harrison is a veteran of the Bonus March, a supporter of ‘the dictatorship of the proletariat,’ (understood by him to mean democratic workers’ power) and a member of the leftist artsy milieu in Mexico City. Harrison is also young, and Trotsky was more politically tolerant toward younger comrades. But Harrison is, for all this, not very knowledgeable about or active in politics. I think Trotsky would have sooner entrusted such a key role to members of his own organisation, the Fourth International. 

The 1932 ‘Bonus March.’ Jobless veterans camped out in Washington DC were subjected to a violent military crackdown.

So it’s a very strange moment when Harrison asks how Stalin and not Trotsky ended up in charge of the Soviet Union. This should be something which Harrison already knows about and has developed opinions about, if he’s living and working in a trusted position in Trotsky’s household.

It’s a problematic moment in a bigger way, too. The real Trotsky wrote entire books about Stalin’s rise to power, so we know what he would have said. The explanation he gives in The Lacuna is wide of the mark. Trotsky, earnest and visibly pained by the memory, tells Harrison that he missed Lenin’s funeral because of a devious prank by Stalin. And so Stalin took centre stage at the funeral, and so, in this version of events, he became the sole possible successor to Lenin. I remember being told this by my school history teacher as an aside, as a touch of pop-history anecdote material, but I haven’t come across it anywhere since. Maybe it’s true as far as it goes, but it doesn’t answer the question.

And it’s definitely not the first answer Trotsky would give. In real life, Harrison would want to put the kettle on and pull up a comfortable chair before he asks Trotsky how Stalin ended up in power. Trotsky would not have spoken of personal intrigues; he was far more partial to grand socio-economic analysis and theoretical debates. If you open up his key book on the subject, The Revolution Betrayed, you can see this in the title of the first chapter; it’s not ‘Stalin: Devious Bastard’ but ‘The Principle Indices of Industrial Growth’.

A mural by Diego Rivera depicting Tenochtitlan. Harrison’s stories are set in the same era as this painting

Yeoman farmers

In another strange scene, Trotsky laments the latest news from Russia: now Stalin is going after the ‘Yeoman farmers.’ But Stalin had started in on the ‘Yeoman farmers’ (kulaks) in earnest from 1929, and this conversation is happening around ten years later! In the early 1930s forced collectivisation and the ‘liquidation of the kulaks’ led to famine and terror on a huge scale. It was one of the most traumatic episodes in Soviet history and Trotsky wrote about it at the time. It wouldn’t have been news to him by the time he was in Mexico. In any case by then there were no kulaks left. 

Trotsky in The Lacuna seems to regard these ‘Yeoman farmers’ as a key constituency whom nobody should mess with. This wasn’t the case. While Trotsky condemned Stalin’s onslaught on the peasantry and national minorities, he would still have used the derogatory term ‘kulaks’ rather than ‘Yeoman farmers.’ He saw the kulaks as a problem (though he advocated gradual and peaceful solutions) and earlier (in the mid-1920s) he condemned his opponents, including Stalin, for enacting policies that enriched and empowered this social layer.

‘pedantic and exacting’

In 1938 Trotsky’s son and close comrade Leon Sedov died in Paris, likely poisoned by Soviet agents during a routine surgery. In a powerful obituary, Trotsky expressed regret over his own often difficult personality:

I also displayed toward him the pedantic and exacting attitude which I had acquired in practical questions. Because of these traits, which are perhaps useful and even indispensable for work on a large scale but quite insufferable in personal relationships people closest to me often had a very hard time.

A more rounded novelistic portrayal of Trotsky would show us this ‘pedantic and exacting’ side, which was not a figment of Trotsky’s imagination – and perhaps his own occasional pang of regret over it. As his secretary, transcribing his extensive writings, Harrison would not only experience on occasion this ‘very hard time’ but would read practically every word Trotsky wrote. Someone as raw and open as Harrison would (rightly or wrongly is of no concern here) see some of Trotsky’s writings as ultra-principled or hair-splitting. This would especially be the case in the late 1930s; the extermination of all his allies and supporters back in the Soviet Union left Trotsky isolated, debating with the few survivors over questions which had no easy answers.

Trotsky with Ramón Mercader moments before the assassination. From The Assassination of Trotsky (1972, dir. Joseph Losey)

This depiction of Trotsky is incomparably more accurate and fair than the gothic, depraved supervillain we see in the 2017 Russian TV series. The 1972 movie The Assassination of Trotsky, starring Richard Burton in the title role, is a fair depiction and, I think, a good movie. We do see some steel in Trotsky’s character along with vulnerability. But I should mention that while I am far from its only defender, it was heavily and widely criticized as a film.

It’s believable and accurate that Harrison would encounter Trotsky and see a kind, curious, haunted man. But since he lived with him for a few years, he would see that like many great leaders and writers, Trotsky had his more negative personal traits. A more nuanced Trotsky, like the multi-faceted Kahlo we come to know in The Lacuna, would be all the more sympathetic for our having seen various sides of him. 

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I’m Finally Reading… Ruth Rendell

Or, the housing arrangements of psychopaths

A Demon in my View (1976), The Face of Trespass (1974), Dark Corners (2015)

My first knowledge of Ruth Rendell was probably of seeing her name on library paperbacks around the house when I was a kid. I didn’t read her stuff until many years later after reading some glowing endorsements of her by authors I like. The only title of Rendell’s available that day on my library audiobook app was one called A Demon in My View. So I went ahead and downloaded it. That was back in March; by August I had read three out of her many dozens of novels published across nearly fifty years. I’ll give a run-down of each of the three, in the order in which I read them.

I should add that I listened to these novels as audiobooks, performed by Julian Glover (A Demon in my View) and Rick Jerrom (The Face of Trespass and Dark Corners), who both do a great job.

By the way, the reviews below contain some spoilers.

A Demon in My View

I was hooked on this story, right from the fucked-up start to the ironic and satisfying finish. A Demon in My View is about a man who once terrorised his fictional London suburb as a serial killer, but who has settled into a safer middle age by getting his kicks repeatedly ‘murdering’ a mannequin who lives in the neglected cellar of his shared, rented house.

The killer is a despicable sadist but Rendell manages to get us into his head, convinces us to feel an iota of sympathy for the wretch. He was raised by an aunt who judged him because he was born outside wedlock. There is something pitiable in his uptight, timid, neurotic narrative voice. But this timidity is the flip side of his murderous compulsions; he has a drive to feel power over others by causing fear and pain. The most horrifying example is the flashback scene involving the baby, which nobody who reads this book will ever forget until the day they die.

The whole story revolves around the tension between his hidden world and the intrusive realities of a shared housing arrangement. What we’ve got here is a story that’s fundamentally about housing, a theme that is important in all three books of Rendell’s that I have read.

The story is firmly rooted in its time and place, not in a way that dates it but in a way that enriches it. A new flatmate moves in; he has a very similar name to the secret serial killer, which provides all kinds of opportunities for confusion and subterfuge. In the 1970s, when this story is set, the post was crucial to people’s social lives and communications, and the only phone in a shared house word likewise be a shared one. The new arrival is really our main narrator and protagonist, but the long agony and final comeuppance he inflicts on our serial killer is unintentional and indirect.

Here is a writer, I thought, who can keep me in suspense, craft a believable social and cultural world, invest me in the practical limitations of comms in the 1970s, and horrify me with a rounded portrait of a human monster.

The Face of Trespass

The Face of Trespass is about a young writer living semi-feral in his friend’s cottage on the wooded margin of London while his girlfriend, a married woman, tries to convince him to murder someone. The story is bookended by a brilliant introduction and conclusion which involve a completely different cast of characters but which provide a resolution to the story. The day is not saved, but at least we get a significant consolation at the very end and from an unexpected source.

Murder is of course not relatable. But Rendell surrounds it, links it intimately, with things that are closer to our everyday lives. There’s lust, greed, envy. Again, housing. Scarcity of funds. An elderly mother living in another country and slowly dying; linked to this, a stepfather with emotional baggage and a language barrier.  Aunts and old school friends. Pets. Obligations.

Apart from the aforementioned bookends, we stay in the point of view of the main character, the struggling young writer. Everyone reading The Face of Trespass will be able to see clear as day how our main character is being set up. I found this a little frustrating; we hate protagonists who are fools, who walk blithely into trouble. But in the end all was forgiven. Rendell’s playing a deeper game. The girlfriend is out to set him up – that’s obvious. What’s not so obvious (though all the clues are there) is (spoiler alert) how he will get out of it in the end.

Even more so than in A Demon in my View, seventies comms are central to the novel; much of it revolves around people waiting by phones.

One surprising highlight of this novel is the stepfather. I don’t know if I would pick up a book based on some blurb about a stepfather-stepson relationship. But the murder/mystery/thriller genre here serves as a vehicle for an amusing and, in the end, quietly moving sub-plot.

Dark Corners

Dark Corners was Rendell’s last novel, written decades after the other two above. It is still very good and gripping, but rougher around the edges.

At one point in the novel the main character, again a writer, laments that the characters in his work-in-progress all speak like they come from the middle of the century. This must be Rendell’s little dig at herself; the characters speak and often act like they just walked out of the much more affordable London of A Demon in my View. Modern things like the internet are mentioned a lot, but usually bracketed with some comment like, ‘Johnny supposed that this was the way things were these days’ – as opposed to thirty years ago, before Johnny was born.

Like The Face of Trespass, pets and vets come into it. But it’s housing that’s at the heart of the novel, in ways that highlight how the issue has changed radically since the 1970s. The landlord in A Demon in my View is a rather greasy and selfish character; the landlord here is a struggling writer renting out the upstairs of his late Dad’s house so that he can work full-time on his novel. But his tenant proves to be far more trouble than he’s worth. He refuses to pay the rent and refuses to move out.

Meanwhile a rudderless young woman finds her rich friend dead, and proceeds to occupy her apartment and wear her clothes. But impersonating a rich person, like taking in a tenant, proves to be more trouble than it’s worth. In this case, that’s putting it mildly: she is brutally abducted and held for ransom.

These two characters are a few degrees of separation from one another and only meet toward the end, in a very fateful encounter.

Again, the literal setting is London – and there’s a powerful sense of place – but on a deeper level the setting is the human mind struggling with fear and longing. Rendell’s home turf is psychology. As in A Demon in My View, we see the murderer from the inside out, and he is wretched and pitiful. Unfortunately, like The Face of Trespass but more so, we have a struggling writer who spends a chunk of the novel just frustrating us with his passivity and short-sightedness.

There is a third, and subordinate, storyline about a retired man who rides buses for fun (Yes, a third storyline. All three of these books are very slight, but it’s amazing how much is crammed into Dark Corners). This storyline is fun, but its culmination is the retiree very suddenly foiling a terrorist bomb plot. Rendell has this humane side that allows her to write stories where a modest older man becomes a hero thanks to his eccentric hobby, and that is satisfying. The problem is that the bombing has nothing to do with anything else in the novel, and has no impact on subsequent events.

This is one of many strange improbabilities and coincidences that, to my mind, constitute gaps in the fabric of the novel. It’s all the more obvious when compared to how tight-knit the other two books are. It appears the novel is kind of about coincidences – stories criss-crossing in a Pulp Fiction kind of a way. Coincidence played a role in the others, but to a lesser degree, and with more subtlety, and to better effect.

Dark Corners is readable and satisfying, but rough and flawed. In addition to its other virtues, it is rough and flawed in interesting ways.

First and foremost, these were gripping thrillers that passed the time for me while I did chores or drove. But the contrasts between the younger writer and the older, between the younger London and the older, added a great deal to the experience for me.

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Nick Bano on Landlord Abolition

Against Landlords: How to Solve the Housing Crisis by Nick Bano

Verso, 2024

So that headline about ‘landlord abolition’ caught your attention. Maybe you’re wondering, is it just a sensational name for a moderate reform policy, like when people talk about ‘prison abolition’? No, landlord Abolition, as laid out by Nick Bano in this eye-opening and well-written book, is the real deal.

Consider the following:

  • Renters in Britain in 1957 spent 6.5% of their income on rent (now think, how much do you spend on housing?).
  • Before 1951, any increase in land value created by planning decisions was taxed at 100%.
  • In the late ’70s, private rental was a dwindling sector and ‘the death of the landlord’ was widely predicted.
  • Landlords were eager to sell, councils willing to buy. Social housing stock grew massively without anyone having to lay one brick on top of another.

The private rental sector was saved by concerted government intervention during the Thatcher years. Housing stock was in poor repair. How to fix it? Give grants to local authorities to renovate their stock? No! Get private capital to pump money into housing! What could possibly go wrong?

Fast-forward thirty years: terraced houses built by local authorities a century ago are being sold for half a million.

We could fix our housing crisis today by increasing social housing stock. Rent controls are not only fair; they would drive landlords to sell to councils. The more social housing stock there is, the less desperate people will be for housing, the less landlords will be able to get away with charging. It would be a virtuous cycle culminating in the private rental sector shrinking away to occupy an insignificant margin of society.

House prices are tied to rental yields; when you buy a house, you are actually paying for the right to receive rents from it for the rest of your life, even if you never have any intention of renting it out. Reducing the private rental sector to insignificance would benefit home buyers and make mortgage lenders cry bitter, salty tears at all the money we get to keep in our pockets instead of giving them.

Bano is under no illusions that the collapse of the housing market, while it seems necessary and desirable, would be an economic catastrophe for Britain whose governments have bet the country’s shirt on the impossible dream of eternally rising housing costs. And under capitalism, the poor would pay first and steepest for any economic disaster.

The housing market is not a bubble – people are actually realizing profits. But it has to hit the limit of a crisis of affordability, unless British renters can be convinced to live in tiny cubicles or ever-worsening Dickensian squalor – which Bano, to be clear, does not rule out.

The main clarifying point for me was that this is not a crisis of housing supply, but a crisis of housing costs. The imperative to “build more houses”, unless they are all public, social housing, will actually continue to drive up costs (and also destroy the environment).

There is a lot in this short book. There is historical material, for example, about an amazing rent strike in 1915 and the role of housing in the lead-up to the Battle of Cable Street. There is incisive commentary on Grenfell. There is a chapter on race. There are plenty of concrete examples of the squalor, injustice and absurdity of housing in Britain today. There is an overview of how landlords changed from social pariahs to celebrated entrepreneurs in one generation.

My only reservation was wondering how much this analysis applies to Ireland, which is my neck of the woods. Here investment funds seem to be playing more of a role than in Britain, but the mom and pop landlord seems to be very much a social phenomenon here as well.

In 2022 £63 billion was paid in rent in the UK – of which £23.4 billion was Housing Benefit. All that public money – gone, just to reward landlords for charging unaffordable rents. Meanwhile they are incentivised to keep on hiking the rents. Ireland’s Housing Assistance Payment (HAP) is the same, and I bet similar numbers apply.

The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson

Have you ever heard of the Great Migration? I had heard of it before reading this book; I had a dim idea that it had something to do with black people moving to the northern cities during World War Two. It turns out, it’s much bigger than that. Isabel Wilkerson’s book The Warmth of Other Suns opened my eyes to the scale of this migration and how central it is to black history. In 1910, 10% of black people lived outside the South. The black population of Chicago was only 44,103. By 1970 that 10% had risen to 43%, and that 44,103 had topped 1 million. They were moving northward in their masses for over fifty years. It was not just a massive demographic shift. It was, says Wilkerson, “the first step the nation’s servant class ever took without asking.”

This is a big book, but I got through it pretty quickly. The author focuses on three individual migrants from different decades, states and backgrounds. She writes about them so well and they are such interesting people, that I remember their names six months after I read the book: Ida Mae Brandon Gladney who went to Chicago, Robert Pershing Foster who went to California, and George Swanson Starling who fled death threats in Florida and became a train porter in New York. In between, the author zooms out to an overall narrative, placing their travails in context. 

I thought I knew about the racist Jim Crow laws in the Southern US. But I never realised just how dystopian, sick, mad and brutal it was. Black and white people could not tread on the same steps or hold the same rail entering a train. Black motorists had to give right of way to white motorists. Black schools got second-hand textbooks begged from white schools. Ocoee 1920 and Rosewood 1923 were two of many pogroms I’d never heard of before. The lynching of Claude Neal (1934) was another episode which was almost beyond belief. Sheriff McCall is another name you’d do well to google if you’re looking to be horrified. Between 1889 and 1929 someone was lynched on average every few days. 

“Scott and Violet Arthur arrive with their family at Chicago’s Polk Street Depot on Aug. 30, 1920, two months after their two sons were lynched in Paris, Texas. The picture has become an iconic symbol of the Great Migration. (Chicago History Museum)”

George Starling attracted my interest because of his role as a labour organiser. In a very informal way, he organised black fruit pickers in Florida to demand better wages. It worked fine until word reached him that the bosses were planning to lynch him. Then he had to high-tail it to the north. Robert Pershing Foster gives an insight into the world of the black bourgeoisie and upper middle class – which always existed, throughout the Jim Crow period and after. But I guess it was Ida Mae’s story that got under my skin the most. We see her as a young wife in Mississippi picking cotton, and we see her as an old woman in the Chicago home she moved into back in the white flight era, observing through her upstairs window the comings and goings of the familiar neighbourhood drug dealers and sex workers.

Generally the black migrants benefited from their migration to the north. Stereotypes about the new black communities in the north – that they had big dysfunctional families, that they didn’t work, that they were uneducated – were all rubbish. 

But often the book’s title reads like bitter irony; the sun wasn’t much brighter in the north. Foster’smigration involved driving for days across the desert being turned away from every motel because of his skin colour – in Arizona, which was not a Jim Crow state. Wilkerson paints a picture of how a ghetto neighbourhood was born. I always assumed ‘white flight’ from the inner city to the suburbs was some slow gradual process. It was not. The first black family would move into the neighbourhood, and at once all the whites would descend into a hysterical frenzy. They would be gone within months or even weeks. 

That is, if they didn’t try to drive out the new black families. There were 58 bombings in 4 years in one Chicago neighbourhood as white concerned residents fought a guerrilla war against peaceful black families. Wilkerson gives an account of the absolutely horrifying events in 1951 in Cicero, a suburb of Chicago, when one black family tried to move in. 

I remember my schoolbooks mentioned that Martin Luther King got a cold reception when he tried to organise black people in the northern cities. I always assumed, in a vague way, that he organised some meetings to which nobody showed up. What actually happened: he organised large marches that were beaten off the streets by violent white mobs. Northern mobs.

What I got out of this book was, first, an acquaintance with Ida Mae, George and Dr Foster, three fascinating individuals. Second, an appreciation of what a massive phenomenon the Great Migration was; think of any famous black person, and chances are they or their parents or grandparents were part of this epic story.

Third, what a crazy dystopia the USA was and is. That country has never really reckoned with this past, not really. For most of my life, the standard way for Americans to deal with the past has been to pretend that Martin Luther King agreed 100% with whatever the hell they happen to believe (Only people in the overlap of the Venn diagram of Protestantism and Socialism can actually claim that honour). This cosy consensus has been fracturing since Trayvon Martin, Mike Brown and George Floyd, and since Trump rose to prominence as a political figure in 2015. I don’t know what the next consensus will be or whether it will be closer to the truth or further away, but it will take a long time to emerge and will be the outcome of an epic political and social struggle. The Warmth of Other Suns deals with a historical episode that ended in the 1970s but it’s impossible to read a book like this without it provoking all kinds of reflections about the present and the future.

The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson, Random House, 2010

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What I’m Reading: Foundation by Isaac Asimov

‘Seldon crises are not solved by individuals but by historic forces. Hari Seldon, when he planned our course of future history, did not count on brilliant heroics but on the broad sweep of economics and sociology. So the solutions to the various crises must be achieved by the forces that become available to us at the time.’ 

– Hober Mallow, ‘The Merchant Princes,’ Foundation by Isaac Asimov

A lot of what’s fresh and brilliant in Isaac Asimov’s Foundation, written as long ago as World War Two, have since become so common in the genre that they almost escape notice when you encounter them in these pages. 

We have travel by hyperspace (‘hyper-space, that unimaginable region that was neither space nor time, matter nor energy, something nor nothing’); weapons called blasters; roguish but ultimately moral traders; cities which cover entire planets; galactic empires with a civilised core and a wild outer rim. We even have a planet called ‘Korellia’ which reappears as the shipbuilding world of Corellia in Star Wars. 

A galaxy without women

The first thing that strikes the reader is that the characters are all male. From a Galactic population numbering – what did he say, a quadrillion? A quintillion? – there are almost no women the author believes are interesting enough for us to meet.  

Here follows a list of female characters in Foundation: 

  • A telephone operator (!) 
  • A servant who tries on a gizmo
  • The Commdora of Corellia

And, if we really want to be generous:

  • Hober Mallow’s hypothetical mistress (Maybe I’m pushing it now)
  • Housewives are key to Mallow’s scheme to bring down the Korellian Republic (…That’s pushing it.)

The next thing that strikes you is that this book was apparently written as if Isaac Asimov had a very limited special effects budget. The first part contains compelling descriptions of space travel and the city-planet Trantor, but the rest is almost like a stage play: largely a series of conversations in rooms, mostly between seated men. 

Discussing this with friends, I thought of radio dramas, a popular medium in the 1940s when Asimov was writing. He wasn’t writing with an eye to radio adaptation, as far as I know, but maybe he listened to a lot of them and they influenced his style. The 1970s BBC radio play of the Foundation series proves how well it translates to the medium. 

A galaxy without ‘great men’

The lack of a balanced representation of humanity in the cast of characters is pretty awful. But I like the morality and the philosophy of history this story expresses – that it is not ‘great men’ but great impersonal forces that shape history. True greatness lies in predicting and adapting to the currents of history – not holding back the tide, but riding the wave. Real material relations are more important than ideas and words. Don’t be fooled by pomp and regalia; the empire is losing crucial technical skills. Don’t be intimidated by military thugs and their death machines; those machines must be operated by human beings, who can be influenced in clever ways. 

The ‘greatest’ figures in Foundation history are not strutting macho types. Hardin and Mallow alike embrace a kind of humility and acceptance, as well as cunning and unscrupulousness.

Both Hardin and Mallow embark on too-clever-by-half plans that would, in reality, totally demoralise their own people long before they bear fruit. This is a common failing in fiction: the illusion that conflicts have to be solved by clever tricks in order to be narratively satisfying.

In fairness, the climaxes to ‘The Mayors’ and ‘The Merchant Princes’ are very satisfying. Defeat turns to victory in a matter of moments. These eukatastrophes are seamless and well-plotted. 

Cynicism

They use religion to harness the Four Kingdoms to the chariot of the Foundation. But religion is superseded – by the time of Mallow, it is necessary to realise that trade is the new superweapon of Terminus. And trade itself will one day be superseded, become an obstacle: 

‘So, then,’ said Jael. ‘You’re establishing a plutocracy. You’re making us a land of traders and merchant princes. Then what of the future?’

Mallow lifted his gloomy face, and exclaimed fiercely, ‘What business of mine is the future? No doubt Seldon has foreseen it and prepared against it. There will be other crises in the time to come when money power has become as dead a force as religion is now. Let my successors solve those new problems, as I have solved the one of today.’

The flip side of the novel’s cleverness is the smug attitude that comes through. You read this book and feel like you, Isaac Asimov and Salvor Hardin are the three smartest people in the universe, and all these trillions of people are stupid. It celebrates cynicism and manipulation. Hardin controls the press behind the scenes and takes power in a coup. This is to say nothing of the invented religion and how it brainwashes people. This is not moral, of course, but we are supposed to accept that it’s an example of ‘doing what’s right’ in spite of any silly ‘morality.’

A galaxy without violence?

We are told that ‘violence is the last refuge of the incompetent.’ The author’s distaste for violence is rare and refreshing. He’s just not interested in it. The novel is better because of this. But the novel’s philosophy does not renounce violence; it just puts violence in its place, as the enforcer and copper-fastener of things already established by culture, economics and politics. It is not the last refuge of the incompetent; it is a necessary, though subordinate, stage of conquest. 

Consider the following exchange of dialogue: 

Jorane Sutt: You’re a Smyrnian, born in Smyrno, one of the former Four Kingdoms. You’re a Foundation man by education only. By birth, you’re an Outlander and a foreigner. No doubt your grandfather was a baron at the time of the wars with Anacreon and Loris, and no doubt your family estates were taken away when Sef Sermak redistributed the land.

Hober Mallow: No, by Black Space, no! My grandfather was a blood-poor son-of-a-spacer who died heaving coal at starving wages before the Foundation.

This passage tells us a lot: 

  • That the Foundation made war on Anacreon and Loris (two of the Four Kingdoms) some time in between the events of ‘The Mayors’ and ‘The Merchant Princes.’ 
  • That the Foundation has brought about a land revolution in the Four Kingdoms through the dispossession of the nobility. In other words, not just a war but a revolutionary war has taken place between two episodes. To cement in place and enforce the outcome of ‘The Mayors,’ war and revolution were still necessary. 
  • That the resolution of the second Seldon Crisis was not the end of Sermak’s political career (Sermak was the leader of the pro-war party in ‘The Mayors’). In fact, Sermak was heavily involved in the subjugation of the Four Kingdoms, to the extent that the land revolution is attributed to him. The pro-war Actionist Party have their day after all. 
  • People like Hober Mallow come from a background where before the Foundation they were denied any opportunities in life. The coming of the Foundation has been revolutionary, opening new opportunities for them. 

All of this is between the lines. Foundation is short and well-paced, but in places there’s a depth and density to it. These lines remind us that even though the novel leaves violence to one side, the universe in which the novel is set is just as violent as ours. The worst ‘barbarism’ in the novel is that which the Empire carries out on Siwenna – atom-blasting the population in revenge for a rebellion which that population didn’t even support.

This brings us back to the points about how it’s written like a radio play. Of course, it was written for magazines and presumably each instalment had to be kept fairly short. Most of what happens in the novel happens through dialogue, but Asimov puts that dialogue to work. The dialogue is good as drama, but it really shines as worldbuilding. It’s nutritious stuff around which your imagination can sketch in the galaxy outside the four walls of the room where, inevitably, men are talking.

What I’m Reading: Judge Dredd Case Files Volume 03

Judge Dredd: The Complete Case Files Volume 03, progs 116-154 (Rebellion/ 2000AD, 1979-1980, 2008). Written by John Wagner and Pat Mills. Art by Brian Bolland, Dave Gibbons, Mike McMahon, Brendan McCarthy, Ian Gibson, Garry Leach, Ron Smith, John Cooper, Barry Mitchell

My Sláine series remains relatively popular, so clearly a lot of people share my fascination with 2000AD comics. Years ago the whole Judge Dredd back catalogue was re-released in these huge ‘Case File’ tomes. The best I’ve seen to date has been Volume 02 (which I’ve praised here before). That included two great epic storylines, the Cursed Earth saga and Judge Cal. There’s nothing as brilliant or as large-scale here; Volume 03 collects a few one-off stories and short series. Some of these I’d come across before in other volumes years ago, such as the first appearance of Judge Death. Others were new. 

Of the series, my favourite was one where a plague of poisonous spiders threatens a small town in the Cursed Earth, and Dredd has to help a community of mutants to resist. Then the spiders infest part of Mega-City One, so without a moment’s hesitation Dredd has the whole neighbourhood bombed flat. The spiders didn’t get under my skin, but a mutant talking horse named Henry Ford did. When the mutinous, grumbling mount got bitten and I thought he was going to die, I felt pretty sad. He survived, only to witness in horror Dredd’s incineration of a whole sector of the city. 

Of the one-offs, far and away the best was the one about Uncle Umpty’s candy. This is so funny and so sad at the same time. It’s very short but it feels like there’s a lot in it. A kind, whimsical and talented old man invents a range of sweets that taste unspeakably wonderful and aren’t addictive or harmful in any way. On principle Dredd does not approve. But on tasting it, Dredd declares ‘It’s delicious!’ and actually smiles. But this little story sums up how absolutely pathological the society and culture of Mega-City One are: people go mad for Uncle Ump’s candy, leading to a breakdown in law and order. The judges take extreme measures against this wonderful old man just to ensure that his candy is gone forever. 

The people of Mega-City One are very, very stupid. They are an unkind caricature of the people of capitalist societies: prone to fads and mindlessly acquisitive. But the ultimate consequence of their frenzied consumption is that they can’t be allowed to have nice things at all. They almost (almost, but not quite) deserve this ultra-punitive law enforcement system. Outside of contrived ticking time-bomb situations, the more conventional (but not necessarily bad) storylines where it’s a choice between the status quo and the annihilation of billions of people, the Judges plainly do more harm than good. Judge Death (‘The crime is life! The sentence is death!’) is only Judge Dredd taken to the logical conclusion of his misanthropy. Sometimes he plays it atraight as a Dirty Harry type. Sometimes he gives a hint of remorse or compassion; sometimes it’s not that, but only his sheer integrity leading to the same outcome. And sometimes, as with Umpty Candy, he is a brilliant and merciless caricature of himself.

What I’m Reading: The Only Good Indians

The Only Good Indians by Stephen Graham Jones (Saga Press, 2020). Audiobook narrated by Shaun Taylor-Corbett. 

Here are two images of this novel that sum it up best: a sweat lodge made from random old blankets, sleeping bags and jackets so that it looks like, the narrator says, a pile of hobos; and a woman with the head of an elk. 

This is US horror writing in the mould of Stephen King: garage-door social realism; characters whose internal monologues bring them to life as much as their words and actions; incomprehensible passages about sports; monsters and apparitions that feel like an extension of the mundane world and are all the more horrible for that.

But as it goes on The Only Good Indians reveals a folk-tale quality that you don’t find in King. 

It’s set around a Blackfoot reservation in the present day, and the story is steeped in the grim conditions in which the Indians live (that’s the term the author and characters use). Lewis has made it to his mid-30s without dying of diabetes or an overdose or suicide or a car crash, or freezing to death after passing out, and he considers that a small miracle. Don’t tempt fate: the first quarter of the book depicts his complete unravelling, his descent into blood-soaked psychosis. The apparition of the elk-head woman drives him to it. 

Lewis is one of four friends in the crosshairs of this monster. When they were in their early twenties, they committed a transgression which involved blowing a pregnant elk to pieces with rifle fire. Ten years later a dangerous elk spirit has come for revenge – not only to kill them but to destroy everything they love. 

Each one of these Indian characters feels like a traumatised survivor of some terrible war. Each one of them has managed to get through some bad shit and to put their lives together. As death comes to claim them one by one, it feels wasteful and hopeless. The worst part is, it feels true: people who fight their way up out of a bad situation and build new lives for themselves are always prey to some demon from the past catching up with them. 

Twice while reading this novel, once at the one-quarter mark and once at the three-quarter mark, I stopped reading and put it aside, disgusted with it. ‘So it’s like that,’ I thought. ‘Every woman in the story has to die a horrible – and improbable – death.’ The brutality felt capricious and meaningless. We’re supposed to think the elk-head woman was pushing an open door when she turned Lewis into a murderous ghoul, but to me when the killing started it felt too abrupt. It’s difficult to get invested in one character only to switch to some others two-three hours in.

But both times I gave it a week and came back to it, and found myself drawn in again. It’s not really like that. It really is going somewhere, building up to something. Not every woman and man dies. There is a way out.

Denorah, the teenage daughter of one of the four men, is the only ‘calf’ any of them produced. She is a brilliant basketball player, someone who will really make her tribe proud one day. After a long sequence involving the makeshift sweat lodge which builds slowly from tense humour to pure horror, Denorah finds herself in the crosshairs of the elk-head woman. The final struggle falls to her.  

That’s where I am now: in the last half-hour of the audiobook with no idea if the ending is going to come down on the side of the things I liked or the things I didn’t like. While he nearly lost me once or twice, now I’m convinced Jones knows what he’s doing, and I’m keen to see how it all ends. 

[Edit 26 May 2024: the ending brought it all together. Even better than I hoped.]

Dune: Part Two – a bold, brilliant adaptation

(Don’t worry, no spoilers)

We live in an age of excess – excess of consumer products, of information, of outrageous and unbearable things happening in the world. Maybe that’s why Denis Villeneuve and co, in Dune: Part Two, endeavour to overload the brains of the audience with images grotesque and surreal but also solid and tangible, and on occasion, too, to contrast this excess with stark desert simplicity.

I’ve been blogging about adaptations of Dune. What is this movie like as an adaptation of the latter part of Frank Herbert’s Dune?

Most of the major landmarks in the story are there, such as Jessica, then later Paul, taking the water of life; Paul riding a sandworm; Feyd-Rautha in the arena; and the final climactic battle (the family atomics, ‘a great-grandmother of a storm’…) The film interprets these landmark moments with extraordinary technique and inspiration. When Paul mounts a worm for the first time it’s truly scary and intense. I’ve seen this moment on film twice before, but I never got anything close to a sense of how viscerally terrifying it would be to really do this. The Harkonnen planet Giedi Prime is not just ugly, but an unsettling, distressing place to spend 20-30 minutes. The filmmakers have taken the time to show us how the spice drug is taken from a drowned worm, how moisture is sucked out of the dead (and sometimes the still-living!), and what a palanquin mounted on a worm looks like.

The landmarks are there, and rendered with power and intensity. But the routes between them are changed. It’s that type of adaptation.

For example, the first action scene is completely new; mst of Paul and Chani’s dialogue is not from the book (though it fits right in); Paul learns to ride a sandworm a lot earlier; Paul receiving the name ‘Mu’ad Dib’ comes a lot later.

(By the way, a line uttered by Paul when he comes face to face with Baron Vladimir Harkonnen suggests that this adaptation is set in one of the alternate timelines foreseen by Paul in the novel.)

But it goes beyond that. Things are not changed only for the sake of economy or clarity. The biggest changes are in the service of tackling the defects of the book – the stress placed on bloodlines and eugenics; the white saviour enlisting the credulous natives; Chani, the most obliging of this very obliging bunch of natives, consenting to being Don Paul’s goomah while he marries someone else. In the novel the Fremen, for all their pride and ferocity, never call bullshit on the ridiculous aristocratic institutions to which Paul expects them to bow down, or on the Bene Gesserit’s shameless manipulation of faith in the service of their insane agenda.

In the movie, each major character (Stilgar, Jessica, Chani, Gurney) is aligned to an agenda, and exerts an influence on Paul; it’s a laser focus as regards character that pares things right down, renders conflicts more extreme and dramatic.

This film rejects space feudalism and eugenics; look at Chani’s reaction when Gurney Halleck speaks of Paul’s ‘bloodline,’ in the context of her earlier statement about how all Fremen are equal.

If you’ve seen the film, you know what I’m talking about, and if you haven’t I won’t spoil it. But in this movie the Fremen are not extras who wandered off the set of The Life of Brian ready to fall for the first messiah who climbs up on a soap box. In this movie Chani’s pride and self-respect do not allow her to be such a pushover as she is in the novel (‘History will call us wives’). Paul’s political choices have consequences for him and others. He really hurts Chani.

1984’s Dune ended on a note of triumph; 2000’s TV version is true to the novel in that it mostly leaves you with good feelings. This movie takes the book’s undercurrent of tragedy and drags it to centre stage. The jihad is not a foggy prediction; it’s kicking off right before our eyes. Paul’s victory has come at a terrible cost, personified in a specific character who, in this adaptation, serves as his conscience.

This ending meant that I left the cinema not with a sense of ‘all’s well that ends well’ but with a strange feeling, something rich and contradictory between triumph, relief and sadness.

High praise so far. What do I not like about the adaptation?

I felt that the script relied too heavily on named Harkonnen characters brutally assaulting and killing their underlings; it’s repetitive, ugly and unsubtle.

There was one thing I couldn’t get out of my mind. Every time I saw Jessica after the first hour or so my reaction was, ‘Jesus, is she still pregnant?’ Speaking of Jesus, it’s written that he was three years preaching before his crucifixion. Now imagine a movie where Jesus dethrones Tiberius Caesar just three months after he begins his ministry. Just ask anyone who has ever been involved in a pregnancy or, I assume, in a jihad: a guerrilla war takes longer than a trimester. In the book we cut away for two years, then return to find Paul at last ready to ride a sandworm. Even two years was cutting it fine. How do Paul and Jessica get millions of Fremen eating out of their hands in just six months? The movie works hard to get us away from the white saviour narrative stuff, but this telescoping of the timeline sends us back a large part of the way.

Linked to this, I missed a certain omniscient syringe-wielding toddler who didn’t make the cut.

[Edit, 8 mar 2024.] Here’s another problem. Would it kill Hollywood directors to give speaking roles to actors from the Middle East? What’s the terrible thing that would happen if you gave roles to people from the country you filmed in (or countries where they speak the same language, or practise the same religion)? I didn’t want to raise it at first, because with Dune it’s always going to be a fine line between accusing authors of erasure and accusing them of appropriation. But it occurs to me that just hiring some Arab or Muslim talent is neither erasure nor appropriation. Ridley Scott hired Ghassan Massoud to play Salah ad-Din (Saladin) in Kingdom of Heaven – and the sky did not fall on our heads. Dune borrows so heavily from the Muslim world. It should start paying back.

To see this movie on the big screen was to be put through a succession of intense and unexpected experiences. Sometimes you’ll see a movie that has some great moments, images or scenes, but just isn’t great overall. But in Dune: Part Two, it all adds up to something powerful and brilliant. And as an adaptation, it favours the things I like in Frank Herbert’s novel, and militates against the things I find embarrassing. In particular it leans hard into the tragedy and dread that make the ending of the novel Dune so different.

Screen Adaptations of Dune

The new Dune is phenomenal. Two-plus years ago Dune: Part One got me out to the cinema for the first time since Covid and it was exhilerating. Part Two is reported to be even better. But Frank Herbert’s 1965 novel Dune has been adapted for the screen before, more than once. I have seen all these adaptations, because I have a strange fascination with Dune which is part nostalgia because I first read it aged 14, part a mature realisation that the things we enjoy don’t have to coincide with the things we believe in, and part, no doubt, reasons that could be best explained by Freud (sandworms), Marx (family retainers) and Edward Said (white saviour complex).

Freudian beasts, their hour come round at last, slouching toward Arrakeen. From the 2000 TV version, dir. John Harrison.

Enough deprecation. I also like this story because it’s exciting, intelligent and haunting. The author takes politics, economics and ecology seriously while telling a great story. How well has that translated to the screen?

This review will take a look at David Lynch’s 1984 movie, the Sci Fi Channel’s 2000 miniseries, and Denis Villeneuve’s 2021 adaptation of the first half of the novel.

Villeneuve is talking about adapting the Dune sequels. In a bit of a sequel to this post, we will look at the 2003 adaptation of Dune Messiah and Children of Dune.

Three different versions of the ornithopter from, top to bottom, 1984, 2000 and 2021.

Harkonnen Horror Picture Show

God created 1984’s Dune to train the faithful. For every good thing I can say about it, there’s a bad thing too, and vice versa.

To begin with, something bothers me about the interiors. The Atreides live in surroundings of Victorian frumpiness, gaudy but flat, like the decor in Boris Johnson’s house; the Harkonnens in a green-lit space slaughterhouse. For all the implicit homophobia in the way the Baron is portrayed, something about the campiness of the whole set-up makes me think the whole evil cabal might jump out of their chairs and start singing ‘Time Warp’ at any moment. But other elements of the visual design are brilliant – the guild spice navigator and his cohorts, who prefigure the fascinating visual excess of Warhammer 40,000; the tonsured Bene Gesserit; the faceless rubber menace of the Harkonnen troops.

The spaceships look cool; but the visual sequence in which the guild navigator bends time is slow, unclear and not necessary.

I like the weirding modules. These are invented out of whole cloth for the movie: in short the Atreides have a special weapon that can kill with the utterance of a sharp syllable. This idea fits pretty well in the world of Dune and helps the story along. For example, it explains what’s so special about Paul from the point of view of the Fremen: he brings a powerful new weapon to the table. But the shields, personal force-fields used by combatants in the universe of Dune, look silly.

Top to bottom: Kenneth McMillan, Ian McNiece, and Stellan Skarsgard as Baron Vladimir Harkonnen. Top to bottom, the colour pallettes of a 1980s movie, a TV show from 2000 and a 2020s movie

The movie is rushed and incoherent. It might have gotten away with telling such a huge story in just over two hours, but it goes out of its way to be confusing and to trip us up on irrelevant things. It’s difficult to imagine anyone who hasn’t read the books being able to follow what’s going on. But the final half-hour strides along with a formidable momentum and plenty of cool imagery.  

At the very end of the movie it suddenly rains on Arrakis – a development that makes no sense in the logic of the world, but which is absolute magic on a simple storytelling and thematic level. I can see why they couldn’t resist.

It’s a movie I could talk about, back and forth, is it good or is it bad, for a long time.

The guild spice navigator, from the 1984 Dune, dir David Lynch

A very delicate time

The opening of 1984 Dune is problematic in ways that are thrown into sharp relief by the quality of the 2021 Dune’s opening. In 1984 Dune, we begin with Princess Irulan, a very formal narrator who stares straight into the camera and explains things, followed by a scene in the imperial throne room. In 2021 Dune we begin with Chani narrating over a striking visual sequence. 

The 2021 approach is more democratic and materialist, centring the indigenous Fremen and the key resource they control rather than the galactic aristocracy. But it is also much better from a storytelling point of view: it is rooted in real and tangible things, while narrators and the high politics of throne rooms are distant and abstract. Chani is narrating but also participating in a sequence that conveys visually the importance of the spice, the oppression of the Fremen by the Harkonnen, and the transfer of power from the Harkonnens to another noble house.

The guild spice navigator in the 1984 Dune is a top-tier movie monster. In the books we don’t see him until Dune Messiah, but here he makes his grand entrance in the opening sequence. Unfortunately that is a big problem. Although he is cool, he is one of several big things that we don’t need to know about this universe right away, or at all. But the movie goes out of its way to foreground him.

From the 2021 Dune, dir Denis Villeneuve. Murky.

Comedians of Dune

The Harkonnen scenes in the 1984 Dune leave me with a vague impression of grotesque-looking people bellowing and jabbering monstrous things at one another, punctuated with maniacal cackling. The 2021 Dune is a bit humourless by comparison. There is an early moment in which Paul and Duncan Idaho share a chuckle. But that is an oasis in a desert of dourness.

There is, to be fair, one other joke in the movie:

‘Smile, Gurney,’ says Duke Leto.

Scowling, Gurney replies: ‘I am smiling.’

Someone has decided to make Gurney ‘the grumpy one.’ It’s a good joke, delivered well by the actors. Is the movie taking a dig at its own serious tone? Or is it opening itself up to the retort: ‘Which grumpy one?’

Still, the 2021 Dune is better in almost every way. The storytelling and worldbuilding are far more skilful, conscious, economical; the screenwriters treat words as the Fremen treat water. The visuals play with light and shade, convey weight, grit, thirst, scale. It does not lack that essential quality: weirdness, accident, quirkiness (Who thought of giving the Atreides bagpipes? Give them a medal) but it doesn’t allow that element, either, to get in the way of the story.

In any adaptation, fidelity to the original is not crucial for me. Things have to change in the move from one medium to another. A change for the better, or a change necessary for the medium, justifies itself. But for what it’s worth, the 2021 Dune is much more faithful to the original. Both other adaptations resort to arming their extras with projectile firearms. But in the book and the 2021 version, shields have rendered firearms obsolete, and combat is primarily a hand-to-hand affair.

Budgets of Dune

An even smaller point against the 2021 Dune is its portrayal of the city of Arrakeen. In a movie that cost $165 million to make, this key location appears to be nothing more than a scale model, entirely devoid of human life. The 2000 TV adaptation, working with a budget of $20 million, manages to convey a lively and bustling place. (In case you’re wondering, the 1984 Dune cost about $40 million.)

The same moment in three different versions: fleeing by ornithopter as a sandworm eats a spice factory. Top to bottom, 1984, 2000 and 2021.

Now we come to the most obscure adaptation, Frank Herbert’s Dune, a three-part miniseries for the Sci Fi Channel written and directed by John Harrison.

(It was one of three very fine miniseries released by the Sci Fi Channel around that time, along with Steven Spielberg’s UFO epic Taken and Battlestar Galactica. The latter ended up running to the proverbial six seasons. It was an underappreciated moment in the history of ‘prestige TV’.)

I’ll level with you up front: Frank Herbert’s Dune is not visually spectacular – the CGI is dated and some of the costumes look tacky.

But the actors are impressive. It is long not because it is bloated, but because it has made a conscious decision to tell the story more fully and faithfully, without unseemly haste. Everything about this adaptation is confident and assured, as if having a smaller budget gave it much more freedom.

And about that CGI: on a technical level, it would not pass muster today. (Though nostalgia or irony might induce people to deliberately copy this style in the future – stranger things have happened). The images are well-composed and are shot and edited in such a way that, interspersed with live-action footage, they tell a compelling and comprehensible story. A lot of today’s filmmakers could learn a lot from how the CGI is used here, how John Harrison does so much with relatively little. The result is that a CGI-heavy action scene, such as when the spice factory is eaten by a worm, is a genuinely tense experience.

In a fantastic scene, the ‘Beast Rabban’ gets a personal comeuppance he never gets in the novel when he is killed by a mob in the streets of Arrakeen. I guess budget dictates that some additional scenes must happen in this set, to justify the expense of building it; but budgetary needs can coincide with storytelling needs. It is satisfying to see this showdown happen in this familiar place. In the novel, by contrast, we are told in the most perfunctory Shakespearian way that ‘Rabban, too, is dead’ – offscreen somewhere.

I don’t want to over-praise something that, after all, will have dated poorly, especially measured against the new big-budget spectacle. But here’s one last piece of praise: Frank Herbert’s Dune is the only adaptation to leave in the crucial banquet scene (into which it inserts the Princess Irulan and a bodyguard of Sardaukar. It’s important later that we know who these people are, so it makes sense to feature them here).

It was shot in Czechia, and you can decide for yourself whether that (a) results in lamentable whitewashing of the Middle Eastern elements or (b) to your great relief, distances the adaptation from the wild orientalism of the novel.

Paul in stillsuit watches a sandworm’s back cresting the sand. From the 2000 version.

Recommendations of Dune

If you want a spectacular modern science fiction epic, well-conceived and well-executed, with current stars and big budget, you should watch the Denis Villeneuve Dune.

If, like me, you are really into Dune and also interested in the process of storytelling and adaptation, these versions are all deeply intriguing.

If, like me, you are interested in things that are good but also kind of bad, you should watch David Lynch’s Dune. The highs and lows are equally bold and striking.

If you liked the 2021 Dune and want to know more, but aren’t much of a reader or can’t get into the books, the 2000 miniseries is a good place to go to delve deeper into the story. It would be a good option for someone who prefers the pacing and serial form of TV shows. It also has the great advantage that it has a direct sequel to introduce you to the later books in the series.

Next week I’ll talk about that sequel: the novels Dune Messiah and Children of Dune, along with the TV miniseries Frank Herbert’s Children of Dune (2003). Stay tuned for that if you want to hear about how a low-budget TV adaptation can be better than the source material. Until then, enjoy Dune: Part Two.

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How Dune gets away with it

No, Rebel Moon is not really like Star Wars

‘A pound shop C-3P0!’

That was Mark Kermode’s verdict on Jimmy the robot from Rebel Moon. This sums up what Kermode and many others have said about director Zack Snyder’s new space adventure movie: that it’s a rip-off of Star Wars, that it’s staggeringly derivative.

I usually like Kermode but actually Jimmy isn’t much like 3-CP0. He’s a humanoid robot with an English accent – OK. But there have been a lot of human-shaped robots since Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. It’s pretty much the default shape for robots. And English accents are not rare; Mark Kermode has one.

Jimmy is a military robot, designed to kill, not a protocol droid who can speak 6 million languages. C-3P0 is pedantic and cowardly and pessimistic. Jimmy, on the other hand, has an interesting and messy internal life. Unlike C-3P0 he is dignified, and he is played for sympathy, not for laughs. He was programmed to defend a certain princess, and now that she’s dead he can’t fight – until something unexpected suddenly restores his capacity for violence.

This incident has placed him on an interesting trajectory. When we see him in one of the final shots of the movie, having not seen him at all for over an hour, he has undergone a strange transformation – a kind of robotic midlife crisis, resulting in new feral headgear. It’s a striking image.

I didn’t particularly want to like Rebel Moon and I didn’t see myself writing about it here, slightly pedantically defending it from a critical pile-on. Of Snyder’s precious films, 300 impressed me at 16 but in retrospect it was a crazy and fascist movie, drawn from an equally crazy and fascist comic. I haven’t seen a Snyder film since Watchmen. I know that Rebel Moon started out as a rejected pitch for a Star Wars movie. In the trailer, the action looked weightless, the characters dour. I thought it would be Star Wars without any humour or character, and with a reactionary political edge.

But honestly, contrary to what most of the critics are saying, Rebel Moon carves out its own space and is its own thing. I watch everything in 20 or 30 minute stretches these days, between changing nappies, sleeping and going to work, so the length of the movie didn’t bother me as I didn’t watch it in one sitting. But if I didn’t really like it, I wouldn’t have kept coming back.

From the start, Rebel Moon struck me as more like Warhammer 40K or Dune than Star Wars: there’s the solemn choral music and the baroque Gothic style of the bad guys. This tone promise was borne out: the whole movie is edgier than anything Lucas made. It’s not exactly Come and See but it’s more for teenage boys (of all ages and genders) than for the whole family.

The early scenes with the good guys are also very un-Star Wars. They talk about sex, joke about it, and have it barely off-screen, which is something most action-adventure films of our era are terrified to do because they want to pack all age groups into the cinema. That’s refreshing. Also, these pagan farmers appear to be having a really good time even when they aren’t riding each other. For me, all this was unexpected and endearing.

The arrival of the bad guys is really tense. This sequence follows Hitchcock’s ‘bomb under the table’ principle. Yes, thanks critics, it’s obvious they’re bad space fascists and they’re going to do bad things. But we don’t know exactly what they are going to do, or when. Hence the tension.

The imperial soldiers are not faceless stormtroopers. They’re macho bullies and rapists, apart from one decent guy; they have horrible personalities, but the point is that they have personalities. In another 40k nod, their armour spans the gap gracefully between futuristic and baroque.

Contrary to what I expected, the fight scenes actually kick arse. They have real weight and are gritty. The energy weapons have a kick to them.

There are plenty of genre tropes in the first 40 minutes. But there are few specifically Star Wars tropes until Kora and Gunnar (look! I remembered their names 3 weeks later) take in a vista of a town from a clifftop before proceeding into a cantina full of exotic and dangerous-looking figures. From there it turns away from Star Wars again and becomes a ’round up a posse’ story, drawing from Kurosawa himself, not Kurosawa filtered through George Lucas.

There are plenty of moments where the movie is a visual feast. But sometimes the environments look like stage backdrops, and even when they don’t look like it they behave like it. When our heroes meet the Bloodaxes, it might as well be happening on a theatre stage because there is no interaction with the floaty columns that loom in the background. Towards the end, which is not really an end but a lull before the next movie, the characters keep saying wooden portentous things clearly designed to get the ending to feel more ending-y. That’s clumsy. I found most of the slow motion stuff unnecessary and distracting. A slo-mo shot of seeds being sown – what is that for?

The Bloodaxes keep saying the word ‘Revolution,’ without every giving us the slightest notion of what their revolution is about. In this sense too the movie is distinct from Star Wars: it finds a way to be even more apolitical. Unfortunately Rebel Moon also goes so far as to hint that the evil empire might be redeemed by a slightly more compassionate absolute monarch, one who can heal little birdies with her bare hands.

Once again, like in Dune and Star Wars, we have space feudalism. The assumption that a lot of dukes and emperors would be able to manage interstellar travel, when our modern capitalists have such trouble even getting off the ground, is a strange one, but again it’s a genre trope and hardly unique to this movie.

The whole thing is basically limited and on the shallow end, but it’s gripping, pacy and well-executed. Take the masked priest characters who lurk in the background ominously for the whole movie, until the final scenes when we at last learn what their function is and see them at work. That’s cool. The script is pretty likeable. When a bunch of nameless good characters are killed in battle toward the end of the movie, we afterwards get a moment of tribute and mourning – something we rarely get in Star Wars, where there’s an unwritten rule that nameless characters are disposable.

It’s a shame this kind of budget isn’t going to a movie adaptation of some piece of space sci-fi by, say, Ian M Banks or Ann Leckie, or some original adventure drawing on their ideas. That’s my main problem here: there are lots of little sci-fi tropes and elements in Rebel Moon, but no big Science Fiction ideas animating the story, no consistent through-line in the worldbuilding.

I thought the Avatar sequel, Dune: Part One and Andor were all brilliant in very diferent ways. Rebel Moon is not on that level – it’s not so original or intelligent. But the critics are wrong. It hits the targets it sets out to hit. And it’s only ‘like Star Wars‘ in the sense that they both belong to the same genre. In the same way Notting Hill is like Meet the Parents in that they are both rom coms. In the way that 300 is like Gladiator. In the way that Watchmen is like an Avengers movie.

Saying that Jimmy is C-3P0 is just pointing out that they both have human shapes and English accents. It’s not demonstrating anything, except ignorance or maybe disregard for the genre. Likewise, pointing out that Rebel Moon is like Star Wars is actually saying nothing more than ‘These two films are action-adventure movies set in space.’

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