Sherlock Holmes Solves Everything For Everybody And Still Leaves You Wanting More

So I just finished reading The Hound of the Baskervilles which is of course a book starring (for the most part) Sherlock Holmes. A persistently brilliant read and the reason I choose the former adjective is due to the positively canine behavioural traits of the star of the show, one Mr Sherlock Holmes.

The introduction to The Hound... by art and film buff and general broadcasting guru Christopher Frayling makes clear that Holmes is a singular man in the romantic and 'existential' sense if you'll permit me (I intend to stay clear of terms such as 'epistemology' throughout here as frankly they're a turn-off) beginning with that astonishing opening in which a curly haired spaniel materializes from Holmes's deductive reasoning of a walking stick with distinctive marks in the middle (n.b Holmes reasons through intuition that the dog carried the stick by the teeth - one thing I did really enjoy about this incidentally was the unspoken detail that the marks in the middle indicated equal weighting on each side should the stick be carried horizontally, which is of course exactly how a dog would behave. James Wood talks about stuff like this in How Fiction Works - seems to me to be fiendishly hard to do but I digress) which the trusty (yes it's a dog metaphor) Dr Watson brings to his master's attention (yada yada).

Hound of the Baskervilles has been variously touted as an attack of the Id on the ego (step up Freudians), an attack of the proletariat on the bourgeoisie (step up Marxists), a treatise on rationalism (step up philosophers) and as a detective story (the other 90%). For me leaving aside the underlying metaphorical stuff this book is just a consistently amazing example of how to write really great detective fiction. I've read quite a lot of this stuff in my youth and I've travelled the globe in my narrative escapades - I've read Mankell and some of Larsson in Sweden, Chandler in LA, Christie in most of England and Europe and Le Carre in Berlin and London. I'm a cultured guy when it comes to this genre. But Kurt Wallander will never be played by Lucy Liu. What makes a detective and his compatriot so popular they can be watched by millions a century after they retired?

Lots of people (alright, everyone) will say 'it's the story, dummy' and it is. BUT it isn't just that is it? Arch clever guy Umberto Eco studied a great deal of Conan Doyle's - and by extension Holmes's - superlative techniques and dextrously weaved them into The Name of the Rose. The novel is set in a Franciscan monastery in which an 'outsider' (read; non-superstitious weirdo) comes in and begins to use his environment, temporality, cause and effect and intuition into behaviours by those around him to build a picture of the murderer, who he eventually gets (although not without the bodies piling up). Eco's point is that the deductive qualities of Holmes are in fact vastly heightened qualities that we ourselves have and use to make sense of the world around us on a regular basis.

Detective stories come in many hues but Holmes and his wit seem somehow life-affirming; unlike the miserablist Larsson who, being brutally frank, comes across as a bit too nihilistic to be taken very seriously (there's only one way to do nihilism: with a smile). Conan Doyle makes the facts of the case stand up and tell their story and that's the engaging part; the interaction, the mingling of these pieces of evidence which are alive and say things to each other - not to mention the ingeniously innocuous nature of some of them (the boot that goes missing from outside Henry Baskerville's hotel room upon his arrival in London is one of the best 'elements' of a story I've read and is weaved in such simple colours) all of which suggest both nothing and something deeply odd all at once.

The Hound is also particularly famous for its depiction of Dartmoor. With its huddle of stone dwellings once occupied by prehistoric man and wails of legendary beasts swirling in the fog, the clarity and steadfast logic of a clearly thrilled Holmes stands in stark contrast to a beautifully realised canvas, almost impressionist in its ethereal wastelands and inhospitable mires. The inferences of man versus his environment and specifically the science of reason against the unspoken laws of superstition and whimsy are drawn with subtlety and simplicity at every stroke; at just 160 pages long the pervasively sinister atmosphere is sketched expertly and creeps in every page the lonesome Watson spends there with his charge. Conan Doyle spent time there with former journalist and Express editor Fletcher Robinson and as a serving doctor in the Boer War it's obvious the guy's got previous with desolate open environments. The seal of approval may well come from the poet T.S. Eliot, who was fairly familiar with the composition of the dearth of humanity himself and was reportedly a huge fan of Holmes's.

The above may be another strong reason for the enduring popularity of this, Holmes's best-loved and most-read tale. Garlanded with praise like no other work by Conan Doyle, it's hard not to notice the familiar theme of man overcoming uncertainty - and almost certain death by what can be variously interpreted as hereditary traits and the sins of others through to sheer fear and ignorance of death and its consequences to master all within his realm by relying on his own wherewithal and intellectual ability.

I could go on and on about this book - it's that good and delivers with so much economy of prose on such a consistently high plateau that this 'review' or whatever is something of a knockabout thing in assessing its merits and powers, but the greatest praise I guess I could pay The Hound is that I will seriously consider seeing how Lucy Liu gets on if she travels to Dartmoor.

Being Dysfunctional Is Great (And You Can Look Okay In A Binbag Too)

David O. Russell has a really satisfying name. Less peppery than David O. Selznick, whose surname makes me think of savoury pretzels, he's also one of those directors, like Alexander Payne and Wes Anderson, who gets photographed a lot wearing a shirt and tie.

This is an informal piece about the film Silver Linings Playbook because I am wearing a cashmere sweater, jeans and it's a Sunday evening. I really enjoyed I Heart Huckabees when it came out, even after seeing that bust up between Russell and Lily Tomlin (spectacular!) and decided on the basis of a trailer I watched alone in bed on Saturday morning once that this was a film I wanted to check out to see if I felt the same way about the guy.

Obsessive compulsive behaviours are a thing close to my heart, because I have been obsessive compulsive for almost half my life. It's something that comes on and off depending on a variety of factors, mainly how tired I feel - which might mean I am just twitchy (I feel the need to do certain things more if I have had less sleep than usual on a cumulative basis) but I will always do certain things because they are part of my life. The deal, as ever, is recognising habits for what they are; physical manifestations of my mental state. In that respect I am dissimilar to other people but only because other people don't do specifically what I do.

I enjoyed Cooper's portrayal of a 'self-built' man hugely. I have never seen any Bradley Cooper films but this was a real eye-opener for me; the bull in a china shop approach I was expecting (and kind of got) was an aspect of, rather than the performance. The straight-upness of the guy was a big win for me and Cooper, with his 6 foot whatever frame, permagrizzled jawline and consistent choice of loungewear with a binbag for his street jogs came through as all goofy au naturelle rather than a calculated move. This is a film that really oozes sincerity in every hue and Cooper's Pat, saying farewell to A Farewell to Arms at 4am or watching Singin' In The Rain on his iPod (donated by his rageaholic buddy Ronnie) is an all over embodiment of that feeling. His clear-eyed focus on a goal he may never achieve through his previous sins was an admirable statement and I think Russell deserves a lot of credit for showing this without blinking.

Anybody reading this will have done so because they wanted information or (God forbid, from me) an opinion of David O. Russell (skip this blog if that's the case, I'm all shyness and weird turns in the dark) but anyway Russell is, of course, well known for his soupçon of giddy, screwball highs and social-realist lows, all of which again are delicious to my palette, and Playbook doesn't disappoint; the camerawork, a strong feature of his in Three Kings, is again employed to engaging and claustrophobic effect, particularly in the Solitano domestic household, an intense relay of a cramped and intense atmosphere in both the physical and metaphorical sense. At times it reminds me of those docu-dramas you (still?) get on terrestrial TV (usually Channel 4) 'observing' a family under pressure in some way. The Steadicam here both adds to the spicy ménage, suggesting an extra presence of induced stress, and another purely ambivalent perspective, content to watch as it blurs between a ranting Jennifer Lawrence (what a performance; great) and a slowly unpeeling Robert de Niro (my favourite character, for self-evident reasons).

It feels right to mention Lawrence on the basis that she is another actor that I have never seen in anything. Boy she is good. Most adjectives in the Depression Thesaurus feel lazy when describing this character and that's to Lawrence's great credit IMO: she is completely convincing in a plot that veers off the rails as it reaches its destination and handles her sentimental streak with the right amount of love and cynicism so that come that rather slushy conclusion you feel as though she (and Cooper) earned it. A post-game household scene in which she destroys Pat's father's (de Niro) obsession that she is redirecting his son's 'juju', much as a magnet does with filings is hilarious, and de Niro plays the obsessive to perfection, bowing to completely nonsensical reasoning in a totally lifelike manner (trust me on this; I have had exactly the same experience and was smiling whilst biting my fingers at this point).

De Niro, FWIW, is absolutely excellent. There's a charming piece on him in today's Observer and he comes across as a lovely guy, enamoured with youth and cajoling them into leading the way in life. I would be wholly unsurprised to see some sort of award going his way soon for this performance and his partnership with the wonderful, wonderful Jackie Lowe (a portrayal of desperately anxious motherly love that's completely beguiling) is the bedrock of Russell's tragicomic genesis. De Niro also lends a toughness to the film's emotional catharsis, a post-dance scene that in other hands may cloy with a sentiment too sugar-sweet for all tastes. But this is judged to perfection and the physical bond that is reignited between father and son - it's impossible to write that moment in unsentimental terms, let alone film it - was totally nutritious to me.

I was so pleased to see Russell demolish my previously held conventions on why certain scenes 'don't work' in cinema, a feeling I previously experienced in pop lit whilst reading Franzen's The Corrections. It's a delight to enjoy a thing whilst recognising elements you have seen in other films and fallen out of love with because of your judgement. I felt a reappraisal of a lot of previously held perceptions was due and ultimately the subjective part of me that responds to the rom com has changed in a definitive way. The most enjoyable experience I took away was a simple one; that whatever art is, it's definitely completely shapeless and logic and reason stand as part of the subjective experience to say anything, anything at all, can and will be fantastic in the right pair of hands.