I love the Decemberists. This fact makes objectively analysing any new offering from the band much like a parent surveying their child’s cacophonous crap-pile of pasta and glitter and smiling broadly, congratulatory, resisting the urge to delicately ask ‘What is it?’. And so in front of me sits a CD subtitled ‘A Single Series’ and although I know I won’t be able to help myself from loving it, I’m forced to ask ‘What is it?’

As a precursor to their forthcoming fifth full-length Hazards of Love it could be seen as merely marking time until that album’s release. More importantly as three individual singles, with a b-side a piece, it showcases the band to be more than the bombastic, thesaurus bashing balladeers that their last, and yet still brilliant, album The Crane Wife would have you believe. ‘Valerie Plame’ is a bouncy, ukulele-led ditty about the titular one-time CIA operative – a theme which has shades of older song ‘The Bagman’s Gambit’s tale of government informants, but where that ends with a string-led wig-out this climaxes with a joyous ‘Hey Jude’ style la-la-la-along.

Elsewhere ‘O New England’ is a beautiful, if fairly damning, portrayal of the area’s tourist attractions with idiosyncratic vocalist Colin Meloy declaring “I think I’d rather just wait in the car”. The remainder of the tracks are refreshingly simple in form and yet still demonstrate Meloy’s enchanting lyrical dexterity and it’s encouraging that he’s dialled back the florid verboseness he’s prone to – not that previous albums’ audacious rhymes like ‘And above all this falderal/On a bed made of chaparral’ should be something that the band should eradicate completely from their repertoire as it’s all part of their unique charm.

Of the six songs on offer here, only a pointless cover of The Velvet Underground’s ‘I’m Sticking With You’ would sound disappointing on a full-length release. And for this caring parent that’s a great relief – it makes it a lot easier when you don’t have to feign admiration of your loved-ones art.

My name is Guy Pewsey, and I’m an Alphaholic. I can’t deny it anymore; perky Danish pop combos are my idea of musical nectar; toe-tappingly catchy tunes, a pinch of ’80s nostalgia and a dash of ’90s cheese, smothered in a colourful American Apparel wrapper. It’s all just so impossibly inoffensive, if a little uncool, but with

Alphabeat’s massive success in the U.K. with stellar pop songs like ‘Fascination’ and ‘10,000 Nights’ and a nationwide tour which just stopped off at Oxford, I’m clearly not the only one. Arriving to meet the band during a sound-check, I am greeted by a group who are practically vibrating with energy and smiling almost literally from ear to ear. To be honest, it’s a little disconcerting and, certain that their egos will be revealed, I brace myself for a rough ride.

Alphabeat, however, are instantly pleasant as I ask them why they think that they’ve managed to break through the bubblegum pop stigma to success all across Europe, particularly in Britain. ‘With our music, there are people who get into it instantly, and obviously there are some people who hate it from the beginning’ says Anders, the bassist, (three members of the band are called Anders), ‘we’re used to that. Either you like it or you don’t.’

Musical Marmite they may be, perhaps understandable considering that they are probably the cheesiest thing to hit the charts in a while, but there’s no denying the sheer energy of their songs, inspired by early Madonna, even Abba. ‘We like old-school pop artists. Now we’re more into contemporary music but we take the best bits from the old stuff.’ It has been a long time before ‘old school’ has been said in my presence without being ironic, but if anyone can get away with it, it’s the colourful Danes sitting across from me.

After turning down an offer to support the Spice Girls on their ill-fated reunion world tour, (‘It was the easiest decision in the world’ says Anders, the bassist, ‘nobody was really disagreeing with us, it wasn’t the right time for us.’) the band are looking forward to continuing their own tour and working towards their next album. ‘We’ll go in a new direction, but we’re very much into contemporary American music’, Anders says, before being interrupted by Anders (God help me) ‘We don’t want to run away from being a pop band though.’

After playing to Oxford’s sold out Carling Academy, the band have clearly been enjoying their time in Britain, and are relieved that their time spent living in London ‘trying to convince people that we were good’ ended up paying off; ‘We knew we were walking a very fine line between what is cheesy and Eurovisionish and what is just good pop music. But a lot of people have taken it more seriously than we thought.’

Following on from the Eurovision comment, I suggest that they might represent Denmark in next year’s contest, and while they recall the glory days of the European institution, they insist that today’s offerings are too political, even racist, for them to ever give it a go.
Impossibly perky, with effortless charm and a sextet of great cheekbones, it’s difficult to imagine Alphabeat engaging in the usual lifestyle of a musician (singer Stine, a tiny blonde pop queen, quotes her personal motto as ‘keep dancing for a better tomorrow’). Anders (Stine’s fellow singer) insists, though, that they’re not as boring as I assumed, informing me almost proudly that ‘we were supporting a band and we got into a fist fight with them. It was a drunken night, and we didn’t really like them.’ He looks guilty for a moment, then adds, ‘They started it.’ Rock and roll guys, rock and roll.

I don’t know whether to be relieved or disappointed in Alphabeat’s behaviour. Half scared that the most innocent band in music would actually be amoral crack-heads, half hoping for an exclusive look into the evils of Danish pop, a pit of sex and filth. Either way, I have clearly failed to kick the habit. And in case you were wondering, my favourite member of the band is Anders.

There are a number of very good reasons to avoid trying to turn a book called Blindness into a film. A blank screen is the second taboo of cinema (the first being Adam Sandler), and when broken, is usually done so in such a heavy handed manner that it serves to undermine any message the film might have, rather than shore it up (Nicolas Klotz’s Heartbeat Detector being the most recent example). To be fair, Meirelles persistently avoids leaving the screen blank, and his failure to handle the on-screen representation of blindness is only intermittent and interspersed with moments of insight that are remarkable – if only for proving that CGI isn’t just for explosions and pitched battles.

What is perhaps more troubling is Meirelles’ attempt to control the unresolved allegory behind Saramago’s novel. Rather than have the blindness descend all at once, it comes back to each person individually – a device that seemingly imitates the cultural logic of the Saw films: you’re going to enjoy your life, even if it kills you. Furthermore, the rape scene is terrible to watch, probably the most traumatic moment to have been caught on celluloid in the last ten years.

Julianne Moore’s performance is particularly impressive, bringing a much needed human element to this somewhat farfetched but compelling film.

Four stars

The prudish and easily offended take heed – Clark Gregg’s adaptation of Chuck Palahniuk’s novel Choke is not a trip to the cinema for the kids. Sam Rockwell is Victor Mancini, a sex addict stuck on step four of his recovery and more likely to be found slaking his lust in the public toilet with a fellow addict than sitting through group therapy.

By day, Victor is an 18th century, Irish indentured servant at a historical theme park, by night he is duping unsuspecting diners at restaurants all over town to break out their best Heimlich maneuvers and rescue him from choking on his food. When these good Samaritans save Victor, he makes them into heroes, giving them a purpose in life while simultaneously filling his pockets with the money they send him out of sympathy and attachment.

Victor’s money goes to housing Ida, his dementia-afflicted mother played by the scene-stealing Anjelica Huston. Ida is tended to by Dr. Paige Marshall, played by Kelly Macdonald, a detached yet earnest young physician who develops romantic feelings for Victor. Victor, along with his best friend Denny, a chronic masturbator and fellow theme park employee played by Brad William Henke, attempts to extract the identity of his biological father from Ida before she slips into a state of dementia from which she cannot return.

Choke’s casting directors deserve praise for finding actors who were able to capture the tone of Palahniuk’s writing. Rockwell seemed born to play Mancini, effortlessly delivering each line of tactless dialogue with just enough heart to make you root for his successful reform. Huston’s Ida Mancini is a pitiable, sick woman who continually fails to recognise her own son. The film succeeds in presenting Victor’s back-story as a plausible catalyst for his present-day lifestyle. However, there are several plotlines which call for the total suspension of the viewer’s disbelief including the initial, far-fetched suggestion of the identity of Victor’s father.

The film’s twist in the final stretch is unexpected, but it does not pack the same punch delivered by Tyler Durden in the successful adaptation of another of Palahniuk’s novels – Fight Club. Choke is not a life-changing piece of cinema but it is diverting in that it allows the viewer to put their own struggles aside for ninety-minutes and explore Victor’s depraved world.

Three stars

Directed by Ridley Scott and starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Russell Crowe, Body of Lies is a high budget adaptation of David Ignatius’s CIA thriller. The story follows CIA operative Roger Ferris (DiCaprio) on his mission against a terrorist cell in the Middle East. Under Scott’s steady directorial hand, the film flicks across multiple locations, with the focus maintained on Ferris’s involvement in the Islamic world.

Though never lacking interest, the film offers little extra spin on the fairly familiar story of ‘our hero’ up against hidden criminal masterminds. This lack of inspiration, however, is not the fundamental problem with Body of Lies. Rather, the key issue is with the film’s treatment of the situation in the Middle East, which teeters precariously between apology for, and defence of, America’s involvement.

Perhaps most difficult to bear is the painfully contrived romantic subplot between Ferris and his nurse, Aisha (played by Iranian actress Golshifteh Farahani). The story finds Ferris in her home in Amman, winning over her family with his candid admittance of the Iraq War’s destructiveness. The short scene, in which he exchanges words with Aisha’s sister and begins to bond with her two nephews, comes across as a rather stilted attempt at cultural reconciliation.

Of course, such cynicism would probably be unwarranted, had the film not drawn the majority of its adrenaline focus from high-octane chase scenes in which the lead players blast through various middle-eastern residential areas. Ferris’s character development is at pains to persuade us of his guilty conscience, but, as a vehicle for sympathetic reconciliation, he remains unconvincing.

Both the character of Ferris and the film as a whole seem to be suffering from something of an identity crisis in this respect. In a world still profoundly affected by the impact of terrorist attacks and the wars in the Middle East, fictional portrayals must often fall either on the side of detached entertainment or serious exploration. The gung-ho American involvement shown in Body of Lies unfortunately seems faintly reminiscent of satirical representations like Team America: World Police.

That being the case, the action thriller nature of the film should have precluded its foray into the realm of political drama. Understated political comment, as characterised by Russell Crowe’s wonderfully infuriating portrayal of Ferris’s ignorant and inflammatory boss, would have set a far better tone for the film.
Russell Crowe also took one for the team in putting on a large (and I mean LARGE) amount of weight to play Ferris’s minder; his very obesity hints at a sickness lying deep in the heart of the American condition.

All this being said, if one is to press on and ignore these awkward elements, Body of Lies remains a slickly produced and fairly gripping action thriller. With Ridley Scott at the helm, the film has a consistently professional feel, and there’s enough tension and visual finesse to keep the popcorn flowing for the film’s two-hour runtime.

If poorly pitched political comment is a problem for you in cinema, then this definitely isn’t the film for you. While it may be a good alternative to Quantum of Solace, it is, unfortunately, equally unoriginal.

Three stars

There is a point towards the end of The Bell Jar where Esther Greenwood is sitting at the funeral of a friend and she stops to consider her own existence with ‘I am, I am, I am’. Leave it to Sylvia Plath to use another person’s death to gloat that she had somehow made it through. Not only that, but, given the fact that the friend in question, a girl named Joan, is a far more fun and generally more interesting woman to say the least, you wouldn’t be alone in wishing that it was Esther in the coffin while Joan had a quick go at a John Clare impression.

But that’s The Bell Jar all over. ‘Look at me!’ Plath screams, in an autobiographical novel so thinly veiled that the pseudonym is practically invisible, ‘I’m alive! I’m miserable, but I’m alive!’ By the end of this ordeal of a book I was trying to find a gas oven of my own. It’s a practical ‘dummy’s guide to suicide’, and I mean the dummy part; Esther tries and fails to kill herself so many times, (hanging, self-harm, pills and a particularly enjoyable drowning attempt) that it stops being shocking, for shock is what she was going for. Shock was always what she was going for. All this crap about Nazi lampshades and fucking her father; she just couldn’t get over the look of her own words on the paper, and this self-indulgent book proves it.

For those spared this diary of a nervous breakdown, The Bell Jar follows Esther’s attempts to become a successful magazine journalist on a scholarship in New York. It all sounds nice and civilised to me, but no. Not for Esther. She’s depressed, and bored, and suffocated, and has to go for electric shocks to get her all perky again. Attempting to portray her inner darkness, Plath instead trivialises her pain and asks the reader for something; sympathy, judgment maybe, it’s hard to tell. Instead, you’ll be rolling your eyes with disdain so frequently that someone will think you’re having a stroke.

There can be no doubt that Sylvia, and by association Esther, had a difficult time with life, but writing about it in an almost casual way is in no way the best method of expressing that pain. A few more hugs, and a warmer mother-daughter relationship might have made this book into Sylvia in the City; a sort of Devil Wears Prada kind of thing. Instead, we get a pill-popping bore. Would you trust a writer who couldn’t even drown herself? Thought not.

Its title notwithstanding, Apology for the Woman Writing has less to do with ‘the woman writing’ and much more to do with woman’s inability to write in early-modern France. It is a novel about those people living in the gaps between great writers.

Its protagonist, Marie de Gournay inherits a medium sized ‘gentleman’s library’ from her recently deceased father, reading through the two hundred or so volumes electrified by the thought that ‘behind each individual book was a mind’. Whilst most are indifferent to Marie’s literary inclinations, her Uncle, Louis, seems to encourage it, bringing her new volumes on each of his regular visits to the family home. The watershed moment, though, occurs in 1584, when Marie comes into contact with the essays of Michel de Montaigne.

She instantly becomes obsessed by both his writing and his person. On first reading his essays, she faints. From then on her sole aim in life is to become Montaigne’s disciple. He is flattered but weary; after she stabs herself in a desperate show of loyalty, he declares her his ‘fille d’alliance’ to stave off further bloodshed. After his death, Madame de Montaigne graciously allows her to edit a new edition of his essays, which she takes as an opportunity to lauch her literary career.

From then on it’s a descent into the isolation of an oncoming death. The servant Jamyn gradually becomes more important to the author so that by the end of the novel we are firmly looking through her eyes. This is not necessarily a good thing. It is plagued by what is a problem throughout the novel – a constant attempt to generalise the emotional effect of a moment within the terms of the story as a whole. The author draws one away from whatever might be happening to point out its place in the greater scheme of the novel. This frustrates, only serving to undermine any sense of intimacy the reader might share with Marie or Jamyn. The overall effect then is one of historical biography masquerading as historical fiction.

In a recent review of Alastair Campbell’s new novel, Jenny Diski wrote that ‘people’s lives come, if you must, alive in a piece of writing if the writer can make the writing work. The words story, colour and texture are no more helpful to a writer than key trigger, downward curve and plunge are to someone in the grip of a depression without a way to use them effectively.’ Perhaps Diski should take her own advice.

One star

You can always tell when I’ve been pulling all-nighters by the stains on my bed. (Peanut butter stains, I mean – there’s never time to make any other kind of stain.) Curling up in bed with a spoon and 454g of crunchy Sun-Pat almost makes constitutional law bearable.

That’s why, when in her second essay collection ‘At Large and At Small’ Anne Fadiman writes how she “frequently took a pint of Haagen-Daazs Chocolate Chip to bed, with four layers of paper towels wrapped around the container to prevent digital hypothermia”, I knew I’d found a role model.

The talented Fadiman, who is Francis Writer-in-Residence at Yale and is renowned for her nonfiction, is probably one of the few people in the world who can muse lovingly about ice cream for 18 pages, while still being funny and fascinating. Just as engaging are the other eleven essays in the book. From the fizzily optimistic first half to the calmly nostalgic second, the book demonstrates her mastery of the familiar essay.

“Today’s readers,” Fadiman writes, “Encounter plenty of critical essays (more brain than heart) and plenty of personal essays (more heart than brain), but not many familiar essays (equal measures of both).”

What she modestly neglects to mention is that her essays have both in spades. Fadiman’s feelings and reminiscences flit through her writing, as when she describes her brother using liquid nitrogen in pursuit of the perfect ice cream, or talks about her family’s response to September 11, or even in an off-handed remark about losing her virginity in an essay on coffee.

Rather than weighing her prose down however, these personal elements are effortlessly blended with unexpected facts trawled from science, history, literature, and so on in a buoyant gush of enthusiasm.

Even her more intellectually-oriented pieces, such as one on literary culture wars, or on the semiotics of the American flag, share the same dry wit, amiable rambling and homespun conversational tone, mixed with the odd word that sends you scurrying to the dictionary. It’s like talking to a reference librarian on cannabis.

Of course, not everyone likes conversation for its own sake, and if you’re the type who scoffs at columnists, opinion writers and bloggers, this book is probably not for you. But for the rest, At Large and At Small is the perfect way to while away the hours. I’d even recommend it above peanut butter – at least there are no calories, and also (unless you really like Anne Fadiman) no stains.

Five stars

In an anonymous brick building, 10 minutes walk from Appleford station, is the most remarkable museum in Oxfordshire. Pendon Museum was set up by an Australian who fell in love with the beauty of the Vale of the White Horse in the mid-30s. He was horrified by the demolition of its beautiful cottages and started to create a series of precise and perfect models of cottages in the area.

Time for an example: imagine a card model of a half-timbered vicarage, about eight inches by four inches by three. Imagine how small creeper leaves in proportion to it would be. Now imagine that the front is covered with Virginia creeper, and each leaf is cut out of tissue paper, painted and stuck on individually. Now imagine that each tile is painted with a slightly different mix of watercolours.

Now imagine a landscape for the cottages to sink into, the size of a JCR, of Berkshire in August 1930: villages, railways, watercress beds, mills, and a hill fort, all as carefully made. No cottage took less than a weekend to make, most took months of part-time work.

Although seventy-five volunteers have worked on the scene since it was started in 1954, it is still not finished: about a third is plywood framing waiting for something to support.

A technical triumph, then, and a rather obsessive one. But more than that; it is beautiful. The colours are carefully balanced and adjusted to the lighting, the contours of the land planned to surprise visitors. Villages that didn’t seem to be there appear from behind tiny hills. The range of detail leaves you squinting, eyes pressed up against the glass: hollyhocks, farm machinery, rabbit warrens. There is wit, too: I was told that the railway station was placed where Didcot is, to replace it, ‘because Didcot is ugly, and we could do better’.

And, when you think you’ve got used to all that they can do, the museum staff turn the museum lights off and lights inside the cottages on. You see the bookcases and pictures inside, and you look down from a ridge, into a valley, going from a wet muddy autumn of squelchy leaves underfoot into a perfect summer night. Amazing.