The Royal Oak (with apologies to George Orwell)

Shortly after the Second World War, George Orwell wrote a paean to his ideal London pub, in an essay called The Moon Under Water. The titular tavern did not exist - it was a composite, a fantasy, a dream. But Orwell described it beautifully and memorably all the same. 

I rather fancied trying my own hand at a similar exercise, focusing on a rural inn, especially in these strange days of shuttered pubs and social distancing. So here it is - The Royal Oak...

The Royal Oak is a little outside the centre of the village, within walking distance of any house in the parish. It sits just beyond a small but picturesque area of woodland that screens out most of the traffic noise from the annoyingly busy main street. It is set back from a quiet and little-frequented road, a few steps up, with a tidily-kept lawn at the front. In spring and summer this lawn is set with wooden picnic benches.

Christmas, ghosts and MR James

Quis est iste, qui venit? 

Who is this, that is coming?

An unsettling question from ‘Oh Whistle, And I’ll Come To You, My Lad’, by MR James. It is one of the inscriptions on the side of an old whistle found by a certain Mr Parkins, in a ruined Knights Templar chapel on the remote east coast. The story does not really provide us with an answer. Parkins is pursued and menaced by a silent and malevolent presence, but we are never told what precisely he has encountered. James rarely felt the need to over-explain his apparitions.

Parkins is a typical James protagonist; a bachelor academic, sceptical and firmly materialist, visiting an out-of-the-way spot who, through a combination of ignorance and foolhardiness, summons a terrifying and unholy visitor from – well, from Elsewhere. He escapes from the spirit relatively unharmed; this is the norm for well-meaning people in the Jamesian canon, though there are exceptions, like the unwise Mr Wraxall from Count Magnus or the doomed Paxton from A Warning To The Curious. Grisly ends tend to be reserved for genuinely villainous characters. One thinks of the magnificently sinister Karswell from Casting The Runes, or John Eldred, the antagonist of The Tractate Middoth.

"The ABC Murders" Murder

NB This post contains spoilers for several Agatha Christie books. 

The defining scene of the new BBC adaptation of The ABC Murders, written by Sarah Phelps, came quite early on in Episode 1. Poirot was talking to Japp on the latter’s allotment. It was just about the only moment in the whole adaptation that felt like it had any connection at all to the spirit of the original novel, not least because it involved two likeable characters, bearing at least some resemblance to their literary counterparts, having an amicable conversation (this made it practically unique among any of the scenes in the entire three hours).

It didn’t last. In what was clearly intended to be a giant middle finger to dreary bourgeois squares who actually enjoy Agatha Christie novels, Japp promptly dropped dead from a heart attack. In the books, he is still going strong in 1948, fifteen years after the setting of this adaptation, when he receives his last mention in that year’s Taken At The Flood. Of course only suburban pedants like me actually care about such trivial matters, and who are we to question the Great Artiste?  

It’s A Wonderful Film

Attaboy, Clarence

'Tis the season of Christmas iconoclasm. One of the staples of this festive contrarianism – alongside “Scrooge was just a smart businessman doing the best for his clients!” – is the negative take on that Christmas classic It’s A Wonderful Life.

For those who haven’t seen it, the film follows the life of George Bailey, a native of the small town of Bedford Falls. Bailey is clever and ambitious, and has big dreams of moving to New York, travelling widely and forging a career in architecture. But after his father’s sudden death, he reluctantly takes over the family business, a rackety building society called the Building & Loan, realising that if he does not do so it will be subsumed into the empire of the grasping slum lord Mr Potter. Later George sacrifices his honeymoon savings to keep the B&L solvent during a run on the banks. Later still he turns down a well-paid job with Potter that would have fulfilled his dreams of travel.