Portrait of the Artist as a Crow Girl: trying on my barrister’s robes for the first time.

I had been feeling rather rueful about my long silence on this blog (and on all my other social media networks, for that matter). That silence was finally broken this past week, when I recently had a chance to finish a post I’d started some time back.

It feels good to have posted something recent. I really miss it when I don’t get the time.

But ultimately, this latest milestones blog post is about the lacuna in my Kat Anthony self’s developments and adventures. Because as with most of us, my author self’s activities are very much subject to the demands of my day-to-day self.

And that other self, the lawyer-in-training, learned in late April that I would not be hired back at the firm where I did my articling (for those of you who don’t know the term, this refers to a required practicum in the licensing process, like a residency for medicine. In Canada, we write the bar exams, but then we also have to work for ten months under the supervision of an experienced lawyer).

Articling generally involves a short term, no obligation contract. Because of the general slowdown in the industry, alongside the fact that law schools have not slowed at all in accepting and graduating students, there are far fewer jobs than there are candidates for the jobs. Evidently, the firm where I articled just wasn’t busy enough to justify taking on a junior associate (we are high-maintenance, high-supervision creatures, alas).

And so, in the wake of that news, I went into a tailspin of IRL activity–updating my resume, enhancing my LinkedIn profile, going to networking events, speaking with others about jobs and availability (those student loans and monthly bills sure aren’t going to pay themselves). A difficult process, between the stress of not knowing what, if anything would turn up, and the fatigue of the introvert having to go out and be social (I suspect I’m actually probably more of an ambivert, but on the introverted end of that designation).

It took a lot out of me, to say the least.

But I was also really touched by the abundance out there and the kindness of the people I’ve come to know in the community. I had so many people provide me with names and contacts of people in local firms, or pass along my name to colleagues who were looking to hire. I received phone calls and invitations to apply and had the opportunity to interview with a number of places in town. And through it all, I felt such gratitude.

I ended up getting an amazing offer: to work with two lawyers I really respect, at a firm that has a great reputation, doing precisely the kinds of law I wanted to be doing. I’m still marvelling at my great good fortune. It’s as if I had written that offer myself–it couldn’t have been better crafted to what I want to be doing.

This in turn means that when I get Called to the Bar in one week, I’ll actually have a job on the other side of it. In celebration, I’ve posted a photo of me trying on my robes for the first time, when I went to pick them up from the robe maker last week. (It looks like I’ll likely be arguing in court. In Canada, lawyers have to wear robes when they appear before judges in most levels of court. The robed lawyers at court and chatting outside courtrooms always remind me of crows, in their long black robes with gathered, billowing sleeves like dark wings. Thus: Crow Girl.)

On the other hand, I’m not sure what this will all mean for Kathryn Anthony, and so it’s something of a bittersweet prospect. Lawyers, after all, are not reputed for their nine-to-five existences, and my health and energy challenges mean that I might not have too much extra left at the end of the day.

But I also know that she’s an essential part of who I am. The writing I do as Kat speaks to–and is an expression of–an essential part of my soul. Going forward, the moments may be more stolen and fleeting than ever–brief rendez-vous amid days overflowing with the flurries and demands of work. But sooner or later, I will always be back.

I’ve been thinking about Tennyson’s The Lady of Shalott often of late. It’s a poem that I’ve always liked (not the least because of all the gorgeous associated illustrations, and Loreena McKennitt’s lovely musical setting), because of where it would take me during those dreamy, fanciful years of my youth.

Despite this, I’ve always found the story frustrating. We are told the Lady is under a curse that forbids her from looking at the world directly. Instead, she looks through a mirror that is angled so that it reflects the landscape outside the window. The mirror mediates her reality, and she takes the images she sees in the mirror and weaves them into a tapestry of her own.

And yet, the poem also acknowledges that she doesn’t even know the nature of the curse, nor its consequences. I was discussing it with my brother recently, and we agreed that Tennyson leaves it ambiguous as to whether there actually is a curse that is ultimately triggered when she looks directly upon Lancelot and the world outside, or whether the consequences that flow from her act are simply self-fulfilling. In other words, because she believes there is a curse and that she triggered it, she behaves accordingly, and ends up succumbing to a dire fate that is ultimately the result of her own assumptions, paradigms and ways of parsing reality.

This gets at the nature of my frustration with her. I’ve always been bothered by the fact that she just passively accepted the reality of the curse and allowed herself to be subject to it. No questions about the nature of it, nor about any possible ways to get around it or free herself? No doubt it was easier to just accept and succumb–after all, being fatalistic and embracing the idea of a destiny or a particular lot in life meant that she didn’t need to make decisions and have agency. And of course, that she could blame the curse in the end, and not be faced with the failings of her own hard work and aspirations.

My frustrations with her passive acceptance of her situation aside, the poem itself is rich with imagery and metaphor.

I’ve always wondered whether Tennyson intended the Lady to represent a metaphor for the author or academic: locked in a tower, reading books (i.e. the shadows of the world appearing in the mirror) and writing, in turn (in her web she still delights to weave the mirror’s magic sights). With such a reading, the curse could be the fear of engaging with the world beyond books–a fear of caring, of being hurt by others, of loving (not just in the sense of romantic love) and losing. The world of the tower, and of shadows, is far safer, albeit lonelier.

A more contemporary spin (that would obviously have nothing to do with authorial intention) could have many of us engaging with shadows of the world on the Internet, and in turn adding to the web via blog posts etc. Our woven sights become others’ mirrors, reflecting shadows of the world to which they respond, and so on, placing us in a veritable postmodern hall of mirrors, a web world of shadows. Regressus ad infinitum.

But the passive metaphor works better with previous versions of the web, in which people posted pages, and the content was static: others came, read and posted static pages of their own in response. The real postmodern twist in our current iteration of the internet is that the shadow world–the internet world–is in the process of becoming real. It is interactive rather than passive and has therefore become a new, increasingly legitimate, stage for our getting and spending, our sounds and furies. The real world remains real, but the world of the web is becoming as real.

People are now engaging in interactions involving both broadcast and dialogue that are exclusive to the digital world of the internet, and that have not been possible in the analog world because of geography, logistics and the challenges of distribution and reach.

And so, rather than being reflections of “real world” thoughts and experiences, transformed into written, photographic or filmic shadows, the web is now becoming part of that real world, as a forum for interaction. The surroundings there may be shadows of a sort (photos, video clips), but the connections and the interactions, are real. This is no longer the passive viewing and silent weaving of the Lady in her tower, the author in his garret. The real world has come to the internet–and such a brave new world it is, that has such people in’t.

In Konstantin’s Gifts, I took the idea of the rusalka, which in folklore is primarily an aquatic entity (rather like a cross between Peg Powler, Jenny Greenteeth or grindylows of English folklore, and a siren), and extrapolated the idea of rusalki that could be connected to other elements. In my case, one of my characters becomes part fire rusalka. I had such fun, creating a new mythology and folkloric setting of stories and rumours relating to the nature of the fire rusalka.

Other semi-recent works featuring the rusalka include C.J. Cherryh’s Rusalka, which was set far earlier in Russian history, during the period of the Kievan Rus (and which I’ll confess I haven’t read…. yet!) and Dvorak’s opera. Here’s the justly celebrated aria, “Song to the Moon” from Mr. D’s work–a lovely, lyrical, wistfully yearning piece. This version features Lucia Popp (the chorus comes at about 1:24, and I suggest you wait for it… it gets me every time):

Hyperbole aside, I realised today, as we encountered a spot of roadwork on the highway and were forced to trickle down to a single lane, that the aggravation of waiting was actually quite mild (so long as I’m not in a rush), relative to the anger I feel at the sight of someone trying to jump the line. And though I am usually a fairly calm person, it is something akin to rage that I experience at the sight of such behaviour.

When I react so strongly to something, I often like to step back and ask myself “why”? What button is this particular behaviour pushing in my psyche?

In this case, it’s because when I join the line and stay in it, my primary motivation has little to do with duty, fear of censure or peer pressure. It arises out of a fundamental sense of fairness. To me, the idea of waiting one’s turn is fair. It’s civic, it’s communal, it’s about giving something up–in this case, one’s time–in order to ensure that everyone gets a similar experience. It’s not pleasant for anyone, but if we all do it together, and wait our turn, then we’ll all have a comparable level of inconvenience and no-one will be stuck with an unfair shake. That’s part of what working together is about.

It’s for this reason, I suppose, that line-jumpers infuriate me–because they offend my inherent sense of fairness and civic-mindedness. Instead of co-operating, joining the line and waiting their turn, they prioritize the value of their time above everyone else’s. It’s about short-term gain and some entrenched sense of entitlement.

Traits which, as you can imagine, I dislike intensely (which is itself a strong statement for me).

Thinking about all this made me wonder what justifications–if any–a line-jumper might proffer, if asked. There are, of course, all the self-serving, self-absorbed, obvious reasons like “I’m just really in a hurry” or “it’s just one person (me) and it won’t add that much time to everyone else’s wait” and so on. Once placed in the context of everyone else’s time valuations and so on, these simply don’t hold up, from a fairness perspective. There are the “special circumstances” reasons that I’d be more tolerant of if there were some way of ascertaining them at the time of the line jump–the “my wife is in labour” or “my child is in the hospital” types of justifications.

But I do wonder, as a thought experiment of sorts, whether there are any reasons someone could possibly give that would actually hold up as reasonable outside of the “special circumstances” exemption.

I often engage in this exercise when I encounter behaviour that irritates me or strikes me as unfair, in part because finding a reasonable explanation for such behaviours sometimes means that the behaviours are less irritating. And hey, I’m always good with having fewer irritants in my life.

I also find this an interesting exercise from a writing perspective. I like to think in terms of antagonists rather than villains, so even when I’m writing nasty characters, I try to think of ways for them to be justified in their own minds, at least. Sometimes that justification does simply arise out of a profound selfishness, entitlement or lack of compassion. But if it’s possible to get into the mindset of such characters, to present credible, alternate motivations for seemingly unsympathetic actions, then that can often open the space for nuanced and intriguing conflicts.

Sadly, in the case of line-jumpers, my imagination failed me. I have yet to come up with a reasonable explanation for such behaviours–and so, they continue to irritate me. Perhaps my bias against such behaviour is just so profound that I simply cannot see beyond it, to legitimate, fair-minded, equality-based reasons for jumping the line.

Given that, I couldn’t help but feel a good deal of satisfaction when I saw, in the rearview mirror, several vehicles throughout the line, straddling the lanes and joining the community effort, doing their best to thwart the upstarts.

My Great Grandfather

So I have this book in my mind that I want to write. Magical Realism. A family saga. It’s a piece that is deeply important to me because of legacy.

What do I mean by legacy?

I have always valued ancestral narrative, family stories–all the myths and lore that grow up around the things our parents, grandparents, great aunts and uncles, and other family members did during their time in the dash between birth and death years listed on their headstones (my heirloom stories idea is also a reflection of this, in shorter form). I had always dreamed of passing those stories down to further generations to come.

When I found out I was infertile, it was difficult. But, as those whose lives have been touched by it know, it’s not a closed door. Though in the wider parlance, “infertility” sounds stark and difficult and definitive, in modern medical speak it actually just means that a certain amount of time has passed during which a couple has been trying to conceive, and nothing has come of the attempts. So it’s more the naming of a question mark than of a final outcome. There are things you can do. Fertility drugs. IVF. Etc.

And I did them.

It was painful, intrusive and emotionally exhausting. My story “Katabasis”–so wonderfully and beautifully analyzed by Lorinda J. Taylor–was written after the last of our IVF attempts proved unsucessful. Though it is entirely fictional, and in many ways Elana’s reaction is very different to mine, it is in part a howl of grief, and in part a metaphorical documentation of depression (my own Underworld was the everyday elements of my life, but it was as if a scrim had descended between my consciousness and the world around me, as if I were inhabiting a juxtaposed but completely separate reality in which I was weighted, in which it was difficult to think or move, and I was barely able to communicate with those around me), of the heartbreak of disastrous, painful pregnancy (my arthritis proved a painful complication) and miscarriage. The endometriosis that caused all the trouble became, for the main character in the story, a toll extracted by Ereshkigal, Queen of the Underworld.

At any rate, the final result of all the needles and blood tests and expensive drugs has been that it seems I’m somewhere near the barren, not-a-hope-in-the-Underworld end of the infertility spectrum, for a variety of reasons.

Reaching even further back: my great, great grandmother in India, wearing a Victorian-era mourning gown.

Which brings me back to my point: legacy. It is possible that I will not have anyone to pass down the beautiful stories and memories that were bequeathed to me by those who have come before. Stories of psychic great-grandmothers, encounters with ghosts, mysterious spirits and even with Death personified, in India. Rumours of illegitimate children and secret scandals. And so many compelling, titillating question marks.

It was only in realizing that I would not be passing them down that I truly realised how much I had been looking forward to sharing those stories that had so enchanted me when I was growing up.

And so: this book that I want to write. All fiction, yes. Few of the family stories will be unchanged in the telling, such that only someone very familiar with the people and tales would recognize the fictionalized characters and incidents. But like “Katabasis”, which gets at an underlying truth wrapped in layers of metaphor, fantasy and fiction, this book will in part be about telling that story.

Since this will be my only way of passing these stories along–even if they are only to a very limited readership–the prospect of writing them has become all the more important to me, as part of a process of naming, of deeper grieving and of documentation.

And after putting it off for years, I decided about a month ago that I need to get back to it. There will never be a perfect time, when I am at the height of my literary prowess and ready to create a flawless and powerful narrative that makes a reality of my imagined vision. It will always be a matter of fumbling through unlit rooms full of jumbled words, ideas and images, lighting little areas at a time, trying to decide where is the best point at which to start, how to draw out the tension, whose stories to focus on, and when, and in which order.

So, I turned my mind to this–and promptly found myself working on everything else, everything but the book. That spectre of perfection, and of falling short of the vision, seemed to prevent me from even pulling up the draft and staring at it. I practiced expert avoidance.

When the Camp NaNoWriMo email arrived in my inbox in March, proclaiming April to be the month, I fence sat until the eleventh hour, at some level still hoping the book would emerge, fully-formed and perfect, like Athena from the mind of Zeus. But alas.

And so, on the last day of March, I signed up, donated, and braced myself.

I’ve already fallen behind. But where I managed to write perhaps 500 words on the book for the entire month of March, I am 3000 words further along in it, at the end of the first week of April. They are not the ideal words that perfectly encapsulate what I hope to express (if indeed, there is such a thing), and they are in far from the correct order. But they are out of my mind, written at last. A starting point. I can work with that.

Thank the magic of an imposed deadline, and a minor baseline of accountability to break the barrier of perfectionism. I know that I am.

Vasya, my main character, is a serf who has been abused and imprisoned by her sadistic owner. In captivity, but faced with the first real prospect of escape, she falls into a restless sleep:

She dreamed of her childhood. Her grandmother’s face, peering down at the cluster of cowering children–Vasya and her cousins–hollow cheeks and knobby features deeply shadowed in the winter lamplight.

“Be good, little children,” the old woman hissed. “Don’t make a peep, or Baba Yaga will hear and she’ll take you away with her forever.”

Vasya and her cousins nodded solemnly, suitably cowed by the threat of Baba Yaga, the evil witch, who travelled on a flying mortar. She lived in a house with tall chicken legs that walked about the countryside, collecting up children, who were never heard from again. Baba Yaga would eat the children for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Then, for dessert, she’d save the sweetest, tiniest, most succulent little babies–or at least, that’s what Vasya’s cousin claimed.

Baba Yaga aside, Vasya’s grandmother alone seemed terror enough. Tall, thin and knotted as a hollow old tree whose branches remained bare and bleak even in midsummer, the old woman moved with a creaky inexorability that made her all the more frightening to the cluster of grandchildren she regularly terrorized with harsh words and beatings. Vasya had, as a result, concluded that anyone that fearsome old woman invoked for the purposes of further intimidation had to be horrifying indeed.

There were other things to worry about as well, like the water rusalka that lived in the pond near one of the fields Vasya’s family farmed. They said that more than one of the villagers had been lost to the creature’s seductive song. Vasya had always believed that she would be able to resist–after all, what could be so compelling about a song, no matter how lovely?

And then, one day, as she and her cousin Nadezhda, who at eight, was two years her senior, were walking back from delivering lunch to the menfolk, she heard it. Nadezhda, who always began singing loudly as soon as they entered the haunted wood, began singing even more loudly. Her voice was far from sweet, and her sense of pitch was the most imaginative thing about her. She sang an old lullaby,

“One day soon
You’ll be a warrior
Bayushki bayu
You’ll ride off on your proud stallion
I will cry for you.
You’ll protect us
From the Vilnyets
Bayuskhi bayu
I’ll give you a holy ikon
For to guard you too.”

It helped, but only a little, because still, there was the other singing underneath it. It was sad, but so beautiful that it made Vasya feel warm and tingly inside. Surely, if she just paused a moment and listened, it would carry her away to a safe place, where her grandmother would never smack her with the wooden spoon or pull her about by the ear or pinch her because she had spilled precious flour or over-carded the wool.

But Nadhezhda pulled her along, ever rushing, and singing loudly to drown out the water rusalka’s song… except that she lost her grip on Vasya’s hand. Vasya’s steps slowed, even as her cousin’s momentum kept her moving forward. As Nadhezhda broke away, the sound of her voice faltered, and the rusalka’s signing flooded Vasya’s ears, suffusing her body in moments. Before she even realised what she was doing, she had started towards the pond.

Nadhezhda started singing louder than ever.

“Sleep my child, my lovely baby
Bayushki bayu
I will tell you tales of
Fairies, gods and princes too.
Songs of heroes,
Songs of sadness
Bayushki bayu
While you slumber, I will guard you
Bayushki bayu.”

She kept repeating the same refrain in her loud, unmelodious singsong voice as she threw herself at Vasya, knocking her against the trunk of a tree, then seized her wrist and dragged her back to the path, while Vasya struggled furiously and tried to pull free.

But her cousin wouldn’t let go–she continued singing, even though by now, the sound of the rusalka’s song throbbed through Vasya’s blood, whispering to her soul, telling her she had to follow the voice, the ethereal music, wherever it might lead. But still her cousin dragged her along, until finally, they stepped out of the dappled forest and into the bright sunshine of the fields. The song cut off abruptly, as if a thick door had been closed, silencing it.

But Vasilisa never forgot that sound, and even all these years later, it haunted her restless dreams.

She woke to the lingering, ethereal touch of the rusalka’s voice teasing the edge of her consciousness, with sunlight streaming across her bed, and the sound of someone fumbling at the latch.

Gosford Park. Yeah, baby!

I’ve continued watching Downton, as time permits. It has moved a little out of the rut that it had fallen into when I did my last post. But I have to admit, the main frustrations I have with it (and with the villains in particular) remain.

Still, it’s set in a period and against a backdrop I particularly enjoy. If you’re a fan, something like Upstairs Downstairs is one of the more obvious comparators. I remember watching some of that, and being initially engaged, before losing interest for some reason, many years ago. Here are some other films and shows that evoke elements of Downton–and which sustained my interest throughout.

Brideshead Revisited (the 1981 miniseries)

As mentioned last week, this is set slightly later–in the 1920s–but is a beautiful, evocative, sad, exquisitely depicted series about the Flyte family and their struggles with questions of faith, guilt and redemption. It is darker than Downton Abbey but is oh-so-wonderful. Highly recommended.

A Room With A View

Based on Forster’s novel, this beautifully adapted Merchant Ivory production is gently satirical of the prevailing attitudes, mores, personalities and conventions of the gentry in early 20th century England. My one quibble with it would probably be that Julian Sands and his somewhat quirky mannerisms do little for me. But I still found this film to be quite delightful. And as always Maggie Smith–this time as the perpetually martyred, passive aggressive poor relative–is entertainingly engaging.

Maurice

Another Merchant Ivory adaptation of a Forster novel. I found this film hauntingly beautiful–the cinematography is lovely and many of the frames look almost like paintings. There is also a lot of male beauty on display, and this is also poetically depicted. The novel was only published posthumously and while it isn’t precisely a coming out story, it does deal with Maurice’s struggles with his sexuality as he faces heartbreak and embarks upon an oft-painful journey to self-acceptance.

Howard’s End

I didn’t actually like this film as much, but since I’m on Forster and Merchant Ivory, I thought I’d mention it all the same. This is the darkest of the three–and while I don’t mind dark, this somehow felt edged and ominous in a way that didn’t particularly resonate with me. It focuses on class tension, again in the early twentieth century. I found it ultimately unsatisfying.

To Serve Them All My Days

I saw this series years and years ago, but I remember really liking it. The television series is an adaptation of an R. F. Delderfield novel, and is the story of David Powlett-Jones, a young man just returned from the trenches and suffering from shell shock, as they called it then (PTSD in our current parlance), who finds work as a teacher in an English public school (what we’d call a private school in the americas). The series follows his life, as he learns to heal, deals with students, love, loss and life in general.

Gosford Park

This is more of an Agatha Christie-esque murder mystery, set in the 1930s, but there are definitely common elements, from the eponymous country manor and the centrality of both upstairs and downstairs characters, to the presence of… you guessed it, Maggie Smith. This isn’t what you’d call a warm story with delightful characters, however.

All Creatures Great and Small

Also set in the 1930s, and with a rather different backdrop to the hereditary country manor. The common element here for me is that sense of comfort. The good characters are reliably good, despite their foibles and eccentricities. I must also say that unlike my frustrations with Downton and some of the characterizations, here there are few villains. It’s just episodes in the life of a country vet, with the associated challenges of dour farmer clients, awkward courtships and the like. This isn’t normally my sort of thing, but even re-watching a number of the early episods again recently, I found it really engaging, no doubt because the characters felt so loveably–and frustratingly–real. Doctor Who fans may also enjoy seeing a young Peter Davison as Tristan.

That’s my list for the moment. Sometimes the connections are tenuous–more about an overall “feel” than particulars of setting or period (e.g. All Creatures). I expect there are many other films and series I’ve missed–feel free to weigh in with your comments!

I know. This isn’t Downton. It’s Brideshead, 1981 edition. More on that below.

My husband and I have been watching Downton Abbey these past weeks and we’re now partway through the second season (so, you know, here there be spoilers, at least up to part way through the second season–be ye duly warned). We both really liked the first season, and I found the first few episodes of the second season engaging.

There’s a lot to love–the beautiful setting, the beautiful characters; the fact that the good characters, aside from minor flaws (a temper, an impulsiveness, a peculiar blindness in the context of one’s lady’s maid), are very good; and the bad characters, aside from occasionally redemptive acts, are reliably awful. This means that as viewers, we can feel a kind of safety in watching. Bates will always be quiet, courtly and honourable, even to his own detriment; Lady Sybil will be reliably activist and progressive; and so on.

This reliability is something appealing about the show. Except when it stops being appealing, and starts to feel static.

This stasis isn’t endemic, of course. At this point in season two, a couple of the characters have revealed a little more about themselves. It’s a fine line between this and actual transformation, in some cases.

Lady Edith, for instance, was an extremely one-sided character in season one. We primarily saw her in the context of her contentious relationship with Lady Mary, which brought out the worst in her, and I remember feeling a little irritated by this, since it was obvious that she might be rather different outside of that context. I don’t know to what extent season two has changed her, and to what extent she’s simply been shown in other situations, where she has a chance to be herself. It’s likely a mix of the two.

The Dowager (Aside: Maggie Smith alone makes this show worth watching. She more or less OWNS every scene in which she has a speaking part) has also possibly changed, or revealed more of herself–I’m not sure which. She went from being a snobbish stickler of propriety to being a curmudgeonly grandmother figure who is protective of her family and happens to be a dowager countess.

Other “good” characters–Mrs. Patmore, Bates, Anna, Cora, Grantham, Carson, et al. have stayed more or less the same. Though the story arcs stretch across episodes, in some ways the format is like episodic television, in which everyone retains the same fundamental characteristics, and in each episode they have to face different situations and respond based on those particular characteristics (think: MacGyver, Murder, She Wrote, etc.).

I don’t mind this, actually. I rather enjoy these characters, and seeing them interact.

My main frustration with the show comes from the baddies of the piece: Vera, O’Brien, Thomas. In season two, we learn that O’Brien has a soft spot for PTSD victims and is more loyal to Cora than she was in season one. But in every other context, she’s as nasty as ever. Yet, she remains employed. I find Cora’s blindness vis-a-vis O’Brien mystifying, particularly considering how much everyone upstairs seems to know about all the minutiae of goings-on downstairs.

I would have wished for more nuance from Vera as well. She enters, issues threats, talks about wanting money and laughs evilly. I think the story would have been more compelling if we actually had an inkling of compassion for her, rather than just presenting her as a totally nasty and horrible antagonist. Even if Bates never feels that compassion, I would have liked to. I’d have liked to have glimpsed her situation, her hardship, her point of view. For me, that would have escalated the conflict, because I’d be more ambivalent.

But my biggest issue with season two is Thomas. He was awful in season one. Then, in the first few episodes of season two, we saw him on the front–amid the horrible, nightmarish trenches of the Great War. We saw him scared, experiencing things that you’d think would have changed him deeply, traumatized him, and for the purposes of story, provided him with an opportunity for growth.

Indeed, he’s so afraid, that he intentionally wounds himself to get away from this situation–and I suspect that far braver souls than he would have done the same thing amid the horrors of the trenches.  But then, he gets back and is completely unchanged. This really disappointed me. I mean, if he’d been a different kind of horrible after he got back–as a result of trauma, anger, bitterness, some PTSD of his own, whatever–I could see that. But he’s exactly the same kind of nasty as he was before: mean spirited, nasty-tongued, petty, scheming and malicious. It’s as if the war hasn’t put things in any kind of perspective for him at all.

And then, there are the wafer thin circumstances under which he was brought back (Grantham to Carson: “Well, Cora seemed so excited and I didn’t want to disappoint her.” WTF? This is the guy who stole, then lied about it and tried to pin it on an honourable character whom Grantham considers a friend–in a world where that sort of thing is enough to get you dismissed without a character). It all felt rather contrived.

The result: we have precisely the same set up, with almost the same cast of antagonists (plus Vera) as in season one, but with the war as a backdrop.

This, for me, makes the show feel rather static. And while some of the patterns of the show are fine–and rather comforting, really–between the three main black-and-white villains, I’m honestly debating about whether to keep watching. I like villains who are awful but intriguing. Or better yet, characters who are fully developed, flawed and nuanced, and who happen to be villains because their interests are in opposition to the interests of the protagonists.

The counter weight–the element of the story that would keep me watching–is Lady Mary’s growth. Amid a number of characters who are relatively static (even Lady Sybil is static–she’s just more of what she was in the first season. So: more about equality, more about women’s rights etc.), Lady Mary is actually changing. She has grown and matured in ways that I think are real, consistent with her character, but also gratifying to watch. I’m intrigued to know how she develops and what happens with her.

Downton also invites comparison with another British series that is named after a house: namely, Brideshead Revisited (and I’m not talking about the recent film, which I am told was execrable. I mean the BBC series starring Jeremy Irons, Anthony Andrews, Lawrence Olivier, John Gielgud and Claire Bloom). Brideshead is set between the wars, and is also about a titled family and their troubles during the transition from the old world values into the new.

And yet, it is also fundamentally different: this isn’t a safe world of characters who can be relied upon, but rather a place in which friendships and romances are inexpressibly sweet, but fleeting and ephemeral–a place in which the characters’ fundamental values come into conflict with their desires, hopes, inclinations. The characters in Brideshead often go to dark places indeed, and they are changed by those places. They emerge from them infinitely sadder and more solitary. And yet, it is all so beautifully told, so wonderfully and evocatively depicted. I find it a haunting series–I’ve seen it more than once–visually lovely, compelling, nuanced and replete with discussion points about the nature of character, faith, morality and indeed, the human condition. If this sounds at all intriguing, I highly recommend you check it out!

Not so with Luther. This show surprised me, and by the end of the first episode, I was hooked and wanting more. My list of five:

Idris Elba as Luther

If this were a longer list, he’d be my first and last choices. As the lead, Elba plays Luther with a slouchy, hands-shoved-in-pockets, weary edge that works marvellously well. He seems weighted by the sadness and corruption of the world. But, beneath the weariness are two fascinating characteristics: the first is a coiled emotional tension that we glimpse occasionally in a gesture, a look, and then forget about… until it bursts out and we realise that under the weariness is a man who cares so deeply that he is barely able to cope and hold himself together. This is masterfully done. The other characteristic that pulls the viewer in is the charisma. Luther is fantastically charismatic, and Elba’s choice of making him such an understated, struggling character makes the charisma far more compelling–to me, at least–than if he’d put it out there and turned it up to eleven.

Ruth Wilson as Alice Morgan

Another fascinating character, as played by Wilson (whom I also really enjoyed as the eponymous character in one of the recent adaptations of Jane Eyre). I love the boundaries she’s able to cross, and I really like the dynamic between her and Luther, for all that the characters are not romantically involved. The two of them, on screen together, have the kind of chemistry that slaps you in the face–and the writers are wise enough to keep the contact at a level that leaves the viewer wanting more.

The Post-Colonial Narrative

One of the things that I find intriguing about Brit shows is that race is handled so differently to how it is in North American shows (and particularly U.S. television). There are a lot of reasons for this, but it also means that the fact that Luther is of African heritage, his wife is clearly of East Indian background, and so on, is portrayed differently to what you’d see if this were done in the U.S. Like the rest of the show, it’s understated and totally matter-of-fact. That said, their relationship is compelling because of the characters, and where they are emotionally, in themselves and in the context of their relationship–not because of ethnicity.

The Trappings of a Plot-Oriented Detective Show In Which the Conflict is a Function of Character

Not the most punchy of headings, I know. But I couldn’t think of a more succinct way to express this concept. I love that on the surface, it’s a whodunit detective show–but the core conflicts and challenges that keep us watching and engaged all arise out of marvellously drawn characterization. In a good narrative, there’s always some element of this–we don’t watch Dexter because we just want action-oriented plot twists, but because the characters intrigue us–but here, the relationships are so grounded and well done. That (and the excellent acting) is what elevates this drama to an altogether new level. Luther’s troubled and conflicted nature, his deep sense of a calling that makes him want to help people, even as his sense of moral or ethical imperative does not line up with procedure and process; the ways in which we see so clearly how much Zoe loves him, and why she cannot be with him anymore for her own emotional wellbeing; even the ways in which his partner is so loyal and his boss is so stoic. It’s potent stuff, marvellously done.

Smart Plots and Villains

I always like it when the villains aren’t dumb and make obvious mistakes. I’m similarly impatient with deus ex machina resolutions. Here, the solutions Luther arrives at are often unexpected, but effective and to me at least, they don’t feel contrived or problematic. I might be watching the show primarily for the bigger story arcs (Luther and Zoe; Luther and Alice; the office place politics) but I do want the episodic challenges/whodunits to be engaging, and I do want some meat there, in seeing how Luther approaches the solutions and deals with the moral ambiguities involved in arriving at those solutions. I love that the show delivers at both levels.

Many of these factors are functions of excellent writing, of course–the necessary prerequisite for the director to orchestrate an excellent production and for the actors to shine through their creation of the characters. It’s the ensemble, the combination of all these factors, as well as the visual styling and the overall “feel” of the piece, that draws the line separating mediocre from amazing. If you’re someone who likes shows that are about moral ambiguity and the darker side of our natures, set in a crime-solving context, then Luther is one to add to your list.

Peasant Girls, 1909

A number of years ago, my husband brought this website to my attention. These are the photographs of a man named Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii, a photographer who lived in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and whose photographic method allowed him to win the funding of Tsar Nicholas II. He travelled the Russian Empire, documenting in full, vibrant and gorgeous colour, a sampling of the vast and diverse scope of the Russian Tsarist regime short years before war and revolution caused it to disappear forever.

I was absolutely fascinated. Here were villages that had, in many cases, been untouched by electricity and the modernity of industrialization, but were documented in photographs so vivid and intense that they might have been taken yesterday. I kept coming back to them again and again. I couldn’t get over the colours–I always assume that somehow life was duller and less colourful in those old black and white photos (I know otherwise intellectually, but with no information to interpolate colour, my mind tends to infer drab shades). Not so.

For someone like me, who is endlessly caught by the question of how people live in different places, and how they lived in other eras, this kind of glimpse into the past felt like another kind of time machine, thanks to the anachronism of the full colour imagery. I had dreams about this world. I just couldn’t let it go.

I started reading about Russian history, and my fascination deepened. The fact that serfdom existed in Russia and was only abolished around the time of the emancipation of slavery in the U.S. The lack of industrialization, in large swatches of a vast empire. The fact that even the railway was late in coming to this vast and forbidding territory that had defeated the likes of Napoleon and Hitler.

The idea that kept coming back to me was: what if this act of documenting the empire had been a little earlier… maybe by 50 years or so, when everything would have been just that much more remote? The technology for colour photography existed then, too, and some people did experiment with it. So what if?

No railway, so transporting large glass plates would be challenging. For many of the inhabitants of remote villages, folklore around rusalki, werewolves and other fantastical creatures would have been part of the everyday reality of dealing with the powerful, treacherous dangers of the Russian winter and wilderness. In such places, the science of full colour photography would have felt more magical, more mysterious, than the reality of the rusalka in the pond down the way.

And so, it began–the book that became Konstantin’s Gifts, which is set in a world that is very similar to our own. One of my main characters is loosely modeled on Prokudin-Gorskii, though I’ve interpolated an appropriate, far more cumbersome, photographic technology that might have existed in the 1860s. The original idea had been to have a man of science and rationalism, traveling through remote regions and taking photographs with an entourage of assistants who are afflicted with folkloric conditions: a vampire, a lycanthrope and a rusalka (the slavic version of a siren of sorts). In that conception, the photographer took them on because he believed their conditions were based on viruses, and that they were therefore curable, thanks to the promise of science. Part of that story would have involved a search for the cure. Even the names of the characters were based on those associations (Vladimir, as a name associated with the most famous vampire of them all; Pyotr, because of the story of Pytor and the Wolf. Though I did switch them up).

The idea morphed a few times since then, of course. The final product is rather different to what I had originally conceived.

But, even through all the writing and rewriting, the edits, proofs and revisions… even after all that, the fascination remains: when I look at Prokudin-Gorskii’s photographs, I feel that same sense of excitement, wonder and delight. These photographs are world treasures: another form of time travel, into a world long since vanquished. I have inserted a small sampling of his work below, but if you are intrigued, do check out the Library of Congress’s website, where there are full-size versions of these images, and many more besides.