UFO Info Week-End

This season we have had William Boyd’s World War Two and Cold War thriller Restless so good that as far as

This season we have had William Boyd’s World War Two and Cold War thriller Restless, so good that, as far as I’m concerned, it is simply his most recent literary novel; and now last year’s Man Booker winner, John Banville, having published 14 highly cerebral literary novels, has given us, in Christine Falls, an account of dirty deeds in Dublin and Boston in the early 1950s, written under the pseudonym Benjamin Black.
Its protagonist is Quirke, a pathologist at a leading Dublin hospital, who discovers that a young woman, Christine Falls, has had her cause of death altered in the official records by one of the city’s leading obstetricians, who happens to be not only Quirke’s colleague but also his brother-in-law.Quirke possesses most of the by now archetypal attributes of the troubled investigator/hero. Graham Greene famously called some of his novels “entertainments”. Other very distinguished novelists have written genre fiction, almost invariably pseudonymously, to pay the rent. One of the more dubious clich?of the cultural life is that all clowns yearn to play Hamlet. Oddly, few people maintain that the average Hamlet wants desperately to play the clown. It’s also put about, again rather dubiously, that your typical genre writer, be it of police procedurals or political thrillers, wants to be taken seriously as a novelist. Most of us have our favourite writers whose best genre books already seem to be as good as many so called literary novels.

There are of course several “literary” novelists who write with different personas. To order a copy for £13.50 (free p&p), call Independent Books Direct on 08700 798 897. It was recorded live at the Fillmore West concert hall, and later that evening the musician was stabbed to death in the car park. Curtis didn’t know it, but he had been performing an elegy for himself. Robinson said that he knew he had the emotional key to his story when he heard King Curtis playing his lyrical, jazzy interpretation of “A Whiter Shade of Pale”. This is the music we hear at the start of the film, as we watch “I” suffering an amphetamine-induced anxiety attack.

The New England couple who read the film as profoundly sad were not altogether wide of the mark: strip it of its wonderful linguistic richness and you have a film about, inter alia, the threat and reality of failure; lovelessness (there are no romantic possiblities for our boys, and poor Uncle Monty’s lust remains unslaked); not-so-genteel poverty; the loss of idealism and youthful hope; the decay of friendship. In an early draft of the screenplay, Robinson had Withnail commit suicide with a shotgun, then rightly had second thoughts: when Withnail bows to the wolves and walks away, we know all too well that he is walking away from life.Nor is the melancholy reserved for the film’s final scenes: it suffuses the whole thing. (One charming couple from Massachussetts, in their early 50s, strained their ears throughout: they pronounced it a very moving tragedy, and had barely noticed any comic effects.)Most succumbed willingly: the teenage kid with Asperger’s Syndrome, who played air guitar to the Jimi Hendrix songs on the soundtrack, and summed up the film as “good”; the retired Oxford Kantian who carefully explained to me that Margaux ‘53, though indeed very fine, was not, as Withnail contends, the finest of the century; the dying homme de lettres who considered it all perfectly delightful, and asked wistfully if there were any other films in the same vein?Alas, no. But my little sampling, unscientific as it was, did confirm what I had long suspected: that the raucous, booze-along Saturday night favourite of the Loaded crowd was also quite suitable for reflective Sunday viewing, too. Again, not everyone was seduced – particularly American viewers, who often found the accents impenetrable. When I wrote an essay on Withnail for the BFI Modern Classics series a few years ago, I took the opportunity to experiment, and show the film to as many different types of audience as possible.

The cinema bulges with movies about college japes – especially American college japes – but it took a low-budget English film about washed-up actors to capture for good and all the dark side of that protracted adolescence which is the ambiguous privilege of young people in rich countries.To dwell unduly on the aspects of the film which most appeal to the lager and varsity gangs, though, is to slight its many other virtues. But the authetic texture of student life at its most horrible – the manky digs, the uncertain friendships, the wilful neglect of hygiene and health, the binges, the cold and damp, the free-floating anxiety and directionlessness – none of these has ever been caught with such dismaying yet hilarious precision. Withnail & I is the ne plus ultra of student films, both in that students adore it (you can bet your last farthing that this very weekend, British undergraduates who were either unborn or gurgling at their mother’s teat when it opened in the West End will be roaring along to it for the first time) and that it is by far the best representation of student life in British cinema; maybe in world cinema.True, neither of our heroes is a student any more – indeed, they are both rapidly approaching 30. Especially younger members of the drinking classes.Which leads to a slightly more sober point. (Has anyone ever lashed out on a bottle of Margaux ‘53 to join Withnail in his valedictory swigs? Letters, please.) The sheer, liver-blitzing quantities of Withnail’s alcohol consumption – “I demand to have some booze!” – and the film’s uncensorious attitude to piss-artistry automatically win the film affection among the drinking classes. It was James Brown, the editor of Loaded magazine, who first put on public record the fact that Withnail had encouraged all manner of riotous behaviour among “lads”, and above all the famous drinking game in which participants have to line up a prodigious row of tipples, run the video or DVD and match Withnail’s on-screen guzzling drink for drink – including, for the real hard core, his swig of lighter fluid. Act Three: Bring him down.) It is evidently not pulse-pounding excitment which has earned Withnail its place in the cinematic pantheon, so what are the sources of its appeal?Let’s start with the booze.