Getting Away From It All

A little correction to yesterday's post. I said that Ghosts and A Doll's House weren't in any sense 'message' plays, but on one level they clearly are. I should have said that this is not fundamental to how they function or affect the viewer.

But it's not all been Ibsenite gloom (or light, possibly) lately. The joys of Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? have done much to remind me of just how flexible a medium for ideas the novel can be. At least one trick he pulls off, amongst many, is quite remarkable. I'm referring to the way he takes tissue thin characters - at times little more than ciphers for the real thing - and endows them, or evokes through them, powerful layers of emotion. The bit where Phil Resch, the android hunter that our 'hero' and chief android-hunter, Rick Deckard, encounters at the 'other' police department, is wondering whether he himself is also an android, and coolly assessing how he intends to do away with himself, had me both genuinely on the edge of my seat with suspense (I'd completely forgotten what happens next) and feeling a sense of potential real loss. It's as if you are made to endow the characters with the psychological depth Dick doesn't bother to give them - or cunningly implies. I suppose.

I've also been holidaying in the sunlit world of Anthony Buckeridge's characters Jennings and Darbishire having picked up one of the series in a recent amazonian foray. More of which anon, as I am now going to get ready to take our nieces for a bit of a nosh-up in honour of Fifi's birthday. There's more to life than just books, you know.