Winter’s Knight: Day One

Robert M Ball

Great Beast

The Great Beast, the creator-owned Indy Brit comics publisher started by Adam Cadwell and Marc Ellerby, has a new title out this very month, and it is a truly beautiful looking piece of work. Robert M Ball’s Winter’s Knight Day One is wonderfully, delightfully different, a ‘silent’ comic, a wordless tale crafted in images only and relying on the reader to work with the artist to create the narrative inside their own imagination. Our own Richard reviewed it in self-published form last year (see here) and now it’s getting a wider release through Great Beast.

An elderly, weary looking knight swathed in a green cloak crosses a stark, barren winter landscape, the stylised art (which, to my eyes anyway, often felt like stills from a beautifully crafted animation) conveying a sense of chill and foreboding, from white wastelands to jagged, snow-covered peaks and bare, leafless trees where one of the few signs of life in the first pages – a jet black crow – sits like an omen, in one scene glimpsed in the foreground, beak wide open, the juxtaposition with the knight in the distance making it appear as if the bird is about to swallow him whole from the Earth. The few signs of human habitation are deserted, the statue of a martyr holding his severed head stands in icy silence before the houses in a scene reminiscent (in a good way) of something from Mignola’s Hellboy.

Finally encountering some life in this barren place the knight sees a magnificent stag. What follows that encounter I won’t spoil here, suffice to say we move through scenes which may be real, may be fantasy or may be delirious dreams. The open, text-free nature of the story leaves it to the reader to interpret the images, like interpreting a dream or signs and portents. Some elements remind me of the great chivalric romances (of which the modified, Christianised Arthurian tales are the most famous), others recall more modern interpretations (a couple of scenes reminding me very much of elements of Boorman’s exquisite Excalibur). The art moves from some minimalist scenes of a vast, frozen, almost empty landscape to some utterly gorgeous, much more colourful, dream-like moments.

Your interpretation of the story may well trigger different thoughts and feelings, and that’s the beauty of this very open work. Every text – book, painting, music, film – we read is always interpreted a little differently, depending on the reader’s experiences and knowledge, of course. Taking in a tale, in any form, is never a passive experience, our brains tick and fizz away making connections to other memories, other books we’ve read, films we’ve seen, music we’ve heard, and so the reader is always in a form of partnership with the storyteller. With Robert’s achingly beautiful tale that interpretation on the part of the reader is left much more invitingly open – he’s trusting the readers to be a part of the story’s creation here, and that’s not just giving someone a compelling reading experience, it’s giving them a wonderful gift, because when you can engage with a story like this it becomes much more vivid in your imagination, that realm where all stories reside.

Winter’s Knight: Day One is published this month in both print and (DRM free) digital, with Day Two scheduled to follow in November and debut at Thought Bubble.

OVO from WeWereMonkeys on Vimeo.

(Iain signing copies of the Algebraist back in 2008 in Edinburgh’s Traverse theatre. Books to sign for readers and a pint by his hand equals contented author. Pic from my Flickr)

Iain straddled literary genres with ease, creating his science fiction (including the remarkable Culture novels) and also his ‘straight’ literary fiction (if you could call anything Iain wrote ‘straight’!) and also deviating into some non fiction for his whisky tour of Scotland (he once told me one of the few books where the research required was a genuine pleasure to undertake). Few writers get to be successful in both a genre and be equally accepted in ‘literary’ fiction (a cumbersome, imprecise term), but Iain did, and both his fiction and science fiction both were covered by the literary critics. His science fiction, in particular his Culture novels, displayed a displeasure at the inequalities of the world as it is but, like Clarke and Rodenberry, a hope and belief that humanity could be better, more evolved, more equal, more caring, more enlightened.

Iain often stuck by those principles in his own life – when Blair and his acolytes fudged ‘intelligence’ to prove why we should invade Iraq Iain refused invites to Blair’s Downing Street gatherings of various artistic worthies and instead cut up his British passport in disgust at this action and said he would do without foreign travel and getting a new passport until the wars were ended or Blair out of office. I am glad that in his last few months he got to go abroad again, having a honeymoon with his long term partner Adele (many Edinburgh geeks will know her for her sterling work in the city’s Dead by Dawn film  fest). I received an email from Iain when he was away with Adele a few weeks ago in Venice. I replied saying I hoped he wouldn’t feel compelled to emulate Byron and challenge the locals to a swimming race down the canals. No chance, came the quick reply, I’ve seen what goes into those canals… That was Iain, humour always there, even at times like that, facing what he was facing.

The very evening before I was due to start here at Forbidden Planet several years ago I was treated to a huge, slap-up feed with Iain, Adele and fellow Scottish SF author Ken MacLeod. I had a bad experience with my former bookstore and Iain and Ken had been among the writers I had worked with who stood up and defended me, which was a huge morale boost for me at a very difficult time in my life. It was to be a cheer up, could be worse night out, but by then I had met with our own Kenny who had asked me to start at FP, so it turned into a celebration night. Huge amounts of curry and wine ensued. Despite his huge bestselling status for so many years Iain remained the same friendly, open and very approachable man, the sort of bloke you could just stand in the local pub and chat to over a pint. We lose him just before his publisher, the very fine Orbit Books, one of the homes to the best in British science fiction, could get his new book out. I know they have been rushing to try and get the book out much sooner than possible, everyone thought we would have a bit more time, but again that bastard devil Cancer has had its way instead (and in the words of the current advert series “up yours, Cancer”) and now the book will come out just that bit too late. And ironically one of the main characters is a man facing terminal cancer. Sometimes when art imitates life it is interesting; in this case it may well prove interesting but also rather bitter to the many of us who loved Iain’s writing. I’ve been so looking forward to the Edinburgh International Book Festival this August, but the thought of that annual major literary bash without Iain’s usual presence seems so damned wrong.

(taken just last year, two of Scotland’s bestselling authors beginning with ‘I’, Iain Banks and Ian Rankin, enjoying one of Edinburgh’s fine hostelries, pic from my Flickr)

We’ve lost one of Britian’s finest writers (held by many to be among the top 50 most influential and important writers in the UK since 1945) and a major influence in our beloved science fiction genre, and worse we’ve lost a damned good man, and far, far, far to bloody young. If you enjoy a good drink then when you have a decent ale or even better a good dram of single malt, raise a wee toast for Iain, he’d doubtless appreciate that. And maybe as well as picking up The Quarry later this month from Orbit readers may, if they are able, want to consider a wee donation in his memory to Cancer Research, still fighting fighting against this damned disease which takes too many of us (are there any of us who haven’t lost a family member or friend to it?). In a small mercy his wife Adele said that his passing was without pain.

Goodbye, Iain, your inventiveness brought so many of us onboard and you took us with you on some extraordinary expeditions into the imagination, and on a personal note you and Ken and many other writers were there for me when I needed it and stood up for me, which I will always be so grateful for. Rather than dwell on losing Iain so damnably young I prefer to remember him smilingly signing books for fans, chatting away to them and other writer friends and booksellers after the author event was over, usually in the bar over a pint, beer in his hand and big, open grin on his face. My thoughts go out to Adele, his family and closest friends who have had to endure the thought of his dreadful illness and now his sudden passing. Somewhere, in the vastly distant future, when mankind has perhaps evolved to be more like the Utopian Culture he imagined I hope one day there will be a Mind piloting a starship and it will choose to call itself after Iain.

Down at North Berwick on a very warm, sunny Sunday afternoon earlier this week, strolling along the beach we heard the drone of a propeller engine – not unusual as there is a small airfield nearby and light aircraft and small microlights fly out from it and along the coast regularly. This sounded much more powerful though and when we spotted the plane it was moving a darned site faster than the usual little Cessna type light planes you see around there (which are really the small car of the skies, very slow). This sounded like an engine beefed up for speed and it roared past quite low; as it tilted we realised it was a biplane and we thought hey, few years back, last time we saw a biplane at this spot he was practising his air display routines, I wonder… And lo and behold on went the smoke cannister and the pilot launched into a series of maneuvres, rapid climbs, dives, looping…

After several moves the pilot roared low over North Berwick, from this perspective seemingly in line with the rocky headland which just out beyond the Scottish Seabird Centre and the harbour and I quickly tried to zoom and focus on the fast moving plane and was lucky enough to capture this scene:

And a moment later I got another decent pic of the plane with the local landscape, this time flying past the mighty Bass Rock (once a site of pilgrimage, a monastery, a fortress and a prison across our long history, now one of the largest seabird colonies in Europe, given back to nature):

We even got to see the pilot pull a classic stunt that goes back to the World War I dogfights, climb up at full speed, almost vertically until stalling then let the plane ‘fall’ over and straight back down into a dive:

Turning into a climbing loop:

And then it was all done, our brief one-man air show was finished and the biplane was roaring back inland towards the airfield. But what a cracking little surprise show we had:

Directed by Neil Jordan

Starring Saoirse Ronan, Gemma Arterton

I’ve loved Neil Jordan’s films since the Crying Game and the fascinating Company of Wolves. He has a lyrical quality in the way he structures the stories and the cinematography of the scenes, and he is adept at layering stories and characters, most especially (as he demonstrated with Company of Wolves years ago and again in Interview With the Vampire) when dealing with mythic and folkloric subject matter. I was a little worried about Byzantium as it had some very mixed reviews, some lavishing praise, others saying it fell badly short. On viewing it myself a few days ago I have to say my worries vanished and I was absolutely absorbed into this intriguing and different take on the vampire mythos.

Gemma Arterton’s Clara turns tricks and performs in lap dancing clubs to bring in money while staying off the grid, living a secretive life with Eleanor (Saoirse Ronan), who, given the fact that Clara still appears very young, she passes off as her little sister, who she is the legal guardian of after their parents were killed. In fact the quiet and thoughtful Eleanor is her daughter, born under less than ideal circumstances and then raised in an orphanage some 200 years ago, while her mother paid for her board but was forced to keep her distance. After Clara’s vampirisation she returns to claim her daughter, the legacy of her mortal life, and for two centuries the pair have had to live a secret life, not just hiding their immortal, blood drinking nature from society but also from an unspecified threat, that Clara is clearly aware of but will not tell her daughter about.

It’s clear that Clara is protecting her daughter from some group and at first we’re not sure who – vampire hunters? An organised team of other undead who object to their freelance lifestyle? But Clara, stuck in repeating the same routine – evade, hide, turn some sexual tricks to make money, move on, hide, repeat – doesn’t realise her daughter, eternally 16 years old, has matured within and is questioning why they live as they do, especially since she’s lacking any real history from Clara on why they are as they are. She repeatedly writes down her life story on paper, in beautiful copperplate handwriting, but not for anyone to read – symbolically she tears up the pages after she finishes and scatters them to the winds…

This brings us to one of the first kills and the modus operandi for the women, when a kindly, very elderly gent in the apartment block they are living in talks to Eleanor one day about the pages – he has picked some up, enough to start putting a little of her story together. He knows what she is and more than that, he welcomes her – he is old, alone, ready to move on. And Eleanor is only drawn to feed on those whose time is done, the old, the dying, the suicidal. To them she is not a blood sucking monster but an angel of mercy, and she speaks a benediction of peace to them as she takes them and lightens their passing. In one scene the horror of a vampire feeding on a helpless old victim in a hospital is transmuted as the woman looks at her and whispers, you came, my angel – she welcomes the release…

Which is not to say they can’t kill for other reasons – Clara is perfectly prepared to kill, but in her case it tends to be evil people, such as an arrogant pimp in the seaside town they flee to (the world is a better place without you in it, she tells the surprised pimp as she overpowers him). Or to attack a mysterious pursuer (I won’t say any more on that for fear of spoilers). These are no innocents (in fact Eleanor makes no claim to be especially good), but they do have a moral code and despite their circumstances they are in many ways moral creatures, given their situation.

Of course eventually we find other vampires and it links back to how both women became immortals, an ancient society, a Brotherhood, which is not terribly keen on the idea of a woman joining when Clara is reborn, much less when she wants to make her daughter the same – women are forbidden to create, one brother intones. Just as the vampire is the inversion of natural life, here their immortal club is also inverse, the men are allowed to create new vampires (all men they deem to be of the right quality, like a perverse gentleman’s society) and women are forbidden – the power of birth, of the creation of new life, is here in the hands of men.

The film is replete with references to some of the 19th century Gothic classic novels, and layered with symbols and many allusions to – and disruption of – gender expectations and roles. It’s a fascinating and spellbinding film, from the gritty, seedy underground life the women have to live to keep themselves hidden, on the edge of society forever to the flashbacks to both of their earlier lives and (eventually) their genesis as vampires (I won’t ruin it for you, suffice to say it is much more mythologically satisfying than the old being bitten and turned, and involves some beautifully composed and memorable shots). Saoirse’s performance in particular is exceptional – in the Lovely Bones (disappointing misfire of a film but she was good in it) and Hannah she’s showcased not only an especially refined gift for acting for such a young woman, she also has a wonderful, ineffable, otherworldly quality to her – like Cate Blanchett in Lord of the Rings you find it easy to take her as different because she radiates that quality quite naturally, and it is used to huge and sympathetic effect here as she questions her life, her immortality, the world around her that she can’t really be part of, and finally romance with a seriously ill, very sensitive young man, who is himself very different from most of society.

I could write screeds more on the symbols and myths invested into this film, the performances, the beautiful shots and the narrative structure which also draws you into this hidden world, but I think if I write any more I’ll risk spoiling some key scenes for anyone who hasn’t seen it yet, so I’ll wrap up. Suffice to say for those who like something deeper, more folkloric and  with more bit to it (sorry) than the dreadful modern Twilight teen-girl friendly film vampire tale this is it, deeply steeped in folklore (the transformation scenes owe much to Celtic culture and myth rather than Transylvanian counts) and Gothic lore but laced with the real world and gender issues, it’s intoxicating. As with Jordan’s superb Company of Wolves I know I am going to have to get this on DVD when it comes out so I can watch it again and again, because I know there will be elements I missed the first time round. And when I find a film I want to rewatch numerous times and still expect to find new moments and insights, well, that’s about as high a compliment to a film-maker as I can pay.

The Wake #1
Scott Snyder, Sean Murphy
DC/Vertigo

Two of the hottest properties in DC’s table, Scott Snyder (some stunning Batman work among others) and Sean Murphy (the brilliant Punk Rock Jesus – reviewed here – and Joe the Barbarian – reviewed here) working together on a new Vertigo title? Yes, I was curious and naturally I picked it up among this week’s crop of new releases. I was not disappointed – The Wake #1 is pretty much what you want from a first issue, intriguing, setting up some scenarios but only giving glimpses and tastes so you know you not only want more, you have to have more…

An opening prologue sees a woman on an advanced hang glider soaring among once towering skyscraper, now architectural islands projecting from the rivers of what were once streets, a drowned city. Landing she confers with a cybernetically enhanced dolphin before it alerts her to an incoming tidal wave which they try to flee…

And then after those few pages we’re back, some two hundred years previously we’re told, to what looks like our own present, where Doctor Lee Archer is studying whales, in a beautiful scene where one of those magnificent, gigantic ocean mammals surfaced right by her small boat and even allows her to touch him, while her estranged son talks to her on a video communicator. Her ocean studies are about to be disrupted though; through her camera her son can see a helicopter approaching swiftly behind her. Enter Agent Cruz of the Department of Homeland Security.

Archer, it seems, has a previous history of government secret work and they want her services again, despite her previously leaving under a black cloud (at the moment unspecified). She’s told that they picked up a strange sound in the ocean off Alaska, almost whale-like but distorted and odd, so they need someone with Cetacean interests and an espionage background. The carrot dangled is the classic one – help to get custody of her son back. Of course, you know there is a lot more to this than she is being told (Cruz will tell her several times later he didn’t lie to her, he just didn’t mention certain aspects of events).

As I said at the start this does exactly what a first issue does – introduces main characters and set up (handled with great economy and efficiency), tickles our curiosity with a barely glimpsed mystery and promise of much more to come so you know you will have to pick up the next issue. Murphy continues to be one of the hot new comic artists to watch and I’m increasingly enjoying his style, not to mention some neat little touches, such as Doctor Archer wearing a Flak Jackets cap (Chris’ band from Punk Rock Jesus). This looks like a pretty intriguing new Vertigo title: a bit of mystery, some relationship problems, a touch of science fiction and even a secret underwater base – a good mix! Well worth getting in on the ground floor on this one, I reckon.

Since our much delayed spring is finally (sort of) arriving, and also to show that I don’t just spend my time shooting in oh-so arty black and white, a little splash of vibrant colour returning to the parks and public gardens of Edinburgh.

EXPO from Joe Sill on Vimeo.

And indeed I had missed a lot – in fact I will need to wander back some time to take more in – including this large memorial, a Celtic cross, which is richly inscribed with a very detailed history of the man and event it commemorates, Lieutenant John Irving, Royal Navy. Lt Irving was a member of Sir John Franklin’s famous 1840s expedition to find the fabled North West Passage. His ship HMS Terror and her sister ships HMS Erebus, became trapped in the ice of the far northern waters, with Franklin and many others losing their lives. Eventually the remaining crew were forced to abandon their ships and tried to reach a northern Canadian settlement on foot, but the cold and the lack of food would doom them. A later American expedition found the cold grave of John Irving and these explorers paid honour to their late predecessors by arranging for his remains to be returned to his native land, where this memorial was raised.

Like many a boy when I was young I had books on the great explorers and loved those stories; that Victorian era is one of the great ages of global exploration, when the Royal Navy not only patrolled a worldwide empire as a military force but dispatched ships on missions of exploration and scientific endeavour – Darwin’s voyages on the Beagle being one of the more famous of those great world-spanning missions. Such expeditions pushed back the frontiers of our knowledge of our own world, but many of them came at great cost, a reminder that exploration and the gaining of knowledge is often demanding and dangerous. I had no idea this memorial sat there quietly in my city; it’s one of my simplest but greatest pleasures to find little historical gems like this tucked away (and to photograph it and share it) on my walks around Edinburgh, like little presents my city sometimes gives me as a reward for being curious enough to look around. And it’s always worth pausing and looking around you, because you never know when you might find treasure…