Tag: political wrongness

the secret murder

bad drawing in biro and felt pen of six young people from the shoulders up, three female, one male, two kind of in-between

Transcript time again!

‘Jules leaned forward in his chair and spoke wonderingly, intensely “How would it feel to kill someone?”

I think this line is going to be the highlight of my yet-to-be-written book? My friends, we are in trouble already.

Six of them there were — rich, clever and beautiful. They never went to bed at night, they sat up drinking coffee and talking about deep things.

Six of them there were? Are you Yoda? I find my schoolgirl vision of Life At Uni vaguely heartbreaking. I always went to bed at night, mostly because I had to write two essays a week and this is quite hard to do on no sleep. And I knew, like, one person who was rich, clever and beautiful, and instead of talking about Deep Things everyone mostly bitched about her.

Of the six, Ayesha was the richest — of Arab descent, she reinvented herself with blonde hair and contact lenses.

I feel compelled to admit that Ayesha was in fact based upon this Super Cool Sindy:

tanned doll dressed in neon, with blonde nylon hair and unnaturally blue eyes

Now you have a mental picture of her, we can continue.

Jules and the androgynous Christian were twin brothers — Jules was the cleverest, Ayesha’s idol, and obsessed with crime. Christian was ‘happy to be in touch with his male and female sides’ and had a stormy relationship with his twin.

ZOMG TWINS! Also, I want cookies for having a genderqueer character, seeing as how Tumblr is twenty years in the future.

Saundra was a ‘weirdo’ having a platonic affair with Christian.

GIVE ME GODDAMN COOKIES TUMBLR I MEAN IT.

Joe was a general ‘good guy’ and Venitienne was a mysterious and melancholy brunette, who wrote haunting poetry. Six quicksilver young people, bright as the sun, talking at midnight about murder.

Joe is just here to make up the numbers, isn’t he. And Venitienne? There are so many lovely names in the world, why do you have to try (and fail) to invent new ones?

It is Jules who meticulously plans his ‘perfect crime’ and Venitienne who helps him. The victim is unimportant — she is a prostitute of around 35, identity unknown.

Wow. I don’t even know where to start with this. Well, clearly 35 is far too decrepit to be allowed to live, and sex workers are unpeople (which I assume is why Jules has chosen her), and really this poor woman whom I have not even bothered to name (though, given my track record at naming characters, this may be no bad thing) is no more than a plot device. I am cross with you, younger self, and I am confiscating your Tumblr cookies because you don’t deserve them.

At a bleak beauty spot the six assemble. Each does his or her part, wearing rubber gloves and bathing caps to prevent leaving fingerprints or hair.

Oh yay, Jules is forensically aware. I do however feel that his ‘perfect murder’ would be substantially more perfect and the risk of leaving DNA traces significantly lessened if he hadn’t roped in FIVE OTHER PEOPLE to help out.

She is buried in a strange ceremony composed by Venitienne and conducted by Christian.

Well, that’s nice.

Then they return, talking incessantly about the experience.

Sounds fun.

Only Saundra remains silent. A week later, tormented by guilt, she kills herself.

Saundra, Saundra, Saundra. Why did you agree to it in the first place? Did it not occur to you earlier that you might feel an eensy bit bad about killing an innocent person just for kicks?

Her suicide note, confessing everything, is burned by Christian — grieving for her, but loyal to his twin.

What has fraternal loyalty got to do with it? Presumably the note implicates everyone, in which case destroying it is kind of a no-brainer.

Joe ‘cracks’ — eventually returning home but visiting the grave constantly.

I thought Joe was supposed to be a ‘good guy’? How did Jules even get these people to participate in his human sacrifice thing? Maybe when he leans forward in his chair with a preponderance of adverbs he is actually hypnotising them all?

But Jules and Venitienne were hooked by the first blood — now they form a sinister alliance…

I ran out of page at this point, but I can tell you that in the fragment of this which succeeded in getting written (and not many blurbs made it that far, so I must have considered this one of my Best Ideas), Jules and Venitienne were engaged in a bathing-cap-clad killing spree which was rapidly developing BDSM overtones, Joe was in a psychiatric hospital, and Christian was on the run with a spaced-out Ayesha.

(Also, there was a conversation about infinity. It was awesome.)

So essentially this is The Secret History, right? Except for how it is rubbish. Six fabulously pretentious students? Check. Murder, suicide, intra-group affairs and infatuations? Check. There are even TWINS. (Of course there are twins. There are always twins.) I’m thinking I must have been ‘inspired’ by a review in the Sunday Times Books section, which I suppose is a step up from stealing my plots from Neighbours.

0

born on a space shuttle

Five girl's faces drawn in blue biro surmounted by the words Take Five and the following text:

I am phoning this in, rather. Everything is in crappy blue biro, the title is repeated three times for no apparent reason, and I seem to have dispensed with anything resembling a plot. OK, we have ‘five sixteen-year-old girls, one from each continent’. So far, so BBC Three documentary. But there doesn’t appear to be anything to connect them other than the fact that they are all sixteen-year-old girls.

I kind of love that ‘Californian’ is equivalent to ‘African’? Um, hello, neither of these are actual nationalities.  And I suspect that Maria Luisa is actually Colombian, unless she was born on a space shuttle.

I feel that having a character born on a space shuttle would have made this substantially more interesting.

Let us review. Naturally our representatives from South America, Asia and Africa live doomed lives of poverty and unrelenting misery. They are either knocked up, ‘coping’ with repressive regimes (it is so hard to be sixteen and not able to vote! oh, wait…) or homeless. Meanwhile, our girls in Europe and North America seem to be doing… not very much, to be honest. Poor Veronique hasn’t even been given a dilemma, while Lullaby (LULLABY) seems destined for an endless round of pointless plastic surgery.

(Your ‘first nose job’ should really be your last, if your surgeon knows what they are doing. Noses are not breasts. Glad we got that cleared up.)

There are times when I think these things were less a spontaneous overflow of my creative mind than a desperate attempt to avoid doing my maths homework.

0

revolutions are not an everyday event

Handwritten biro text interpersed with biro drawings of people with monobrows and physical injuries

(No, I didn’t suddenly develop a tremor, my biro was running out)

So yeah, fall of the Iron Curtain! It’s 1989! I’m twelve! I can’t draw hands!

I will say, even now, that as names of fictional eastern European countries go, ‘Barillia’ beats Enid Blyton’s ‘Baronia’ to which it is closely related. And that as made-up eastern European names go, ‘Romilla’ could be worse.

I love that Paul is ‘promising’ and ‘talented’, because recognising that Barillia might not be a Marxist utopia of happy smiling peasants is obviously really hard, especially with all these people wandering around in Dickensian rags covered in bruises and weird haematomas (what is that on Romilla’s foot? and that blonde woman who is presumably her mother has, like, a snake issuing from her mouth, it is freaky).

He tricks his way into the workhouse! He rescues a hot skinny blonde chick! He becomes a fugitive! He becomes a revolutionary! Whatever would ‘bleak Barillia’ have done without the hunky Western guy to help them out?

OK, so the ‘winds of change’ are operating independently of him (bonus points for Scorpions reference! also bonus points for totally subconscious Sydney Carton quote) and Romilla does help him out a bit with the whole revolution thing, maybe by acting as an interpreter. Or possibly Paul is so super that he picked up the language in a week. Or (more likely, this) everyone just speaks English.

I cannot end this piece without pointing at the bloke in the hat. And the bob. And the purple bowtie. And the mad eyebrows. And the moustache which entirely conceals his mouth (how is that even possible?) He is clearly EVIL and quite possibly a dictator of some sort, but how for the love of god is he getting anyone to take him seriously in that hat? Does he just shoot everyone who laughs at it? Or is he cultivating an image as a murderous yet lovable buffoon so the West will sell him arms? (Oops, sorry, wrong batch of revolutions)

0

Proudly powered by WordPress | Theme: Baskerville 2 by Anders Noren.

Up ↑