swimming home [deborah levy]

There's a corner of a foreign field that will be forever England. According to Levy, this corner is constructed out of petty deceit, matrimonial disquiet and suicidal urges. Whilst there are echoes of McEwan's Atonement in the conceit, the work of art this most resembles is Joanna Hogg's Unrelated. The British idyll abroad upset by the appearance of a rogue element, in this case the unpredictable and clearly unhinged Kitty Finch, who is swimming in the pool of the French holiday villa hired by two bourgeois London families. Kitty Finch spells trouble and sure enough she brings it to the party, unhinging one and all.

Whilst this is a potent cocktail of a premise, the truth is that the book skates over the dramatic depths. Like an iced-over pool, we gain glimpses of things the novel might have explored but chose not to. Instead the writer favours a poeticised imagistic approach, full of metaphor and simile, one which lathers the cold, cruel eye of the poet over the novel's crust. If you get my drift. Cruel, the book certainly is: with the exception of a 14 year old girl, Nina (more shades of Atonement) all the various characters are people you'd rather not hang out with. It does feel slightly pretensious of the author to give them such portentous jobs, (a holocaust-escapee poet; a TV war correspondent; etc), the significance of which are never really investigated. Instead the book hinges on Kitty, the bastard daughter of Fitzgerald's Nicole, waiting for the nuthouse to claim her.

The book has been a success and has earned an introduction from Tom McCarthy, no small praise. In some ways it also reminiscent of Lerner's Atocha Station, but it lacks the humour of Lerner's anti-heroic text, forever taking itself as seriously as it possibly can, overloading its 150 pages with an implication of a depth it never gets round to revealing.

vantage point (d. pete travis, w. barry levy)

I should confess to the state of my brain as I attempt to review this movie. I had 3 hours sleep on a transatlantic flight last night and I'm desperately trying to stay awake for the arrival of a plumber who's coming to fix the leak that sprung in my absence. It's 10.30 on a Saturday night, I need a bath which I cannot have and a bed which remains out of reach, and I've spent the vast majority of the past 24 hours staring out of windows at a world slipping by.

Which might be not the perfect state of mind for getting to grips with the memory of the film I saw a couple of weeks ago, or then again it might be the perfect state of mind. We shall see. If this piece should end with an explosion in twenty minutes, then repeat the event six times or so from different perspectives, then give up the ghost altogether and ramble incoherently towards a feelgood finale, it shall have been the ideal state of mind.

Vantage Point takes the same event - the assassination of a US president - and repeats that event from several different perspectives. Or vantage points. Immediately there's the shadow of the ticking clock of 24 rattling in the background. The event takes about 20 minutes to unfold. (We know this because the first vantage point is that of a TV news production team following the event 'live'). We see it from the good guy's perspective, the bad guy's perspective, the bystander's perspective, the president's perspective, the global perspective. The explosion retains an almost intimate decibel level, but every time it occurs its savagery is diminished, and it comes as no surprise to learn that it wasn't really President William Hurt up on that stage, but some poor sap, along with lots of other poor sap heads of state.

However, having revealed this final piece of perspective, the filmmakers clearly found themselves stuck. They needed to get beyond the twenty minutes, to reveal the President's fate and inevitable salvation. At which point, narrative discipline and structural ingenuity are just plain superfluous. William Hurt, at his most oleaginous, needs saving, structure comes second. The creators were no doubt hoping that with the discipline of all those taut twenty minutes sections they'd bought themselves a little slack. But a hammy ending is always going to be a hammy ending, and if it's super hammy and lasts for longer than twenty minutes and trashes all the work that's gone before, all its going to end up doing is reveal the paucity of the material in the first place.

The plumber's still not here and I feel as though I'm in danger of recreating the movie, so before my conclusion ambles towards a predictable, bland, neo-heroic, bathetic conclusion, I'll stop. Ending not with a bang! but a whimper.