azdak

I'm late with this, but antisoppist gave me an S, so here are some burblings.



Servalan
Servalan is the White Witch of the Federation, Supreme Commander of a drab, depressing, enslaved universe in which it is always winter and never Christmas. Even when our heroes visit a desert planet, it's like the Flanders and Swann weather song ("On Zonda the sun is hot. Is it shining? No, it's not"). Against a background of dreary (non)-functionality, she stands out like the Sugar Plum Fairy at a mining engineer's convention, her plumage the symbol of the corruption in the Empire she heads. She is also the most transgressive thing that ever minced across a TV screen, with her dyke's crew cut and her drag queen outfits, her astonishingly beautiful face and her utter ruthlessness. My sister once got a question in a game called Scruples: "Would you use your feminine wiles to advance your career?" Servalan would have laughed in your face. In the capable hands of Jackie Pearce (who once described, in a memorable interview, twirling in front of the mirror in one of Servalan's more outrageous dresses, chanting gleefully "Fuck you, Mother Superior!") she's an astonishing portrait of a human so damaged by her will to power that no other person can ever be more than a pawn to her. And my God, her will is fabulous. There is a wonderful, wonderful scene in the episode Orac, where she and the psychopathic Space Captain Travis are struggling through dank underground tunnels, where monsters lurk in the dark (Travis is wearing black leather, which at least keeps him warm; Servalan is wearing a white evening gown, high heels and some kind of white feathery thing round her neck. She looks magnificent). One of the monsters pounces on Servalan, scaring the living daylights out of her. Immediately afterwards, they come to a rockfall that has left only a tiny hole to crawl through. Servalan has just had the fright of her life, but when Travis says sneeringly "I'll go first," she is coldly furious. There is no way, no way on earth, she is not going to be FIRST, terrified or otherwise. And it's that iron will, that self-control, that makes her such a deadly adversary, in spite of the incompetence and corruption of her forces. What can I say? She's truly iconic.

Sapphire and Steel
Sapphire and Steel come as a pair. We don't know why. We don't know who they are, or what exactly their relationship to one another is – it seems to shift all the time – or who sent them. We do know why they're here. They're here to fix breaks in time, but as every break is different, even their vast experience doesn't often help. The very lack of information makes them fascinating. It's a challenge to interpret every look, every intonation, every expression. What scares them? What makes them smile? Watching Sapphire and Steel is like watching really good Theatre of the Absurd, because the conversations MAKE NO SENSE (apparently whenever they did start making sense, David McCallum would lock himself away in a cupboard with the scriptwriter and work with him until they stopped making sense). But, as with good Theatre of the Absurd, the actors behave as if it does make sense, they imbue their dialogue with layers and layers of reactions and emotions and significance, and so we follow them, grasping eagerly at the bits we do understand, which is mostly the feelings behind the words. It doesn't really matter what these two are talking about, what matters is what we find out about them when they talk. Oh, and they can communicate telepathically.


Steel: Try the stairs.
Sapphire: Nothing.
Steel: What about the top?
Sapphire: Yes. There's something... somewhere. It's not very strong. But somewhere here.
Steel: What are you sensing, resentment?
Sapphire: No.
Steel: Hatred?
Sapphire: Neither of those. It's more like.... fear, and hopelessness.
Steel: What's the temperature?
Sapphire: Cold.
Tully: That's odd, I've never recorded a temperature drop there, always the opposite.
Sapphire: Yes it's quite cold.
Steel: Give me details.
Sapphire: It's just cold. But it's a strange sort of cold, like...
Steel: Like at the bottom of the sea?
Sapphire: No, the other extreme!
Steel: What?!
Sapphire: It's like high in the air! The air is thin, it's a high altitude!
Steel: But it's still dark..?
Sapphire: No! The sun is shining! It's very bright, it's almost dazzling! [Pause] It's gone. Whatever it was, it's gone, Steel!
Steel: Maybe it's all designed to confuse us. It's all a bit of a mixture, isn't it? Bottom of the sea, high in the air. Things out of order, out of time.
Sapphire: And the voices?
Steel: It has to be the soldier. The main instrument is the soldier, only him.
Sapphire: Yes.
Steel: We've seen him. We know this place is a goad to him, that his resentment started here.
Sapphire: Is that what you're thinking, or what you're hoping?
Steel: Hoping. I'd rather not have to think the obvious.
Sapphire: That this could be a recruiting ground for the dead.
Steel: Yes. I'm going to check the other three tapes.

Sapphire has eyes that glow blue when she's doing clever things with time. She's improbably beautiful, in a way that a porcelain figure might be beautiful, and moves with an exaggerated elegance that's not quite human. She empathises with people, up to a point, but she doesn't feel akin to them. Steel doesn't even empathise with people (although he does, oddly, with ghosts. And animals. The scene where he worries about Mr Tully's cat is priceless, in a horrible sort of way.) He is, as truepenny calls him, "a titanium bitch", who takes it for granted that he can boss everyone around and gets very shirty if they don't cooperate. Sapphire can turn back time and tell when people are going to die and analyse the component atoms of any object and tell if it's been mucked about with by time; Steel's superpower is Being Bossy. He often gets bossy with Sapphire, but this seems to amuse her rather than pissing her off. In spite of the bossiness, Steel loves Sapphire, he says (but not to her – to the Darkness that he's trying to trick), and he's clearly eaten up with jealousy when Silver flirts with her, and he kisses her hand when she saves his life, but more than anything else they seem to be, as he tells Mr Tully in a blatant lie, "business associates", professional partners in an obscure undertaking. Their relationship, like everything else about them, is a mystery, but following the twists and turns of it, as they do their equally mysterious "work", is fascinating.


Scout Finch
I have loved To Kill a Mockingbird ever since I read it when I was too young to know what a 'morphodite was or what Uncle Jack's story about politicians had to do with whore-ladies or why Boo Radley couldn't/wouldn't leave his house. Back then, I found Tom Robinson's trial utterly gripping. As I got older, I started skipping it because it seemed so simplistic it strained my credulity. The rest of the story still held me, though – I found Maycombe County as fascinating as any science fiction or fantasy society, with its strange ways and words and customs (cooties, haints, it being good manners to address people with "Hey!", playing under the house, rabid dogs walking up the street, etc etc)

The white people are the protagonists, a white man is the hero. It would look very different told from the point of view of Tom, or Helen. With that proviso in mind, though, it's an important book for white people to read, because it shows so viscerally both the corrosive effects of racism and the enormous courage it takes to stand up for your convictions, even in a society where you're one of the most privileged. Atticus's principles, and the way he puts them into practice in his child-rearing and his law work, are both inspirational and rather shaming – we're very comfortable with cowardice these days, with the idea that we can't risk getting killed because we have a responsibility to our children.

The book wouldn't work at all without Scout's voice, the eternal younger sibling, struggling to keep up, to understand a world that's beyond her comprehension. I shared her grief as Jem grew away from her. I shared her bitterness as she was compelled to abandon the relatively genderless world of childhood and had to learn to behave "like a lady", so as not to give her father's enemies ammunition. The little girl who plays her in the 1962(?) film turns in a beautiful performance – the whole film is a rare example of an adaptation where the characters come to life, not exactly as they are in the book, but more than close enough.

It's a book about racism for white people by a white person, of course (I'd love to read a "Wind Done Gone" take on the story from Helen's point of view, or Calpurnia's). But every perspective is necessarily limited, and the limitations on Scout's are up front for everyone to see.


Viscount St George
Peter's nephew is in Gaudy Night to make Peter look good. The transition from silly-ass-about-town with a foolish face and whopper of a nose, to romantic hero with womenfolk swooning at his feet wherever he goes, is in large part accomplished by sleight of hand, a bait and switch with St George as the bait. The Viscount, we are told, is an Adonis amongst undergraduates, excessively handsome, excessively charming and a terrible flirt. We have all seen enough Merchant Ivory films/read enough Evelyn Waugh/seen enough drawings of Rupert Brooke not to regard this extraordinary attractiveness in an Oxbridge undergraduate as implausible, even if he is Peter's nephew (and besides, we know Gerald is handsome, even if Peter isn't). Whilst establishing St George's beauty in our minds, Sayers quietly starts drawing parallels between him and Peter – they look so very much alike. Then comes the switch – St George's resemblance to Peter is so great that Peter must be attractive, too. Eventually – hopefully – Peter's attractiveness is so firmly established in our minds that it no longer seems unlikely, when St George shows up at Shrewsbury, that the Dean should describe him as "even more decorative than the other one." But really, when has Peter ever been decorative? In Strong Poison even he admits that his face might well put Harriet off accepting his proposal. I can only buy the transformation of Peter Wimsey, the chattering icicle with the foolish amiable face, into a sex god extraordinaire, scattering pheromones where'er he goes, by attributing it to this being Harriet's point of view, and Harriet, as we all know, is in the grip of raging hormones and cannot see straight. As a Talking Beast observes in one of the Narnia books, "beetles fancy other beetles, they say" (which I parse as "There's no accounting for taste").

St George, however, is eminently fanciable. And his general lack of morals wouldn't set too high a bar to live up to, either.