Scarred For Life Volume Two: Television in the 1980s

 

Scarred For Life Volume 2: The 1980s Part One – Television by Stephen Brotherstone & Dave Lawrence et al (2020 Lulu.com softcover 530pp)

 

Unfettered nostalgia is often a cause of a lot which ails our modern society – why try to do something bold and new when it’s easier to wallow in warm comforting memories? But what about those half-remembered moments and snippets of media from our childhoods which give us the chills and still just don’t seem quite right? This is where the Scarred For Life team have stepped in to provide us with guidance. In the three and a half years since their first volume (which covered all cultural aspects of the 1970s) was released, so called ‘Hauntology’ and or ‘The Haunted Generation” has become a ‘thing’ online and beyond. People in roughly the same generation as myself (forty-mumble) have been falling over themselves to read, watch and listen to those weird little things that seemed to have collectively influenced our early lives in the 1970s and 80s.

With a surfeit of material to deal with in regards to the 1980s the SFL creators have decided to confine themselves to covering only the decade’s televisual output in volume 2 with a further volume covering books, movies and so on promised in the near future.

Volume 2 consists of roughly 70 articles grouped together in mainly by genre or other themes – there’s Kid’s TV, Surreal Drama, Science Fiction and so on. One section concentrates on the event of the arrival of Channel 4 in the UK and how its output shock things up. Another section concentrates on mass unemployment and how it was portrayed on 80s television. A fairly lengthy section covers UK Public Information Film (PIF) ‘fillers’ of the decade.

This brings up one problem that some readers might have with the book – its very UK centric. As a bit of an anglophile New Zealander, I could follow most of it. I estimate about 70% of the UK television mentioned ended up screening here eventually but things like the PIFs trigger no memories for me and end up being more of academic interest.

On the whole the writing style is fun and jokey and I like it that way. Its not a dry survey of the contents, the authors have their own memories and often put what they cover into context which is often enjoyable to read. However, it is sometimes obvious that this book was written piecemeal over several years – there are references to the current year being anything between 2017 and 2020, some things are repeated and what probably seemed like a clever turn of phrase is often over-used. A few typos raise their ugly heads and there’s a couple of odd layout issues in my copy at least. The book is very information dense and sometime the format works against easy reading – long lines of text run across the page and into ‘the gutter’. A dual column format like that used in the PIF section might have been a good idea for more of the volume.

It took me a while to make my way through all the of the material but I think it was worth the effort. There’s a lot that will trigger memories and quite a lot more to seek out and view for the first time on the likes of YouTube. I look forwards to Volume 3.

Scarred For Life Volume 2 is NOT available from your usual bookseller or bookseller website. So far at least, it can only be found as a print-on-demand book or pdf file via Lulu.com.

The Absolute Book

 

The Absolute Book by Elizabeth Knox (2019 Victoria University Press paperback 656pp)

 

Elizabeth Knox is a well-known and respected local (New Zealand) author who has written both adult and YA books often with a touch of the fantastic and usually well thought of by critics and readers alike. When this book was first published in 2019 people were falling over themselves to offer praise and acclaim it as a major new work of fantasy literature. Now as its Northern Hemisphere publication approaches, I thought I’d better actually read it for myself and see what all the fuss was about.

 

The Absolute Book tells the story of Taryn Cornick whose complicated family unit is split between the UK and New Zealand. When she is 13 years old her beloved sister Beatrice is killed and the man responsible is sentenced to several years in prison. Taryn believes a much more severe punishment is required and years later when she’s married, she finds someone willing to exact the ultimate revenge for her. Years later still Taryn is single again and has become a scholar and writer about books, libraries and history. The Police, suspicious about what happened to Beatrice’s killer start to pursue Taryn. She starts receiving strange phone calls and the world generally closes in on her just as she’s set to embark on a book tour. In a moment of crisis, she finds herself transported to another world along with Jacob Berger, one of the detectives on her trail. They both befriend the mysterious Shift a young man seemingly from the Sidhe (fairy) world they now find themselves in. After several adventures in the fairy world and back in our own they start a search for the mysterious “Firestarter”, an ancient scroll box that has survived the great fires of several libraries in history and once was in Taryn’s Grandfather’s possession. The denizens of Hell itself are also searching for the box and the future of all worlds could be at stake.

 

Things get a bit more complicated than the above description but that’s basically the plot. There’s an awful lot of slow travel in the fairy world and beyond -something which does seem puzzling when often the same characters are capable of summoning transport ‘gates’ between locations and worlds when the plot requires. There’s a certain fever dream feeling about some of the writing and I found that often rubbed me up the wrong way. Mysteries and puzzles are set up and initially seem to be important but often are dismissed ‘off screen’. The main human characters seemed completely nonplussed about finding the existence of other worlds and races of beings. Elements of Norse mythology and Christian theology are mixed in with the fairy lore and everyone seems fine with talking birds and demons strutting about the place. The author seems to delight in putting the main characters through physical trauma often for no good reason. She also seems to be in love with the character Shift who starts out as seemingly a simple young man but has so many layers of back-stories and mythology added to him that by the end, he’s apparently one of the most important beings in existence. The parts I did enjoy more were the stories recited by some of the minor characters giving a background to the fairy race and events that shaped their land. These were pure high fantasy and more enjoyable. By the end I got the impression that the author feels a simply agrarian existence living off the land and foraging for our food would be far better than a technological civilisation and shame on us all for wanting a modern life.

 

I enjoyed it in parts but as a whole it wasn’t for me. Your mileage may vary.