HollowCity/DeadWomenTalking/Constantine

Today I read the first fifty pages of Ransom Riggs’ Hollow City (2014), the sequel to his 2011 novel Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children.  I read Miss Peregrine at the urging of my older daughter, who loved it, and I loved it, too. I found it refreshingly original and atmospheric and it used the interface between text and image in really imaginative ways. Above all, it conveyed a message about the importance of valuing difference that was neither sentimental nor oversimplified. Hollow City begins right after the cliffhanger ending of Miss Peregrine and the first fifty pages strike a nice balance between advancing the action and recapitulating some of the key moments and themes of the first novel.

I also finished Brian Norman’s Dead Women Talking. In this closing section of the book, Norman discusses Ana Castillo’s So Far From God, Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bones, Suzan-Lori Parks’ Getting Mother’s Body, and Maxine Hong Kingston’s “No Name Woman.” A couple of things really jumped out at me, the first being the fact that Sebold’s novel is the first text to which Norman does not give unqualified praise. Seeing it for the most part as a rather insipid suburban novel that exemplifies that moment at which the presence of a dead female narrator is in danger of becoming a gimmick, Norman nevertheless provides an astute reading of the way in which the novel’s conclusion is surprising on both a plot-based and generic level. Norman’s book ends very thought-provokingly with a discussion of a dead woman who refuses to talk. After examining a number of examples of the ways in which dead women talking force communities to come to terms with their histories and further the cause of justice, Norman concludes that sometimes the most just and ethical position is to let the dead remain silent.

I also watched Francis Lawrence’s 2005 film Constantine, based on the comic Hellblazer. I’m not a huge fan of Keanu Reeves but I think he’s at his best here, largely because he’s supported by an amazing cast including Tilda Swinton (as the Archangel Gabriel!), Rachel Weisz (with a very credible American accent), Peter Stormare (with a wonderfully creepy and restrained performance as Lucifer), and one of my favorite character actors, Pruitt Taylor Vince (as an alcoholic priest). Not even the awful Gavin Rossdale can mess things up. But despite great acting and wonderful special effects, there’s one scene that ruins this film for me. When a Mexican laborer accidentally finds the object the entire film revolves around, he takes it to Los Angeles, crossing the border into the US to do so. Thanks to the evil power of the object, the Mexican man leaves a trail of death and destruction behind him, but the sight of this man jumping a fence to enter the US and crossing a plain while cattle drop dead all around him exemplifies viscerally racist fantasies of the immigrant as a source of contagion in a completely uncritical fashion. Ironically, a deleted scene from the movie shows the Mexican man killing two border patrol agents, but what Lawrence left in is just as egregious.