I should hate it... but this icy horror story has me hooked
The Terror BBC2, Wednesday McDonald & Dodds ITV, Sunday
Friends, where are we this week with our television? The second episode of Bloodlands had THAT ending. Unforgotten’s latest cold case is warming up deliciously (this is the show I most look forward to all week). Gregg Wallace has taken to sporting a pink waistcoat for the new series of MasterChef, which should, surely, have come with a trigger warning. (I am not of a nervous disposition but even I was: ‘Whoa. I should have been told.’) Elsewhere, potters were pottering, landscape artists were landscape art-ing, vets were vetting, The Repair Shop was repairing, McDonald & Dodds returned for yet more silliness (see below) and there was The Terror. The like of which I have never seen before.
The Terror, on paper, sounds like everything I would hate. Masculine derring-do. Horror tropes. Thanks, but no thanks. But then I read that it stars Jared Harris and Ciarán Hinds, so that was two reasons to watch, right there, and Tobias Menzies, so that was a third, and if you stick with it, Greta Scacchi turns up, albeit briefly in flashbacks, which is a fourth. This is masculine derring-do, and this is horror, but it all comes wrapped in top- notch prestige drama and that, I discovered, I can take.
It is loosely based on true events. In the mid-1800s two British ships undertook an ambitious voyage to the Arctic to find the Northwest Passage. The ships and crews never returned. Exactly what happened was a mystery, but in his 2007 novel, Dan Simmons created a fictionalised account of what befell the men of HMS Erebus and HMS Terror, and that book became this series. Erebus, by the way, is from the Greek and means ‘ personification of darkness’, while Terror means, well, terror. You do wonder if nominative determinism also applies to ships. Perhaps if they’d been called HMS Daffodil and HMS Puppy, there’d have been a sunnier outcome, but we’ll never know.
It is ten parts and opened with a double episode. You will be confused at first as both ships are populated by many miserablelooking men talking about ice – that miserable man talking about ice, is he the doctor? Or the cook? But bear with, bear with, as Miranda Hart would say, as they do become distinguishable.
The two main characters are clear from the off and they are Captain John Franklin (Hinds), who is head of the expedition and helms Erebus, and Captain Francis Crozier (Harris), who helms Terror.
Franklin is an optimist and God- loving while Crozier, not so much. Crozier is a weary boozehound but smart. This could simply be a tremendous character study of a man who is out of his depth and doesn’t know it (Franklin), and the other man (Crozier) who does. There’s also the third-in-command (Menzies), who possibly shares Crozier’s contempt. Not that any of this tension is spelled out. It is a slow, slow burn.
The production values are first-class. The ships creak and list and offer a real sense of claustrophobia. The sea, with its sheets of ice, looks like a terrifying skin disease. When the Erebus breaks a propeller, Franklin insists on forging ahead despite Crozier’s misgivings. Big mistake. As we left it at the end of episode two both ships are stuck in the ice, with whiteness as far as the eye can see. And is there something out there? Is it the bear we think it is? This is saturated in dread, and while ten parts seems rather long, I’m determined to find out where the ships get to. Or don’t.
The mismatched cops show McDonald & Dodds stars Jason Watkins as overly fussy, anorak-wearing Dodds and Tala Gouveia as his eye-rolling boss, McDonald. It’s set in Bath and their case, this week, involved a group of 1980s icons – played by Martin Kemp, Patsy Kensit, Rupert Graves and, good grief, Cathy Tyson – who take a trip in a hot-air balloon (laughable CGI), but when they return it’s discovered that the fifth person with them isn’t there. There’s also an air-accident investigator played by Rob Brydon, so you can’t say everything wasn’t thrown at this, cast-wise.
I have heard it described as ‘likeable’ and ‘soothing’ and ‘perfect Sunday evening fare’, but much as I strain to accept and enjoy it for what it is, and I know exactly what it is, I can not. It’s so formulaic it’s deadening. And at two hours a pop, it has the same running time as, say, Citizen Kane, although there the similarity does end. As for the killer’s motive, it was so wildly ridiculous and implausible, I felt deadened by that too – what is the point of investing if there’s no attempt to be credible? – plus, throughout I kept wanting to shout: ‘ There are easier ways to get on the housing ladder, you know!’
It’s so annoying I am the opposite of soothed. I am unsoothed, you could say. If you love it, tell me why and I’ll try once more to understand. But as it stands, it just made me want to get back to those ships, as awful as they are.
About halfway through Kazuo Ishiguro’s new novel, which is set in the near future, I happened to tune in to the radio news.
‘People will soon be allowed to meet one other person outside,’ announced the newscaster.
Had I heard such a thing 12 months ago, I would have automatically assumed I was listening to a bit of science fiction. But nowadays the world of science fiction seems commonplace, perhaps even slightly old-fashioned.
Again, in his entertaining new book about dogs, which I reviewed a few weeks ago, Simon Garfield told the story of Barbra Streisand and her pet dog, Sammie, a Coton de Tulear. Though Sammie died some time ago, in a sense she lives on, as Ms Streisand paid to have her cloned in a laboratory in Texas called ViaGen Pets (‘America’s Pet Cloning Experts’).
‘It was easier to let Sammie go if I knew I could keep some part of her alive,’ she explained to readers of the New York Times.
Klara And The Sun was written before the emergence of coronavirus. This means that though it is largely concerned with a brave new world of robots and artificial intelligence, it still has a rather creaky, reassuring, old-fashioned feel to it, like a work of science fiction from the 1950s.
It begins in a department store (remember them?) on the main street of an unnamed American city. ‘When we were new, Rosa and I were mid-store, on the magazines table side, and could see through more than half of the window,’ runs the first sentence. It soon emerges that the narrator is a robot called Klara, who looks and sounds almost exactly like a human being.
Klara’s language is flat, basic, pedantic and ever-so-slightly peculiar. This is true of all Ishiguro’s narrators, regardless of whether they are set in the future or the past. Ishiguro’s novels are all composed in what could be described as instruction manual prose. His narrators tend to be plodding, colourless types, struggling to adapt to a world in which they feel out-of-kilter.
The first line of his most famous novel, The Remains Of The Day, narrated by the starchy butler, Stevens, goes: ‘It seems increasingly likely that I really will undertake the expedition that has been preoccupying my imagination now for some days.’ Klara and Stevens have a lot in common.
In fact, for all its sci-fi setting, Klara And The Sun carries many echoes of The Remains Of The Day, which itself carried many echoes of its beautiful predecessor, An Artist Of The Floating World. All three are narrated by a devoted servant, who puts all his or her energy into becoming the type of human being most pleasing to their master.
Stevens, the butler in The Remains Of The Day, is forever struggling to learn to ‘banter’ like everybody else. He even prepares little items of banter, ‘ conversation of a lighthearted, humorous sort’, before taking his master his afternoon tea. Stevens is a sort of lonely replicant, out of touch with human emotions. On the very last page of the book, he is still wondering ‘if it is the case that in bantering lies the key to human warmth’.
Klara, the robot, is similarly devoted to learning whatever it takes to make her eventual owner happy. Standing in the window of the department store, she looks out on the street, carefully observing t he peculiar ways of all the passing humans. She also notices other robots – called AFs, or Artificial Friends – avoiding her glances. She wonders why they behave so oddly towards her, but later thinks: ‘ They were afraid because we were new models, and they feared that before long their children would decide it was time to have them thrown away, to be replaced by AFs like us.’ A teenage girl called Josie, on a shopping trip with her mother, catches sight of Klara, and likes what she sees. Josie describes Klara as ‘ really cute, and really smart… short hair, quite dark… and she had the kindest eyes and she was so smart’. When Josie is elsewhere, her mother puts Klara through a swift audition: can she replicate Josie’s voice, and Josie’s walk? Klara has been created to remember everything she sees, so she passes the audition with flying colours.
Just as Klara must devote a lot of energy to learning about humans, so the reader of Klara And The Sun has to put a good deal of effort into understanding the whys and wherefores of Ishiguro’s strange new world.
Like the world of his 2005 novel, Never Let Me Go, it is an odd mix of the familiar and the peculiar, the old and the new. People still drive cars, and lorries still cause pollution. At home and in the street, people are still hooked on smartphones, though they are here called ‘oblongs’.
Yet Ishiguro’s created world is also packed with new practices and expressions that the reader has to comprehend as though through thick fog. It is quite some time, for instance, before you discover that AF stands for Artificial Friend, and other aspects of everyday life remain puzzling for much longer. What is the RPO Building? Why is Klara so obsessed by the Sun, and why does she speak to it as though it can hear? What is meant by one
teenager being ‘lifted’ and another being ‘not lifted’? I’d guess that science fiction buffs would be well-equipped to work out what’s what, and would take pleasure in puzzling it all out, but throughout the book I found myself fretting that I was missing something essential, or worrying that I still wasn’t sure what on earth this or that character was on about.
By the end, I felt that some of these puzzles were needlessly obscure, and might have been explained in simple language much earlier on. It all means that the novel is a lot more heavy-going than it need be.
Like many films and books involving robots – from Ian McEwan’s recent Machines Like Me to films such as A.I.: Artificial Intelligence, Ex Machina and Blade Runner – at its heart lies the ancient question of whether humans have souls. Is there, in other words, something at the heart of being human that makes each of us absolutely individual? Or are we all simply a collection of atoms and molecules that may one day be reproduced with complete accuracy?
If a robot can be programmed to feel empathy, should it still be called a robot? The great computer scientist Alan Turing believed that if the time comes when we are unable to tell the difference between the behaviour of a machine and a person, then that is the moment we must confer humanity on the machine.
At its centre, Klara And The Sun tackles these fascinating points in an original way. It emerges that Klara’s teenage owner, Josie, has some nameless ailment, and may soon die. Josie’s mother wants to convert Klara into an exact replicant of Josie, believing that, by doing so, Josie will live for ever.
But Josie’s father is more sceptical. ‘Do you believe in the human heart?’ he asks Klara. ‘I don’t mean simply the organ, obviously. I’m speaking in the poetic sense. The human heart. Do you think there is such a thing? Something that makes each of us special and individual? And if we just suppose that there is. Then don’t you think, in order to truly learn Josie, you’d have to learn not just her mannerisms but what’s deeply inside her? Wouldn’t you have to learn her heart?’
The problem with Klara And The Sun is that, for all its ingenuity, it is a bit of a plod. There is little characterisation, and they all speak in remarkably similar voices: you might almost say that, whether they are humans or Artificial Friends, they all sound like robots, created by Kazuo Ishiguro. In a recent interview, he revealed that he originally intended this as a children’s book, until his daughter told him that any child would be traumatised. But there are still moments when its simplistic origins poke through. Indeed, when Klara said ‘I could tell that the Sun was smiling towards me kindly as he went down for his rest’, I found myself coming over all queasy, and wondering if my wiring had gone awry, and I had accidentally tuned in to the Teletubbies.