Happy Birthday Charlie Dickens

It's Charles Dickens' Day today, 200 years since the date of his birth, and to celebrate we should all be clinking tankards of foaming ale in smoky hostelries, re-reading Oliver Twist and embarking on improbable romps around Southwark. Sadly, it's a bloody Tuesday and there's no time for Victorian jackanapes. Instead I've had an extra helping of homemade gruel for lunch as a small tribute to one of my favourite writers.

Of course, back in the times when most words had at least one unnecessary 'e' at the end, 'Dickens Day' was a monthly occasion. The great man was published in serial form, which made his work alive in a way we can barely conceive of; like DC and Marvel merged into one and enrolled into Mensa. Avid readers would fight their way through the bustling streets of foggy London, through the fug of burning braziers, crowds of soot-blackened urchins and other Victorian cliches I've picked up from BBC costume dramas, to buy the latest instalment of the great man's work.

They probably trudged a little more wearily to collect the final chunks of Hard Times* than, say, Pip's marshland terrors in Great Expectations or the rollicking climax to David Copperfield, but you-pays-your-ha'penny and all that. These days, comic-book fans can surely relate to the thrill of anticipation, the expectation of new twists and turns awaiting them, even if Dickens' superheroes were mostly portly solicitors whose superpowers involved eating enormous amounts of cheese.

Great Expectations (1946)

I loved Google's tribute to him today which assembles some of his most famous creations. A mutton-chopped Avengers.


Look, there's Tiny Tim, Scrooge and Professor Chuzzlebuster! Chestnuts for all! Happy birthday, sir.

* Unlike David Copperfield, Great Expectations and Oliver Twist, Hard Times was actually published weekly. Dickens' distributed it through his own Household Words mag, a kind of Guardian without the snark, between April and August 1854.

Birdsong, BBC 1

Great art can take time to germinate, which is why after I watched Terrence Malick’s The Tree Of Life, I decided not to make up my mind for several moons. All those dinosaurs and lens flares and Brad Pitt hissy fits and is-it-real-or-is-it-all-a-dream beachscapes will slowly solidify into an opinion over the next bajillion years, probably somewhere behind my frontal lobe where the mind larva bubbles and farts like that 20 minutes of BBC creation opus that appeared in the middle of it all. Until then I’m keeping schtum, mostly because I genuinely can’t make up my mind about it. It’s beautiful to look at, but also as ephemeral as it is profound, and what Sean Penn is doing in it, even he couldn’t say – and he tried more than once. I write this all as a man who puts Malick’s films into two categories: masterpieces and almost-masterpieces. Even The New World, which is essentially 135 minutes of fort building and corn grinding.

What’s frustrating, though, is Malick’s pervasive, if inadvertent, influence on other filmmakers. Take Birdsong. Like the millions of people who read and loved the book, I had an image of the story in my mind. Suffice to say, it wasn’t anything like the three hours of sub-Malick fluff we settled down to this month. Obviously it’s not a director’s job to join the dots on other people’s visions, but I firmly believe that what happened in my mind’s eye would have made much better telly. At no point in my imagination did anyone stare longingly into the distance like they'd just spotted an old school chum’s face in a cloud, or grimace wistfully at the thought of missing tuck their lost love (grimacing wistfully is hard to do unless you’re Eddie Redmayne, which luckily Eddie Redmayne is). Plus, in my head, the war bits were good – especially the tunnelling – and the romance didn’t move with the speed of a wheezing snail. Only Jack Firebrace, played by the excellent Joseph Mawle, lived up to expectations.

Left to right: the underground one; the pouty one

The BBC's adaptation - long-awaited - felt like a good example of that ‘art’ thing leading filmmakers astray. Sebastian Faulks’s novel was basically a pretty straightforward piece of storytelling and the BBC tried to turn it into high art, like the Thin Red Line in British Army fatigues. The problem is that Malick isn’t interested in narrative and Faulks is, so replacing story with mood left a whole lot of pregnant pauses and not a lot else. The Thin Red Line has Jim Caviezel’s lovelorn GI, Private Witt, in common with Redmayne’s Captain Wraysford – both, after all, are drifting towards violent death with their minds on the past - but he's only a fragment of the picture Malick is painting. Three hours of Jim Caviezel moping about writing love letters and even the Japanese would have thrown themselves into the sea. But Wraysford is Birdsong and after three hours watching Redmayne staring meaningfully at Clémence Poésy I had much the same urge.

The Menin Road, Paul Nash

As an aside, and this is probably just me, but the impressionistic depiction of the trenches grated a bit too. I’d always thought of it as an expressionist’s war - the jagged lines of Otto Dix and Paul Nash (above), the staccato alliteration of Wilfred Owen, or the martial drumbeat of Lewis Milestone’s All Quiet On The Western Front and Stanley Kubrick’s Paths Of Glory - not this soft-focused, pastel-coloured, war-by-Laura Ashley vision of a hell where you have to take your shoes off first.