Essie Davis: Chameleon, Shapeshifter

Two completely different characters; one astounding actor

For the last few years, I’ve known Essie Davis only as the star of Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries. Based on a series of novels by Kerry Greenwood, the Australian-produced show is broadcast here in the US on a variety of PBS stations. (For cord cutters, it’s also available through Acorn Media.)

I think the title is a bit cutesy and the plots are, unsurprisingly, often routine. But Miss Fisher is great to look at, sumptuously draped and furnished in 1920s dress and décor. It takes place mostly in the upper strata of Melbourne society, where “g’day mate” is rarely heard. No one plays Aussie Rules Football or cracks open a Foster’s. It’s typical of a well-woven British mystery. Once in a while, I think I might be wandering Midsomer County with Tom Barnaby.

But I know better, primarily because of Ms. Davis as the titular Miss Fisher: Sherlock Holmes as a wealthy flapper, fashion plate, and free-living feminist (or, more accurately for that era, suffragette). Like Mr. Holmes, Miss Fisher is less a character, more an ingenious cobbling of attributes, both representative of her time and highly appealing to ours. Next to her, Mae West looks a dowdy aunt; her detective’s eye make the Melbourne police look blind. And, finally, she’s a dead shot with her gold-plated revolver.

Miss Fisher is not a deep role (even with the traumatic past now mandatory for detective heroes). As any actor who’s played either Holmes orJames Bond can tell you, these parts can be frustrating and boring. They also need to be cast just right.

Miss Fisher gets it right with Essie Davis, a tall angular beauty with a perfect black bob, cheekbones you could ski down and huge panther eyes. She plays Phryne with an elegant strut, always dressed and wound up for adventure.

The show also provides her a well-matched suitor, a rough-barked police inspector played by Nathan Page. Their tense, romantic rapport puts me in mind of Cybill Shepherd and Bruce Willis in Moonlighting, the rom-com mystery series from the 1980s.

My main point here is that Essie Davis is a terrific actress. As in great actress. For witness, I offer not her commendable work as Miss Fisher, but her extraordinary performance in one of the most highly praised films of 2014, The Babadook.

The Babadook is an intense and excellently made horror fable. Here, Ms. Davis plays the polar opposite of Miss Fisher--Amelia Vanek, a widow haunted by the gruesome death of her beloved husband in a traffic accident seven years before—the very night their son, Samuel, was born.

Since then, Amelia has become a ragged derelict sinking in a black sea, surrounded by endless fog. She’s all shaking bones as she stumbles around inside the blue-gray walls of her house, which are disturbingly blank and empty, like an imprisoning sky.

Her relationship with her son is dangerously needy. Together they ride towering waves of love, neglect and abuse. Samuel (well played by Noah Wiseman) is a weird kid, a terribly lonely boy, loud and impulsive, feared and disliked by both friends and family. Together, mother and son become entwined in their moldy isolation as they turn against each other.

One night, for bedtime reading, Samuel brings Amelia a book she doesn’t recall seeing on his shelf: The Babadook, a pop-up featuring a black-clad demon who peeks, waves and rises from its tomb-like pages to the murmured cadence of a creepy nursery rhyme.

This demon, who smells grief like a vampire smells blood, is soon released from its bound pages to slither in their lives, to strike again and again.

The Babadook is beautifully crafted, a disturbing claustrophobic fable about undying grief. Writer-director Jennifer Kent has created a beautifully crafted horror show of atmosphere and style with hardly a drop of onscreen blood. It stands with my favorite horror shows of the 2000s, alongside Session 9, the American version of The Ring and the original The Returned.

Essie Davis ties it all together with her blistering performance as Amelia. Like Julie Harris as Eleanor in 1963’s The Haunting, Davis brings a fragile deer-like quality to Amelia, a woman who wears her nerves on the outside, where they’re plucked upon by the raging ghost of grief.

Loneliness and vulnerability are two of horror’s best and most reliable themes. Amelia is a classic player. Davis plunges to the center of her skull and surfaces with its harrowing contents. She is simply riveting.

It takes guts and talent to portray someone like Amelia with such unbridled feeling. Essie Davis, a major-award winner for other performances, has plenty of both. That she makes Amelia completely unrecognizable from her work as light-footed Phryne Fisher is about the highest compliment I can think of. The way she's going, she could be as big a star as her fellow Tasmanian, Errol Flynn. You can call me a fan.

Copyright 2015 by Thomas Burchfield

(Edited 11/2/15; the actor Nathan Page was accidentally transcribed as "Nathan Hunt.")

Thomas Burchfield’s latest (yet to be published) novel is Butchertown, a ripping, 1920s gangster shoot-‘em-up. He is also the author of the contemporary Dracula novel Dragon's Ark, winner of the IPPY, NIEA, and Halloween Book festival awards for horror in 2012. He’s also author of the original screenplays Whackers and The Uglies (e-book editions only). Published by Ambler House Publishing, those three are available at Amazon in various editions. You can also find his work at Barnes and Noble,  Powell's Books, and Scribed. He also “friends” on Facebook, tweets on Twitter, reads at Goodreads and drinks at various bars around the East Bay. You can also join his e-mail list via tbdeluxe [at] sbcglobal [dot] net. He lives in Northern California with his wife, Elizabeth.

"Appleby's Answer" by Michael Innes

I first learned of Golden Age British mystery writer Michael Innes back in the 1990s, from San Francisco Chronicle columnist and Innes fan, Jon Carroll. Carroll’s enthusiasm for an Innes novel called The Journeying Boy coaxed me to open its paper door.

I got a good kick out of The Journeying Boy, a vim and vigorous chase adventure that roamed through England’s green at a colorful and witty jog before roaring into a ripping action climax involving a plane dive-bombing a boatful of nasty villains.

Some years later, I opened up another Innes mystery and now visit his books annually. He was the fecund author of over 50 mystery novels, plus short stories and numerous mainstream novels written under his real name, John Innes McIntosh (J.I.M.) Stewart.

Born in Edinburgh, Scotland, Innes was educated at Oxford. His books are flavored with brave and rather unfashionable erudition, a genre now called the “donnish detective.” They are impish, arch and witty, sometimes to a fault. (Innes also authored biographies and academic studies of such literary thunderbolts as James Joyce and Thomas Hardy. He also seems to have known J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis.)

His literary legacy carries on circuitously through Colin Dexter’s Inspector Morse novels and the subsequent TV series, all of which are set in Oxford. His prose is stylish, unfolding in long, winding sentences clustered with winking asides. Reading him can take a little patience. But while literary allusions abound, you keep smiling, tittering, chuckling, occasionally guffawing.

Like all super-prolific authors, Innes’s output is checkered: some books are successful (Journeying Boy; A Private View, about the very public theft of a Vermeer painting; Hare Standing Up, about nuclear war); some not (The Bloody Wood, Man from the Sea).

Happily, Appleby’s Answer, (Dodd Mead, 1973) counts as one of his funnier, more entertaining novels.

We board the story on a London-bound train. Miss Priscilla Pringle, a spinsterish and moderately successful “cosy” writer, is on her way to a meeting of the Crooks’ Colloquium (based on the legendary Detection Club, of which Innes was a member). It should be a relaxing, forgettable trip, but for the strange man who shares her compartment, one who turn out to be a most unlikely fan.

Colonel Bulkington is a Colonel Blimp type, a retired soldier of questionable means and evasive manner. He treats Miss Pringle’s mysteries as though they were intended to be instruction manuals. They debate the tenuous relationship between crime fiction and crime fact. As he takes his leave, the colonel suggests the two of them collaborate on a murder mystery.

This strangers-on-a-train episode sparks a strange fever in Miss Pringle. Bulkington may be a trifle mad, but, she thinks, she may be able to turn his lunacy toward her own profit and finally write that elusive breakthrough bestseller. And so she starts her own descent into the swamp of folly.

Miss Pringle tracks the colonel down to the West Country village of Long Canings (“named after an interesting rural pursuit”; the novel steams with such clever double entendres.) She finds him living in a derelict mansion, tutoring a pair of delinquents, and waging a secret war on a wealthy neighbor.

Of course, Miss Pringle finds herself rapidly losing control of the situation as Bulkington ensnares her in his nefarious plot against the vulgarians next door. Clever as she thinks she is, Miss Pringle’s no match for the colonel.

Luckily, retired Scotland Yard man John Appleby, Innes’s constant detective hero, happens on the scene, accompanied by his Watson, his equally able and witty wife, Judith. Appleby sets things aright, snatching Miss Pringle from Bulkington’s evil clutches in a cliff-hanging—and awkwardly contrived—climax concerning a grouchy goat and a deep well.

I wouldn’t call Appleby’s Answer top drawer, but it’s a fun read much of the way. It casts a puckish eye on English country manners and mores. Innes relies more on witty dialogue and plot than descriptive prose. For example, we never get an idea what Appleby looks like—Tall? Short? Thin? Fat? David Niven or John Nettles? “Draw your own Appleby” seems to be the rule here. There’s also some painful and unlikely slapstick involving a horse and an automobile.

Appleby’s Answer shouldn’t be the first Michael Innes novel you read. (Start with The Journeying Boy.)  It may be an “old” book, but the past has its way of enhancing the now. It can even put the new, the shiny, and the shallow to shame.

Copyright 2015 by Thomas Burchfield

Thomas Burchfield’s latest (yet to be published) novel is Butchertown, a ripping, 1920s gangster shoot-‘em-up. He is also the author of the contemporary Dracula novel Dragon's Ark, winner of the IPPY, NIEA, and Halloween Book festival awards for horror in 2012. He’s also author of the original screenplays Whackers and The Uglies (e-book editions only). Published by Ambler House Publishing, those three are available at Amazon in various editions. You can also find his work at Barnes and Noble,  Powell's Books, and Scribed. He also “friends” on Facebook, tweets on Twitter, reads at Goodreads and drinks at various bars around the East Bay. You can also join his e-mail list via tbdeluxe [at] sbcglobal [dot] net. He lives in Northern California with his wife, Elizabeth.

Worlds Within Worlds: "Little, Big" by John Crowley

Little, Big by John Crowley, is like a nesting doll full of paradoxes: a big meditative book about little things hiding big things; a genre novel where nothing much happens on the surface (like in some realistic novels). It’s made up of small gestures with large emotional meanings; a magical-realist fable and a family saga covering generations in small spaces. As it turns inward, its world grows bigger.

Little, Big was first published in 1981 to great acclaim, nominated for numerous awards and winning the World Fantasy Award. It was garnished and draped in laurels and accolades. No less a critic than Harold Bloom included it in his Western Canon, declared it “the best book of its kind since Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass.” A twenty-fifth anniversary illustrated edition is due out soon. I set off into its depths at the urging of one of my dearest Facebook friends.

With some guilt, I’ll admit I failed to fall in love with Little, Big. Is it something with me? (After all, I’m a man who hated—yes hated—Moby Dick.) It might be. Still, after expending serious effort and making it all the way through this exquisitely written novel, I felt more frustrated than moved. And somewhat glad when it was over.

Little Big is a family saga, a magical realist fable remotely reminiscent of the wonderfully crazy Bellefleur by Joyce Carol Oates, and compared by some to A Hundred Years of Solitude. It starts with the story of Smoky Barnable, a resident of an unnamed city much like New York, who one day sets out on foot from the city into the countryside (resembling New York’s Catskill Mountains) to marry one Daily Alice Drinkwater, a girl he’s met only once.

Smoky is also marrying into Alice’s remarkably eccentric and extended family and, further, marrying into their most unusual world: the gateway to the world of Faeries.

The Drinkwaters live in a fantastical house, called Edgeworth, a mansion amalgamated into several architectural styles including Tudor and Gothic. It was built by the family patriarch on the wonderful idea that within every world exists another world, one that is larger. And as that world passes within, another arrives to take its place. Edgeworth does look different from every angle, both inside and out, its true nature hard to grasp, impossible to define (making it, maybe, a metaphor for life).

The novel covers three generations, with Smoky marrying the one in the middle. The larger overarching story concerns the struggle of the Faeries against their enemies in the upper world, personified by a cartel known as the Noisy Bridge Rod and Gun Club and a charismatic leader known as Russell Eigenblick who somehow becomes President and declares war . . . but it’s unclear against whom.

Meanwhile, Smoky and Alice have three children, including a son Auberon, a tremendously forgiving and patient sort who makes his way back to the City where he moves in with his Uncle George Mouse and falls in madly love with a vibrant Puerto Rican girl named Sylvie. He then loses her, right before becoming a successful writer for a long-running TV soap opera that connects obliquely with the story of his own life, his family, and their world. . . .

If you have trouble grasping on what’s at stake here, come sit by me, friend. Little, Big reads like a realistic domestic novel, with fantastical elements elegantly, carefully woven in alongside the characters’ small detailed gestures and domestic outlook. Even the magic reads like something out of a classic New Yorker story. And like so many realistic novels I’ve read, not much happens. No one, not the tyrant Russell Eigenblick, does much of anything. It’s the interior lives of the characters where the drama happens.

That’s a definite virtue for readers who value that kind of focus. For the rest of us—shallow action fans, like me—Little, Big may seem long and boring, promising a revelation or payoff that it never quite delivers. There seems to be no urgency, no thrill, no suspense. At times, the magic feels buried in detail. It occasionally moved me, but never thrilled me.

If you do manage to finish the book, as I did, it will be due to the simple true fact that John Crowley is a great stylist, a beautiful writer. He reminds me quite a bit of Vladimir Nabokov in the twisting shimmer and gleam of his prose.

But Nabokov also wrote books things happen, even in his most challenging novels. (Pale Fire, for one, contains a grand suspense story among its mysterious trappings). Little, Big, for all its sparkling beauty, failed to set my mind and heart afire.

Copyright 2015 by Thomas Burchfield

Thomas Burchfield’s latest (yet to be published) novel is Butchertown, a ripping, 1920s gangster shoot-‘em-up. He is also the author of the contemporary Dracula novel Dragon's Ark, winner of the IPPY, NIEA, and Halloween Book festival awards for horror in 2012. He’s also author of the original screenplays Whackers and The Uglies (e-book editions only). Published by Ambler House Publishing, those three are available at Amazon in various editions. You can also find his work at Barnes and Noble,  Powell's Books, and Scribed. He also “friends” on Facebook, tweets on Twitter, reads at Goodreads and drinks at various bars around the East Bay. You can also join his e-mail list via tbdeluxe [at] sbcglobal [dot] net. He lives in Northern California with his wife, Elizabeth.