September Roundup

Tomorrow is the last day of September, and it’s been a great month for books, film and TV. Here’s what I’ve been reading, listening to and watching, for those of you who might be looking for a recommendation or two.

Love, Rosie x

Reading 

Prima Facie (book & NT Livestream) by Suzie Miller

This is the story of a young and brilliant barrister, Tess, who devotion to her career in criminal defence law is thrown into jeopardy when she becomes the victim of a sexual assault. Both the book, which is a novelisation of the play, and the original play are expertly constructed, brilliantly performed (Jodie Comer plays the role of Tess in the theatre production and also reads the audiobook) and entirely chilling. This story hinges on the impossibility of establishing ‘facts’ or legal truths in the aftermath of assault, and the gulf between what can be established as legal truth and the realities that are the lived experience of so many abuse survivors. The brilliance of the text, and Comer’s performance, lies in the devastating internal conflict by which Tess finds herself entrapped. Highly recommend.

We The Animals by Justin Torres 

This is a fantastic novel by American writer Justin Torres, about three brothers of Puerto Rican and white parentage growing up in rural upstate New York in the 1980s. We The Animals is short and perfectly formed of a series of vignettes, and vivid, economic characterisation. The three brothers, of which the narrator is the youngest, mimic and mock the complex and often violent dynamic between their parents, veering between expressions of love and violence. From the turmoil of these dynamics, there emerges the narrator’s growing sense of difference between him and the rest of his family, and as he begins to find expression for his desires and sexuality, a deep rift emerges. Taut and beautifully wrought.

Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead

A well-researched, brilliantly written historical novel that tells the story of Cora, a young woman born into slavery on a plantation in Georgia, who embarks upon a daring escape and begins her journey north via the network of tunnels, the Underground Railroad, which is managed by free and enslaved black people and white abolitionists. Cora is pursued by Ridgeway, the main villain of the novel, who is fixated upon returning her to Georgia. Even in the pockets of freedom she finds, Ridgeway’s shadow looms and Cora evades it: a symbol of the myriad violences that can impinge the liberty of an entire people, but also the myriad ways in which freedom can be realised. A brilliant and engrossing novel.

Surprise, Kill, Vanish by Annie Jacobsen

This is my one non-fiction read of September: a history of the birth of the CIA, and its covert operations via its secrete paramilitary units around the world from the plot to assassinate Hitler, the Vietnam War, to Cuba and the Middle East. An absolutely fascinating book documenting the tentacular reach of the American secret services, their sustained interferences in the workings of nations around the globe, the chaos created, and the fascinating conflicts between the centres of power internal to America. Highly recommend.

Watching 

Look Back In Anger, Almeida Theatre, Islington

This play was written by John Osborne in the 1950s and is an entirely absorbing and highly confronting story of an abusive marriage, based closely on the playwright’s own relationship with his first wife, Pamela Lane. This Almeida production is directed by my wonderful and very talented friend, Atri Banerjee, and is a brilliant and clear-eyed realisation of a script that looks directly into one of the most difficult questions humans face and have always faced: why do we love people who hurt us? Jimmy, the play’s male protagonist, is charismatic and intelligent, funny and more than a little cruel. The energy he brings to the stage is both animating and confronting. He has the quickest comebacks, the most energy, and a deeply embittered misogyny that is both pitiable and repulsive. His wife, Alison, is paralysed by the unpredictability of his oscillations: between affection and violence that is mostly verbal, but which edges always towards physical. What I loved about this production was its ability to hold both Jimmy’s charisma and his monstrosity in such a confined theatrical and emotional space: a rare feat given the polarity with which society likes to either pedestalise or demonise its men. At the centre of this play a literal and symbolic pit, standing for the intractability of the entanglement between Jimmy and Alison, into which the people around them are drawn and from which they cannot excavate themselves. Fantastic and chilling, all at once. The play is running through to the 23rd November, and it’s one I highly recommend you go and see.

Supacell, Netflix

This show came out in July, and is the story of six young black people living in South London, who discover that they have superpowers born of Supacell, a mutation of Sickle Cell Disease. Supacell is brilliantly plotted, performed, and realized, is more than a little stressful, and I would say is unfortunately relatively rare for a piece of British television in being incredibly well written. It’s a familiar story — ordinary people discovering they have superpowers — but it is strikingly original simply because the characters feel so real and the plot is so slick and well-paced. I loved this show and am already waiting for season 2.  

Blink Twice, Theatrical Release

Now, I did watch the trailer for this film before going to see it but I don’t think I paid enough attention because I wasn’t quite prepared for what happened. Trigger and spoiler warning, this film contained incredibly harrowing depictions of sexual violence. That being said, I thought it was a brilliant and original interrogation of the dynamics between desire, money and violence. The film starts as something like a heightened White Lotus and becomes something else — something much, much darker. Naomi Ackie is superb in her oscillations between naive and rageful, from playful and besotted to fearsomely vengeful. I’m also a huge fan of Channing Tatum’s willingness to diversify from type, and I absolutely loved his performance, boyish in one turn, terrifying in the next. Not one to watch if you are feeling anything less than very emotionally robust, but excellent.

Emily in Paris (Season 4), Netflix

Like burying your face in a meringue. I don’t know if I’m watching a series of disconnected luxury adverts or swiping TikTok, such is the incoherence of the plotting of this show. And yet, Season 4 is here, and so am I. Emily is just being Emily and we have to love her for it: there is something so incredibly comforting about watching a character act entirely illogically and embroil herself in disaster after disaster, and to still find that everything works out for her so incredibly well. Superb.

Slow Horses (Season 4), Apple TV

If you haven’t watched the first three seasons of Slow Horses, I promise you it’s worth the 30 day Apple TV trial. Slow Horses is a darkly comic spy drama, set in the fictional Slough House in contemporary East London, an administrative purgatory for washed-up members of MI5 headed by the grotesque and brilliant Jackson Lamb, played by the even more brilliant Gary Oldman. Season 4 begins with a familiar set-up, a terrorist attack in London, duplicitous back-room dealings and double-crosses by Kristin Scott Thomas’s head of MI5, Diana Taverner, and the recklessness of the show’s sometimes idiotic and sometimes ingenious hero, River Cartwright, played by Jack Lowden. There’s a good dose of escapism, comedy and always an incredibly absorbing plot.

Listening

The Coming Storm, BBC Radio 4

This podcast, hosted by BBC journalist Gabriel Gatehouse, aired its first season 2021, not long after supporters of Donald Trump stormed the Capitol. The first season takes a deep dive into how the January 6 attacks were fuelled by the QAnon conspiracy theory. In the show’s second season, Gatehouse goes even further back in time, in a fascinating dive into the genealogy of conspiracy theory in America, which should not be dismissed as the esoteric beliefs of a small portion of the population but are very genuinely the deeply held convictions of millions of people in America alone. Fascinating and terrifying.