Nobody Move, This Is A Review: MOON by Duncan Jones

Next Monday is the 40th anniversary of the moon landing, making for a timely release date for Moon, a tasty little Phildickian tale of clones, paranoia, and futuristic fear and self-loathing. To wit:

You certainly can’t fault Duncan Jones’ ambition. Moon is only his second feature, and yet Jones has boldly gone where directors such as Kubrick, Tarkovsky, Soderberg and Trumbull have gone before. And as if that wasn’t enough pop-culture baggage to lug around, Jones – aka Zowie Bowie, and the director of the quirkiest sci-fi space oddity for some time – is David Bowie’s son.
  Under pressure? No man has more …
  Actually, Moon unfolds with the easy authority of a director in mid-career. Sam Rockwell plays Sam Bell, a lone astronaut working on a mining station on the dark side of the moon with only a talking computer, Gerty (voiced by Kevin Spacey), for company. Sam works for E-Lunar, a company strip-mining the moon of selenium, a miracle energy source which has recently reversed Earth’s chronic energy dependency. With his three-year contract running out in a matter of weeks, Sam is tired, bored and unkempt, but very much looking forward to going home to Earth to see his wife, Tess (Dominique McElligott), and young daughter, Eve.
  Unfortunately, while checking out a malfunctioning mining vehicle, Sam has a serious accident. The next we see of him, in the base’s infirmary, the previously scruffy miner is clean-shaven and immaculately dressed. Banned from moving outside the base by Gerty, Sam invents an excuse and goes to check the malfunctioning mining vehicle. Inside the vehicle he discovers his unkempt and unconscious but very much alive doppelganger. Is Sam hallucinating? Has he gone insane? Or has he simply – fiendishly – been cloned?
  It may sound perverse to say that a film that so explicitly references some of science-fiction’s most recognisable movies has a freshness and authenticity all of its own, but the movies Moon pays homage to – 2001: A Space Odyssey, Silent Running, Solaris, even Blade Runner – are also thoughtful, introspective pieces that trade on the question that has sustained 2,500 years of philosophy: What is it, exactly, that makes us truly human? As Sam and Sam declare an uneasy truce, despite each thinking he is the original and the other the clone, the screenwriters, Jones and Nathan Parker, use their dilemma to ask a series of profound questions about the nature of humanity, about personality and uniqueness, about the very tools we use to measure who we are.   As is generally the case with the best sci-fi – or speculative fictions, as its devotees prefer – Moon is a fable about contemporaneous alienation, and for the moon-bound Sam, the isolation is literal as well as psychological and emotional. How is he ever likely to extricate himself from his predicament, asks the story, when he has only his mirror-image to turn to for answers? How is it possible to find the strength to live when your life is not even pointless in the face of the heedless cosmos, but a carbon copy of a pointless existence?
  Despite the relatively small budget of £5 million, Jones has created a superb lunar landscape, an utterly believable hinterland that sets the tone for Sam’s isolation with its vast backdrop of the limitless universe. The special effects give proceedings an unexpectedly appropriate other-worldly feel, the exteriors drenched in matt blacks and greys, and gleaming silvers, conveying the sense that Sam has woken up to discover himself not only in a nightmare, but a ghost story too, albeit a haunting that is – as with Kubrick’s The Shining – derived less from the supernatural than the manifestation of a fatally sickening mind.
  It’s not a perfect movie, of course. There are craters in the plot, the largest concerning the fact that Sam ploughs a lone furrow as a lunar miner. If selenium is the miracle energy provider the movie claims it to be, wouldn’t a host of companies on Earth have laid claim to parts of the moon? And even if the E-Lunar company had a monopoly on the source of lunar selenium, it would surely have a small army of Sams at work on the dark side of the moon.
  Caveats aside, Moon is a thoroughly enjoyable and thought-provoking offering. Rockwell turns in an excellent performance, particularly as he’s playing against himself for practically the entire movie. He does get support from Spacey as the lugubrious robot Gerty, who in turn offers some flashes of black humour. Gerty, to all sci-fi fans, is the latest incarnation of Hal, the mission-wrecking computer from 2001. When Gerty helps rather than hinders Sam at a crucial point in the story, Sam is moved to ask why. “Because it’s my job to help you, Sam,” Gerty replies, deadpan, setting off a million dark and knowing chuckles.
  As for Duncan Jones, well, he’s got a black sense of humour too. Rather than have Sam rise each morning to the alarm-clock strains of the more appropriate Space Oddity, or Major Tom, Jones has him wake to (koff) Chesney Hawkes’ The One and Only. ****

Mi Casa, Su Casa: Adrian McKinty

The continuing stooooooory of how the Grand Vizier puts his feet up and lets other writers talk some sense for a change. This week: Adrian McKinty (right) on THE THIEF AND THE DOGS by Naguib Mahfouz.

Less Bark, More Bite: THE THIEF AND THE DOGS

Osama Bin Laden’s latest attack on western culture criticized Danish cartoons, western movies, western books, and freedom of speech, while praising – like tedious undergraduates everywhere – the work of Noam Chomsky and Robert Fisk.
  Lately the west has been fighting back against the Islamists through the writings of Martin Amis, Christopher Hitchens and others who seem to think that nothing good has come out of Araby since they gave us the words for alcohol and tobacco.
  Mystery novelists seldom venture onto this field and it’s not my intent here to add to any of this debate but rather to draw interested readers to the work of Naguib Mahfouz, whose crime novel THE THIEF AND THE DOGS is not only a classic of the genre but is a wonderful example of how west and east, genre fiction and literary fiction, religious writing and secular prose, can all get along famously in one great book.
  Everyone can learn a little from THE THIEF AND THE DOGS and even if you couldn’t care less about the current political debates, the book should still delight as a fast-paced thriller.
  Set in post-revolutionary 1950s Cairo, THE THIEF AND THE DOGS is about master-burglar Said Mahran and the weeks following his release from prison. During this time he attempts to reconcile with his family, to reconnect with his old friends, and eventually to seek revenge on the men who he feels have betrayed him.
  His first day of freedom is a disaster. His daughter Sana doesn’t remember him and his former girlfriend (Sana’s mother) Nabawaiyya has married one of his old confederates, Illish. Mocked by Illish’s friends, Said wanders the boiling, confusing streets of Cairo seething with anger in one of the first of Mahfouz’s extraordinary expressionistic scenes that are strangely reminiscent of Stanley Kubrick’s early New York crime movie KILLER’S KISS (which is set at roughly the same time as Dogs).
  Both Kubrick and Mahfouz (right) are attracted to outsiders, betrayal, sexual dishonesty and conspiracies, and both love plunging their characters deep into the abyss to see if they will survive.
  Said Mahran fails the first of these tests, deciding to take up burglary again but without the gang of associates who used to help him case rich neighborhoods and work as servants inside the mansions of the elite to give him information on money and valuables.   His anarchic unplanned solo burglary attempts are failures and Said narrowly escapes death. He seeks refuge with a Sufi Sheikh, a former friend of his father’s. The Sheikh offers him a bed and sanctuary but Said moves on again, eventually shacking up with a young prostitute called Nur. The story has its own inexorable momentum but its Naguib Mahfouz’s Cairo that is the real eye-opener. Whores, thieves, beggars, whisky-drinking soldiers, corrupt officials – the whole fermenting underbelly of the ancient city laid bare. This is an Islamic culture that we seldom see in the west and it’s completely different from the shady Arab underworld that is given to us in perennially popular novels such as [Paul Bowles’] THE SHELTERING SKY or [Lawrence Durrell’s] Alexandria Quartet. Here the reader is inside the culture peering out, not the reverse, and this position is much more interesting.   Seeking revenge against the whole of “cruel humanity”, Said settles on Rauf Illwan, an old school chum who has become a rich newspaper columnist. If he assassinates “the betrayer” Rauf, Said feels that his life will attain some kind of fame and meaning.
  Nur begs him to abandon his plan and the Sufi Sheikh goes deeper telling him that a dramatic act is not necessary. The Sufis believe that we all have a chance at redemption, right here, right now. All our pain, all our suffering, is the proof that we are alive. Our hurts and our humiliations are what make us human and seeing that is a path to peace and acceptance. Inverting the famous line of the morning call to prayer (“come to the mosque, for prayer is better than sleep”) the Sheikh tells Said that for him sleep is a form of prayer. He should sleep and then wake up and love his life today, right now, for who knows what comes in the tomorrow or even the sweet hereafter.
  Naturally Said rejects all of this and puts everything in place to carry out his assassination plan. Hunted by the newspapers, the police and informers, doors start closing on Said, his allies desert him, and his last refuge becomes a sprawling Cairo cemetery.
  Despite his acclaim, Islamists dislike Naguib Mahfouz and dismiss THE THIEF AND THE DOGS as decadent western fiction (In 1994 one of these Islamist fanatics even tried to kill him). His defence of Salman Rushdie has made Mahfouz suspect in the Arab world and his failure to praise Rushdie as a writer annoyed some in the west. Literary critics prefer Mahfouz’s Nobel Prize-winning Cairo Trilogy to his crime fictions, but it would be a shame if the forces of reaction or counter-reaction kept THE THIEF AND THE DOGS from a wider readership.
  All of us, including Osama Bin Laden and his largely Egyptian followers, would get so much more from Naguib Mahfouz than by any number of tracts by Chomsky, Fisk, Amis or Danish cartoonists. Certainly anyone looking for a terrific crime novel set in Egypt that doesn’t feature Belgian detectives or western lotus eaters could do worse than read Mahfouz’s short masterpiece, THE THIEF AND THE DOGS. – Adrian McKinty

Adrian McKinty is the author of THE BLOOMSDAY DEAD. His latest novel, FIFTY GRAND, will be published by Holt later this year.

This Week We’re Reading … Borderlands and Clean Break

“This really is a stunning debut,” says It’s A Crime of Brian McGilloway’s opening gambit in the Inspector Devlin series. “The writing is excellent and the suspense of the plot is maintained to the end … So strong is the novel, it’s easy to imagine Morse’s Oxford and Rebus’ Edinburgh having Devlin’s Borderlands snapping at their heels.” High praise indeed, but Marcel Berlins over at The Times wasn’t to be outdone. McGilloway as joined the ‘roll of excellence’ in Irish crime fiction that includes Ken Bruen and John Connolly, he assures us: “Brian McGilloway’s command of plot and assurance of language make it difficult to believe that Borderlands is his debut… [He] tells this with style and compassion.” And there’s plenty more here where they came from … Style and compassion weren’t really Lionel White’s forte – prose as brutally blunt as a headbutt was more his thing. It’s difficult these days to dig up a Clean Break review that isn’t wibbling on about Stanley Kubrick’s The Killing, but we’ve managed to dig up a couple. “For unadorned action, suspense, and vigorous storytelling, Lionel White’s novels have seldom been surpassed,” says Bill Crider, while over here they reckon that, “For action-packed thrills, for hard-boiled, slugging adventure, The Killing is a fast-paced crime novel that won’t quit until the exciting photo finish.” The edition to your right is a complete mess inside the covers, the myriad typos and infantile layout suggesting it was photocopied from a first draft, but until they get around to republishing Clean Break, it’ll have to do. Grumble, rhubarb, etc.