“Artists are tricky fellows, sir, forever reshaping the world according to some design of their own,” said Strange. “Indeed they are not unlike magicians in that.”
--Susanna Clarke, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Evil; Truthseekers; Bodkin;
and Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, the Book is Better
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| frog at night |
Why to Watch My Show: Evil
My guilty pleasure is watching the series Evil.
Even friends whose tastes usually differ from mine, watch this religiously. The whole series has just concluded and all episodes are available to watch. The series is from Robert and Michelle King, who also made The Good Wife, (I haven’t seen it).
I originally watched a few episodes privately, just in the background while I was doing some household chore. That’s when I try out silly shows my family would not appreciate, I just put them on for company. Then this one left the platform I was watching on, or we canceled that streaming option, and I didn’t see it again.
When I found it again I shared it with my family during prime time viewing, and it became My Show. My grandmother had “her serial”; remember when women would have a soap they preferred and would put it on for company while ironing or something? Evil is “my show”. My comfort viewing.
My multi-generational adult family enjoys Evil with me.
I describe it as cozy paranormal. Cozy exorcism. It reminds me of X Files, probably for the chemistry, and the almost-humorous plots. Other reviewers have likewise referenced the X Files comparison.
We love it because it is ridiculous. The demons are mostly, of course, ridiculous. The evil antagonists are very, very funny. We almost always chuckle out loud, in every episode. All of the actors are perfect individually, and in their chemistry together. The nods and winks of tropes for the audience, in contrast with the deadpan earnestness of the characters, tickle me to death.
Three “assessors” work for the Church investigating various alleged supernatural phenomena, most often to rule out demonic activity.
The Assessors
The team includes two nonbelievers: a petite cute-sexy forensic psychologist, Kristen, and a snarky yet gentle tech scientist, Ben. They partner with David, a smoldering-sexy and sincere priest.
Kristen and family:
Kristen’s husband is usually away running a mountain climbing expedition, and he dabbles in Eastern spiritual practices. She herself was raised Catholic but has firmly rejected faith.
Their four entertaining daughters all always talk simultaneously in a wonderfully chaotic babble, and for some reason attend Catholic school, I suppose because they live in New York where it’s a common private school choice for educational reasons.
I love the Catholic church-adjacent context of the series, the context of so many Americans who left the church but have some fondness for and aggravation with its markers.
Kristen’s mother Sheryl becomes a significant, addictive character, sucked into performing something as a double agent between her role as grandma to Kristen’s kids, and a girlfriend/employee to demons and participant in truly evil practices.
Ben:
Ben, the tech expert, has rejected his family’s Muslim faith. His sister remains devout even while she is a talented scientist, whom he often consults for her superior skills.
David:
David as a novice to the priesthood is fighting to maintain his own faith, among cynical priests and institutional church hierarchy, and the affectionate ridicule of his science-worshiping friends.
A compelling theme is how the three friends accept and love each other even with such core disagreements.
David’s quarters are eventually inhabited by the temptation of a demon in Kristen’s form, exaggeratedly seductive. Kristen faces her own temptations, mutual and otherwise.
So many entertaining characters:
Leland is a wonderfully funny, dorky yet cunning demon in human form.
Dr. Kurt Boggs, a psychiatrist therapist, is such a well-intentioned good man that I root for him even when he succumbs to temptation in practicing dark arts; he just seems so inherently of good will, an innocent.
Sister Andrea portrays the no-nonsense nun heroine, the most gifted vanquisher of evil, condemned by the banal male church hierarchy to clean and launder, keep quiet and get out of the way.
I might have picked Sister Andrea as my favorite character, but I can’t pick just one, they are all my favorites! This is my show!
Action!
Hilariously, Sister Andrea, Kristen and Sheryl, each individually, often confront and sometimes outwit the cabals of corporate or church chauvinism.
The episodes each address a “chapter” of a pop-up book about evil, the kind of “guilty pleasure” kids might like to scare themselves with. Often the supernatural event assessed begins with the daughters’ schoolyard games and legends or internet memes.
Each situation revolves around a fear, like night terrors, dolls, elevators, cops, fire, the IRS, UFOs, sex, parenting, silence, death.
Warning: the material gets a bit spicier with progressive seasons. The first season is pretty tame, with a demon that’s just a little scary; a family with kids could manage it. It’s a grown-up show in subsequent seasons, not as sexually graphic as most streaming shows but some episodes have darker contexts. The scary monsters don’t get worse, those are usually just funny.
A conspiracy plot involving, among other evils, a potential Antichrist baby, plays out over the subsequent seasons.
Who can resist layers of Vatican secret armies, or the mob-like 66 "families" ? Best of all every episode pairs our phobias with some real or almost-real science or human cultural phenomenon.
I join the Evil legions who are sad it's over, for now.
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| church |
Truthseekers, a short paranormal series
This streaming series earned our delighted chuckles over its portrayal of some current cultural phenomena. I know these people!
The big guy in his watch cap, beard and shorts, holds a tech day job involving installation and troubleshooting for WiFi customers of some cable company. His sidegig is paranormal investigator, with detection gear of his own invention, and his own podcast channel.
The online cosplay makeup influencer is an obsessive fan convention devotee. She meticulously creates prize-winning costumes in which to attend an annual con. Though she bravely attempts every year, she phobically fails to muster appearing in person.
The cranky, aging father-in-law, a target of jokes for his comedic senior habits, stubbornly advances his own demise by embracing a fraudster.
A movie fan’s inside joke: Malcolm McDowell plays this aging parent, and the ultimate conflict in the conspiracy plot incorporates nods to his role in A Clockwork Orange.
Bodkin
Bodkin is billed as a comedy and a mystery. True crime podcasters and a transplanted native Irish journalist head to Ireland to investigate a years old cold case disappearance from a Samhain festival, the Celtic foundation for Halloween. Isn’t that enough to make you watch?
[Note: If it matters to you, there is a gratuitous sexual encounter. We fast-forwarded past it. Usually I just turn it off, but I was committed enough to the series to watch the rest!]
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| library magic |
The Book is Better: Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
It is 19th century England. "Magic” is now a distant chapter within England’s glorious history. Current “magicians” are academics, the men who study the history.
However, a very few are discovered, hidden away in a remote country house, or unbeknown even to themselves, or disguised amongst the common charlatans who perform tricks, who do have the ability to practice the old magic.
The government enlists one such magician, Mr Norrell, and an ambitious upstart studying with him, Jonathan Strange, to aid them in prosecuting the Napoleonic war.
In support of his own ambition, Norrell aids an important personage whose new wife is gravely ill. He summons, with distaste, a malicious fairy king to resurrect Lady Pole from death.
As I watched a few episodes on TV, the fairy and his realm seemed too dark and frightening to me, with the intensity of a serial killer, though he had a great look.
The fairy is known as a “gentleman with thistle-down hair”. He wears an odd green. He does awful things to furnish his parties and parades with humans he finds charming.
I didn’t continue the streaming series, too dread-inducing! I was frightened when the bells would ring to announce the intrusion of the fairy. However, the characters were so interesting that I decided to try reading the book, and I love it!
In Susanna Clarke's book, even though the effect of the fairy’s magic is so unsettling and the source of much despair, the fairy himself comes across less as having “evil” intent, and more as a selfish, unrestrained innocent, narcissistic the way I imagine fairies, and as they are commonly portrayed in literature.
For readers who avoid fantasy, or for readers who crave fantasy, this book wasn't really what you may expect. I read it as more literary, more allegory, more like, Pilgrim's Progress or Canterbury Tales? Like these, some chapters read like a digression wherein someone tells a story within the story.
As a reader and writer, I especially loved these themes and devices of the book:
In a Jane Austenesque or Dickensian way, there are so many funny social observations, memeable quotes, by the narrator, or mouthed by characters oblivious to the sense we are making of their words.
The women in the story are the intelligent, practical ones. They are the source of Strange’s ambition, and the objects of the fairy’s desire for them as playthings and ornaments. They are victims of magic. They strike me as captive muses for the men.
The magicians are like mad scientists of our own time, inventing means of using awesome powers in nature to alter the natural world and human relations.
I took the contrast between the academic magicians and the practicing magicians to be a commentary on critics vs. creators.
I similarly read the contrast between Norrell and Strange as commentary on talent vs. training and effort, or maybe between gatekeepers and artists in the wild:
- Mr Norrell assiduously studies his craft for ages;
- he scoops up every book on magic for his own personal library and to prevent other’s access, to maintain his status as hierophant;
- and limits his work to historic rules made by prior masters.
- Jonathan Strange happens upon his natural gifts when casting about for something to do as a profession at his wife’s urging,
- and his inherent talent makes him a greater magician.
Stephen Black, a servant, learns of his past as the nameless son of an enslaved woman. Will he vanquish the thistle-haired gentleman to become a new kind of king, who serves his subjects rather than his own whims?
Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell is a magical work, and the book is better, (though I read that the author was on set in the making of the series). I look forward to reading the author’s second book, Piranesi, said to be very different from this one, and published in 2021. I understand the decades between debut and second novel are due to the author’s illness.
If you read it, do you agree with my understanding?
“It is the task of the Book to bear the words. Which I do. It is the task of the Reader to know what they say.”
Clarke, Susanna. Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell (p. 836). Bloomsbury Publishing: 2004. Kindle Edition.
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