Adrian McKinty on English self-loathing and faux Celts
Adrian McKinty pinch-hits for Declan Burke on Crime Always Pays and delivers a ringing defense of the classic English fictional detective. He offers that sophisticated, smart, unruffled figure as a kind of Mulliner's Buck-U-Uppo for a national self-esteem battered by hooliganism, economic recession, colonial guilt and Hugh Grant. It's the sharpest and funniest piece of sociological analysis you will read all day, and you can read it all here.
© Peter Rozovsky 2008
Technorati tags:
Adrian McKinty
© Peter Rozovsky 2008
Technorati tags:
Adrian McKinty
Labels: Adrian McKinty, England, Ireland
posted by Peter Rozovsky at 12:06 AM
10 Comments:
"Irish indeed is the default nationality for uncomfortable Englishmen everywhere."
Pure gold ...
Ihave to admit upon hearing the suggestion one should identify with the older English Detectives, my mind went immediately to Holmes, and then perversely up popped the image of Mrs. Marple----I need to go lay down now----
I'd never imagined Marlowe as 'English' until I read this ... but suddenly a lot of things fell into place. Yon McKinty's a perceptive man. Cheers, Dec
Gjg, I hope you will not be tortured by dreams of John Bull wearing a deerstalker and smoking a pipe, and of Miss Marple sitting on the throne.
Declan, I think in particular of the gentlemanly fashion in which Marlowe drapes a coat across the naked Carmen Sternwood's shoulders in The Big Sleep. Pure English-style courtliness at its finest. He doesn't even leer at her.
Loren, I knew that Americans liked to ape the Irish, or at least to do so one day a year, but I didn't know the English envied them. And the notion of uncomfortable as a national epithet is delicious, isn't it?
Quite. And yet poignant, too. I studied for a couple months in the UK one summer, and one of my (American) professors said the country was quietly becoming one huge museum to good days gone by.
"Uncomfortable" makes me think of the apologetic tone with which a conductor asked for my ticket the first time I rode a double-decker bus in London. It was touching, actually.
Good piece of analysis, but mckinty's missed the boat, its way too late to reform the english. today's yoof dont read books anymore either in school or anywhere else...toby p.
McKinty does write that reading has become almost a cult behavior. Perhaps he would argue, then, that while English yoof might be beyond help, older folks who still read might take some comfort from his prescription. What the hell, at least they can get a laugh out of it.
Post a Comment
<< Home