One of my current broken-record criticisms of the Russell T Davies Doctor Who is that not enough time is taken. Everything is rushing around, and everything is tidied up nicely, often implausibly, inside the hour. What it needs, according to me, is more episodes. Re-viewing some of the old Tom Baker stuff (now there's a guy who's genuinely bonkers) there are some great stories developed over four or six episodes. Time is taken to develop ideas and characters, and, crucially for science-fiction, time is taken to think about what's going on.
From the pants that was Now: Zero, The Sound-Sweep is a five-parter which does precisely this. It charts the relationship between a mute who is employed to hoover up sounds and a has-been opera singer who hasn't worked since the invention of ultra-sonic music. Once again we have an entire world that is fantastic, coherent and thought-provoking, created not by paragraphs of scene-setting, but by actions and interactions of the characters. We are shown how this world works, rather than being told.
There is a lot going on here. Firstly, the effect that our environment has on us is a recurring theme in JGB's work. In almost everything I've read of his, much of the weird behaviour stems from living in holiday villas, or near Heathrow, or next to a shopping centre, or in a block of flats. In The Sound-Sweep is the sheer levels of noise that exist in our day to day lives that has the most profound effects on people, particularly as the sounds linger in walls, floors and furniture, repeating, haunting people until a janitorial figure comes along and hoovers them up for you. Although the bulk of the story hinges on the possibilities of blackmail using the echoes of past conversations, what struck me was something else. This is a story about noise pollution.
I can't help but think that I only noticed this because JGB left enough space between the chapters for me to figure it out.
No comments:
Post a Comment