time to review

Over the last eight weeks, I've spent my Thursday evenings glued to the BBC2 drama The Honourable Woman, which came to a captivating end last night. I really enjoyed the show. I enjoyed the complexity of the characters - there were no goodies or baddies here, but rather a full cast of flawed individuals, acting and reacting according to their separate personalities and ideals and ambitions and histories and beliefs. I enjoyed the quantity and variety of female characters in the show - not strong female characters in the unrealistic Hollywood brand but female characters whose strength lies in the depth and versatility and realism of who they are: women who are sometimes weak, who make bad decisions, who are sometimes naive - and sometimes overconfident; women who think and feel; women who sometimes do terrible things or have terrible things done to them and then have to live with the consequences, informing the choices they make thereafter; women who make mistakes; women who make choices; women who do heroic things in impossible situations. It's all good stuff. I enjoyed Stephen Rea's character Hugh Hayden-Hoyle, the nightwatchman spy who slowly regains his sense of purpose through this one last case. I loved Lubna Azabal's character Atika, whose motivations and inner thoughts remained shrouded right till the last, yet whose personality and core beliefs always shone through regardless. I enjoyed that this was a show that required its audience to concentrate and to think about what they were watching, rather than drifting along with only one eye on the telly, as so many of us are wont to do. It isn't perfect - nothing is - but it's a good show, I recommend it.

And while I'm in the pop review mood, I recently finished reading Jo Baker's Longbourn, which on the one hand is Pride and Prejudice from the point of view of the servants, but on the other hand absolutely is not. It's more than that. Pride and Prejudice merely provides the framework for a raw, earthy insight into the lives of the serving class of two centuries ago. In Pride and Prejudice, the servants are practically invisible and the story offers a romantic view of life in the early 1800s, featuring as it does the relative comfort and ease of the gentle classes. In Longbourn the roles are reversed, and all romanticism and idealism is stripped away to reveal the harsh reality of life for the serving class at that time. The Bennets and their friends are mere ghosts around the fringes of the story as their servants take centre stage, working for the family yet entirely removed from the preoccupations and concerns that dominate their thoughts - for the servants have lives and loves and cares and ambitions and dreams and desires and fears and worries all their own. Longbourn is set within the framework of Pride and Prejudice, yet tells an entirely different story - it's an excellent, engrossing, engaging read, and I thoroughly recommend it.