Armitage as vampire?

A much slower day here today, the first day everyone was home together; we’re all still feeling each other out about how this arrangement is going to work and where our personal boundaries are, and of course, as I keep saying to my parents, the first ten days are supposed to be vacation!

To that end (relaxation) I’m reading A Discovery of Witches by Deborah Harkness. To some extent because it’s supposed to be the great summer blockbuster, to some extent because she spoke on my former campus in the spring, to some extent because she’s a history professor and there’s a lot of chat about how to communicate about history with broader audiences or whether this sort of thing is one thing that history professors can / should do, to some extent because I wonder whether what I should do is write novels.

Well, what I shouldn’t do is write novels like this one. I mean, there’s nothing wrong with it, but I fear it’s what happens when a history professor writes a historical novel about a history professor. The main character, Diana Bishop, is a history professor doing research at Oxford and also the reluctant heir to the magical heritage of a long line of very powerful witches. Part of me is happy to read, finally, a novel where a manuscript-consulting protagonist is drawn by someone who’s used scholarly and rare book and manuscript libraries and knows the procedure for how things go in them and something about the qualities and construction of old books. Harkness makes Diana excited about old books in themselves both as objects and as receptacles of arcane content, and that’s pleasurable for me as a fellow lover of ancient texts and objects. But on the whole, the novel isn’t that great. The plot is clunky; backstory gets inserted “just in time” in order to make the plot make sense; she picks and chooses arbitrarily about which pieces of vampire lore she’ll accept and which she’ll ignore; and perhaps, worst of all, the protagonist is very clearly a Mary Sue. You get the feeling that this book is intended as the first entry in a Harry Potter series for adults, but it offers nothing near the sophistication or artistry of those works. The prose is competent, workmanlike, and clear — not unlike the writing style we teach our graduate students to emulate — but never magical or captivating. Frankly, one expects more for $28.95, even in our degraded age.

[At right: Robert Pattinson as Edward Cullen. Yawn.]

BUT. There’s one thing that’s really entrancing about this novel, and it’s something that surprised me: the depiction of the male protagonist who is (I yawned when this emerged as a plot element) a vampire.

Now, Servetus is not interested in vampires. She forced herself to read the first two Twilight novels and see the first film out of a feeling that she needed to try to stay au courant with the popular culture her students were consuming. She was horrified by the possibility that what teenage girls these days desperately want is simply to wait around in various states of ecstasy, tension, or boredom until they get bitten by difficult guys who aren’t all that into them for the first several hundred pages. She found Edward Pattinson bland and uninteresting and was much more interested in both Jacob Black and Taylor Lautner. But she’s never read any Anne Rice, beyond her erotica (make of that what you will), and can’t remember ever having been interested in any other novelistic depictions of vampires or having seen any other vampire films. She’s even mentioned that Armitage as a vampire would challenge even her rather latitudinarian views on what he should be doing with his career (summary: whatever he wants).

Armitage as vampire: first kill? Actually, Lucas North (Richard Armitage) reels, blood-spattered, from Marlin’s suicide in Spooks 7.3. Source: Richard Armitage Central Gallery

Despite my lack of interest in vampires and vampire literature, Harkness’s vampire, Matthew Clairmont, is really seductive, and I found myself repeatedly reading Clairmont as if Richard Armitage were playing him. It made me think of Anne Rice’s statements that she would be interested in having Richard Armitage play Louis or Lestat (or, which I didn’t realize at the time: Jesus. I had thoughts like that early on that bugged me a bit). One interesting thing about vampires in Harkness’s novel is that their glance causes witches to become cold, so that every time Matthew looks at Diana, she has the feeling of snowflakes falling on her. These photos of Lucas that make him simultaneous appear angelic and frozen fit really well with that image, like this publicity still:

Richard Armitage as Lucas North in series 7 of Spooks. Promo photo drawn from events of episode 3. Source: RichardArmitageNet.com

He’s so finely drawn and pristine, so pale of cast, and he puts together his lips and blinks his eyes so gently, in an almost otherworldly fashion. You think you could almost look through his skin and see his cold veins pulsing.

But I think the main thing I got from Harkness’s book was the vampire as the creature of desire. Matthew wants Diana very, very badly. This fits in to some extent with Skully‘s theory about one reason for our love of Armitage, his ability to portray desire. I want to add to that slightly, with respect to the vampire theme, because it seems to me that one thing that unites the few vampires I’m familiar with (in this case, both Edward Cullen and Matthew Clairmont) that goes beyond their desire is their conflict over their desire. The “modern vampire” (which Angie has John Porter make fun of in an amusing chapter of “Truce”) has ethics and doesn’t give in to his desire to feed on human blood every time it occurs to him, and this ability to show us desire under control is an important trick in Armitage’s oeuvre as well.

Mr. Thornton (Lucas North) encounters Margaret (Daniela Denby-Ashe) at the Thorntons’ dinner party in episode 2 of North & South. Source: Richard Armitage Central Gallery

It’s that capacity of his to say “I want you so very much, and I am holding back with every fibre of my being except my eyes” in his acting that fits so well with these modern vampires. Armitage has even expressed himself as finding this task not so difficult: “you look at the person, think of them in the most desirable way you can and then suppress the desire to do anything about it. There are many ways to smoulder. You can smoulder with your back.” But I think the point is not solely the fact of the desire, but rather the way that Armitage as actor puts the desire in the context of the role. He’s not simply panting for love — in every role where desire is an element, it gets a slightly different read from him and a slightly different series of boundaries that make it unrealizable.

Guy of Gisborne (Richard Armitage), who’s always simultaneously driven and humiliated by his desire for Marian, after she agrees, reluctantly, to attend the fair with him in Robin Hood 1.5. Source: RichardArmitageNet.com

So maybe I can live with Armitage as vampire, should that eventuality ever eventuate. Perhaps I should send Deborah Harkness — who has a poll on her website about who should play Matthew if there’s ever a film of this book — some Armitage DVDs. Anonymously, of course, since that would break my basic rule about being willing to go wherever Armitage goes in his career, role-wise.

[ETA: Here’s @Rob’s post on the topic at the Richard Armitage Fan Blog. Sorry I forgot this, @Rob. Here’s Maria Grazia’s post on the topic at her blog; I’m sure I didn’t read this because I automatically discounted the vampire theme. My apologies, MG.]

~ by Servetus on June 26, 2011.