I hate you even more now, Richard Armitage [spoilers for Red Dragon],

than I did a few weeks ago. Yeah, I’d actually planned to try the show first, but I ended up ordering the book from my swap club and it’s always easier for me to make myself read a book than watch television. I started reading it and had just decided as I started chapter 12 that it had nothing for me in it. I didn’t care for the violence, or the prose style; the sexism was annoying; and I found Will Graham as a main character basically uninteresting. He has almost no inside. James Lee Burke does this kind of damaged protagonist so much better, with just as much violence but so much more atmosphere. Lecter, too, I found a flat, unintriguing villain (not the horrifying spectre I remembered from the Jodie Foster film). I found myself pondering how much that was possible for criminals in the 70s has been obliterated by the tech revolution and the surveillance boom since 9/11. Mailing letters anonymously? Pay phones? Personal ads in papers? I was actually feeling a bit relieved. I don’t even have to risk being angry or out of equilibrium about this frivolity.

Why had I been so worried? My own struggles around this were starting to bore me.

Then I hit chapter 13 and the letter about Becoming and the signature Avid Fan. OK, that’s interesting, I thought I’d keep reading. So was the thing about the nose print and the weird wordplay coincidences around the Chinese Mahjjong character. I read a bit further, though, and I found myself unsurprised by something Harris apparently wanted to slap us in the gut with: that Graham, too, has murderous impulses. I found the circumstances of Dolarhyde’s childhood both not entirely credible and just as I had feared: blame the (evil) women. When the stuff with Reba started, I also found that plotline not entirely successful. A blind woman invites someone she hardly knows from work to her apartment? Unlikely. After one date she goes to his house and sleeps with him? In a male author’s dreams. Sex is going to save him? One good fuck? Sigh. If only that were remotely credible. I know that the demands of genre novel writing give rise this kind of thing, but I wasn’t enjoying the story any more than I had been a hundred pages earlier. I was ready to quit, again.

And then, nothing to read in my car, so I pulled the novel out again to have something to read, and hit chapter 37. The Red Dragon’s extensive, punishing conversation with Francis Dolarhyde and Dolarhyde’s reaction to it.

Sock in the gut.

(The end of the novel is silly.)

I have to see Richard Armitage play that scene.

This crazy synchronicity, the kind of thing I always believed was coincidence. Here I am fighting with myself to write, to make myself free of all of the beliefs that hamper me, just when Richard Armitage picks a role with the possibility of playing chapter 37.

I’ going to have to be dragged kicking and screaming all the way, and this might be some of the harder writing I have ever done, but I have to see how Richard Armitage will play that scene.

~ by Servetus on February 17, 2015.