The Buried Giant: some treasure here, but more spadework required

There’s a tendency among many writers of literary fiction to opt for emotional coolness and ironic detachment, as though fearing that any hint of excitement in their storytelling would undermine the serious intent of the work. I don’t know where this notion came from. You can’t see Maugham or Greene or Forster having any truck with it. But the question is not where it started but whether that is the kind of literary writer that Kazuo Ishiguro is.

Adam Mars-Jones seems to think so. In his LRB review of The Buried Giant, he particularly takes Ishiguro to task for throwing away what ought to be a Fairbanks-style set-piece in a burning tower by allowing “nothing as vulgar as direct narration to give it the vitality of something that might be happening in front of our eyes”.

I’m not so sure about that particular scene. It could be that Ishiguro is reaching, not for the drama of the events, but the drama of the telling of the events. In the way he deploys the scene, we’re left in the dark for a while as to the fate that has befallen a major character. It’s how Conrad, say, might have chosen to tell it. The point is, though those events are not told in a way that plays up the excitement of the action itself, they nonetheless have dramatic effect. It works – just not as Mars-Jones or I might have preferred.

But there are other bits of the story that do not work at all, and make me think that Ishiguro either scorns, or is not craftsman enough to manage, the control of the reader’s expectations that is needed for a novelist to hold and enthral.

An example – and from here on beware of spoilers: Wistan and Sir Gawain are both supposedly charged with killing a dragon whose breath is causing people’s memories to slip away. Finally, approaching the dragon’s lair, Sir Gawain reveals that he has actually been protecting it for all these years. The two warriors walk up to the lair, chatting away, and we have plenty of time to see how this has to play out. Wistan and Gawain must fight, and because the book has a good way to go yet and there’d be no story if the dragon isn’t killed, we can see that Wistan will beat Gawain, and then he’ll slay the dragon. Almost sheepishly, Ishiguro then goes through those exact motions, apparently sensing that something he has done has defanged what ought to be a thrilling peripety, but not knowing how to fix it.

Unlike the burning tower, this isn’t a case of a scene that Ishiguro has made to work differently. As he tells it, the scene simply does not work. No story can grip if it fails to make the reader wonder what’s going to happen next. Here’s how he could have fixed it. Wistan and Gawain walk up to the lair. Wistan is still injured from the fight in the tower, Gawain is an old man. We wonder if even together they’ll be able to overcome the dragon. Then, just as they’re about to descend into the crater where the dragon waits, Gawain steps in front of Wistan and admits that he is sworn to protect it. Now that would be a moment of pure anagnorisis to make Aristotle cheer – and the reader would be left reeling. What? Sir Gawain’s on the dragon’s side? He’s about to fight Wistan? What is going to happen now?

See? Told like that we wouldn’t have time to predict the consequences. We’d be in the moment, struggling to draw breath. It would be – gosh – exciting. And it would work.

There are other places where Ishiguro struggles with the storyteller’s craft like it’s a broken deckchair. Fleeing from enemy soldiers through an underground labyrinth, Gawain and his companions come to a portcullis, which they lower – barring their own escape route – simply so that they can discuss (ie tell us about) the hell-hound that is said to dwell in the tunnels. In a movie the hound would at least turn out to be on the same side of the portcullis, though the shock would be soured by knowing the characters had done something dumb just for the sake of getting the plot into its next mooring. As it is, the hound turns up on the other side and we have to go through a lot of tedious mechanics about how they will raise the portcullis while ensuring that the hound doesn’t attack the two old people who are tasked with doing that. Everything plays out exactly as Ishiguro has just had his characters describe it, and then to top it all off we have to go through yet more nuts-n-bolts prose about getting the portcullis up having cut the rope earlier.

This verges on “he crossed the room, putting one foot in front of the other, until he reached the other side,” and it’s surely the job of the editor to point out to the poor dumb author that he has befuddled himself with foolish details and really ought to take a stab at getting the story firing on all cylinders rather than wandering around the side alleys of his narrative in an obsessive-compulsive daze.

Talking of obsessive-compulsive, I feel compelled to dwell on some quibbles. Ishiguro has a curiously imprecise control of authorial viewpoint that may possibly be deliberate, but in light of some of the fumbled set-pieces I’m inclined to think it’s just a failure of craft. For instance, lapsing into a personal narrative voice as he is inclined to do every hundred pages or so, he says, “Many were roundhouses not so far removed from the kind in which some of you, or perhaps your parents, were brought up.” Ah, so I am supposed to be a reader familiar with this world; these are events that occurred just a generation or two back. But not so fast – just a few lines further on he describes “a tall fence of tethered timber poles, their points sharpened like giant pencils” and we’re back in a modern mindset. Why not, “and a duckpond the shape of an iPad,” while you’re at it, Kazuo?

Maybe that skittering viewpoint is deliberate, but how about the sinews from a hacked-off arm being described as “entrails”? A “hollowed-out trunk” – when he means just a hollow trunk. “Comprised of” occurs a couple of times; didn’t this book have an editor? And there are several instances of constructions like, “with my wife and I hanging together on the rope” – these from characters whose grammar is otherwise solid enough.

And then this: the narrator tells us, “This door – it would have been a ‘proper’ door on wooden hinges – ” What? That voice, that “it would have been”, is how I might relate an anecdote. Pyrrhus being hit by the roof tile, for instance; something I know about but have no first-hand knowledge of, so I have to intuit details like, “it would have been a flowerpot-shaped cylindrical tile.” But everything else in The Buried Giant is related as if the narrator is there to see breath steaming on a cold morning, clothing flapping in a high wind. So why that one lapse into a removed viewpoint? If it’s technique rather than carelessness, it’s a technique that fails to have any useful effect.

Tom Holland in The Guardian gives Ishiguro the benefit of the doubt. "The gaps and seams," he says, "[...] are designed to show." But I say, goddamn it, an author should do the bloody work. Nabokov wanted Laura burned, and it was in not greatly more ramshackle a state than The Buried Giant. 

And yet – the book has something. A world in which memory is unreliable, a fantasy told without the pomp-rock bombast that’s typical of the genre, events recombining in oddly shifted permutations as in a dream, a quasi-allegorical exploration of love and loss – those are all interesting ideas. And Ishiguro has moments of great inventiveness that are well-served by his flatly unadorned style, as he talks of the ogres that emerge out of the mist or describes an attack by pixies on a boat caught in reeds. It often reads (and this probably is deliberate) like a translation of a classic saga, in that its brilliantly arresting images are recounted in the voice of an academic whose striving for accuracy sacrifices any of the original’s lyrical power. Fine, that's what Ishiguro set out to do and that, at least, he achieved. But me, I like to luxuriate in the poetry of beautiful language, and I kept thinking that if my accountant rewrote Malory or Beowulf she might end up with something a lot like this.

Look, here's the thing. All this carping is because I can see the outline of something great here. I just wish Ishiguro had chipped away the stone until he found it. Written by somebody like Alan Garner, The Buried Giant would be fabulous. As it is, throughout the book we continually run smack into quagmires of clumsy prose and expository specifics , with the result that it all reads like the extensive notes an author prepares before he or she gets stuck into writing the novel itself. It really is half brilliant and half incompetent – both "fascinating and moving" and yet "aimless and atomized", as Laura Miller described it in Salon - and that alone makes it almost unique among modern novels. Well, I say that, but I have yet to read the rest of Mr Ishiguro’s oeuvre.

If I haven't put you off reading the book (and I hope I haven't) then you might be interested in hearing Kazuo Ishiguro talk about it on this Guardian podcast.

 

Writers, have the courage of your convictions

It strikes me that the problem with a lot of television drama shows is that they seem to be created with the expectation that audiences will only keep half an eye on them while doing other things. Often the scripts are almost tongue-in-cheek, crowbarring in arbitrary plot developments and dei ex machina like sellotape slapped on to a badly wrapped present. It's as though the writers don't expect anybody to believe in their story, so they carry it all off with a big pantomime wink.

It's what I hate about a lot of British TV shows these days. They don't have the confidence to act like they even deserve your full attention. They treat drama like it's light entertainment, with sniggering nods (sorry, intertextual references) to quiz shows and guest-starring comedians or newsreaders instead of actors. And so, naturally, the audience doesn't ever fully engage. They watch it all with the cynical smile that insincerity invites, like a bully smirking at a victim who is resorting to pratfalls and forced jokes to try and ingratiate their way out of a beating.

Yet in the States, where network TV is subjected to the ongoing indignity of countless commercial breaks and messages running in the lower third, the actual craft of drama continues to be treated with proper reverence by the people making the show. You can watch a network drama like Elementary, Monk, Life, Eureka, ER... and it's clear that, despite the medium's contemptuous presentation of their work, everyone involved is willing to do their jobs as though you are giving the show your full attention. Even if three-quarters of the audience are actually tweeting, reading, talking on the phone while the show is on, the creators earn respect like an entertainer at a club who soldiers on professionally through constant heckling. They are doing the work. No faking, no ironic distance. It's obvious that they genuinely care.

If you're a writer or an artist or a musician, whether working in television or novels or comics, integrity is the single most important thing you have. It can be hard to hold onto that integrity if you don't feel like anybody is paying attention, but lash yourself to the mast and see it through - because unaffected love for the work you are doing is the only way to engender love in an audience.

Showrunner of your story, captain of your soul

"Think anybody these days would disregard George RR Martin or JK Rowling on the subject of typeface or cover design? That’s even if they could. Jonny Geller wrote for The Bookseller recently about how Susanna Clarke’s deal for the miniseries of Jonathan Strange and Mister Norrell gives her more control than the original film deal twelve years ago. That’s not a concession, not a sop to the author’s preening ego. It’s a win-win. An author like Ms Clarke, as demiurge of their story universe, sits at the heart of its sun. From there, everything is illuminated. By comparison, anybody else can only know half as much – and most of that will be wrong."

This week I began a regular column in The Bookseller. My first piece (excerpt above) is about the role of the writer as creative champion of a project - whether book, comic, videogame, TV show or movie. (Or radio play, I guess - gimme a break, you know how hard it is being a Renaissance Man these days?) Pop over and take a look. Leave a comment. Debate is good, and remember there are no right answers.

Publishing contracts: three key things to watch for

Some years ago, Jamie Thomson and I were setting up a development company using investment and personnel from the games publisher where we worked. There were three contracts to negotiate (for two games and the start-up itself) each the size and complexity of a government white paper. So every evening after work, Jamie and I would sit with the publisher’s lawyers hammering out the deal point by point. Days of this. Did I curse my lot? Oh yes. ‘I’m a game designer, not a contracts lawyer,’ was the habitual grumble.

Why not use our own lawyers? That’s an expensive way to begin a start-up, since each clause had to be parsed as if it were a safety instruction for the ISS. The main reason, though, is that lawyers can’t do your negotiating for you. It’s like an author with an agent. Don’t you and the agent have congruent goals? Not quite. He or she gets a percentage, but you’re the one who has to live by the contract’s terms. Make sure, therefore, that you’ve scrutinized and agreed every point.

These days you don’t have to be involved in a start-up to need to know your way around a contract. Authors have become savvier now that they have the option to self-publish. About time, too. When I started out in the business, it was common for authors to sign publishing deals that gave no guarantee of print runs or marketing spend. It still is, actually. Quite recently a friend of mine had a novel published by one of the Big Five that I have yet to see in any bookstore or reviewed in any magazine or paper. They might as well have put concrete overshoes on his manuscript and tossed it in the East River.

It doesn’t have to be this way. There are three things that an author should look out for when negotiating with a publisher. Attend to those and the contract can be, as an idealist once said, ‘an agreement between friends to make sure they stay friends.’

First, a publishing deal is a joint venture. In any joint venture, you can only agree an equitable division of spoils when you know what each party is putting in. Now, there’s no way to know the value of a novel before it’s published – if there were, we’d all self-publish. But you do know how much money (in terms of time and risk) you invested in it. Say it’s nine months. What is nine months of your time worth? Once you’ve settled on that, find out what the publisher is going to be investing. They have no reason not to be specific; this is a partnership after all. Say that their editing, design, printing, distribution and advertising tots up to the same as your nine man-months. That’s a fifty-fifty JV, and don’t let anybody tell you any different. The advance has to be factored in, of course, but remember that you’re the early investor here. You plunged on in the wild surmise that nine months at the keyboard would result in something that others would deem worth reading. Publishing your book isn’t a personal favour.

By the way, authors can be delicate flowers so maybe you don’t like the idea of demanding to know the publisher’s business plan for the book? Spin it around. Do you think they would sign a contract that specified all their obligations but left blank the details of what you were going to write? The reason they wouldn’t is they can always do a deal with someone else. And so can you. You have a finished manuscript. You can walk across the road and publish with someone else. They want your book, remember. Any glint of magisterial disdain you may detect is really the shiny sweat of desperation.

For the second tip, skip to the stuff at the back: what does the contract say about its own termination? In the old days termination might be triggered by a book going out of print, but with print on demand that’s meaningless. Instead you’ll need to agree a minimum level of sales. Consider that and other termination conditions. Your aim is to make sure that the rights don’t remain tied up in perpetuity. The day may well come when the publisher has no great interest in promoting your book. Fair enough, it’s not their baby, but you won't feel the same way. The partnership then no longer makes any sense, so make sure you aren't going to be chained together after that point is reached.

Thirdly, be aware that it’s all very well to make statements of intent, but the contract has to back those statements up. Short of a default that triggers actual termination, what happens if one of the parties fails to do what they said they would? In the bigger world, a company might undertake not to dump dangerous chemicals in the sea. If they do, they are fined a million dollars, say. Right there you have a clause that, if the cost of processing those chemicals to make them safe is more than a million, stands as a guarantee that they will get dumped in the sea. A contract is a set of game rules, you see. You sign and then you start playing the game and each side will see what they can do to win.

This isn’t cynicism, just reasonable caution. You’ll hear of the ‘Chinese Contract’ – supposedly an agreement so wisely constructed for the win-win that neither side has any reason to game it. But there are zero-sum elements in the most harmonious partnership. My wife and I can’t both have the whole of the last Rolo. You may notice grey areas in a proposed deal, and it is your job to identify them and seal up the gap. Nobody who intends to play fair would want to leave anything undefined and if they say, ‘We can decide that later,’ then leave at once. But when you do see and fix those loopholes, keep a smile on your face. ‘An agreement between friends,’ remember. Or to put it another way, ‘It’s not personal, it’s business.’

Gotta kiss a lot of frogs

‘We need a writer for an animated TV show. It’s from a concept by Viv Stanshall – ’

I was off like a shot. Viv Stanshall? The Bonzos. Do Not Adjust Your Set. Sir Henry Rawlinson and Cumberpatch the gardener – not to mention Old Scrotum the wrinkled retainer. Work on something cooked up in that great rambling, fecund greenhouse of a mind? You bet.

Well, even the best of us fires a blank from time to time. Viv’s “concept” was of a bunch of kid tadpoles living in a canal. The leader’s name was Walthamstow. That was the first red flag. It was where Viv grew up, but dammit, I don’t call any of my characters Stoke Poges, do I? The first gag in the script was a pun on Henry Ford’s comment that “history is bunk”. In a show for 7-10 year olds. A writer, they said they needed? I had to explain I’m not qualified to administer the Last Rites.

Other characters in the original pitch were Taddy Boy, complete with frock coat and Chris Isaak quiff, and a frog called the Wise Old One. Along with the name of Walthamstow’s gang (the Telstars) that rather stamped an expiry date on the whole package. There was also a Scottish tadpole who wore a Tam O’Shanter and always carried tartan bagpipes. Let’s not even, as they say. To help sell all this there was an animatic for which the production company had somehow managed to rope in Stephen Fry and Neil Innes. (Innes isn’t too big a surprise, admittedly, being Viv’s old mucker and therefore bound to do it for Old Times’ Sake, but what Fry was thinking I don’t know.)

The guys at the production company were excited because they had shown the animatic to a BBC exec and he had expressed a flicker of amusement. I wasn’t there, but I’m familiar with those Matrix-like halls and I’m willing to hazard that it was really just a hiccup after a long lunch. Encouraged as they were by this apparent evidence of approval, the production company nonetheless realized that the whole thing needed to be torn down, sown with salt, and rebuilt in pristine materials.

‘That name Walthamstow…’

‘Yeah. No. That’s shit, obviously. You can get rid of that.’

‘So what do we have to keep?’

‘Well, it’s got to be called Tadpoles.’

That’s what you want in a brief – ie, it actually was. I had just finished working at Elixir Studios, so I was familiar with the canals of Camden Town and liked the idea of dropping an edgy feeling of urban clamour and detritus into the canal – a development that I don’t believe Viv would have objected to.

As it often helps to have a writing partner when you want to spin up the levels of energy needed for comedy and/or animation, I roped in a friend of mine. (She is quite well-known these days, though wasn’t back then, and as I haven’t sought her permission to talk about this, I’ll be a gentleman and leave her name out of it.) We knocked out a script (this is one of several versions) after first changing all the characters:

TADPOLES Aquatis Personae

Finzer – aka (only to himself) "The Finz". Desperately wants to be cool, so the fact he's a tadpole AND a kid really gets him down.

Bino – Finzer's cousin. An albino tad; big and tough (for a tadpole).

Izzy – a wannabe tad. Don't call him a newt to his face.

K8 – pronounced "Kate". She’s sweet on Finzer, although she's in heavy duty denial about that.

Sprat – brainier than the rest and boy does he like them to know it. Sprat is a fish and, brainy as he is, he still can't figure out how come he and Finzer are half-brothers...

Dad Pole – dumb as ditchwater, but doesn't realize it.

Massy – Dad Pole’s girlfriend; the mother-figure of Finzer's household.

Mrs Todpuddle – the gang’s teacher. The longest suffering tadpole in the canal.

Spikey – the local bully/menace. He’s a mean-eyed fish and he’d like to eat you, but not before he’s sold you a dodgy timeshare in the Norfolk Broads. Think Arthur Daley at 78 rpm.

The Frogs – three grand old figures who are only glimpsed at the water’s edge, turned half away in profile like brooding Easter Island statues. Everyone thinks the Frogs are enormously wise and the source of all good fortune, but they never speak to tadpoles and might very well not even know they exist.

What came of Tadpoles? I’m not sure. I was busy with Leo Hartas preparing our comic strip Mirabilis: Year of Wonders to appear in The DFC, as well as developing book concepts with Jamie Thomson such as the Dark Lord series. Meanwhile, my Tadpoles writing partner had projects of her own. And the production company that hired us went out of business with the new animatic only half-finished. So, shrug. You get a lot of things like this to work on if you’re a freelance writer, usually for no money up front, and most of them deserve to be deep sixed. It’s not like it was a project very dear to my heart. The only regret is that it would have been nice to do something in memory of Viv Stanshall. Maybe this show, though, would have done him no favours.

The sleep of reason

Three years ago I rewrote Frankenstein as an interactive novel. Establishing a timeline was my first task; Mary Shelley didn’t tell us anything about the historical background to the story but I like to know that kind of detail even if it ends up in the part of the iceberg the reader doesn’t see. We know that Walton’s framing narrative is dated sometime in the eighteenth century, but presumably a reader in 1818 would feel the narrative lacking in impact if it all took place back in the days of Newton, Voltaire and Bach. So it seemed reasonable to opt for the 1790s, and I sketched out dates placing Victor Frankenstein’s story alongside the events of the French Revolution.

That was a gift. That great hopeful experiment of the Revolution, the epiphany of the Age of Reason, degenerating into unreason and terror, then into a backlash of conservatism and fear. How perfect a backdrop for what Victor is trying to achieve. You don’t need to know that the monster is murdering William Frankenstein just as Danton and Desmoulins are being guillotined, or that he is born just days after the start of the decimal calendar, but I found it added a little frisson to my imagination as I wrote.

If I were updating the Frankenstein story to the present day, I’d have a still better metaphor in the legacy of French colonial policy. Victor brings a man into being in the midst of our society only to leave him outcast, disadvantaged, alienated. The creature – in my interactive version it’s possible for Victor to name him Adom, but the story always works better if he isn’t granted even that much – attempts to learn from his neighbours, who profess high ideals, but when he puts their liberalism to the test they reject him just like everybody else he’s approached. And so he turns to killing as the only way to exercise any agency in the world.

Justifiably or not, many French citizens of Algerian origin apparently feel much the same way towards the republic as the monster to his creator. Crammed into banlieues, they get to watch the glittering life of Paris always at arm’s length, like the monster in his hovel adjoining the De Laceys’ home. They do not necessarily feel thankful for living in one of the richest and fairest civilizations in history.

Am I saying, “Muslims are monsters"? Of course not, but thank you for giving me the opportunity, so necessary in these dumbed-down days, of repudiating that. The term monster is used with some irony and ambiguity in the novel (in my version, anyway; who is the monster?) and in any case all labels are fluid. The lesson of the story is that you can soon turn others into Others if you treat them as such. Salman Rushdie recently pointed this out on Bill Maher’s Real Time show. Radical elements may whip up their followers to become matyrs, because the martyrs of one side in a struggle are the monsters of the other – and it’s that cycle of blood, fear and reprisal that fuels the maelstrom of unreason that some would like to see us sucked into.

Nor, when I evoke North African immigrant communities in France as a metaphor that could apply to a modern version of Frankenstein, do I trivialize the political situation that led to tragedies like the Charlie Hebdo murders. Transplanting a political idea into fictional form doesn’t trivialize it; it universalizes it. Social mobility even in modern Western societies is such that it can take many generations to break out of poverty. If the downtrodden class tends to be of a recognizable racial type, the injustices that invariably descend upon the poor will begin to look like prejudice. It could be Algerians in France, black people in the southern USA, Dalits in India. Simply legislating the caste/class boundaries away doesn’t solve the problem, as you will still have many generations who are left on the outside looking in. But if I tell the story of, say, an impoverished aborigine in 1960s Australia, then I am telling only that story, and there’s a risk that the reader’s existing preconceptions will turn it into simply a confirmation of what they already believe. Politicians do that every day. It’s up to writers to do something more. We need to challenge beliefs, unsettle people, shake them up, change them.

Literature’s strength is in provoking questions, not providing you with ready-made answers. If you read Frankenstein with the events of Paris, Syria, Ferguson, and Pakistan in your mind, you may see that Mary Shelley’s two-hundred-year-old story still resonates powerfully today. Which side you come out on – if indeed you think it helps anybody to pick a side – is entirely up to you.

A near-perfect scene: great writing in Black Mirror

There's so little really good writing on UK television these days that when we come across something exceptional it's worth shouting about. Here's an example of some very clever writing by Charlie Brooker from his disturbing SF series Black Mirror. (Regular readers will know that "disturbing" is a compliment around these parts.)

In an early scene in “Be Right Back”, the opening episode of season two, Ash and his wife Martha are moving into the house where he grew up. Ash tweets a photo of himself as a kid and Martha comments that it’s sweet. He tells her that it was taken on the first family trip after his brother died. They went to a safari park and “there were monkeys all over the car and nobody said anything.” The smile in the photo was fake, he says, but Martha says that doesn’t matter; his mother didn’t know that, and that’s why she kept the picture on display. That leads Ash on to talking about how his mother took down all his brother’s photos when he died. And the same with his father – “They all went up” (to the attic).

I'll come back to what's so good about that scene, but first let's look at how Brooker handles the nuts and bolts of plot development. This is going to get spoilery, by the way, so go and watch the episode first. Ash is killed in a car accident. Martha is told about a service that helps people to deal with grief by giving them a simulated version of the deceased to talk to. The simulation is based on all records the dead person left – social media, emails, blogs and so on.

A lot of that will have been in the publicity copy for the episode. It would be hard to come to it without already knowing that it's about a wife who deals with her husband's death by getting an AI simulation of him. So how does the writer get us to go along with that without just seeming to go through the motions? The base-level technique is always resistance; if the character resists, the viewer is forced to root for the change. So, naturally, when first told about the service she refuses to listen. Her friend signs her up and she gets an email from “Ash”, which she immediately deletes. But Brooker is too good a writer to let resistance carry us through on its own...

Martha discovers she’s pregnant and, unable to reach her sister, she logs on just to tell “him” the news. She finds that consoling enough to agree to talk to him on the phone after uploading private emails and other documents to help round out the simulation.

Leaving the surgery after an ultrasound scan, she drops her phone while playing the baby’s heartbeat to the Ash AI. Of course the AI is in the cloud, but the broken phone scratches open that raw wound of grief. When she gets home and can speak to him again, she agrees to move “to the next level” – an android body into which Ash’s simulated personality is downloaded.

Notice how each step in this progression is tied to the secondary plot development: Martha’s pregnancy. Without that, we’d just go cycling through the stages of the relationship from text to speech to physical body. Even with token resistance from Martha, that would feel like jumping through inevitable hoops. But the even more predictable progression of the pregnancy grounds the current of expectation, so that the consequent development of the relationship with the Ash AI (right up to a kind of home birth in the bath, incidentally, to get the android started) feels uncontrived.

Back to the first scene. A great scene is always loaded with meaning, and this one achieves a number of things with subtlety, economy and clarity. First and most obviously, it shows us that Ash is very active online; he’s barely in the house before he’s tweeting the photo. But that’s just a plot set-up for later. More importantly, the scene introduces the theme of how to deal with grief. “Nobody said anything,” and the photos that were packed away in the attic. From which it’s clear that denial is regarded as unhealthy, and the drama that follows will explore the diametric opposite: keeping the deceased in your life.

There’s also a story seed planted here. Does it matter that young Ash’s smile was faked for his parent’s sake? Martha thinks not, and she’s about to have a relationship with an android who is faking its whole identity for her sake.

Finally, the scene foreshadows the very end of the story, where we come back after the birth of Martha’s daughter to find out what she has done with the Ash android. He’s in the attic, just like those photos.