{"id":81791,"date":"2015-01-20T11:26:48","date_gmt":"2015-01-20T16:26:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=81791"},"modified":"2019-04-22T17:13:43","modified_gmt":"2019-04-22T21:13:43","slug":"something-nasty","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2015\/01\/20\/something-nasty\/","title":{"rendered":"Something Nasty"},"content":{"rendered":"

Lately, posters for the film Mortdecai<\/em> have been popping up everywhere. They feature Johnny Depp and a battalion of costars extravagantly mustachioed and looking wacky. Oh, great, I thought. More of Johnny Depp pretending to be a character actor. That\u2019s what the world needed. Maybe in six months if I\u2019ve seen everything else on a plane and the movies are free.<\/p>\n

The posters were designed to intrigue, but I can\u2019t imagine they piqued much curiosity. But of course someone, eventually, had to ask, What the Hell Is Mortdecai?<\/em><\/a>, and in a weak moment, I clicked on the link. And of course, then it all made sense\u2014kind of. The new movie is an adaptation of the Mortdecai<\/em> series by Kyril Bonfiglioli. The spelling is the same, of course, but it was still hard to believe\u2014these lighthearted posters just bear so little resemblance to the tone of the books, and the preview roams even further.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s true, the books are technically wacky. Here\u2019s how Leo Carey described them<\/a> in The New Yorker <\/em>when the series was reissued in 2004: <\/p>\n

Mortdecai, the son of a peer, never tires of describing the splendors of his cellar, his table, and his tailoring. There is scarcely a meal (or a drink) that is not recounted in detail and meticulously evaluated, and he cannot leave the house without telling you, \u201cI put on a dashing little tropical-weight worsted, a curly-brimmed coker and a pair of buckskins created by Lobb in a moment of genius.\u201d He loves to boast about the fine establishments he frequents in his London neighborhood. \u201cI went a-slumming through the art-dealing district, carefully keeping my face straight as I looked in the shop windows\u2014sorry, gallery<\/em> windows\u2014at the tatty Shayers and reach-me-down Koekkoeks.\u201d (It is a typical Bonfiglioli touch that the artists mentioned\u2014precisely the kind of respectable nineteenth-century landscapists on which a high-end Mayfair dealer thrives\u2014are just obscure enough to impress the reader.)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

You should read the whole piece to get a good sense of the series and its author. The books are kind of like Jeeves and Wooster stories\u2014the author plays this up with Wodehouse references\u2014if Wooster were a psychotic, misogynistic art dealer with a weight problem. Or maybe he\u2019s more a sociopath or just a pathological narcissist. I\u2019m not a shrink. But he\u2019s definitely amoral, and he certainly hates women. The books came out in the seventies and have a particular sort of flinty, urbane nastiness to them: people who love them really love them. Both Frye and Laurie are on record in their admiration for the series, and if you check out any series of online reviews, you\u2019ll see that readers are pretty much evenly divided between those who relish the books\u2019 unflinching, un-PC meanness, and those who are appalled.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ll confess to falling into the latter camp. Let it be said, I understand the appeal. The series is raffish, dark, melancholy, unabashedly nostalgic, clever, brash. It takes cozy English mystery tropes and takes a sick pleasure in upending them. \u201cFor those who like that sort of thing,\u201d said Miss Brodie in her best Edinburgh voice, \u201cthat is the sort of thing they like.\u201d<\/p>\n

It is, in fact, the sort of thing I thought I\u2019d like. And a big part of the problem is surely that I started the series out of sequence. I read\u00a0Something Nasty in the Woodshed<\/em>\u00a0first\u2014partly because that was the one I first ran across, partly on the strength of the New Yorker<\/em> piece, partly because people kept trumpeting the series as a \u201ccult\u201d phenomenon, and partly because the title references the slyly daffy\u00a0Cold Comfort Farm.<\/em><\/p>\n

Of course, that\u2019s Bonfiglioli all over: summoning a comforting classic (itself a send-up of hackneyed British literary tropes) and giving it a quick sheep-dip in acid. I like to think I\u2019m able to put aside missish twenty-first-century sensibilities and read something on its merits. But I am a product of my time and a woman. And I found the book\u2014with its caustic, rape-centric plot\u2014ugly. The protagonist may be an unabashed narcissist and the narrator may be winking at the reader, but he certainly wasn\u2019t winking at me. I went on to read the others\u2014Don\u2019t Point That Thing at Me <\/em>and\u00a0After You with the Pistol<\/em>\u2014<\/em>but the damage had been done. I have never been eager to join clubs that don\u2019t want me as a member.<\/p>\n

I imagine the film wouldn\u2019t bother me at all\u2014at least not in the same way. The movie, one imagines, will take away everything that people love in the books and leave only what the author was lampooning. Certainly they seem to have put Mortdecai on a diet, so one imagines he\u2019ll restrain his other appetites with equal zeal. Or maybe I\u2019m wrong: maybe Johnny Depp will play an untrammeled, unlovable sociopath who tramples on modern mores and has contempt for viewers. Yes, I\u2019m sure that\u2019s what will happen. In the tradition of Breaking Bad<\/em> and The Sopranos<\/em>, we will see a complex antihero and be drawn to his self-loathing complexity. Done right, an adaptation could indeed be interesting.<\/p>\n

Even more interesting\u2014or at least, of our time\u2014would be a portrait of the multifaceted author, who painted himself as \u201can accomplished fencer, a fair shot with most weapons,\u201d \u201cabstemious in all things except drink, food, tobacco and talking,\u201d who battled depression and alcoholism. He died, financially insecure, before completing The Great Mortdecai Moustache Mystery (<\/em>which title seems to have inspired the team behind the movie) and it was completed by the great literary mimic Craig Brown, under the aegis of Bonfiglioli\u2019s widow. As Carey wrote, \u201cThe undertow of pain and despair is what gives the books an emotional charge beyond their surface urbanity, and makes them stick in the mind long after you\u2019ve quoted all the funny bits to your friends.\u201d On the reissue\u2019s cover, they printed only the end of that quote.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Lately, posters for the film Mortdecai have been popping up everywhere. They feature Johnny Depp and a battalion of costars extravagantly mustachioed and looking wacky. Oh, great, I thought. More of Johnny Depp pretending to be a character actor. That\u2019s what the world needed. Maybe in six months if I\u2019ve seen everything else on a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":178,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[13115],"tags":[5563,16671,17,8094,16669,14988,16670,81,747,9397,16672,16673],"class_list":["post-81791","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-our-daily-correspondent","tag-adaptations","tag-after-you-with-the-pistol","tag-books","tag-johnny-depp","tag-kyril-bonfiglioli","tag-misogyny","tag-mortdecai","tag-movies","tag-novels","tag-posters","tag-something-nasty-in-the-woodshed","tag-the-great-mortdecai-moustache-mystery"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nThe Cult Appeal of Kyril Bonfiglioli\u2018s \u201cMortdecai\u201d Novels<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"The series\u2014soon to be a movie starring Johnny Depp\u2014is raffish, dark, melancholy, unabashedly nostalgic, clever, brash ... and very misogynistic.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2015\/01\/20\/something-nasty\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Something Nasty by Sadie Stein\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"January 20, 2015 \u2013 Lately, posters for the film Mortdecai have been popping up everywhere. 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