2010 books

32) Roy Lewis, The Evolution Man, 1960
Terry Pratchett describes this as "one of the funniest books of the last 500,000 years" – it's difficult to categorise, although it feels like good science fiction and was one of the first novels Brian Aldiss chose to start the Penguin SF list. Lewis was working as The Economist's Commonwealth Affairs correspondent in Africa when he got the idea for The Evolution Man, partially from observing the dismantling of British colonial rule there and also from reflecting on the aeons of history that lay beneath the current political goings-on. It's a single primitive Pleistocene hominid, Edward, whose family only recently came down from the trees, who seems to have figured out most of the essentials that make up civilised existence – fire, weapons, cooking, animal domestication, exogamy – making the Rift Valley the true cradle of early civilisation many thousands of years before Mesopotamia. I particularly like the way Lewis leads the reader towards each of Edward's discoveries, usually being a consequence of the misuse of the previous discovery, so the novel therefore gets consistently more cohesive the further in you get, and once you get Edward's prehistoric world-view as he tries to give his family the best opportunities in life, his tone of voice and manner become very palpable. I certainly liked Lewis's sense of humour – whether a reader would still find it laugh-out-loud probably depends on their personal disposition because it's certainly of the wry and knowing type (a bit like Edward himself) and cleverly situational, and you can sense Lewis's smirk as he wrote it on almost every page. I found the thread of humour sometimes became buried beneath a little too much scene-setting, particularly early on, but a second reading would probably unearth a few more literate gags that I missed the first time around. Certainly a fun read from cover to cover, and one that hasn't dated too badly at all.

1940s SF film

The Mad Monster, 1942, USA   DIRECTED BY SAM NEWFIELD
Lorenzo Cameron, a disgraced and slightly crazed doctor, claims to have created a blood transfusion technique for turning his simpleton gardener Petro into a werewolf killer, and he plans to sell the idea to the government to create a whole army of them. Needless to say, Petro the wolf-man periodically runs loose in the local swamp and kills a few locals, and the game is eventually up for Cameron but not before he tries to conceal the truth from everyone. There are of course two mad monsters at large here therefore the Frankenstein derivation is obvious; there are also two all-but-forgotten big names associated with this mild piece of 1940s horror: Sam Newfield was one of the most prolific Hollywood directors ever, even though most of his productions were distinctly Poverty Row; then there's the British actor and B-movie legend George Zucco, playing to his strengths as the imperious and slippery Cameron, using to great effect those beady eyes of his that could famous nail his antagonists to the wall while he berates them with loud and belligerent self-justifications. The Mad Monster is far from being a classic although its straightforward and predictable story is still very watchable, largely thanks to the distinguished Zucco whose presence gives this all-but-forgotten movie a very atmospheric yet quiet strength.

(Cross-posted with cult_movie)