Your tenuous grip on reality
On The North Water, Next in Fashion, Pride and Prejudice, The Great Gatsby, and an unreserved apology
Hello everyone! Happy new year! I hope this new number on the calendar brings with it some nice things for everyone. Personally my big hopes for the year are that (1) I finally cure my achilles tendonitis (2) I eat a lot of cheese fondue and (3) there’s a permanent ceasefire in Gaza (not in that order).
I’m afraid I must begin with a grovelling apology after realising that I was due to write a newsletter last week, and completely failed to do so. There I was just having my little holiday, eating my little leftover Christmas nutloaf, playing my little online boggle, giving my little children huge amounts of extra time on their little iPads, and did I even once stop to think about my poor subscribers? Did I even once consider that the last days of 2023 would be RUINED for MORE THAN ONE HUNDRED PEOPLE, all of you feverishly checking your email inboxes with trembling fingers and sweaty brows, your tenuous grip on reality loosening with each passing minute in which you failed to hear from me? CLEARLY I DID NOT. If any of you have self-harmed or checked yourselves into a mental institution or moved to northern New South Wales to join former TV-chef Pete Evans’ off-grid alternative lifestyle community as the result of me failing to send you my musings on latest season of The Bachelors Australia—well, that’s on me. Please accept my unreserved apologies.
I am actually having some thoughts about reconfiguring this newsletter a little bit in the new year, and possibly mixing up the regular missives with some newsletters that do more of a deep dive into whatever stupid/wonderful thing has recently caught my attention. I’ll see how this goes, but if you all hate it do let me know because I live only to please. I know everyone’s always dissing people with people-pleasing personalities, telling us to grow some balls and stand up for ourselves and learn how to say no or whatever…but come on, be honest, don’t you find that your people-pleasing friends are just that little bit more loveable than your other friends? Doesn’t it make us more adorable to you, the fact that we wish only to make you happy??? Please tell me it does!!!! But also no worries if not!!!!!!
Television
I’ve had an INTENSE time recently with the TV, because for some reason I decided to watch The North Water. It’s difficult to explain why I decided to watch it, because it was nothing like the bouncy clouds of televisual fairy floss that I usually like to pump into my eyeholes for 2-4 solid hours every night after the kids have gone to bed. Normally, I like my shows to be FUNNY and RELATABLE, or FUNNY and MEAN, or FUNNY and RIDICULOUS, or FUNNY and—well, I think you get the picture.
Anyway, The North Water was not funny. The North Water had no jokes, not-a-one. The North Water was TENSE and BRUTAL, it was SERIOUS and HISTORICAL, it was MASCULINE and BOAT-BASED. And yet I was GRIPPED and OBSESSED.
The show is based on a novel by Ian McGuire, and follows a disgraced army surgeon, Patrick Sumner (Jack O’Connell), as he takes a job on a whaling ship headed into the icy north in the middle of the 19th Century. We find out in the first episode that (a) Patrick is addicted to laudanum, (b) the ship’s captain is planning to sink the ship for the insurance money and (c) one of the crew members, Drax (Colin Farrell), is a an amoral sociopath not averse to clubbing people over the head for a bit of cash. Then things get worse!! There’s fighting, thieving, murder, rape, seal hunting, whale slaughter, hypothermia, boat-sinking, betrayal, snowstorms, racism, moral despair and a very disturbing time with a polar bear.
It was written by Andrew Haigh, a filmmaker who has made quite a few well-regarded films in the last decade or so (All of Us Strangers, Weekend, 45 Years) which I have not seen but will now look for (although I think The North Water is not at all his usual style). I think the reason I found it so absorbing was that it felt viscerally real—it was shot on a real boat in the real north water, and the landscape (seascape, really) was stunningly beautiful, all glaciers and ice sheets and frozen cliffs. I could almost smell the stench of terrified, unwashed sailors as I watched it.
The other main drawcard was Colin Farrell, an actor who I somehow haven’t really seen before, although I’ve been peripherally aware of him. He was incredibly convincing as Drax. It never felt like I was watching someone acting; it was more like watching a force of nature take on human form. He became this great, brutal beast of a man—not exactly cruel, because cruelty requires some interest in the experience of others, albeit a malevolent interest—but utterly without conscience. Drax’s instinct is to survive, and to take pleasure where he finds it, and nothing else matters. As he describes his experience of life: ‘[o]ne thing happens, then another comes after it.’ When Sumner challenges him about his immorality and criminality, he shrugs it off: ‘The law is just a name they give to what a certain kind of men prefer.’ I was shook.
I wouldn’t necessarily recommend this show to anyone who is feeling psychologically delicate right now, but if you have a bit of post-holiday emotional energy in the bank and can handle it, it is an engrossing, visually brilliant and morally challenging show. It’s currently available to stream on ABC iView, but only until January 6.
For those of you who are not up for watching hard men club seals to death in the far north (is that…all of you?), may I recommend Next in Fashion? I just started watching the second season of this show, which stars Tan France from Queer Eye alongside Alexa Chung (in season 1) and model Gigi Hadid (in season 2). It’s basically a reboot of Project Runway—a show I also loved—where designers are required to design and make clothes each week under extreme time pressure, and the garments are then modelled and judged by various famous fashion types. The best thing about it is that the contestants are, for the most part, extremely skilled and creative—always refreshing to encounter a reality competition where the talent are actually talented.
Books
I have kicked off my reading year in 2024 with a couple of classics: Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby.
I’ve read both of the before—more than once!—but not for many years, and I wanted to revisit them in audiobook form. One of the things that keeps me on Audible is that it has a big library of free classics read by great actors—I find that these narrations can give new depth and life to older books. Listening to them makes you really read every sentence, and it also makes it easier to pick up on the satirical elements of the prose which might otherwise sail right over my head because I’m not across the particular old-timey social mores being satirised.
I’ve loved listening to both the Fitzgerald and the Austen, but of the two, Pride and Prejudice is coming out on top for me. It’s the third Austen I’ve listened to in the past year, and I highly recommend Rosamund Pike’s narrations (although apparently the Juliet Stevenson versions are also excellent). It is amazing to me how relevant and relatable Austen’s characters are—Elizabeth Bennett is a perpetual delight, and Darcy is still hot and appealing in his highly buttoned-up way, even 200 years later. The side characters are also perfectly drawn—I feel like I’ve previously worked with several descendants of Mr Collins, who is surely the OG suck-up, and I have definitely known a few Lydia Bennetts (if she were alive today, pretty sure Lydia’s Instagram feed would be 50% couple photos of her and Wickham and 50% semi-naked thirst-traps).
I was surprised on this reading that I found new sympathy for Elizabeth’s mother, Mrs Bennett, who is silly and annoying, but full of love for her children. I was also surprised to find that Mr Bennett, who I’ve previously liked, came over in this reading as a little too sure of his own superiority, and kind of mean to his wife. One thing I did still like about him though is that he is a world-class expert at the fine art of being a Hater—e.g. when they get a letter from Mr Collins, before they’ve met him, Elizabeth wonders if he could be a sensible man, and Mr Bennett responds with: “No, my dear, I think not. I have great hopes of finding him quite the reverse. There is a mixture of servility and self-importance in his letter, which promises well. I am impatient to see him.”
I feel like Mr Bennett would have loved reality TV. He would definitely have been a big fan of Vanderpump Rules.
The cast of The Great Gatsby, on the other hand, is much less recognisable than that of Pride and Prejudice, even though it was written a hundred years closer to our time. The characters are gorgeously drawn—but they are also essentially inscrutable. I don’t know anyone in real life who fits the mould of poor Jay Gatsby, and I struggle to envisage what kind of videos Daisy Buchanan would be posting to TikTok. Where Pride and Prejudice is like being invited into the walls of a real family’s real house, reading The Great Gatsby is like watching a brilliant, dreamy film, or looking at a ravishing abstract painting—it’s an intensely pleasurable experience of something other than life.
Other Things
Some other things I have enjoyed lately include:
This great poem for the New Year by Eloise Grills:
Going into each new year is like walking waistdeep through a sinking ship
Opening each door to the next cabin as the previous one fills with water, and we can never turn back
The pure absurdity of Confidence Man performing at the Sydney Opera House on New Years’ Eve. It gave me great Mr Bennett-esque delight (which I think is the idea? I dunno, I’m an old lady now—I didn’t really understand it but its awfulness made me laugh).
This cranberry and pistachio nutloaf, which I made for Christmas lunch and which was very delicious. However, I did read in the comments of one version of it that it was better cold, so I served it cold…and that was a mistake. It’s better warm.
Leave the World Behind, the Netflix movie with Ethan Hawke and Julia Roberts based on Rumaan Alam’s novel. I loved its Hitchcocky vibes—the persistent strangeness and sense of menace reminded me a lot of The Birds. I also feel like I should watch again now that I’ve read about all its ‘easter egg’ references and details (e.g. the changing painting, the various references to America’s racial history).
This piece in the Fairfax papers which included my book as one of the notable debuts of 2023. I’m still blushing!
That’s all for now! Until next time,
Eleanor xx
Thanks for reading What is This, Who am I, Please Help - if you enjoyed this post it would be lovely if you would share it with your pals, who might also like it?? Or they might hate it, who’s to say. Life is a mystery, everyone must stand alone, etc.
I loved The Birds vibes of Leave the World Behind too! 🍿🎥
That Voldemort meme gets me every time 🤣🤣🤣🤣