Overload!

It's all gone a bit cultural here. For the first time ever (probably) I have finished all three of a 342 from Waterstones, Having read The Lovely Bones and Life Class in quick succession I finally got around to The Rotters' Club which I whistled through in a week. I watched the BBC adaptation of this a few years ago so I was slightly worried that this reading would be redundant but I was wrong - the show managed to keep enough detail to be a good try but the book contains levels of thought and description that show why books will always better visual drama no matter what doodads and gee-whizzery they put out. The novel has varied elements of narrative - diaries - uncategorisable creative writing, articles from the school magazine all of which reminds me of the various style changes in David Lodge books, but without the self-conscious cleverness. I did at times think this made the whole thing a bit scrappy but at the end you realise that instead of lessening the believability, it instead suggests reality far better than any mess of colloquialism or street-lingo. It is noticeable in a book about Birmingham which mentions that fact a lot - indeed dwells on it - that there is no descent into "Depressed Brummy". It manages to cover the ludicrous acts that teenage boys are forced into through love and lust, the more grown-up behaviour that adults display because of same and deadly-serious games that people play when power is at stake. And despite these wild variations in mood it never seems inappropriate because it reflects what we all go through, the sudden lurch from bereavement to love, from betrayal to loyalty and all the other emotions that humans are capable of displaying.

And on top of this we have the unmissable, breathtaking switchback ride of Sherlock, which brings together many pillars of British dramatic ability and creates a delicate, finely-balanced 90 minutes of brilliance. It manages to maintain not only the structure of the original ACD stories but many of the details as well. Its high point yesterday - a dramatic and strangely-soundtracked fight in a planetarium, underpinned one of the more famous factoids about Sherlock Holmes; that he does not know or care that the Earth Travels around the sun. Not remembering this from the original story, I cannot say whether this confession by Holmes is meant in reality or just as an illustration of how he manages to keep focused. The implication yesterday was that it was the latter. We are all now of course in limbo far more delicate that that between penultimate and final episodes of Doctor Who in that we do not know a) how the cliff-hanger ends or indeed b) that the series will be recommissioned. As some of the reviewers have suggested, it might be a brave step to not produce any more episodes and leave us all with this delicious pleasure at something so right and beautiful. However, I am not sure that commercial pressures will allow that. We can only hope that Moffat and Gatiss have a long game in their heads and that the running start can be maintained.