Trevor Ray

A visit to the Wiltshire village of Avebury and its stone circle over the recent bank holiday weekend prompted me to re-read this classic book from my childhood. The TV series was one of the best programmes of the 1970s, with the villagers being brainwashed by mysterious psychic forces ("happy day-itis") in the fictional village of Milbury, filmed and set in Avebury. The series and book are very similar and reading many lines of dialogue and scenes prompted instant recollection of their screen equivalents (I will have to rewatch the DVD). The story combines mystery and mild horror in a way that just works really effectively without going over the top or sending itself up. It shows what can be done with a brilliant narrative/script, good characters and a super backdrop for the filming and setting of the story. Brilliant stuff in both formats.… (meer)

Perfectly adequate if fairly unimpressive novelization of the 1977 TV series, focusing on a teenage borstal boy's introduction into the conflict over an ancient cave system. The archaeologist Professor Young believes the caves hold vital clues to the truth behind the legend of King Arthur, while government interests want to use them as dumping ground for nuclear waste. It's very of its time, very Second British Golden Age of Fantasy. It's no real surprise that mysticism and astrology get called into play fairly fast, with characters making "logical" decisions with the help of astrology and the zodiac.

The big problem is that enigmatic mystical mumbo-jumbo like this simply plays out better on television, where you've got images playing out before you, music, and so on. You can enjoy it at a very passive level and it's easy to get caught up in the pageantry of it all. It's a lot harder to swallow in narrative form because you have all the time in the world to step back and actually apply your brain. Burnham and Ray, who wrote the TV teleplays, don't really bother to examine the implications of their story at any deeper level, or try to give any sort of reasoning that might make it all hang together a little better. That leaves the story looking weak: professionals accept suggestions from teenagers with very little resistance, strange events play out without any seeming provocation, and all sorts of questions are left hanging. Again, in the TV version, it's a little more acceptable because it's largely focused on Raven himself, and his perspective. Other characters are free to be enigmatic, visions don't really need explaining - it's all part of Raven's experience. The distancing of the third-person narration in the novel version just makes it all too unwieldy.

Oh, and let's not even get started on the "romance subplot." That's a laugh.… (meer)