Shannara

I'm guessing this is Seattle in the far far future

Three years ago at a bookstore in suburban West Seattle I was browsing the stacks and doing some Christmas shopping when an announcement came over the Tannoy that a local author called Terry Brooks was in the store and doing a book signing. Now, most of you won't know who Terry Brooks is, but he was a big part of my childhood. As a kid I was really into Tolkien, CS Lewis, TH White that kind of thing and then I discovered that a whole bunch of people who weren't dead were also writing epic fantasy: Terry Brooks, David Eddings, Julian May, Raymond E Feist etc. Some of these books were good and some felt like Tolkien or Dungeons and Dragons rip offs (Feist's career began, apparently, when he decided to write up his D&D campaigns as a novel). I ploughed through Brooks's Shannara books in a couple of weeks and was particularly impressed by the Elfstones of Shannara which had a creepy changeling character that gave me nightmares. So that day in Seattle I wondered over to the signing area and found Brooks sitting there with the publicist having signed everyone's books. I chatted to him for about 25 minutes and he was a very affable, likeable guy. I told him about my liking for the Elfstones book and he told me that that was the one they were turning into a TV series. Great, I said, I'll look forward to that. 
...
Be careful what you wish for. If I could spin the clock back to 1980 I would have been super excited to know that there was going to be a Hobbit movie or three, a Terry Brooks TV series, a series of Narnia movies... Unfortunately they are all shit. I think we can now all agree that The Hobbit movies were a disaster up there with the Star Wars prequels. The Narnia movies were very cheesy and the Shannara series that started on MTV on Tuesday night has apparently been designed solely for younger teenage girls. I'm guessing this because there are lots of handsome dudes with their shirts off, the story focuses on a Katniss Everdeen type character and it follows the show Teen Wolf which also has a big teenage girl audience. The acting on Shannara is of the soap opera variety (there are some very curious line readings indeed), the CGI is cheap and cheerful and the production values ain't exactly Game of Thrones. But really the problem is the focus of the show: about 15 minutes in I realised that I was not the target demo and had to stop watching. 
...
The only thing I found interesting about the Shannara pilot was its opening titles which seemed to suggest that the Shannara universe is actually Earth in the far far future after the continents have changed shape and new races of sentient creatures have evolved. This echoes my own theories about where Game of Thrones is actually set and I kind of dig all that future dying Earth stuff.  Gene Wolfe is an author you should read if you like that trope. Anyway, Shannara ain't my cup of tea but I don't really think it's meant to be. 

Magheramorne

Magheramorne is a tiny hamlet on the A2 between Carrickfergus and Larne. My dad (not pictured) was from Magheramorne and my granny was born and lived there her whole life (also not pictured) well into the 1990s in a two room weaver style cottage. Magheramorne only has about 70 people living in it and there are still several McKintys around those parts. I spent quite a bit of my childhood in Magheramorne and a few years ago when I heard that a new HBO show Game of Thrones was filming in Magheramorne I was pretty excited. Before the show debuted my little brother and I had a gander around the sets that had been built in the old Magheramorne quarry. If you know the show you'll know that Castle Black is there and the Great Wall of Westeros. When we went there no one had heard of Game of Thrones and the sets had zero security. That has all changed of course and now you can go on many different Game of Thrones tours in Northern Ireland (the place where most of the show is filmed).
...
Game of Thrones won the Emmy Award for best drama last year and without doubt the best episode of the entire season was Hardhome (pictured) which also was entirely filmed in Magheramorne but this time on a set built on the shores of Larne Lough to simulate a village up in the polar regions of Westeros. While Jon Snow is up there trying to persuade the Wildings that they should flee south of the wall the village of Hardhome is attacked by the Night King and an army of the undead in a scene that left me and everyone else watching gasping in horror for 15 minutes. The very end of the scene is a Leone style staring contest between Jon Snow and the Night King and is probably the best things Thrones has done since season 3's The Red Wedding. The only weird thing about that scene is the fact that they filmed it exactly where my little brother and I used to go swimming as little kids and its where my dad used to swim across Larne Lough to Islandmagee every Sunday to visit his Granny McKee (my great grandmother). This (the final bit) looks like a scary situation but I assure you that safety from the White Walker army is only a three hundred metre swim away in the village of Mill Bay in Islandmagee.

Ireland Is A Railway Poster: Philip Larkin In Carrickfergus

a post from last year
For years I've been single handedly peddling the concept that my hometown, Carrickfergus, is the centre of the universe, with admittedly, limited success. What I particularly like are the literary connections which are surprisingly rich in so small a place. Famously Louis MacNeice lived in Carrickfergus and wrote about it more than once. He brought WH Auden to the town to stay with him but what he thought is not recorded. Jonathan Swift lived in Carrickfergus (at Kilroot) where he wrote A Tale of a Tub (and possibly plotted Gulliver). Anthony Trollope lived in Whiteabbey near Carrickfergus where he wrote The Warden. William Congreve lived in Carrickfergus as a boy. Charlotte Riddel - best selling Victorian pot boiler novelist - was from Carrick. William Orr, United Irishman and poet, (with an ever more famous poet brother, James) lived and was, er, hanged in Carrickfergus. Currently the science fiction writer David Logan lives in Carrickfergus and my favourite Irish female poet, Sinead Morrissey, lives just up the road from Carrick. And speaking of poets I've just found this letter (below) from Philip Larkin to Monica Jones talking about his lonely visit to Carrick in 1950 when - who knows - he could have seen my mum and dad out for a walk around the harbour. Larkin is on fine miserable form thoughout...

Accents In Game Of Thrones Part 2

Rose Leslie as the stroppy Man City supporter, Ygritte

For the last few weeks as John Snow has headed north over the wall I've been thinking that we were finally going to hear some Scottish accents on Game of Thrones but we haven't. You'd think the people over the wall (a Westeros equivalent of Hadrian's wall between England and Scotland) would have a different accent than the ones south of it and when they cast Rose Leslie, who is Scottish to play Ygritte, I expected that finally we were going to hear some Highland vowel sounds. But instead of that they've asked Leslie to do a Manchester/Lancashire accent which she does brilliantly but even so its a little bit of a let down. There are at least half a dozen Scottish actors in Game of Thrones and four or five Irish actors but so far all the accents on the snow are English or quasi English (Yes I'm looking at you Peter Dinklage). There's a couple of very mild accidental Irish accents (Littlefinger and Catelyn Stark) but everyone else either speaks home counties or with a Lancashire/Yorkshire northern accent. Game of Thrones is filmed in Belfast and previously I've expressed some disappointment not to hear a single Belfast accent anywhere near the show. They've filmed in Magheramorne where my grandmother's from and at Red Hall in Ballycarry where I used to play when I was a kid. They've also filmed up in the Glens of Antrim and down in Strangford, areas I know really well and I can tell you that all those places have distinct, old fashioned very interesting accents. Maybe give an extra a line or two? 
...
The week before last we did get a hint of Geordie which was nice but really the casting people should be less conservative and let the native Irish, Scottish and Welsh actors use their own voices. Americans could handle Welsh accents or Scottish ones or Ulster or even Brummie. And it beggars belief that in a continent 1000 miles from top to bottom you would only hear two different accents. 
...
This guy can do six different Scottish accents (and he forgot 
Glasgow). His Belfast is ok but his Boston and Maine are beyond terrible. Incidentally on a good day I can do 7 different Northern Ireland accents: Derry, Larne, Carrick, Ballymena and 3 Belfast accents: South Belfast/Malone Road, Scary West Belfast & Camp Julian Simmons Style West Belfast.  

Game Of Thrones S2E1, S2E2, Mad Men S5E2

Lena Headey's good but Peter Dinklage steals the show as usual

It's been 12 years since I read A Clash of Kings which is the second book in George RR Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire sequence. I have only vague memories of that novel but Game of Thrones S2E1 surprisingly brought a lot of those memories from the depths of goodness knows where. The episode begins in the aftermath of Eddard Stark's death as various houses jockey for power in Westeros. The episode nicely captured many of the diverse strands of the novel and brought us up to date with the characters from Game of Thrones. As usual Peter Dinklage stole every scene he was in and in fact, if you'll notice, he's been given top billing. From what I remember of Clash we get to know even more characters than were in GOT and the civil war on Westeros becomes even more complicated. I don't know how the TV series is going to cope with all this without shortchanging some of the actors or compressing some of action.  
...
Anyway S2E1 was all about scene setting and recapitulation and it did it pretty well. We got some nice Northern Irish landscapes in S2E1: several different Ulster forests, a piece of beach that looked a bit like Whitepark Bay and snowy volcanic vistas that definitely were not Ireland and must have been Iceland. E2 established a few more characters and laid the seeds for a bit of a story that I do remember about Greyjoy. It was nice to see Richard O'Brien popping up as Greyjoy's dad. Plenty of T&A in episode 2 for the pervy TV reviewers complaining about the lack of it in E1. Good use of British regional accents too in these episodes: as well as Yorkshire we got Geordieland, Welsh, Scottish, mild Ulster and soft Irish, as well as Peter Dinklage's dodgy home counties voice.  
...
Not much happened in the two episodes but the strands of future conflict were definitely laid. GOT S2E1 B+ S2E2 B
...
Regarding Mad Men E2, like the blogger in the New York Times, I too was surprised to see them go the Frasier route with January Jones's pregnancy. We already had someone close to Don die of cancer so it would have been bathos to give Betty cancer too. There was therefore zero dramatic tension and the lameness of the storyline readily became apparent. I have a feeling that the writers on Mad Men dislike January Jones as a person so they've been thinking up ways to humiliate the character. Maybe. Mad Men S5 E2 C-

On The Road Again

Last year Colin Bateman and Stuart Neville showed up to
heckle me. If you were there you'll remember that I retorted by
bursting into tears and running into the street.

I'm heading home to Belfast today. It's a long flight through many strange and interesting destinations (Stansted Airport anyone?) so I may be offline for a bit. I will be posting some new (and some recycled blogs) over the next week or so and certainly feel free to comment, but be aware that I probably won't be able to reply until I get back to Melbourne...I'm not ignoring you, just away from my desk - either that or, you know, clinging to a piece of wreckage in the Indian Ocean. 
...
And if you're in the neighbourhood why don't you come see me and Declan Burke read from our new novels at No Alibis bookshop on Botanic Avenue, Belfast next Thursday. There will be blood. Or more likely wine, cheese and a few funny stories from Dec. From me expect broody silence and the odd monosyllabic, gutteral remark. It'll be fun. Bring the kids. That's Thursday August 18th at 6.00 pm. Remember when Oscar Wilde went on his lecture tour of the United States? It'll be like that. Except totally different. 
...
I'm also going to try to visit The Games of Thrones set. (If anyone can hook me up with that I'd really appreciate it.) If I make it to the set I'll take some pics and put them up on the blog. 

Peter Dinklage

I finally watched all of Game of Thrones, the George RR Martin fantasy series from HBO (which got an Emmy nomination for Best Drama yesterday). The series followed the book extremely closely so not much of the plot came as a surprise but I still enjoyed it quite a lot. The interiors for Thrones were filmed at studios in Belfast's docklands and the exteriors were shot in Northern Ireland (a second unit shot in Malta). In the first episode a major scene (the execution of the deserter from the Wall) occurs in a place where I used to go camping when I was kid. That was strange: George RR Martin's exotic world of Westeros is in fact just outside of Larne on the A2. Probably no weirder than the residents of Vancouver discovering that the planet Caprica from Battlestar Galactica was in fact the University of British Columbia. 

...

In the book I disliked the entire Lannister clan (they were the villains after all) but on HBO they were much more fun and entertaining than Sean Bean and his worthy clan of the north. The star of the Lannisters of course was Peter Dinklage who has just been nominated for an Emmy as best supporting actor in a drama. I've loved Peter Dinklage since I saw him in the wonderful indie comedy, The Station Agent. He also had a memorable turn on 30 Rock back when that show used to be funny. His accent on Game of Thrones is a bit dodgy but his natural charisma, comic timing and intelligence carries him through and if there's any justice, he and Ed O'Neill will win Emmys this year.

The Irish Connection To Game Of Thrones

I was pretty excited to learn that the brand new HBO series Game of Thrones was largely filmed in Northern Ireland. Until the last decade or so no films were made in Ulster because production companies couldn't get the insurance to do so. All those cheesy movies about the Troubles were usually filmed in Manchester, but all that has changed since the Good Friday Agreement and the influx of Hollywood money has been part of the peace dividend.

...
The interiors for Game of Thrones were shot at Paint Hall studios in the Belfast docklands but I was even more interested to learn that many of the exterior shots were filmed in rural Northern Ireland. Filming locations included Carncastle, Shane's Castle, Magheramorne and Tollymore Forest. Carncastle is a wild mountainscape overlooking the Atlantic, it's an area I know extremely well having camped and hiked there. Shane's Castle is a working castle still inhabited by a minor member of the royal family - I've visited Shane's Castle on several occasions. Tollymore Forest I've been to hundreds of times. I even made a Super 8 swordfighting movie there with my little brother. (Hopefully the production values for Game of Thrones are slightly better.) Magheramorne is maybe the most surprising filming location for me. My dad was from Magheramorne and its basically just a village with barely more than a dozen houses in it. I assume they filmed not in Magheramorne village itself but in the abandoned quarry nearby which juts into Larne Lough in pretty spectacular fashion. 

...

If Game of Thrones is a hit maybe HBO will do more of George RR Martin's books and perhaps they'll use Carrickfergus Castle next time (above). I literally was born and grew up a stone's throw from Carrick Castle which is the best preserved Norman structure in Ireland. The keep is over 800 years old and the outer walls date from the thirteenth century. It's an amazing place. When I was a kid I was in the local archery club and once a week we would set up the targets in the middle ward and shoot our composite bows in there - yes it was as cool as it sounds. 

...

I haven't seen Game of Thrones yet (I have read the books) so if anyone has seen a preview copy or the actual show I'd love to read your review in the comments below.