Wonka is a (Paddington) bear hug of a movie

Paul King has found a formula – and it’s every bit the equal of any chocolate treat that Willy Wonka can confect.

Having hit the jackpot with the Paddington films (Paddington in Peru comes next year), King teamed up with Paddington 2 co-writer Paul Farnaby to create a Willy Wonka origin story. And it’s an absolute joy.

We meet our titular hero as he arrives by sea in an unnamed European city (hints of both France and Germany though mostly filmed in England), armed only with his magical abilities with the cocoa bean and the dreams that his mother, who steered a narrow boat up and down canals, told him were so important.

She herself made wondrous chocolate – this feels reminiscent of Joanne Harris’s iconic novel, Chocolat, not least in a sense of magic being involved – but died before she could impart the secrets to her son.

The problem for Willy though, is that the town he has chosen in which to launch his products on the world is effectively run by a cartel of three unscrupulous chocolatiers who want this threat to their power gone – and that follows having fallen prey to the dreadful Mrs Scrubitt and her henchman Bleacher, after the latter offers a homeless Willy a roof over his head, without mentioning the hidden costs that will drive him into captivity and forced labour.

Calah Lane as Noodle

But Willy makes new friends, including the orphan Noddle, and they all – eventually – engage with his plans of how to free themselves and defeat the cartel.

A few commentators have suggested that Willy is such a nice character, it’s hard to believe that, in his future lies a less charming approach.

But there are hints here that his inherent mischievousness could develop a darker side. And Timothée Chalamet captures both that and the naivety of the character in a completely convincing way.

He also has a very pleasing singing voice that does full justice to the great new songs from Neil ‘The Divine Comedy’ Hannon. It’s also a delight that the film includes new versions of Pure Imagination and The Oompa-Loompa Song from the classic 1971 Leslie Bricusse and Anthony Newley score.

I’ve already effectively said that Chalamet is very good indeed – he is utterly convincing and has charm by the bucketload, and can sing and hoof brilliantly. Teenager Calah Lane as Noodle is simply wonderful in what is sure to be her breakthrough role.

Everywhere else – as with the Paddington films – is a wonderful ensemble cast. Sally Hawkins as Willy’s mother, Jim Carter, Natasha Rothwell, Farnaby and Rakhee Thakrar as his new friends are all excellent.

Matt Lucas and Mathew John Baynton as two of the triumvirate of the chocolate cartel are also great, but do rather lose out to a wonderful turn from Paterson Joseph as the third of their corrupt number. And this is before we mention Rowan Atkinson as a dodgy priest, Olivia Colman as Mrs Scrubitt, Tom Davis as Bleacher and Keegan-Michael Key as a corrupt chief of police.

Ah… and then there’s Hugh Grant, who risks stealing the entire show with his Oompa-Loompa (left), as he did when playing Phoenix Buchanan in Paddington 2.

Anything else to add? It looks gorgeous. And after a really tough personal year, it was the hug of a movie that I needed. There is a scene involving flamingos and balloons that had me blubbing for sheer joy.

And that seems to be King’s great skill: he can create films like this, without a shred of cynicism, but always avoiding over sentimentality or mawkishness. A great big (Paddington bear) hug of a film!

'It starts as all these stories do. With blood'

Joanne Harris’s latest novel, Broken Light begins with the blood of menstruation, decades in the past, while the onset of the menopause is the trigger for the contemporary sections.

At the centre of the story is Bernie Ingram (née Bernie Moon), approaching 50, in a marriage that has long since gone stale, while she’s estranged from both her mother and her own son. Working in a bookshop, she has no friends and begins to realise that, in effect, she has little agency.

But as she travels through the menopause, the nearby murder of a woman triggers a return of powers that she had long forgotten about – and Bernie begins a journey to a totally new sense of living.

Broken Light is an extraordinary tale of female experience; angry, passionate and deeply humane.

It’s been labelled as magic realism and it has, as much of Harris’s work, a quality of fairytale/folklore about. In keeping with that, it is an incredibly easy read (420 pages in two days for me), which illustrates the grip in exerts, but it’s also full of complexity, power and moral nuance.

The central theme here is the violence and misogyny that women face as a matter of routine, and the way that women are ignored.

But it’s also an examination of friendship – and of the cycle of toxicity in relationships. And also, the toxicity that can be spread on social media and is stirred by a sizeable amount of the mainstream.

There is something exhilarating about seeing some of the worst offenders called out, by their real titles, in the pages. Harris isn’t afraid to cast her fiercely feminist stare straight at them and illustrate the damage they do and the damage they facilitate.

In terms of the traumas that childhood can produce, there are places I physically winced in personal recognition – not least a child’s birthday party and aspects of domineering motherhood.

But the ending is shocking, yet redemptive and hopeful – simply stunning. Bernie Moon will stay with me for a very long time.

Broken Light by Joanne Harris is out now, available in hardback, for Kindle and audio.

There can never be too many books

And so it is that World Book Day is upon us again – and almost gone, at the time of writing.

In an era where, increasingly, digital seems to dominate, it’s wonderful to think about books.

Yes, yes: I know that books can be digital too, but, to me – and many millions more – there is nothing to beat the tactile joy of a real book. Indeed, for billions of people on this planet, the old-fashioned variety of bound paper is all that they can hope to have access to.

Do you remember the joy when, as a child, you managed to read a book on your own for the first time?

I cannot remember the title of the first book I managed like that, but I remember sitting in a small red and white straw child’s basket chair with it, and being so proud when I got to the last page.

Not that long after, I took enormous pleasure in Enid Blyton’s Well Really, Mr Twiddle, which had me hooting with hysterical laughter.

Many years later, I got pretty much the same sense of pride from reading an entire Asterix book in German. Books always offer potential for new moments of personal achievement.

At the beginning of my twenties, I suffered some sort of breakdown after being injured and then chucked out of polytechnic. For ages, I couldn’t read – even much-loved books could not hold my concentration beyond the first few pages.

What revived reading for me was Stephen King. I picked up Carrie in a local bookshop and couldn’t it down. Then The Stand and It, with many more to follow.

I ‘discovered’ Terry Pratchett before he was anywhere near national treasure status, standing in a small sci-fi and fantasy bookshop to meet him once when nobody else was even around.

The result is three very precious signed volumes of the earliest Discworld novels.

Books – among the very first things I’d unpack in my nomadic early adulthood: get those out and it would start to feel like home.

Books, which provide a wonderful pre-holiday ritual when considering what from my buckling shelves I wish to take.

Books, which bring with them knowledge and entertainment.

While the majority of the books that I have bought in recent years have been non-fiction, I still seek out good storytelling too.

Penguin are now releasing the entire Maigret collection, and with new translations that finally do Simenon’s noir novels justice. Those are on pre-order with me.

There are old friends that I have read many times already and will probably read many times more: Jan Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, Charlotte Brönte’s Jane Eyre (which I hated at school), Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice, Stephen King’s The Shining (the movie was crap) and Joanne Harris’s Chocolat, all of which I find new things in every time I pick them up.

I have a few antiquarian (relish that word) books – some up to 200 years old. They are to be treasured and looked after: I feel only a temporary guardian.

And I also rather pride myself on having a collection of books about German history – no! Not that period! – that would, I suspect, count as pretty decent.

I still judge a bookshop on its history section: on whether it is just full of WWII and the Nazis or goes beyond that.

Of course, talking of the Nazis, it’s always worth remembering how they burnt books on Bebelplatz in Berlin in 1933 – right next to the Humboldt University. That symbolism should tell you something about the power of the written word. And today, of course, we have groups of religious fundamentalists who want to deny people – and women and girls in particular – the right to learn.

Whether in the deepest, darkest days or winter, curled up on the sofa with a good read and a hot chocolate or under a parasol on the beach in the height of summer, is there really anything that can compare to the pleasure that can be found in the pages of a good book?

So let’s celebrate books today – and those who create them and those who read them – but let’s never stop loving books for all the other days of the year.

And PS: make sure you love your local library too.

Books for the beach: the great annual dilemma

Loki with, err, her gospel

And so it begins: the great annual kerfuffle about What Books am I Taking on Holiday.

It brings with it the annual question of: ‘why don’t you get a Kindle?’ Well, I have a tablet, and I read news and features on it, but don’t particularly like reading anything longer.

I love the feel, the heft, the smell, the sense of a real book.

And however good the backlighting is on a device, glass does not take well to being buffeted by sand (oddly enough) and other elements, while computer technology does not, generally speaking, make good bedfellows with water.

I don’t an electronic device into the bath – so why would I risk dropping one into the sea or similar?

Books it is – and this ritual is one that, even in its apparent indecisiveness, I enjoy.

Of course, it adds weight to the baggage, but I’m not travelling by air.

The Other Half is being seriously serious this time around, with an intention of taking Piketty for the beach – only a doubting Thomas would not concede that Capital in the Twenty-First Century has already caused enough of a stir to render the first name of its author as superfluous.

And Bertolt Brecht: A Literary Life, a massive new biography by Stephen Parker, is also sitting ready to find a corner in the case.

My own reading list is somewhat different – although the Brecht will be available if the mood takes me.

First up is The Colours of Catalonia: In the Footsteps of Twentieth-Century Artists by Virginie Raguenaud, which I bought in Collioure in the first place – and will now take back to provide artistic background for this trip.

It does, of course, include a section on Collioure and Matisse and the Fauves. And Raguenaud talks of Ceret and Elne, of Picasso and Survage.

Museums Without Walls, by Jonathan Meades, is also penciled in for provision of pithy pointers to looking at and reading the built environment around us.

And then I have Five Quarters of the Orange, Holy Fools and Coastliners – three novels, all set in France, by Joanne Harris, together with The Gospel of Loki, her reworking of Norse myth from earlier this year.

Harris is one of those writers I haven’t read as much of as I have meant to – but that’s largely out of fear. For ages, I dreaded any of her other titles being a let-down after the glories of Chocolat, which is a rare beast, in that it’s a book I’ve read rather more than once.

Back in 2005, I reviewed Gentlemen and Players for a magazine – and thoroughly enjoyed that too – but subsequent re-reads of Chocolat and a first reading of its sequel, The Lollipop Shoes, were as far as I dipped my foot into Harris’s oeuvre until dipping into Blackberry Wine a week or so ago.

I’d always intended to get a copy of The Gospel of Loki, but this has not been a big reading year, so hadn’t got around to it until The Other Half suggested it for the holiday list.

One Amazon reviewer suggested that Loki won’t appeal to anyone who liked Chocolat, but that seems a remarkably limiting idea with no logic.

I love Chocolat – and I love the Norse myths. I can’t be unique – well, not on that score, at least.

As Terry Pratchett’s dust jacket biog points out, he is “sometimes accused of literature”.

Harris is, first and foremost, a wonderful storyteller, with a great ability to weave modern fairytales – on occasion, very darkly – and to employ magic realism, but she’s also a writer of the sort of subtlety that the same can be said of her: indeed, she makes me think of Angela Carter.

Take Chocolat: it’s a wonderful story, but it’s also ‘about’ so much: about life, living, pleasure and guilt, and it leaves you with plenty of food for thought.

My mother didn’t like it, but then it was only some time after I’d given her a copy that it dawned on me that Harris’s approach to both the sensual pleasures of life and to religion might not entirely have appealed to her.

C’est la vie, as those damnable Frenchies might say.

Blackberry Wine is a great read, and as I turned the final page and brushed away a tear – yes, you really do care that much about the characters Harris creates – thus was born the feeling that Proust can wait.

A question of Schleswig-Holstein

Strandkorb at Travemünde, soft pastel on A4

For a long time, the plan for a spring escape had involved a jaunt to Stratford for a dose of The Bard. But with nothing booked and tempus fugiting, realisation dawned that the Warwickshire town, no matter how delightful, is always absolutely rammed with coach loads of camera-toting tourists.

And crowds are not what the doctor would order, were the doctor peering over the top of spectacles and penning a prescription.

With the question being one of where one could get away from, if not all, but a fair bit of it, the solution arrived with the sort of inspirational flash worthy of a cartoon lightbulb overhead: why not head to Travemünde?

Planning has been minimal, and bookings were only completed last weekend, but the hours are ticking down to departure. 

And so we head to Schleswig-Holstein. The Other Half has been getting excited about this on the grounds that he knows of its place in history.

I’m not going to get into the matter of whether he is only the fourth person to understand it after a Prince Consort who’d died, a German professor who’d gone mad and twice-prime minister of Britain, Lord Palmerston, who famously claimed to have understood it but then forgotten.

Having reached a point of climbing up metaphorical walls, the central requirements have become peace and quiet – and clean air. And the promise is good.

Schleswig-Holstein is the most northern of Germany’s 16 Länder or states, with a population (including the city of Kiel)  of 2,806,531, giving a density of 460 per square mile.

The old port town of Travemünde is included in the borough of Lübeck, thus being part of an overall population figure of 211,713 – or 2,600 per square mile.

Compare that with London’s 13,690 per square mile, and it’s entirely reasonable to expect that it will be a great deal quieter – even to the point of being able to hear oneself think!

I visited just over a year ago during my brief sojourn to Lübeck itself. On what was, in effect, the first truly good day of the year after that dismally long winter, I stepped out of sandals and onto gloriously soft and clean sand.

It was quiet that day – just a few people around – and since it’s not much later in the season, I hope it will be very little busier. Certainly, we had no trouble booking, even at such a late stage.

So, with a few hours remaining before we board the train for Paris and then the sleeper to Hamburg, it’s worth mulling the area a little.

Travemünde itself sits at the mouth of the Trave, overlooking Lübeck Bay.

Originally built as a fortress by Henry the Lion, Duke of Saxony, in the 12th century, it was later strengthened by the Danes, became a town in 1317 and passed into possession of the free city of Lübeck itself in 1329.

None of the old fortifications remain, having been demolished in 1807, juts a few years after it started to become known as a seaside resort.

Sand model of the Holstentor, one of the gates of old Lübeck

It remains a resort, but not to quite the fashionable extent of the beginning of the 20th century, when even the likes of the Kaiser visited. It is, however, Germany’s largest Baltic ferry port, boasts the oldest lighthouse on the German Baltic coast, dating from 1539, and hosts the annual Travemünder Woche of sailing races plus Sand World, with displays of sand sculpture.

Oh yes, there will be history involved in this little jaunt.

On a possibly historical but certainly amusing note, the Schleswig-Holstein coat of arms features two lions looking at a thistle.

The story goes that it was originally designed to have the lions facing the other way, but Otto von Bismarck suggested it be changed because the thistles would make those leonine bums rather uncomfortable.

It’s the sort of story that you deeply wish is true.

But setting that aside, walks along the Baltic sea shore are calling, while there is a fairly sizable-looking park not far from the hotel too.

And then there’s the food: if it’s anything like the simple but squeakily fresh sole, topped with the shrimp garnish so beloved of the region, that I enjoyed on that fleeting visit to Travemünde last year – the first al fresco dining experience of the year – it will be very welcome indeed.

Mind, since we booked, I’ve been thinking of German breakfasts and, most particularly, nearly dreaming of the herring.

The books are backed – a Thames Hudson volume on Matisse, Joanne Harris’s Blackberry Wine and The Rat, by Günter Grass, which I have already started.

And for the first time on such a trip, there’s also a a box of soft pastels, an A4 pad, an A5 sketch book, a pack of pens and another pencils, sharpener and rubbers.

So, Schleswig-Holstein wir kommen!

Weather to warm up the pleasure muscle

A whisper of cloud in the blue and the sun warming the body, all the way to the bone. Bright pink blossom waving gently in the merest of breezes. It was a glorious weekend.

Not that the enjoyment in our neck of the woods was limited to me and The Other Half alone: the cats were thrilled to bits too. The kittens went scatty both mornings, as we sat outside with coffee, relishing the peacefulness.

Otto made several dashes up one fence into next door’s garden, which seems to be her Schleswig-Holstein. Loki too was full of wild-eyed mischief. Next time, I’m naming cats something like ‘Fluffy’. Boudicca, by and large, remained aloof.

I took the chance to sit out with them, finishing Joanne Harris’s Chocolat, which I’ve now read at least three times.

It’s a wonderful book – and one that reveals new things every time I pick it up.

This time, I was particularly aware of the idea of having to stop running from the past before you can move forward. Both Vianne and Reynaud are in this situation, as well as Josephine. The question – and it remains at the end – is whether any or all of them can do this.

As always, it makes me cry in a number of places – and yet this is a deeply life-affirming novel, and one that celebrates pleasure (including food) and life itself.

In ways that I had not seen before, it seemed much more personal than on previous readings, bringing to my own somewhat nomadic childhood and the impact that that (along with other things) influenced.

But lifting the theme of food from it, this was a chance to build on Thursday’s development of taste and looks.

Because I was running low on stock, Saturday was a day for roast chicken. The bird was stuffed and cooked as per the River Café East Two recipe I use (three hours on a low heat, then half an hour on high, with Vermouth added for the final stretch and butter massaged into the skin).

The weather was so utterly fabulous and summery that it was also the perfect time for a salad of courgette, sliced into thin ribbons and dressed with honey, lemon juice, olive oil, seasoning and tarragon leaves. It’s a lovely light and fragrant dish.

I also did Provençal tomatoes. These were big, beefy fruits, halved, de-seeded and dried out carefully, then sprinkled with a mixture of salt, pepper, nutmeg and sugar before being filled with a layer of finely chopped shallots and topped with masses of fresh, fragrant herbs and garlic, also finely chopped.

They go into a hot pan, skin side down, for two minutes, and then you throw in a slug of wine or stock or water. Turn the heat down, lid the pan and leave for 10 minutes.

Take a spoon and a palate knife and carefully turn them, keeping the shape and the filling in place as much as possible. Add a drop more liquid if required. Lid the pan again and cook for a further 10 minutes.

Now mine had rather collapsed on Saturday (hence the absence from the photo), but they’re still seriously tasty.

And as a garnish, I’d more aïoli and also some tapanade, which brought plenty more big flavours to the plate.

That was followed by a rhubarb syllabub, which freshened things up again.

There is pleasure in eating food and there is pleasure is cooking it. And this was a day when the very weather gave an enormous dose of pleasure too.

As pleasing and complex as a really good truffle

Chocolat by Joanne Harris

The wind has changed direction, and it blows Vianne Rocher and her six-year-old daughter Anouk into the insular French village of Lansquenet-sous-Tannes, just in time for the start of Lent.

But when Vianne opens a chocolaterie, bringing sensual treats to the townspeople, she finds herself in conflict with the curate, Reynaud.

And as he struggles with his 40 days of penance and denial, Vianne’s influence over his flock grows.

A very enjoyable novel – and a deceptively light one – that takes the classic ideas of the pure and the profane and gives them a few tweaks.

Joanne Harris writes with real zest of the joys of good food (not just chocolate) and company. In many ways, it’s a gospel of pleasure and of living; a hymn to the senses. And it is extraordinarily evocative.

You do need to suspend your disbelief over certain issues – the timeframe of the story doesn’t bear too great an analysis, but it does suit the subject and can be forgiven for that reason.

Reynaud’s form of his religion is obsessively about denial and control – and he fully intends to foist these on his parishoners (and those who are not amongst their number). His is a censorious and patronising concern for their wellbeing, nourished by his own agonising guilt; he looks down on them and has set himself up as being responsible for them, seeking his own redemption in them. And in attempting this, he loses sight of their humanity.

But there are reasons for Reynaud’s attitudes – just as there are for Vianne’s approach to life. And Harris’s strength as a writer is that she never opts for the most simplistic approach.

Chocolat is not simply concerned with the battle between pleasure and denial, but also with mortality and the question of how you live life – including how you die.

It’s about love and laughter, friendship and joy. About loss and longing, pain and fear, and the need to stop running. There is a belief in magic here – the magic of life and living.

Harris has created a really delightful – and remarkably provocative book. My religious mother disliked it quite intensely, although she won’t talk about it other than to state that simple fact.

And finally, there is Armande, based on Harris’s own grandmother. No spoilers here – but perhaps the real question that the book leaves you with is whether you could, or would, follow Armande’s lead. It is a challenge for anyone who has been brought up to view conformity as the only possible option. Live, says this book: live!