Review and critical writing

A First Novel That Knows Exactly What It Is

There is a particular pleasure in a debut novel that does not overreach, and The Tide House — the first book by the young writer Maren Voss — is one of them. It is a small, sure-footed story about a family clearing out a dead grandmother's seaside house over a single weekend, and it is wise enough to understand that this is enough. Where many debuts strain for significance, this one trusts its smallness. The result is a quietly accomplished book that does less than it could, and does it almost perfectly.

The novel's great strength is its restraint. Voss never tells the reader how to feel. When the youngest sister finds a box of unsent letters, the scene lasts barely a page; there is no swelling revelation, no tidy explanation, only the letters and a closed expression. The withholding is deliberate, and it works: grief in this book arrives sideways, in the spaces between what the characters say. The prose matches this restraint — short, plain sentences, almost no metaphor, a deliberate refusal of the lyrical. It would be easy to call the style thin, but it is not thin; it is taut. Every sentence has been cut back to what it needs.

Where the novel is less sure is in its handling of the middle sister, Ana, who is given the most pages and the least to do. She exists mainly to react — to the house, to her siblings, to the letters — and rarely acts on her own account. The book seems to know she is its centre but never quite makes her one. It is a real flaw, though a forgivable one in a first novel: the supporting cast around her are drawn with such economy that her relative flatness is the more noticeable.

The structure is the book's quiet triumph. The whole novel takes place over forty-eight hours, in a single house, and Voss uses the tight frame to her advantage. Each chapter handles one room, and clearing each room releases one memory, so that the physical emptying of the house and the emotional unpacking of the family run exactly in step. By the time the last room is bare, the reader understands the family without ever having been told anything directly. That is craft.

What The Tide House finally amounts to is a demonstration of how much can be done with very little. It will not change anyone's life, and it does not try to. It is not ambitious in scope, but it is exact in execution — and there is something more impressive, in a first novel, about a writer who knows precisely the size of her own story than about one who reaches for the epic and falls short.

Judged against the great novels of family and grief, The Tide House is minor. Judged as what it actually is — a controlled, restrained, perfectly-proportioned debut — it is a real success, and a promise of better to come. If Voss can keep this discipline and add the ambition her central character is still waiting for, her second novel could be remarkable. On the strength of this one, I will be reading it.

Beautiful, Empty, and Almost Worth It

The Lantern Keepers is the most beautiful film I have seen this year, and one of the least satisfying. It is two hours of extraordinary images in search of a story, and whether you forgive it will depend almost entirely on how much you are prepared to be dazzled in place of being moved. I was dazzled. I was not moved. The film, to its credit, seems to know the difference and does not much mind.

Visually, it is a triumph. The director frames every shot as if it were a painting — a lighthouse keeper crossing a tilted floor at dawn, a single lit window in a black cliff, fog moving across a beam of light like something alive. The cinematography is not merely pretty; it is controlled, each image composed to feel both grand and lonely at once. For long stretches the film does not need dialogue, and it knows it: some of its best scenes contain no words at all, only weather and light and a man growing smaller against the sea.

The problem is everything that happens between the images. The screenplay is inert. The lighthouse keeper has a secret, the secret is slowly revealed, and the revelation changes nothing — not the character, not the story, not the audience's understanding. Incident piles on incident without development, so that the film mistakes events for progress. By the ninety-minute mark, the plot has stopped moving and the images are doing all the work, carrying a story that has quietly given up.

The lead performance papers over a good deal of this. The actor playing the keeper is extraordinary — watchful, still, capable of suggesting decades of regret in the set of his shoulders. He gives the film an emotional centre the screenplay refuses to supply, and his best scene, a long wordless breakfast in which nothing is said and everything is understood, is more affecting than anything in the script. He deserves a better film than the one built around him.

What undoes The Lantern Keepers is a failure of ambition disguised as restraint. The film mistakes withholding for depth: it keeps refusing to explain itself, and we are clearly meant to read this as mystery. But genuine mystery raises questions worth asking, while this film simply declines to tell a story and hopes its beauty will be mistaken for meaning. Sometimes it almost is.

Judged as cinema — as a sequence of composed, intelligent images — it is among the finest things on a screen this year. Judged as a film, as a story told to an audience over two hours, it has almost nothing to say. Whether that is a triumph or a waste depends entirely on what you went in wanting. Go for the images and the performance, and you will leave satisfied. Go for the story, and you will leave wondering what all that beauty was actually in aid of.

One Idea, Forty Times Over

There is a moment, halfway through Thresholds, the new exhibition of the painter Cosima Réti at the Glasshouse Gallery, when you understand the whole show — and the understanding is not entirely to its credit. Forty canvases, all of doorways, all in the same grey-green palette, hung at the same height around four white rooms: the effect is initially hypnotic and finally exhausting. Thresholds is an exhibition with one genuinely arresting idea and no apparent suspicion that one idea, repeated forty times, becomes something other than an idea. It becomes a wall.

This is a pity, because the idea is a good one. Réti paints doorways — only doorways — as thresholds between known and unknown, lit and unlit, and the best of these paintings are genuinely unsettling. In the first room, a canvas titled Going In shows a half-open door onto a darkness so total it seems to draw the eye physically forward; the painting is restrained, almost monochrome, and all the more disquieting for it. Réti understands that a threshold is frightening precisely because it withholds what lies beyond, and her refusal to paint the far side of any door is a real and disciplined choice. For the length of one room, the discipline is thrilling.

The trouble begins in the second room, and worsens in the third. The doorways keep coming, and the variations are too small to sustain attention: a door slightly more open, a green slightly cooler, a threshold seen from a marginally different angle. What read as discipline in room one reads as limitation by room three. The show offers the eye no contrast, no relief, no second idea against which to measure the first — and without contrast, even a strong image goes inert. By the fourth room I found myself walking faster, which is precisely the wrong thing for a painter of thresholds to make a viewer do.

The hanging compounds the problem. Every canvas is the same size, hung at the same height, evenly spaced — a decision that may be intended to suggest ritual or repetition, but in practice flattens forty distinct paintings into a single decorative frieze. A braver curator would have broken the rhythm: hung one canvas alone in an empty room, or varied the scale, or let a single threshold dominate a wall. Instead the installation enforces the very monotony the paintings risk, so that the show's weakest instinct is doubled rather than corrected. It is tonally consistent to a fault — and consistency, pushed this far, is just sameness with better manners.

And yet it would be unfair to leave it there, because at its best Thresholds does something genuinely difficult. The single finest painting, The Last Door, hung alone on the gallery's end wall — the one place the curator allowed an image room to breathe — is masterful: a doorway opening not onto darkness but onto a faint, cold light, so that for once the threshold offers something on the far side, and the whole exhibition's withholding suddenly acquires a point. Standing before it, you grasp what the show could have been: forty paintings building toward this one release, instead of forty paintings deferring it equally.

This is the real disappointment of Thresholds. It is not that Réti lacks an idea; it is that she has exactly one, and neither she nor her curator has thought hard enough about how to deploy it. An idea this strong needed shaping — needed development, contrast, a sense of movement from the first door to the last — and it has been given only multiplication.

Judged painting by painting, this is the work of a serious and disciplined artist, and three or four of these canvases would stop you in any gallery in the country. Judged as an exhibition — as a designed experience that a visitor moves through and is changed by — it is baggy, undercooked and self-defeating, an arresting idea that mistakes repetition for depth. Go for The Last Door. Go for the first room. But do not expect the forty paintings to add up to more than the four or five that matter.

Why We Cannot Stop Watching People Cook

The cookery programme should, by any reasonable measure, be the most boring thing on television. Nothing is at stake; the outcome is rarely in doubt; the central activity — chopping, stirring, waiting — is the very definition of the undramatic. And yet the genre is, year on year, among the most durable and widely loved on any schedule. To dismiss this as mere comfort-viewing is lazy. The cookery programme endures because it has quietly perfected a set of pleasures that more 'serious' genres struggle to deliver at all — and understanding those pleasures tells us something not entirely flattering about what we actually want from television.

The first pleasure is competence, and it is rarer on screen than you might think. Most drama is built on dysfunction: people failing, lying, falling apart. The cookery programme offers the opposite — the deep satisfaction of watching someone who is genuinely good at something do it well. There is a particular calm that descends when a skilled cook fillets a fish in three clean movements; it is the pleasure of mastery, and we are starved of it elsewhere. The genre understands that watching competence is restful in a way that watching conflict never is, and it has built an entire form on that single, underrated appetite.

The second pleasure is transformation, and this is where the genre is cleverer than it admits. Every cookery programme is, structurally, a tiny story of change: raw becomes cooked, separate becomes whole, ingredients become a meal. It is the most basic narrative shape there is — a beginning, a middle and an end you can eat — and the genre delivers it reliably every single episode. Where a drama might take a season to resolve, a cookery programme offers a complete, satisfying arc in twenty minutes. The appeal is not the food; it is the guaranteed resolution, the promise that this small story, at least, will turn out.

It would be easy to stop there and call the genre harmless. But the most interesting thing about the cookery programme is the way it has mutated — and not always for the better. The early form was instructional: a calm expert teaching you to make something. The dominant modern form is competitive, and the shift is revealing. We have taken the most peaceable activity imaginable and bolted onto it the machinery of the contest — the clock, the elimination, the judge's verdict, the contestant in tears. The genre discovered that competence alone, however restful, was not quite enough to hold a restless audience, and so it imported jeopardy from elsewhere. This is the genre's compromise, and a slightly cynical one: it keeps the comfort of watching people cook while adding the cruelty of watching them fail.

That compromise is, I think, the real key to its endurance. The modern cookery programme offers two contradictory pleasures at once — the restful and the anxious, mastery and jeopardy — and lets the viewer have both without having to choose. You can admire the skill and dread the elimination in the same minute. It is an ingenious piece of emotional engineering, and it explains why a form about chopping vegetables can be quietly addictive: it is not really about the food at all.

What the cookery programme finally reveals is less about cooking than about us. We claim to want drama, stakes, complexity; what we return to, week after week, is the sight of a competent person making something good, with just enough manufactured peril to keep us from relaxing entirely. The genre endures not because it is trivial but because it has understood our appetites better than we have — and has met them with more craft than it is ever given credit for.

So the next time someone calls the cookery programme mindless, the honest reply is that it is precisely the opposite: a deceptively sophisticated machine for delivering, in twenty undemanding minutes, the competence, the resolution and the small safe jeopardy that the rest of the schedule keeps promising and so rarely supplies. That it does all this while making dinner is not the genre's limitation. It is the whole, durable, slightly embarrassing point.

The Charity That Spends Most of Its Money on Itself

It is difficult to argue against a charity that helps disabled children learn to swim. That, I suspect, is precisely how the Brightwater Trust has survived as long as it has. For eleven years the Trust has raised money — a great deal of it, some £4 million last year alone — for what its glossy materials call "life-changing aquatic therapy". The cause is unimpeachable; the photographs are heart-warming; the donations keep coming. Look past the photographs, though, and a more uncomfortable picture emerges: an organisation that has become extraordinarily good at raising money for itself, and only incidentally good at the thing it was founded to do.

The figures are a matter of public record, which is the first surprise: they are not hidden, merely unread. Of that £4 million, the Trust's own published accounts show that £2.7 million — more than two-thirds — went on "fundraising and administration". Salaries account for a striking share: the chief executive is paid a sum that would not embarrass a mid-sized corporation. By the Trust's own numbers, fewer than thirty pence of every donated pound reaches a swimming pool. The most generous reading is that the Trust is inefficient; the least generous, and on this evidence the more honest, is that it has inverted its own purpose, becoming a fundraising operation that runs a small charity on the side.

Defenders will say, reasonably, that fundraising costs money, and that a charity which raises £4 million has clearly done something right. This is true, and it must be conceded. A charity that raised nothing would help no one. But the defence has a ceiling: at some point a ratio stops describing the cost of doing good and starts describing the substitution of one goal for another. When two-thirds of income is consumed before it reaches the cause, the organisation is no longer a charity that fundraises; it is a fundraiser that, almost as an afterthought, performs a charity. The Brightwater Trust has quietly crossed that line, and the warmth of its cause has discouraged anyone from noticing.

What makes the case troubling rather than merely disappointing is the deliberateness of the presentation. The Trust's annual report leads with children, not figures; the cost ratios appear, as the law requires, but on page nineteen, in a table no donor is invited to read. The appeals are engineered to make scrutiny feel like cruelty — to question the spending is made to seem like questioning the children. This is the Trust's real skill, and it is not a charitable one: it has built a wall of good feeling around itself precisely high enough to keep questions out. The cause is genuine; the use made of the cause is not.

To its credit, the Trust does help children, and the families who spoke to me were sincerely grateful — a fact no honest account can omit. The swimming programmes are real, the children are real, the gratitude is real. But the existence of genuine good at the bottom of an organisation does not justify the disproportion above it. A charity is not entitled to waste two-thirds of its income simply because the final third does something worthwhile. The families' gratitude is an argument for the cause; it is not an argument for the Trust's stewardship of it, and the two have been carefully conflated.

Judged by its intentions, the Brightwater Trust is beyond reproach, and its founders almost certainly began in good faith. Judged by its conduct — by where the money actually goes, and by the care taken to ensure no one asks — it is a cautionary example of how a good cause can become a shield. The lesson is not that the Trust is uniquely corrupt; on the evidence, it is not corrupt at all, merely self-serving in a way the sector quietly tolerates. The lesson is for the rest of us: that the warmer a charity makes us feel, the harder we should look at its accounts — and that the most effective place to hide an uncomfortable number has always been page nineteen, beneath a photograph of a smiling child.

Faithful, and Therefore Dead

The most common complaint about a screen adaptation — that it "changed the book" — is also the most confused. We say it as if fidelity were the measure of an adaptation's worth, as if the highest praise were "it was exactly like the book". But the films that are exactly like the book are almost always the worst ones. The uncomfortable truth, which devoted readers resist because it sounds like betrayal, is this: a faithful adaptation is usually a failed one, and the adaptations we love are the ones brave enough to be unfaithful in the right way.

Consider what fidelity actually requires. A novel and a film are different instruments; they make meaning in incompatible ways. The novel's deepest resource is interiority — the silent, continuous access to a character's thought that prose alone can give. Film has no native equivalent. When an adaptation tries to be faithful to an interior novel, it is forced into the clumsiest devices: the voice-over that narrates what we can already see, the lingering close-up that begs us to imagine a thought it cannot show. The result is inert — a film busily gesturing at depths it has no means to reach. The fidelity is real; the film is dead.

The adaptations that live do the opposite. They ask not "how do I reproduce this book?" but "how do I make a film that does to an audience what this book did to a reader?" — and the answer almost always involves infidelity. A novel's interior anguish becomes an exterior image; a hundred pages of reflection become a single wordless shot; a beloved subplot is cut without apology because film cannot afford the digression prose can. These are not violations of the book. They are translations of it, and translation, by definition, changes the words to keep the meaning. The adaptation that refuses to change anything has confused the words with the meaning, and kept the former at the cost of the latter.

This is why the most devoted readers are so often the worst judges of adaptation. They come to the film as a test of accuracy, ticking off the scenes that survived and mourning those that did not, and they mistake their own disappointment for a critical judgement. But "they cut my favourite chapter" is not an evaluation; it is a complaint about loss. The real critical question is never what was cut, but whether what remains works as a film — whether it has found its own form for the book's effect. By that measure, the faithful adaptation that bores and the unfaithful one that grips are easy to rank, however much the ranking offends.

None of this is a licence for anarchy, and it is worth conceding where infidelity fails. There is a kind of adaptation that changes everything and understands nothing — that keeps the title, discards the meaning, and offers a generic film wearing a beloved book's name. This is not the brave infidelity I am defending; it is its opposite, a failure of comprehension dressed up as boldness. The distinction is everything: the good adaptation is unfaithful to the book's letter in order to be faithful to its spirit; the bad one is unfaithful to both. Infidelity is not a virtue in itself. It is only a virtue in the service of understanding.

So should a much-loved book be adapted at all? The honest answer is that it depends entirely on whether the adapter loves the right thing. An adapter who loves the book — its words, its scenes, its surface — should be kept away from a camera, because reverence produces taxidermy: a perfect, lifeless replica. An adapter who loves what the book did — the fear, the grief, the laughter it produced in a reader — should be encouraged to change as much as the new form demands, because only that licence can produce a living film.

The verdict, then, is not "books should not be adapted", nor "adaptations should be faithful". It is more demanding than either. A book should be adapted only by someone willing to betray its every page in order to keep its single beating heart — and the adaptations we call faithful, the ones that change nothing and move no one, are not the respectful exceptions we imagine. They are the genre's truest failures, embalmed in their own devotion.