“Have you turned me on?” Gillian Anderson asked, as she walked swiftly from her trailer on the back lot of a studio in Calgary, swishing up the hem of the long woollen skirt she was wearing to check whether a microphone transmitter affixed to a leather boot was functioning. It was mid-June, and Anderson had been based in Alberta since May, filming “The Abandons,” a lavish new Netflix drama set in Oregon in the mid-eighteen-hundreds. Her boots were scuffed and grimy; the previous day, she’d been shooting scenes on horseback, on location in the foothills of the Canadian Rockies, in her role as Constance Van Ness, a flinty matriarch who has inherited, and substantially increased, the mining fortune made by her late husband. “It’s dust, dust, dust for days, and then mud, mud, mud for days,” she told me, with relish.
Anderson’s career was forged in Canada. When she was in her mid-twenties, she was cast as the F.B.I. agent Dana Scully in “The X-Files,” the sci-fi drama that débuted on Fox in 1993. “I got the job on a Thursday, and I was needed in Vancouver on the Saturday,” Anderson said. The first five seasons were shot in British Columbia, and the show’s dark, gloomy aesthetic was partly a product of the region’s meteorological conditions. “The X-Files,” which ran for nearly a decade, turned Anderson from a couch-surfing unknown into a globally recognized star, and introduced a novel kind of character to network television. Scully, brainy and acerbic, more than held her own with her fellow-agent Fox Mulder, played by David Duchovny, and, in contrast with the proliferating starlet roles featured in rival nineties shows such as “Beverly Hills 90210” and “Baywatch,” Anderson’s character was notably frumpy and invariably serious. (There are Reddit threads devoted to discussing whether, during the entire run of “The X-Files,” Scully ever really smiled or laughed.) Anderson told me that, while filming a scene in an early episode, she sought to add some shading to her character by letting a tear roll down her cheek; she got a call from the show’s creator, Chris Carter, telling her that the ultra-rational Scully wouldn’t have broken down at that moment—“that she was basically a badass.”
The first thing that hits you when you press through the revolving doors of the Hyatt Regency hotel and convention centre in Rosemont, Illinois, on the outskirts of Chicago, is the wall of sound. A cacophony of laughter and karaoke, pumping bass and gleeful, shouting voices. The second is the odour. The air is thick with the smell of sweat, coffee, alcohol, baby powder and deodorant. But the other senses fade out when your eyes start to process what they’re seeing. Because the thing that makes entering this lobby so sensationally surreal – the kind of experience you usually have to lick rare Amazonian frogs to achieve – is what people are wearing.
This collection is a debut – it is also an ending. The poet Gboyega Odubanjo died tragically almost a year ago and the final edit of this extraordinary and arresting book has been overseen by friends, family and his publishers. It is, in one sense, a found poem – or series of poems – about something not a soul would ever wish to find. On 21 September 2001 – anyone alive at that time will remember it – the headless torso of a boy was discovered in the Thames, in the stretch near the Globe theatre, dressed in a pair of orange girls’ shorts. It was police officers who gave him the name of Adam. And although detectives went on to discover that he had been brutally dismembered in a ritual sacrifice – perhaps to win a business deal or secure good luck – the murderer was never confirmed and the case never closed.
Odubanjo’s book takes Adam as his starting point and the name itself becomes a promise, a provocation, a vehicle for his ideas.
Dead in Long Beach, California reminds the reader how lying shapes one’s intimate life and also how lying is infused throughout the noise of the greater world. At times life is messy, and it feels like “the truth is something for private moments behind one’s eyelids and not for authority figures that might call child protective services.” For Coral, lying has become a survival strategy, and in this novel it takes her everything she has to survive.
Yet again, McDermid proves to be a proficient storyteller with a deep understanding of literature, history and human nature. The novel’s refreshing focus on prevailing female friendships at its core allows it to honour its historical roots while standing firmly as an engaging and original read.
A storm in the Sahara inspired Baltimore-based Mai Sennaar’s terrific debut novel. She describes dust settling over western Europe: “A subtle amber muting to the sky… this strange sight, this strange colour, burrows so far into the subconscious minds of the people that for a few nights, they dream in gold… rare evidence that the world is one.” It’s a potent motif for our interconnectedness.
Such complex reactions run through the essays in which his moral sensibility confronts his visceral underbelly. Ultimately, he manages to control the instinctive lure of violence. He is, at heart, a civilized, loving father, husband, and son. His ability to love and care dominates, but the revelations of these essays help us understand the mentality of the many who cannot control the urge to strike out at others when hostile nearness provokes fears of threat. Does Dubus survive because he possesses the intelligence to judge his impulses, the talent to express them in words, and the depths of positive emotions that overpower the negative?