Reviews

Book

Beijing or bust

Planning a trip to Beijing in 2008? You may need a well-designed guidebook to explore the Chinese capital.

The Intercontinental Press has recently published the 2008 edition of Insider's Guide to Beijing, one of the English-language Immersion Guides series.

"Whether you are a Beijing resident or an intrepid visitor, this is a guide that punches through the tourist facade of China's mighty capital and tells you where real Beijingers like to eat, sleep, study, party work, primp and play," says Adam Pillsbury, the guide's editor-in-chief.

The book is updated for the countdown to the 2008 Olympics, crammed with listings of hundreds of shops, pubs, restaurants, and lavishly illustrated with color photos.

Apart from its exceptional utility, the 700-page guidebook is a pleasant read, tapping into the aggregated knowledge and expertise of more than 40 Beijing-based writers and gleefully delving into topics both weighty and obscure.

Zhu Linyong

Film

The Golden Compass

Directed by Chris Weitz, starring Nicole Kidman, Daniel Craig, Dakota Blue Richards, Ben Walker

The first movie-episode in Philip Pullman's much-admired fantasy novel series, His Dark Materials, entertainingly pits a feisty teen heroine against the evil cosmic forces of psychological tyranny. It's a convoluted, enjoyable, very mad, deeply conservative and, at one moment, horribly violent extravaganza. There's no doubt about what buttons The Golden Compass is pushing. It looks like Hogwarts, Narnia, Middle Earth, or Tatooine. Christopher Lee has a small speaking role. Its weird internal universe takes some getting used to, however, and to this non-Pullman-reader, the claims often made on behalf of his legend about striking a blow for rationalism against religious authoritarianism don't precisely hold up. Of this, more in a moment.

Nicole Kidman steals the show as the bewitching yet hateful villainess Mrs Coulter: an appalling figure of pure blond evil. Has her name been inspired by America's neocon glamour-queen Ann Coulter? She slinks about the place in pricey couture and non-faux fur collars that scream: "All sorts of animals were harmed in the making of this garment!" Mrs Coulter plans to get into her clutches the young heroine, Lyra Belacqua, and she particularly wishes to grab Lyra's alethiometer, or golden compass, a precious, magical instrument that enables the owner to tell not the time, but the truth, and so hated by the forces of darkness. Lyra is nicely played by 13-year-old newcomer Dakota Blue Richards.

As she battles the bad guys, Lyra makes common cause with an exotic band of brothers, including nomad grandees, played by Jim Carter and Tom Courtenay, and a very large polar bear, voiced by Ian McKellen, who gets involved in a horrible piece of bear-on-bear violence: explicit enough, perhaps, to exclude some of the series' youngest fans from the cinema.

The story unfolds in a hyperreal, retro-futurist world, with Heath Robinson-esque flying machines hovering and clattering overhead. It is a world in which everyone has his or her own "daemon", like a witch's familiar, representing each person's irreducible spirit. The British cities of London and Oxford are crowded, bulbous, Gilliamesque places of cod-classical architecture. One building in particular looks like a delirious and grandiose mixture of Westminster Abbey, the Royal Academy in Piccadilly and the University of London Senate House in Bloomsbury. This is the headquarters of the Magisterium, a sinister mind-control cult that resents any free-thinking from anyone. Their aim is to establish a Vatican-Caliphate-Soviet dominating all our minds.

The Guardian

(China Daily 12/05/2007 page18)