Dallas Buyers' Club

Dallas Buyers' Club

I read somewhere that the pedants are embroiled in a row about just how much of the 'based on a true story' line should be preceded by 'loosely' or even 'very loosely'.

Give them a big “whatever”, E-for-the-earnestness-of-your-efforts, and watch a great film anyway.

A heterosexual, homophobic, rodeo-ing, coke-snorting, bareback riding good ol' boy cops aids from a needle-sharing hooker, takes on the drug authorities, the hospitals, revises some opinions along the way, and stretches his thirty day life expectancy to seven years, with some help from his friends and his determination and ingenuity.

However (un)faithful to the facts, there's some great lines, and an emotional examination of how entrenched attitudes can change in the right circumstances and environment.

American Smoke

Iain Sinclair goes to America, on a number of occasions, in search of the Beat writers, and their legacy. Being Iain Sinclair, somehow, this involves Camden and the second-hand book trade, Hackney, St Leonards-on-Sea, as well as Kentucky (William Burroughs), New York (Ginsberg and others) and loads of places (Kerouac).

There's the Sinclair geographical imperative, that sense of belonging somewhere. Every venture starts from somewhere, and that home base affects the experience and the perceptions.

Sinclair's good at giving people he meets along the way their head, giving them the pages to express themselves in their own words. There's a great piece in Hackney that Rose Red Empire where a barber who had operated in the area for thirty or forty years is simply let loose to tell his story in his own way. He does the same here with survivors who were on the peripheries, first-hand observers.

The Shock of the Fall

The death of a sibling leads to a descent into madness. Nathan Filer is a mental nurse, and he's written a superb first-person account of that descent, in the uncaring community system. The day centre Matthew Homes (not his real name – he's mad, not stupid, he tells us, all the names have been changed to protect the innocent) attends is closed down due to spending cuts. Life on the ward is described as tedium broken up by smoke-breaks and taking buckets of pills.

What struck me was something that I'd never really considered, the neither here-nor-there nature of mental care for most patients (service users, they're called at the day centre in the book). Before his problems began, there are fond and happy memories of life with a brother and loving parents. In full time care, there's the tedium, but a degree of certainty. It must the in between that's impossible. The 'support contracts', where does support become prying? Where does privacy become secrecy? The grey areas of life are the trickiest at any time and in any case, and must be impossible when a mind is scrambled, over-heating, and not functioning at full capacity.

Nathan Filer picked up a first novel prize, and it is a book that will either be torn through quickly, or cast aside early on. There's no end of funny lines, and the emotional attachments and tensions of family life are explored in the context of Matthews behavioural difficulties and problems.