You don't break, exactly, you just run out of stories to tell

I am very headachy. I don't know if it's the weather changing or the fact that I am fighting off two different infections and my body just doesn't have the time to spare for a pain threshold, but it's not fun.

1. Having finally read Jo Walton's Half a Crown (2008) after spotting the new trade paperback in Porter Square Books last night, I think the most interesting thing I can note about the Small Change trilogy without throwing myself into plot discussion is the way it does not use betrayal as the moral index of its characters. The jumping-off point of the series is an act of powerful and upsetting compromise; Farthing (2006) and Ha'penny (2007) both reinforce that the only things to choose between in this world are grades of collaboration, what you protect, who you choose to sell out to do it. The fact is so self-evident, it's expressed in words only very late in Half a Crown: "Everyone has something they care about more." And I like that it is presented as neither an excuse—well, in a corrupt system, everybody shifts for themselves as best they can—nor a pitying indictment—look what this character has been reduced to, living in the society they do—because the point is not judgment, the coziness of the reader knowing they would have behaved better. Odds are they wouldn't. I keep coming back to John le Carré when I think about these books, which is why I'm quoting the BBC's Jim Prideaux in the subject header. I think his was the first universe I spent any real time in that took it so casually for granted that everyone has a buying point, whether the transaction turns on desire or fear. But I like also that I can write these statements knowing that one of the protagonists of Half a Crown keeps the entire way through a secret I was waiting to get out and ruin someone simply because one of the truisms of the series has been that if information on a person exists, it will be used against them, and the fact that here it isn't makes the difference for me between dystopia and grimdark, or maybe what rachelmanija calls a cement truck Holocaust novel. If everybody always does the wrong thing, if there is no hope of sacrifice or compassion, the world loses its credibility. You tune out your emotional investment, because the deck was stacked anyway. Life sucks, everybody go home! (See also: the reasons I find the 1954 television Nineteen Eighty-Four more upsetting than the film version from 1984, because people there are getting on with their lives just enough, it's not inherently unbelievable that they might be able to sneak in a little more.) The character I'm talking about is not categorized by the plot as a good person because she keeps this one secret any more than she's categorized as a bad one because she gives another secret away. She lives in a fascist state and that's not good for people, but the novel is much less interested in how that brings her to tell stories or break than in what the decisions tell us about her: what it is that she cares about more. It's a very humane approach to dystopian fiction, and one I find a lot more interesting than the relentlessly condemnatory kind. The latter is the anatomized dragon of Farthing's dedication. The former reminds you that someone still gets bitten every day.

(I may throw myself into plot discussion in comments, so if you are the sort of person who cares about spoilers five years after the fact, er, good luck with that.)

2. Talking about fascist states reminded me of a movie I never wrote up, which of course I can't handily rewatch. Reproduced from e-mail to strange_selkie last October:

The Seventh Cross is a weird movie that might really have benefited from being made after the days of the Production Code, except that it was necessary for it to be made in 1944: I haven't read the book it's based on, but it was German protest literature and had to be published first in abridged translation in the U.S. in 1942; it contains one of the earliest depictions of a concentration camp in Hollywood film. Spencer Tracy is a political prisoner in a fictional camp who escapes with six of his comrades; all are progressively captured, hung on barbed-wire crosses to die, and become part of the running narration of the film, tracking Tracy's Georg Heisler in his attempts to get out of the country, at first alone and later with the help of either organized undergrounds or random strangers who aid him for assorted reasons of their own. The problem is that the narration is as subtle as a brickbat and keeps stressing the need for Georg to regain his faith in humanity (which he has not unreasonably lost, having been in, oh, a Nazi concentration camp) in ways that cause a movie with a commendably adult agenda—Nazis aren't funny, Germany isn't a cartoon, the ordinariness of the people Georg encounters is both reassuring and unsettling, because the American audience can't write them off as sheep or sadists—to sound almost unbearably treacly, as well as condescending when it explains what we can already see. It can't have been added after the fact, but it should have been taken out in the draft stages. There is also the fact that as far as protagonists go, I'm much more interested by Hume Cronyn's Paul, a factory worker with a wife and a passel of kids he can barely afford to feed, so he begins as a political neutral—Weimar, Nazis, it doesn't matter so long as he doesn't lose his job—and by trying to help out his old schoolfriend Georg becomes gradually radicalized, although he wouldn't use the word and might not even recognize that that's what's happening to him. He just knows that he won't turn Georg over to the authorities: Georg came to him for help. If that means making black-market contacts and lying to the police and, finally, trying to stand up to interrogation by the Gestapo (which is not presented explicitly, but it's clear what's happened), then that's what he'll have to do. He gets hurt and scared and doesn't retreat into groupthink, and he doesn't think of it as heroism, just being a good friend. The last time I saw this movie was in high school: I did care about Spencer Tracy surviving to the end credits, but I found I cared more about Paul. It was one of the first roles I saw Hume Cronyn in. I noticed him.

3. I imagine I would want to recommend this poem even if it didn't remind me of the poem by shweta_narayan that Strange Horizons will be publishing at the end of this month as part of our South Asian issue, but I like that it does: Sujata Bhatt, "A Different History."

4. handful_ofdust found this on the internet. The artist is Sam Weber; I recognize the style, but I had never connected the name. It looks like the Hanged Man of a Tarot I really, really want.

5. This is a lousy reason for Tamarind Bay to have closed. derspatchel and I found out last night. We'd been talking about eating there all week. This is just going to remind me to be depressed about Miso Market, isn't it.

I wish I didn't feel my brain has forgotten how to write prose.