Run For Your Life by Barbara Holland

[koilungfish]

29/3/10 - Holiday

Title - Run For Your Life
Author - Barbara Holland
ISBN - 0-590-31629-X

"A bunch of people were sitting in a waiting room in a hospital. A little girl with pigtails said, "But what is Mommy dies?" Then there were commercials, and then a pretty blond lady shot somebody in the back with a pistol, and he fell down dead. That looked as if it might be exciting, but it turned out she was only dreaming it or thinking about it."

Run For Your Life aka Prisoners at the Kitchen Table was handed to me by a bee whose name will be censored to protect the guilty, and I don't know what I did to merit such an act, so I gave her a copy of The Power of the Serpent in return, thereby ensuring that I more than deserved what I got in the first place.

Run For Your Life might claim to be about two children getting kidnapped, but it is actually about television. Boring, 1970s daytime television - commercials, game shows, soaps and all that jazz - and sitting around watching it for days on end.

The plot does actually have some potential, which is why it's been used so many times, mostly by Enid Blyton, but Ms Holland decides to forgo such possibilities as escape plans, rescue plans, kidnappers who actually do anything, kidnapped kids who actually do something ... no, as far as Ms Holland is concerned, the really important thing is to describe what everyone is watching on TV, in quite some detail, as in the above quote. Sometimes she even includes the dialogue.

Again we come back to that maxim, which I believe was first stated by Mark Twain: if there is something in a book that comes between the reader and the story, rip it out. In this instance, Ms Holland's editor should have ripped out about a third of the pages and sent the manuscript back with a little note suggesting she put something in other than three of the four main characters sitting at a kitchen table watching daytime TV.

It is entirely possible that Ms Holland wanted to describe the thoughts and emotions of a kidnapped young boy, and she does do a good job in some respects - the interaction of emotion and physical sensation, some good description of the landscape outdoors, of the disassociation of being kidnapped - but then she counters her good points with a thick slab of TV programming. This must have been part of a sticky story creation process - what was Ms Holland to have her kidnappers and kids do for the week they're together? Apparently all she could think of was watching TV.

Not that the kidnappers are particularly smart. Given a choice of rooms to store the kids in - kitchen with front door, empty room without front door, bedroom upstairs, lockable bedroom upstairs - they keep the kids in the kitchen right by the front door. Even to sleep. Why it takes the two children a week to come up with the idea of sneaking out the unlocked front door whilst their one guardian is fast asleep I cannot understand. They apparently did their food shopping on the way to the kidnapping and failed to plan for such minor essentials as a week's food as they did. Given the level of ineptitude - and both book and characters acknowledge these kidnappers are pretty stupid - the main implausibility is that it takes the children a week to escape.

There seems to be an attempt at a Message in this book. Mostly it seems to be TV Is Bad, since the story seems to be as much about escaping from the TV as it is from the kidnappers, yet one of the children got kidnapped specifically because he'd stopped watching TV and gone outside. Ms Holland's message seems rather muddled - possibly she was trying for a realistic balance of "It's okay to be brave, but don't be so brave you're stupid", but there seems to be interference from the TV.

All in all, there's a good kid's book about a realistic kidnapping scenario in here somewhere, but it's been intercut with a summary guide to 1970s daytime TV.

This book is:
* - about 70s daytime TV
* - for kids
* - passably written

This book is not:
* - about two kidnapped children
* - any good
* - in print

Comments

[waywardmartian.livejournal.com]

You didn't include the bit where the female kidnapper is chain smoking whilst watching endless television, and the male kidnapper tells her she's going to get cancer ... from watching television. :D

[koilungfish.livejournal.com]

But no! Only colour televisions give you cancer!

I put that down to the characters being morons.

[lunatron.livejournal.com]

You guys seem to enjoy torturing each other.

[koilungfish.livejournal.com]

Yes. It's rather strange. She comes to visit, we make each other read awful novels, then sit down and watch movies like Mega Shark vs Giant Octopus together. And laugh at how awful they are. Which is much fun.

Sooner or later, we will run out of terrible stuff and start on the good ones.

[dragoness-e.livejournal.com]

Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus was in "So Bad, It's Horrible (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/DarthWiki/Ptitlew9bltta3dv6n?from=Main.SoBadItsHorrible)" territory, unfortunately. (So was last week's Monster Ark.)

Give me a modern or classic Roger Corman 'B' movie like Dinoshark any day.

[koilungfish.livejournal.com]

That's exactly why we were watching it. We were disappointed at how good it was. We need worse movies! Which is why we're going to watch Shark in Venice next.

[dragoness-e.livejournal.com]

Well don't watch Roger Corman movies if you want really horrible. He does good low-budget flicks. Did you notice one of the refreshing things about Dinoshark? The bikini-clad girls all had meat on their bones. They had real physiques, not the anorexic super-model look. I could hug the man just for that.

If you get SciFi Channel (SyFY, blech!) over there, next Saturday's movie is Eragon. I hear that sucks.

[lunatron.livejournal.com]

I can verify that Eragon is horrible. It is even worse than its book, and its book is very bad.

[koilungfish.livejournal.com]

I'd heard it was better than the book purely because it's impossible to be *worse* than the book. I've got a copy - gift from a well-meaning family friend - and the two times I've tried to read it, Rath had to take it away from me because I was becoming dangerously incoherent, or possibly incoherently dangerous.

[lunatron.livejournal.com]

No. The movie is definitely a lot worse than the book. I've read the book. I've seen the movie. I know.

(I enjoy torturing myself.)

Basically, the book treats a few things semi-realistically (hahhaha, right), and the movie decides to make them even more incoherent. It's horrible.

[koilungfish.livejournal.com]

Wow, that's one bad movie.

[dragoness-e.livejournal.com]

That wouldn't be Power of the Serpent by Peter Valentine Timlett, would it? First of a trilogy of gawd-awful smutty sword & sorcery novels from the late 70s?

If so, you deserve this. ;-)

[koilungfish.livejournal.com]

Quite probably, although I thought it was the second in the trilogy.

And absolutely, yes.

[dragoness-e.livejournal.com]

You're right--The Seedbearers was first, not third. (Pretends she hasn't actually read the series...)

[koilungfish.livejournal.com]

I couldn't finish Power of the Serpent. My inner archaeologist started vomiting blood when all the Danikenesque stuff about the Great Pyramid came up.

[dragoness-e.livejournal.com]

Daniken was real popular back then. His crap plus Berlitz's Bermuda Triangle influenced a lot of popular entertainment and fiction back then. Ultimately, we got the original Battlestar Galactica out of that particular meme, so it wasn't a total loss.

Re-reading Chariots of the Gods is giggle-provoking these days, because of what I know now--but if Daniken hadn't published all that bullshit, would archaeologists have come out of their specialty fields to tell us all those interesting things they'd known for years but hadn't gotten into popular science literature?

("We've got actual records of the daily rations for the guys working on the pyramids, and their graffiti on the stone blocks, you know."

No, we the public didn't know that! All we knew about building pyramids came from watching old Hollywood costume epics.

"Yes, early batteries existed and were used for electro-plating jewelry."

This was mentioned in which of my history books? The ones that emphasized that ancient Egypt and Sumer barely managed mud brick, stone cutting and this new-fangled 'writing' concept?

"That little glider was a child's toy, made in imitation of birds, not alien aircraft."

Okay, even I figured that out, seeing it was in the shape of a hawk.)

[koilungfish.livejournal.com]

Oh, don't talk to me about Daniken, I've got a degree in archaeology and a bad temper ...

Seriously, the debate about whether or not archaeologists should engage in counterargument against pseudoarchaeologists was a big thing when I was at uni. The general consensus was no, on the grounds that pseudoarchaeologists draw validation from any establishment attention, and attempting to discredit their bullshit only spreads it further. The problem is that pseudoarchaeology offers simpler, more exciting explanations for a generally mundane, often complicated past, so trying to debunk pseudoarchaeology only results in more idiots believing in it, despite the best efforts of archaeologists [some of whom may well have problems bringing their explanations down to the layman level].

[dragoness-e.livejournal.com]

Unfortunately, leaving pseudo-archaeologists to spread their scams uncommented leaves the general public thinking that they really have something, or archaeologists would call them on their bullshit. Also, without popular education on the topic, the general public doesn't know enough to recognize the bullshit.

Hell, Daniken sounded plausible when I was a teenager! (I really wanted to believe in UFOs, too.) Only since then have I learned enough to know how much bullshit he was spewing. (Ditto for the UFO nuts, too--though in their case, it was being willfully blind to the fact that they "just happened" to see the most UFOs and hear the largest number of implausible government excuses for them around top secret military testing grounds! Gee, I wonder why that was?? *looks at SR-71 and F-117 and whistles innocently*)

[koilungfish.livejournal.com]

The general public is a bunch of fucking morons who will believe what they want to believe, and trying to tell them that no, those stone tablets are storehouse inventories when it's so much simpler and more exciting to believe they're messages from aliens is like trying to explain the nitrogen cycle to a herd of cows :: grimace ::

But of course it indicates a government conspiracy! Or something. Blargh. I think they need to start teaching Occam's Razor in schools ... or just logic in general ...

[dragoness-e.livejournal.com]

As for those storehouse inventories, I don't think it helped that Victorian-era archaeologists were a bunch of romantics who kept looking for some mythical empire of philosopher priest-kings in every unknown civilization. I remember that before Mayan hieroglyphs were deciphered (in my lifetime!), that the popular presentation of Mayan ruins and steles and such like were full of BS about "peaceful priest kings" and "gentle people" (unlike the Aztecs, of course, who were probably libeled by the Spanish priests anyway )...

Once they deciphered Mayan and found out the content of all those steles was pretty much the same as you'd find on an obelisk of Rameses II or stele of Sargon III, ("I, King of A, smote the godless heathens and put up this stele to commemorate how awesome I am") that nonsense stopped.

The teaching of history, rhetoric and logic is horribly neglected in the present public education system, at least in my country. Logic and rhetoric, frankly, need to be taught again, because the Internet is full of bad debaters, and people who are too easily swayed by cheap tricks and bad arguments.