Wrestling Review: WWE Summerslam 2013

Since a fairly predictable and (for the most part) lacklustre Wrestlemania, WWE has been on something of a hot streak where PPVs are concerned, with Payback and Money in the Bank in particular being very strong offerings.  Summerslam has traditionally been one of the biggest events of the year, but this year's card looked a little thin at the outset.  No Tag Title match, no Intercontinental Title match, no Divas Title match, and superstars lacking scheduled matches included Big Show, Mark Henry, Randy Orton (or so it would seem...), Antonio Cesaro, Kofi Kingston, Jack Swagger, Ryback, Seth Rollins, Roman Reigns, and many more.  In addition, the build-up - the two main event matches excepted - was underwhelming; the trope of 'challenger beats champion in a non-title match to set up a title match' which has been overused recently to set up midcard championship bouts seems to have infested the World Heavyweight Title scene.  However, the show was basically being sold almost entirely on the back of these two main event face-offs; John Cena vs. Daniel Bryan and Brock Lesnar vs. CM Punk.  The storylines behind both of these matches were developed brilliantly, and there was a real 'big fight feel' surrounding them.  But did Summerslam as a whole live up to the very high standards of recent WWE?  Well, that's what I'm here for!

Pre-Show: Dean Ambrose (c) vs. Rob Van Dam (WWE United States Championship)

As my previous reviews have made clear, I bloody love RVD.  Yet I viewed his return to WWE with some trepidation.  He's in his forties now, and his work during his spell in TNA wasn't exactly inspiring; it was, shall we say, a little ponderous.  Happily, it seems that this state of affairs was more due to lack of motivation than his losing a step in the ring (and honestly, if I'd been working for TNA around the time Hulk Hogan and Eric Bischoff started running the show, I wouldn't have been too motivated either), and since reappearing in WWE, he's put on several very fine matches, especially his first outing back on Raw in which he defeated Chris Jericho.  RVD earned his shot at Dean Ambrose by winning a battle royal in which he outlasted nineteen other superstars, most notably Mark Henry, who showed his respect to the victor after the match, and Ryback, who didn't, possibly because he and RVD get their leotards from the same place and it's become a little awkward.

My assumption was that RVD was in this match because he likes to take moves by landing right on the top of his head (like so - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6n9EuysP4XQ), and Ambrose's as-yet-unnamed finisher impacts the opponent's head.  This isn't what happened.  But I'm not complaining, as this was yet another solid display from two very talented wrestlers; one coming towards the end of his career, and one just starting out.

The first thing to note is that Ambrose played the villain to absolute perfection here, turning his deranged, almost feral persona up to 11.  The crowd (mostly - there were a few chants of 'LET'S GO AMBROSE!') booed him like crazy, and cheered RVD to the rafters, which is exactly what you want to start off a show; a heel who can whip the crowd into a frenzy, and a high-flying exciting performer to go up against him.  The thing about RVD matches is that you know what you're getting; Rolling Thunder, split-legged moonsault, springboard attacks of various kinds, kicks that don't look entirely pulled, spinning leg drop to the outside, Five-Star Frog Splash (all being well).  But repetition isn't the point; first, all these moves are inherently awesome, and second, they're very fresh to the WWE crowd, because RVD has been away for so long.  It's hard to imagine a crowd in, say, Dragon Gate (a Japanese promotion specialising in all kinds of flippity-flips) treating RVD with such amazement, but he had the Staples Centre in Los Angeles eating out of the palm of his hand, and it was glorious.

RVD looked like he had the match won when he went up top to deliver the death blow to Ambrose, but his Shield cohorts Seth Rollins and Roman Reigns made their way through the audience in order to put 'The Whole F'N Show' off his stride.  Thankfully, Big Show and Mark Henry came out to even the odds and attempt to ensure that RVD could proceed unmolested.  This tactic worked well, until RVD finally hit the Frog Splash, at which point Reigns entered the ring and speared him out of his boots, drawing the disqualification but saving his ally's title.

Between Ambrose's heel mannerisms and RVD's spectacular offence, this was an ideal opening match.  I assume they're building up towards Show and Henry challenging for the tag titles, which I would personally love to see, if only for the morbid fascination of seeing the heaviest tag team WWE could possibly come up with, unless they brought Andre the Giant back from the dead and paired him up with the bloke from that Channel 4 documentary.  Anyway, I love RVD and Ambrose is a great heel, so thumbs up here.  Rating: ***

One criticism I'd make of the show is that it took a while to get going; we had commercials, The Miz's opening spiel, Fandango's interrupting of said spiel, The Star-Spangled Banner (at least with the British national anthem, it's bad but it's over quickly), and the opening pyro.  You might have thought that after all that, they'd have scheduled another exciting, fast-paced match.  You'd have thought wrong...

Match 1: Kane vs. Bray Wyatt (w/ Luke Harper and Erick Rowan) (Ring of Fire Match)

This match, like that in the pre-show, had an established veteran paired with a young prospect bolstered by two stablemates.  That's about where the similarities end.

Regarding the match stipulation, no, WWE hasn't started naming match types after songs by overrated singers.  A Ring of Fire match closely resembles an Inferno Match, which is to Kane as the Buried Alive Match is to his brother The Undertaker; i.e. it's his signature gimmick match, but he almost never wins.  Sadly, however, this wasn't an Inferno Match; the object of the match was not to set your opponent on fire, but simply to pin them.  The flames were simply there to stop the other two members of Bray Wyatt's 'family' from interfering.  And to look cool.  Which they did.

Kane, in recent months, has been something of a comedy character, but the beauty of Kane is that he's so imposing and has such a rich backstory that he can be 'reset' to being an absolute monster at a moment's notice.  The Wyatt Family are a unique and disturbing cult of Deep South backwoodsmen, led by the charismatic preacher-figure Bray Wyatt, whose professed motives are wreathed in opaque, almost poetic language.  Their attack on Kane, WWE's resident eldritch abomination, appears to be a proclamation of their lack of fear of even the monstrous, and when Wyatt was challenged to this match by Kane, he simply laughed.  All very interesting stuff.

Then we got the match itself, which is where the problems arise.  On one hand, the visuals were very striking, with the flames surrounding the ring shooting up in the air with every slam.  The contest started out promisingly, with both men showing surprising agility for their size, trading attempted strikes and reactive dodges.  Kane eventually got the upper hand, at which point Wyatt decided to call on his followers for aid.  They attempted to hand him a kendo stick, but it caught on fire.  Then they tried to use a fire extinguisher to...well, extinguish the flames.  No dice.  Kane then chokeslammed Wyatt, chokeslammed him again, decided that wasn't enough, then set him up for the Tombstone.  Finally, Harper and Rowan remembered what they were taught at school and used a massive towel to quell the flames, rushed the ring and beat up Kane, allowing Wyatt to hit his finisher and pin the Big Red Machine.

My first issue with the match is that the business with the kendo stick and the fire extinguisher was funny, both to me and to the crowd.  Considering the eerie and often disquieting build to the match, the dynamic between the characters, and the inherent danger of the fire, it was tonally jarring.  My second, and much more major, issue, was that Kane used his finisher twice on Wyatt, and was attempting a third when the interference came.  In both this match and the pre-show, the veteran would have emerged triumphant were it not for the cheating of their opponents.  The difference is that Ambrose and RVD had a competitive match, and looked like equals.  Kane obliterated Wyatt in the end, to the point of castiga excesivo.  I will allow that Kane's repeated chokeslamming of Wyatt made the newcomer look like a psychological threat, in that Kane was so caught up in inflicting punishment on his tormentor that he forgot about the match.  But a contest in which Wyatt looked like more of a physical threat to Kane would have done more for him, particularly as this was Wyatt's first match on WWE television.

So all in all, I'm honestly not sure how to rate this match.  I'll be adding points because the flames were cool; sue me.  But the lack of time and substance afforded to the match, coupled with the issues with the booking, lead me to conclude that this was not all that it could have been. And new wrestlers need a good first match to give them the best chance at succeeding; look at The Shield's first match.  Now that was epic. Rating: *1/2

Match 2: Cody Rhodes vs. Damien Sandow

On one hand, I'm bemoaning the loss of Team Rhodes Scholars, a delightfully despicable heel tag team, due to the falling out between its members (Sandow beat Rhodes for the Money in the Bank contract, acted condescending and superior about it, Rhodes got the hump, started brawling with Sandow, stole the briefcase and threw it in the Gulf of Mexico, Sandow unveiled a fine leather replacement in keeping with his upper-class intellectual character).  On the other hand, this match ruled.  It was wrestled at a fair lick, which I enjoyed, considering that Sandow is more known for his methodical, albeit intense, offense.  In short, it felt like a grudge match.  No opening mat-based exchanges here, just two rivals wanting to beat the crap out of each other.  Diversity in match styles is always good.

The finish, with Rhodes simply pulling Sandow away from the ropes and hitting CrossRhodes, came a little abruptly, but that's a minor fault in what was a thoroughly entertaining match.  Rhodes, now that he's a face, has incorporated flashier manoeuvres into his arsenal (especially the Muscle Buster, which invariably looks brutal even if it's being delivered by a man much less beefy than Samoa Joe, its most notable exponent.)  Looking at the durations of the night's bouts, I'm staggered that this one lasted less than seven minutes.  They packed so much in, and in so intense a fashion, that it felt much longer, and much more substantial than your average short Raw or Smackdown match.  I assume this is only the start of their rivalry, so I look forward to seeing what else these two men can conjure up. Rating: ***1/4

Match 3: Alberto del Rio (c) vs. Christian (World Heavyweight Championship)

This was predictably great.  Both of these men would struggle to have a bad match with anyone, and when put together they delivered a gem that will probably be overlooked in favour of the two main event matches when assessments of this PPV are delivered in the coming years.  But while it wasn't up to the standards of those bouts, it was excellent on its own merits.

The thing I like most about WWE PPVs is that the wrestlers expand their movesets from what you see on free TV; you might see John Cena essaying a hurracanrana, or CM Punk delivering a moonsault (they don't do those moves that well, but there are other examples).  You also get counters to expected signature moves; part of the pleasure of watching a major Cena match is when his predictable shoulderblock-shoulderblock-Protobomb-Five Knuckle Shuffle combination is interrupted.  Christian was especially good at that here, playing the part of the wily veteran to perfection to stay one step ahead of the younger man's corner enzuguiri and Cross Armbreaker.

He held out in this way for as long as he could, but del Rio's targeting of his arm paid off in the end.  I'm a sucker for limb targeting by wrestlers with a submission finisher.  You'd think that was the bare minimum to expect, but I've watched a lot of Miz matches in which his work softening up his opponents for the Figure Four Leg Lock entirely consists of a single kick to the thigh.  Del Rio's different; he's clinical and forensic.  I remember last year watching a match in which del Rio challenged Sheamus for the World Heavyweight Championship, and I was with a friend who has barely watched wrestling since 2001 (but who knows enough to know that Kane and The Undertaker are both awesome).  He saw del Rio working over Sheamus' arm and said "Wow, he's actually using a strategy and targeting a single body part...he's going to lose, isn't he?"  Sure enough, Sheamus shrugged off del Rio's arm work and hit his finisher out of nowhere for the win.  So it's nice when limb targeting plays into the finish of a match.  Christian nailed del Rio with a spear, and could have pinned him, but in hitting the move he aggravated his already damaged shoulder, which gave del Rio an opening to apply his submission and force Christian to tap out.

The finish and the inventive counters were by no means the only great things about this match.  Like Rhodes vs. Sandow, they fit a lot into the time they had, and there were some inventive spots, such as del Rio's Backstabber off the second rope.  This would have been the best match on a lot of shows, but then Summerslam 2013 was not most shows.  Maybe Christian will get another opportunity at the World Title, and if he does, I hope he comes armed with a finisher that takes less than ten minutes to set up.  Rating: ***3/4

Match 4: Natalya (w/ Cameron and Naomi) vs. Brie Bella (w/ Nikki Bella and Eva Marie)

This came about due to happenings on Total Divas.  If you're not aware, Total Divas is a reality show starring the women involved in this match, which is running on the E! Network.  I've not watched it and have no plans to, but it's drawing higher ratings than TNA.  Awkward.  Anyway, while I may dislike reality television as a whole, I don't see any harm in the concept if it helps get divas apart from AJ and Kaitlyn over with the crowd.

Judging by the audience reaction to this match, it's going to be a long old process.  The Staples Centre was chanting for JBL and Jerry Lawler throughout.  Look, LA; you were a great crowd for the most part, but stop trying to be East Rutherford.  No crowd should try to be East Rutherford; the Raw after Wrestlemania comes about once a year, and any lesser attempts to recreate the atmosphere end up smacking of hipsterdom.  Furthermore, the 'chant random things' game played in East Rutherford happened in a different context than it did here.  The New Jersey crowd shitting all over Sheamus vs. Randy Orton could be seen as justified for a few reasons; it was a match between two (fairly directionless at the time) faces, it was a bait-and-switch to replace a promised encounter involving the Big Show, and it was pretty chinlock-heavy.  East Rutherford at least waited a few minutes before deciding to shit all over the match, whereas here, LA seemed determined not to take an interest in Natalya vs. Brie from the get-go, which seemed pretty disrespectful to the performers.

As it happens, there wasn't much wrong with this match at all.  It was fairly basic, but not bad (except I wish Natalya would sit down on her Sharpshooter a little more).  It started off with an exchange of slaps, which made me uneasy at first, because the performers in women's wrestling tend to be written differently to the men (how many times do we see a male performer having a temper tantrum after a loss?)  However, later in the night Cena and Bryan had an exchange of slaps, because someone had clearly been watching Minoru Suzuki - a Japanese MMA badass-cum-wrestler nicknamed 'The Ill-Natured Man', who will slap the shit out of you and everything you care about - and realized that far from being a technique for catfights, slapping someone in the face actually really bloody hurts.  So that was fine.  What was less fine was the usual 'catfight' spot from the women on the outside, where they rush each other and start clawing and choking each other on the floor, which resembles wrestling about as much as my lethargic roundhouse kick attempts resemble Chuck Norris.  But you can't have everything.  Following some botched interference from her seconds, Brie got caught in the Sharpshooter and was forced to tap.  Short but competently executed, and inoffensive.  Rating: **1/4

Match 5: Brock Lesnar (w/ Paul Heyman) vs. CM Punk (No Disqualification Match)

Before this match, Heyman did an interview where he called the Bible revisionist history and suggested that Goliath recovered from the slingshot and defeated David.  This is a promotion that once ran a tag match on pay-per-view in which Vince and Shane McMahon faced off against Shawn Michaels and GOD, so I shouldn't expect any reverence for religious orthodoxy, nor indeed would I want to.  Heyman's a heel, so he can basically do what the hell he likes.  And he does.

The first thing to note here is that the build-up did a fantastic job of making Punk seem the underdog, playing up the size difference, and Lesnar's freakish physical strength.  This continued into the match; nobody can dish out a pro wrestling beating like Brock Lesnar, and the brutality on show (even when Brock wasn't using weapons) made the crowd get even more behind Punk than they already were, as the smaller man used his speed and high-flying ability to try and get the upper hand.  Big Man vs. Small Man contests are a staple of wrestling, and you'll rarely find it done better than it was here.  Punk looked tough as hell even in defeat, by simply withstanding the onslaught from the Beast Incarnate, and notably by no-selling a powerbomb at one point, such was his will to win.  You don't need to beat Brock Lesnar to look like a million dollars, which is why having John Cena beat him in his return match was a stupid decision (despite the fact that the contest was fantastic).

Where the two main event matches were concerned, the stars really did align on this night.  Even the botches added to Punk vs. Lesnar.  Punk's Diving Elbow Drop is, in all honesty, a little bit sloppy, and the first one he did at Summerslam was one of the worst.  He pretty much just fell from the top rope in an ungainly manner, and landed on Lesnar's face with his thigh.  It wasn't a thing of beauty, but within the context of the match it fit perfectly, adding to the kitchen-sink approach to offense by both men.

Another thing that was done really well were the MMA elements.  Punk, while he's no expert, and would probably get destroyed in UFC, has some knowledge of jiu-jitsu, and used it to good effect, not just in his usual kicks, but in assailing Lesnar with a triangle choke and a cross armbreaker at a couple of points.  I do find it funny that in MMA these two holds appear in the arsenal of most, if not all, fighters, whereas in the WWE context, Punk was stealing the finishers of The Undertaker and Alberto del Rio, but that's by the by.  It wasn't overdone, and the match appeared less like a shoot-style contest than a proper pro wrestling match with MMA influence, which I think is the right way to play it in a WWE ring.  Incorporating MMA is a good thing as long as a promotion doesn't dilute the essence of wrestling by going too far (for example, by putting your heavyweight title on Bob freaking Sapp.  NJPW hasn't always been awesome).

The two wrestlers made great use of the No Disqualification stipulation, in more inventive ways than you see in your common or garden TV hardcore match.  Lesnar took the covering from the announcers' table, placed in on top of Punk then stomped on it; Punk did a Diving Elbow Drop while holding a chair and driving said chair into Lesnar's skull; Punk bit Lesnar's ear to get out of a submission.  Coupled with the stiffness of Lesnar's moves (especially a couple of wince-inducing powerbombs), it all added up to a contest that felt like a real ordeal.

In the end, Punk finally managed to hit Lesnar with the GTS, which Brock sold wonderfully, going down like he'd been shot.  Heyman ran in and broke up the count.  Punk managed a second GTS, and tried to finish off Lesnar with the Anaconda Vice, whereupon Heyman ran in again, this time with a chair.  Punk, seeing an opportunity to at long last get his hands on Heyman, decked him and locked in the Anaconda Vice on his one-time manager.  Lesnar recovered, F5ed Punk onto the chair, and that was that.  There's a fine line between having outside interference detract from a match and having it add to the story.  At Money in the Bank, Heyman's interference in the match brought what was an exciting, high-flying six-way match to a grinding halt.  Here, it played into the dynamic that Punk's emotions got the better of him; he was more interested in hurting Heyman than beating Lesnar, and it cost him.  This was, all in all, one of the best matches you'll see all year.  And yet, you could make the argument that it wasn't even the best match on the show...  Rating: ****3/4

Match 6: Dolph Ziggler and Kaitlyn vs. Big E. Langston and AJ Lee (Mixed Tag Team Match)

It's clear that WWE are holding out on blowing off the singles feuds between these two pairs for PPVs when they don't have two huge main events as guaranteed selling points, so this tag match is what we got instead.  It was too short to really mean a great deal, but provided some entertaining moments.  Big E. Langston has amazing agility for his size, and watching him go to work on Ziggler was exhilarating.  And I will never get tired of seeing Kaitlyn spear the hell out of AJ, which she did yet again, only this time on the outside of the ring.  This led to Ziggler nailing Langston with the Zig Zag and picking up the win.  I don't buy the Zig Zag as a one-hit kill move, as it really is quite a basic manoeuvre, so it looked odd that it slew Langston, despite the fact that Ziggler had only a fraction of the offense that his former lackey did.  Bit of a nothingy match, but perfectly serviceable.  Rating: **1/2

Main Event: John Cena (c) vs. Daniel Bryan (WWE Championship, with Special Guest Referee Triple H)

The story behind this requires a bit of unpacking.  Raw General Manager Brad Maddox allowed Cena to pick his own opponent, and Cena chose the uber-popular Daniel Bryan, an excellent technician struggling to have the WWE higher-ups take him seriously, on account of his small stature.  Maddox and WWE owner Vince McMahon belittled Bryan publicly, while WWE Chief Operating Officer Triple H backed him.  Bryan sought to draw a distinction between Cena as 'a sports entertainer' and himself as 'a wrestler' with a greater passion for the business.  Cena told him that HE'D HAVE TO EARN THIS WWE CHAMPIONSHIP, JACK.  Vince argued with Triple H while Triple H's wife (and Vince's daughter) Stephanie found herself caught in the middle of it all.  Vince tried to install his puppet Maddox as Special Referee for the title match, but Triple H overruled him and took on the role himself, to ensure a fair fight.  Meanwhile, Money in the Bank winner Randy Orton lurked in the background, reminding both participants in the title match that he could demand a shot at the gold at any time.

Have you got all that?

I know the 'YOU CAN'T WRESTLE' chants have become part of the John Cena Experience, the paradigm of the divisive superstar.  But this match demonstrated once and for all that the chant isn't based in truth.  Cena is by no means a bad wrestler (he got an entertaining match out of The Great Khali, for Heaven's sake), it's just that he tends to work at the level of his opponent.  If he's wrestling Big Show or Brodus Clay, it's probably not going to be that good.  When he's facing off with one of the best in the world, like CM Punk or Daniel Bryan, it's invariably fantastic.  The opening few minutes looked more like World of Sport than anything, with both competitors vying for supremacy on the mat.  It soon spilled to the outside, with Cena drilling Bryan with a suplex off the ring steps.  He followed that up with a Batista Bomb when they got back into the ring.  I thought it was a bit early in the match for a high-impact move such as that, but when the biggest criticism you can make of a match is that 'John Cena used a really awesome move at a weird time', you know a match was something special.

The technical aspect of the match was excellent; I've already mentioned the mat wrestling, but the submission counters, as STF transitioned into Yes Lock and back again, were very well implemented.  Bryan even got Cena with an STF of his own at one point, and characteristically did it much better.  But the high-impact moves were equally as good; Bryan used his kicks to great effect, and utilised a variety of throws including a leg-capture German Suplex which was particularly gorgeous.  Cena's more limited offense looked as good as it's ever done, especially his Flying Leg Drop to the back of the neck, and he even gave as good as he got in the strike department, countering Bryan's running dropkick with a stiff lariat that would make even Stan Hansen say, "Whoa, that's a bit much!"

As with Punk vs. Lesnar, even the botches added to the match.  At one point Bryan attempted to hurricanrana Cena off the top rope, only to get caught.  I'm not sure if Cena was going for a powerbomb or a Styles Clash, but he ended up caught between those two moves and accidentally giving Bryan a Ganso Bomb (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XzhnSjCAmhE) which in terms of deadly 90s Japanese finishers ranks somewhere between Kenta Kobashi's Burning Hammer and Kenta Kobashi's MOONSAULT ONTO YOUR FUCKING FACE.  Don't mess with Kenta Kobashi, basically.  Thankfully Bryan wasn't hurt and Cena transitioned nicely into an STF, and the flub only served to make Bryan look tougher.

I have to say that before the match, I thought Bryan had a good chance of winning.  He was certainly a more credible threat to Cena than Ryback or Mark Henry, two strong but fairly one-dimensional wrestlers.  I just didn't know exactly how Bryan was going to beat Cena, considering that his finisher is a submission, and that Cena hasn't tapped out since 2003.  I thought that Bryan might win by catching Cena unawares with a small package (in ROH, Bryan became such a dominant champion that he decided to start trolling his opponents by trying to beat them with a small package, even, hilariously, taking on the moniker of 'Mr. Small Package'), but that would hardly have been a decisive or satisfying end to an epic match like this.  I needn't have worried.  Bryan went to the corner, then absolutely LEVELLED Cena with a running knee strike (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eXJk3IQrdU0), pinning him to win the title for the first time.  Now that's how you debut a new finisher!

An absolutely wonderful match, and all the more remarkable considering that Cena's elbow was damaged, and that he went in for surgery the day after the match.  Simply sublime, and a great moment to have Bryan cleanly and decisively winning.  Great stuff.  Rating: ****3/4

After the match, streamers and confetti dropped from the ceiling as Bryan basked in the glow of his victory.  Then Randy Orton's music hit.  That's OK, I thought, it's not as though Bryan's in a vulnerable position to be cashed in on.  As soon as I had that notion, Triple H grabbed Bryan and hit the Pedigree, to much consternation.  Orton then handed his briefcase to the referee and the match began.

Money in the Bank Cash-In: Daniel Bryan (c) vs. Randy Orton (WWE Championship)

Orton rolled Bryan over and Triple H counted the pin.  The end.  I can't really give this a rating, even though technically every move in the match was executed flawlessly.  Rating: N/A

Orton and Triple H celebrated with the belt, so it looks like we have a new corporate heel faction.  Should be interesting.

Overall, Summerslam didn't have the consistency of the previous two WWE PPVs, but Cena vs. Bryan and Punk vs. Lesnar are both in my Top 3 matches of the year, and it was complemented by (mostly) solid action, so once again, my thumbs are in the upright position.

Glossary

Stable - A group of wrestlers allied to each other
Castiga excesivo - A rule from Mexican lucha libre; essentially, if one wrestler is more intent on inflicting extra punishment on an opponent at a point where they could have simply pinned them and won the match, they can be disqualified
Shoot-style - a wrestling match where the outcome is still predetermined, but it's presented to look like a legitimate MMA fight

The (Non)Sense of an Ending

  You can bet that the final entry on this blog probably won’t be a final sayonara to my readers (statistically, it’ll probably be a wrestling review).  The nature of the blog as a form is such that most writers start off with the best of intentions, gradually lose interest or find that they don’t have enough time to post frequently, and things come to a halt.  It happens.  What I mean to say is, Stone Cold Jane Austen is more likely to simply stop, than have a proper ending.

  I’ve been thinking about endings recently, as a couple of weeks ago I finished Jonathan Coe’s What a Carve Up!, a novel I’d been meaning to read for years.  I thought it was a fantastic, biting evisceration of the values of self-interest, ruthless free market capitalism, and the umbrella ideology of Thatcherism.  As a bleeding-heart leftie, I empathised with the book’s concerns, but independently of its politics, it’s a damn good read.  But the last hundred pages aren’t that great.  Don’t get me wrong; they’re not bad at all.  It’s just that the last section of the book changes tone in quite a jarring way, as Coe’s critique of 80s Britain is joined by a rather macabre aesthetic, as a string of gothic murders are committed by persons unknown, during a night in a creaking country pile.  In a way, the change of tone in the final part of What a Carve Up! is the point; the narrator essentially ‘checks out’ of his own narrative due to a trauma-induced dissociative episode, and the events at Winshaw Towers tie in with the novel’s echoes of the 1961 comedy film that shares a title with the novel, and which is an obsession of the hilariously-named protagonist, Michael Owen (the book was written in 1994, when the oft-injured starlet was sequestered within the bowels of Liverpool’s youth system).  I get what Coe’s doing, but I don’t feel that it was carried off as effectively as the previous chapters.  You can see each slaying coming from a mile off, and it’s just too different to the rest of the book, in my opinion.

  This isn’t the first time that Coe has disappointed me with an ending; the first novel of his I ever read was The Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Sim (2010), his most recent effort.  This was an entirely different kettle of fish.  My gripe with the final section of What a Carve Up! is that merely that it doesn’t quite live up to the very high standards of the rest of it.  The last chapter of Maxwell Sim is, as I believe F.R. Leavis would have said, a complete shitfest.  The penultimate chapter, by contrast, seems to bring the narrative to an end in a very moving manner.  But then Coe adds a few more pages, in which he appears to his protagonist, informs poor Maxwell Sim that he is simply a created character in a book, and tells him that as soon as the novel ends, he will no longer exist.  Sucks to be him.  And indeed, to be me, for I had to read it.  Just in case you’re thinking that I’m being too harsh on an original and clever narrative device, I wrote my MA dissertation on authorial self-insertion, and read about two dozen novels, novellas and short stories that utilise this metafictional device (far more than I should have if I wanted an easy life), by authors like Borges, Calvino, Roth, Rushdie, Vonnegut, Ballard, and so on.  All of these tomes used the trope in far richer and more subtle ways than Coe.  Before I write another 12,000 words on the subject, let me make it clear.  I hate the ending of The Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Sim.  Hope that clears everything up.

  But maybe I shouldn’t be too harsh on Maxwell Sim (actually, I regret nothing.  NOTHING.)  It really is hard to do a successful ending, whatever the medium.  Some endings are too predictable, whereas others are seen to give insufficient closure.  The literary critic Frank Kermode – no relation to everybody’s favourite giant-handed film critic – wrote a book called The Sense of an Ending in which he remarked upon this very difficulty.  He warned against predictability, writing that ‘the story that proceeded very simply to its obviously predestined end would be nearer myth than novel or drama[...]The more daring the peripeteia, the more we may feel that the work respects our sense of reality’.  This brings me to another disappointing reading experience of mine; Haruki Murakami’s 1Q84.  Like What a Carve Up!, I’d say the novel was good, and it’d be stretching it to call a book featuring blue pixies from another dimension ‘predictable’.  But the ending of 1Q84 combined the worst of both worlds mentioned above.  The relationship between the two main characters was resolved in the most predictable and ‘closed’ way, but pretty much nothing else was.  I know that if I railed against ambiguous endings I wouldn’t be even half the fan of the Coen Brothers that I am, but damn it all, I wanted to know what the deal with the pixies was!  The plot line with the pixies didn’t end so much ambiguously as not at all, and it was by no means the only thread left unfollowed to its termination.  What made it worse was that the book had gone on for 1300 pages, which only exacerbated a conclusion that I found weak and unsatisfying.  I’m glad that Murakami didn’t win the Nobel Prize for that, I can tell you, and he was predicted to.  He had odds of 2/1.  Because William Hill will allow you to bet on anything.

  On the other hand, endings which attempt to tie everything up are also tricky to pull off.  Let me move, like I do at the end of a long day’s work on my thesis, from books to TV.  The Wire did this kind of finale very well, with a wordless panorama of the lives of its characters, showing their fates and futures, while the show’s theme played in the background.  And then there was the last David Tennant episode of Doctor Who.  Oh, man.  The Doctor defeated the Master, saved the world/universe/multiverse (I really can’t remember), and received the lethal dose of radiation that meant that the tenth incarnation of the character was not long for this world.  There were still twenty minutes left.  How are they going to fill that, I wondered.  What we got was the Tenth Doctor touring all of his past acquaintances, saying his goodbyes, in one of the most egregiously tedious and self-indulgent televisual circlejerks it has ever been my misfortune to watch.  It made me wish that I myself had a TARDIS so that I could find Russell T. Davies, dissuade him of the notion that this was a good idea, and then as his penance for ‘Love and Monsters’ (the episode with Peter Kay as the Abzorbaloff, in a rare appearance where he wasn’t recycling a stand-up routine about growing up in the 80s), force him to listen to the phrase ‘wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey’ until he finds it as irritating as I did the first time I bloody heard it.

  Ahem.  There are also TV endings which are just unsatisfying for miscellaneous reasons.  Lost enraged legions of fans who for months had been speculating how all the mysterious signs and threads of the series’ convoluted narrative would play into the show’s finale, only for the ending to be ‘It Was All A Dream’, which is far below even ‘The Author Turns Up RIGHT AT THE BLOODY END FOR FUCK’S SAKE JONATHAN COE And Tells The Character He Isn’t Real’ in the pantheon of tropes that should go away forever.  The Sopranos, one of my favourite TV dramas of all time, notoriously finished its run with a cut to black, leaving it uncertain whether Tony Soprano got shot by the New York mafia, or whether he lived to fight another day and instead die of a heart attack in a hotel in Italy (God, I’m so sorry).  This wouldn’t have been so bad, except Journey’s classic song Don’t Stop Believin’ was playing in the background, in a complete misstep on the part of the writers.  I love that song, or at least I did until Glee ruined it like Glee ruins everything, but I have no idea what it was doing at that juncture.  As Coen Brothers films like No Country for Old Men and A Serious Man show, you can do an inconclusive ending, but you have to do it well.  Don’t have one of the greatest shows in history end with a power ballad and a blank screen.

  Maybe the best endings are deferred.  By which I mean, ones that haven’t happened yet.  You never find fans of soap operas like Emmerdale, Eastenders or WWE Raw complaining about endings, because there aren’t any.  Currently the two drama series held in the highest esteem by critics are Mad Men and Breaking Bad, both of which have just one more season announced.  However they conclude, you can bet that people like me will be on the internet complaining about them.  Because ultimately, a major part of the entertainment value of books or television lies in the imagining of narrative possibilities.  As soon as a novel or a TV series ends, these possibilities are closed off.  The fiction can never be what we imagined it could be.  We may find the ending too predictable, too open, or simply fundamentally misjudged.  But more than that, the ending is always much, much too final.

  Yeah, now that’s how you do an ending to a blogpost.  No need to add anything unnecessary like Coe did.  No need at all.

  Did I mention I hate the last chapter of The Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Sim?

Lost in Translation

Last year, because I'm apparently an Anastasia Steele-level masochist, I wrote my MA dissertation on about a dozen different authors.  One of these authors was the Argentine short story writer and fabulist Jorge Luis Borges, specifically his tale 'The Garden of Forking Paths', which is probably one of the less mind-bending of his writings, although still pretty damn cool.  So I ventured down Durham University's 'Bill Bryson Library', which is sadly not a library just containing Bill Bryson books, in order to find some secondary criticism on Borges.  The library was actually pretty well stocked as far as books on the guy went, except a problem presented itself.  Upon closer examination, I found that about half of these tomes were in Spanish.

I don't know why I was surprised.  After all, Borges is more the preserve of the Spanish Literature department, and of course they read him in the original tongue.  So this was frustrating, but understandable.  My Spanish extends to what I remember from some Linguaphone CDs I listened to ahead of a trip to Spain seven years ago (this was in that lull after my GCSE exams, and I figured that I should do something more productive than watch countless episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer).  That is to say, not much, although for some reason I remember two separate words for stamps (sejos and estampillas, in case you're interested.  Who am I kidding, you're definitely not).  Whatever, I thought, I'll just take out all the Borges books written in English.

It got worse.  Quite apart from the fact that I only managed to find a few salient quotes about 'The Garden of Forking Paths', there was a curious quirk to a few of the critical studies that I couldn't quite get my head around; namely, that although they were written in English, whenever they quoted Borges' stories they did so in the original Spanish.  So the writer would make an interesting and perceptive point, which they'd back up by referring to a passage from 'Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius' or some other such gnarly, befuddling piece of wonder, and I'd have no idea which part of the story they were citing.  I found this fairly baffling; if you're going to quote in Spanish, then you assume that the readers of your book have enough of a grasp of Spanish to understand Borges (and I barely have a good enough understanding of English to fully comprehend translations of his work!).  So why not just write the whole book in Spanish?  Otherwise, you're just targeting the bilingual.

I've been thinking about my Borges experience because I'm currently about halfway through The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, the 2008 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by the Dominican-American author Junot Diaz.  Let me be clear, it's damn good, especially the amusing Sheldon Cooper-esque nerdiness of the eponymous protagonist, the by turns chilling and heartrending depictions of life in the Dominican Republic under the brutal dictatorship of Rafael Trujillo, and the evocation of the immigrant experience that is so central to Diaz's writing.  On the basis of what I've read so far I'd recommend it, but with a caveat.  And it's a fairly big one.

Spanish, my old nemesis, rears its head again!  By which I mean I'm encountering the same problem I came across when trying to research Borges.  It's not sentences of untranslated Spanish this time, but odd words sprinkled into conversation here and there, which ties in with the idea of the immigrant experience; we have exiles from the Dominican diaspora whose knowledge of Spanish is less than total (though obviously still superior to mine), but who pepper their speech in the US with odd words here and there.  It's be churlish and pretty damn racist of me to complain about the fact that this happens in real life; America has a large (and growing) Hispanic population who speak in this sort of manner.  Spanish is more and more becoming a part of American life and culture - when you arrive at JFK Airport in New York there are signs in both English and Spanish, and this is by no means unusual in a city which boasts a Hispanic population of 29%, and which is the setting for most of Oscar Wao.

However, it makes for a frustrating reading experience.  It's rare that there's a page in the novel without any Spanish.  I know enough to translate 'hija de la gran puta' (p. 60) as 'daughter of a big whore' but that's about my lot.  Sometimes you get a passage like, 'Forget that hijo de la porra, that comehuevo.  Every desgraciado who walks in here is in love with you.  You could have the whole maldito world if you wanted.' (p. 113)  Here, the approximate meaning is apparent from the context - clearly, there's some insulting going on.  But the precise sense of such epithets remains obscured.  And finally, there's whole sentences of Spanish which I, as a non-speaker, cannot even begin to decode; 'Oye, pariguayo, y que paso con esa esposa tuya?  Gordo, no me digas que tu todavia tienes hambre?' (p. 108)

I will say at this point that I feel like such a massive jerk for lamenting about something that results from an insufficiency on my part.  And it's not as if in the modern age you can't simply use the internet to translate unfamiliar terms, or to look things up in general.  In fact, some thoughtful soul has set up a website - www.annotated-oscar-wao.com - which gives you the meanings of the Spanish words in the novel, and also informs the reader about the cultural context.  But what if I wanted to read Oscar Wao on the underground?  I can't lug a laptop around with me all the time so I can fully understand the Spanish.  And I don't have the money for a smartphone, or the inclination to buy one, considering that my procrastination is bad enough without having the whole internet in my pocket.

This happens a lot in contemporary fiction, which is the field in which I work.  Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children contains a decent amount of Hindi words (and those from other Indian languages), which produces a similar testament to the adaptability of English, and the possibilities for linguistic syncretism, to that which can be found in Oscar Wao.  But Diaz uses the interpolation of foreign words into Western speech on a far, far greater scale.  The other thing about contemporary fiction is that you will generally require a computer to uncover the meaning behind anything you don't understand; it's different to when you read your Penguin or Oxford World's Classics edition of Dickens, or Austen, or Defoe, and the editor has meticulously created pages and pages of endnotes pointing out every single allusion, and glossing any words, terms or expressions which have fallen out of use in the modern world.  Obviously, I'm not saying that modern writers can't use language that is unusual or foreign - that would be an absurd statement - and I still like Oscar Wao as a novel, and feel like a philistine for writing this.  But a glossary would have been nice.