The UK is a small island studded with secrets and secret lairs. I’m not just saying that because I grew up amidst American expanses and am honestly in awe of how the British maximize every square inch of their homes – although I must give them props for it.
From the outside looking in, it’s always amazing how quiet and unobtrusive the British can be. And yes, I mean British and not just English – having recently gotten a love letter from a Scot who liked me twenty years ago and was too afraid to say it, saw that I was getting a divorce nearly eight years ago and thought he’d act on it, then decided to write poetry instead.
(Yes, he’s OK with me mentioning his letter in this column, he has a sense of humor about it)
And the fact that this quiet can cover up for a number of deadly sins and buried bodies? Well, that makes for great television and equally great literature.
Netflix’s Dept Q and Fred and Rose West: A British Horror Story are shining examples of what I mean, although “shining” may be the wrong adjective.
Both will linger darkly in your mind, long after you think you have moved on from the subject matter.
Dept Q is at least fictional. In fact, it’s so elegantly woven that it can be frustrating at first. “How the hell do you kidnap and lock up a prominent woman in a hyperbaric chamber for years?” I asked myself as I watched the main plotline unfold.
Then I reminded myself that this is Britain, land of secrets.
If anything, the symbolism of the hyperbaric chamber and the ever increasing pressure inside it is spot on.
Dept Q also makes great use of Mathew Goode, whose horribly (and rightfully) angsty character is greatly aided by his sense of humor. A depressed Englishman in Scotland is a fascinating “in” for us Americans. DCI Carl Morck is a fish out of water – and so are we.
Alexej Manvelov, a Swedish-Russian-Kurdish actor, is magnificent as Syrian refugee Akram Salim. Salim’s dark past, mentioned mostly in passing, makes him the perfect person to unravel the mystery that’s staring Morck in the face while Morck is too busy hating his life to do proper police work.
Even if you haven’t been as fired up about the Syrian cause as I have been through my long years in open-source investigations, you cannot help but fall in love with Salim and everything he stands for.
He is the series’ conscience, but a deadly and unapologetic one.
Sometimes, justice must be deadly.
It’s Salim’s status as a foreigner AND his desire to do something good with himself that breaks through police department conventions and unlocks a cold case with extremely scandalous potential. Salim refuses to forget and turn away, and thank God for that, honestly.
By contrast, the story of Fred and Rose West, recently premiered on Netflix, is a gripping true narrative without absolution. For years, this couple tortured and murdered young women, their own children included. Their tiny, ugly house in Gloucester is discovered to be brimming with dead bodies and sawed-off bones ONLY because their remaining children told adults that their older sister was buried in the garden until someone listened.
Neighbors suspected that Fred and Rose were creepy weirdos – especially since Fred was pimping out Rose, and once suggested to a neighbor that he could literally torture her in his basement after he soundproofed it – but never raised the alarm. Most of the missing had led troubled lives, so much so that few people looked for them.
Many people came through the West residence – lodgers, punters, fellow creeps, and no one said a thing.
The little house of horrors in Gloucester was stacked with dark secrets quite literally. And everyone minded their own. Listening to Fred casually tell of his rampages on tape years later makes it all the more ghoulish.
For him, killing and dismembering someone was as normal as carving up a Sunday roast (not that the Wests seem like the kind of couple who were interested in Sunday traditions).
I wrote my senior thesis in college on Kate Atkinson’s Human Croquet. She remains one of my favorite writers and I hope I can be forgiven for how horrible that thesis turned out to be. But I do think I nailed it when I talked about the book’s theme of secrets, of neighbors looking away, women going missing and everyone just shrugging, dads locking up their daughters and everyone assuming they must have a good reason, and so on.
That claustrophobic sense of hidden depths and false-bottomed drawers came back to me when I watched Dept. Q and Fred and Rose West back to back.
I’m not saying that the Brits, or anyone, should take to the streets and shriek out their secrets en masse.
I’m just saying that the quiet life is often not what it seems. Watch out for those quiet ones.