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| Vintage Season reminds me of "Die Hard" |
It’s such a natural and accessible framing device for a
story it’s hard to know where to begin listing examples. The film Twelve
Monkeys is a classic of the breed. That
most famous of time-travelers, Doctor Who,
runs with a variation on the disaster tourist theme at least once every other
season.
It’s such a classic of the genre, it’s a simple matter for
those steeped in science-fiction to unravel the mystery of the strangers who
arrive on Oliver’s doorstep early in the story.
We smug twenty-first century types might be forgiven for knowing the
answer to a mystery we’ve solved a dozen times before, and in the hands of a
lesser writer Vintage Season might feel like the most clichéd example
of the disaster tourist tale. But Moore
manages to pack so much into the story that this first example feels as fresh
and unique as it must have the day she first crafted the template. Aside from the mystery that arises from the
story’s native time point-of-view character, Moore packs in a love story, the
politics of the squabbling future-folks, and enough hints to fully flesh out the
future timeline. It’s a lot to take in.
One of the natural theories as to the identity of the odd
Sancisco family that the reader might develop is that they are aliens. While that idea is explicitly denied by the
Sanciscos themselves, it holds true for a certain understanding of the term, “alien”. The Sanciscos might be human, but the future
is no less a foreign country than the past, and almost everything about the
family is alien. Yes, the trappings are
strange and near indecipherable. The
music in the future is cacophonous to the ears of the past. (Speaking as an old
man, I can attest to the veracity of that!)
The adult beverages are more potent. Their dress is always Hollywood
perfect at all moments. The decorations
glow and shift about in designs strange to the eyes of the past. But these are all just window dressing.
The Sanciscos themselves look and behave as humans on a
holiday, but Moore includes a number of subtle impressions about how strange
these folk truly are:
There was a coldness in the man’s voice, as if some gulf lay
between him and Oliver, so deep no feeling of human contact could ever bridge
it.
Their reactions to everything about them, even something as simple
as a salad, the way slovenliness is trained out of them as children, even Kleph’s
odd style of flirtatiousness, rings of alien ways of thinking. Moore is relentless in bombarding the reader
with constant allusions and reminders that Oliver’s boarders aren’t just
wealthy and strong-willed, they are almost indecipherably different to the
point of ominousness. Hardly a paragraph
goes by featuring one of the Sanciscos that doesn’t impress on the reader a
feeling of impending but indescribable doom.
Where most works that utilize the Moore template are written
from the smug omniscience of the future-folk (the film Millenium notwithstanding), Moore’s decision to write the story
from the point of view of the doomed natives gives Vintage Season an impact that’s hard to beat. Know Vesuvius is about to erupt, or that the
Titanic should slow down a little, or that today would be a good day to skip
that meeting at the World Trade Center, it becomes just a ticking clock. When you know something is going to happen at
the end of May, but not what, it leaves the mind free to fill in the gaps. And the fact that time-travelers would choose
this one, of all the disasters at their fingertips, only serves to enhance the
imagination. The monster vaguely
glimpsed is always worse than the monster clearly shown.
We future folk to Moore’s life in the foreign country of the
past have enough exposure to media in its various forms to come to take for
granted that as times evolve, the classics of a story-type become imitated so
often that the genius behind the originator is often forgotten. Who can forget the raft of Die Hard on an X, movies that followed
in that classic’s wake? Those pale
imitations generally fall short – any imitator who surpasses the original
quickly becomes the new standard by which the followers are judged. That’s simply not the case with Vintage Season. Moore’s deft touch, expertise with
romantic sub-plots, and the breezy sense of impending doom that underlies the
story make this an unsurpassed classic. Vintage Season stands as an example of a
story type that is often imitated, but never surpassed. Just like Die
Hard.
