"Firefly" has some charming passages and achieves a nice effect in portraying the sad final years of one of the great entertainers of the mid twentiet"Firefly" has some charming passages and achieves a nice effect in portraying the sad final years of one of the great entertainers of the mid twentieth century. I wonder though if the author's goals in writing the book were perhaps excessively modest. "Firefly" is really a novella, and it could be that it falls uneasily between the concision of a short story and the complexity of a longer novel.
It also concerns me somewhat that the book fits too easily into a cultural pattern that has been been set up recently in fictional accounts of famous persons. It's as if there's a delight in showing old people in decline, approaching death. I'm thinking of films like "Iris" - about the last years of the novelist Iris Murdoch, when she was suffering from Alzheimers - and also of "The Iron Lady," the Margaret Thatcher bio-pic. It seems like there is a trend to portray these important notables - as Janette Jenkins does also here in "Firefly" - at the end of their lives, when they have lost their powers and characteristics that made them notable, imporant and interesting in the first day. Yes, it is true that getting old can be devastating and ravaging, but I would prefer to have been shown more of what made Noel Coward a significant cultural icon in the first place - the wit, the style, the charm, the "design for living".
If people are interested in Noel Coward in 2014 - and I'm not sure that many people are - it's not because he became a doddering old fogey sitting by a swimming pool in Jamaica. ...more
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