Tweet
Who is your favourite version of Lara Croft right now? The cartoon star of Temple of Osiris, with her bubblegum-blue leotard, or the 2013 reboot's bedraggled gap year student? For me it's neither. I'm much more taken with the Lara Croft of Melissa Lee-Houghton's "Hot Pursuit", which introduces the final section of video game poetry anthology Coin Opera 2: Fulminaire's Revenge. Largely, that's because this incarnation of Lara won't do what she's told. Lee-Houghton portrays the character as neither an instrument of the player's will nor a swashbuckling heroine, but a kind of wayward protégé who must be laboriously won round if any progress is to be made.Setbacks are represented as the result not of pushing the wrong button or fudging the timing, but of Lara's refusal to play along - "my hands react to your rage / like my body reacts to hot water". The tone shifts violently, line to line, from admiring ("you don't thirst / I love that about you") to resentful ("you want to go it alone"). Even Lara's mortality comes to be viewed as a kind of misbehaviour, a cheating of Lee-Houghton's expectations for the character. The poet pictures Lara's corpse being fed to wolf cubs, her pony tail hacked off, only to recall with a start that the point of her death is also the point at which the illusion collapses, rolling back to the previous save: "you were never there".
Where the latest reboot has papered over such scrapes and blemishes, Lee-Houghton's piece rediscovers the invigorating frustrations of classic Tomb Raider - of fighting Lara's wheelbarrow-esque turning circle and her pickiness about handholds, smartly couched in lines that sometimes flow together into sentences and sometimes fall apart, like badly calculated jumps. In the process Lee-Houghton also tells us things about herself, or at least the self she chooses to be for the poem's scope, comparing the failings of her flesh to Lara's "freak show" physique:
Read more…
More...