Add articles to your saved list and come back to them any time."What'll you do next," our heroine Beth Harmon asks a teenage boy who declares he wants to be chess champion of the world within three years. "If you're world champion at 16, what will you do with the rest of your life?"The Queen's GambitAnya Taylor-Joy as Beth Harmon.
Beth is orphaned as a nine-year-old when the car her mother is driving crashes headlong into a truck. Sent to the Methuen home for Christian Girls, young Beth develops a fondness for the tranquiliser librium that's given daily to all the kids, and for the chess the school's janitor, Mr Shaibel , teaches her in his basement workshop. Warm and fuzzy he's not, but he sees the makings of a future champion while almost everyone else barely notices she exists.
Adopted by an unhappy couple – less as a daughter than as a lady's companion for Alma – Beth soon finds that chess offers a lot more than school: travel, money, respect and even a burgeoning sense of community.Alma is a better manager than mother, but for a girl in desperate need of family, their bond is real enough. And for both of them, chess fills an enormous void.
The tale plays out across the span of the 1960s, providing ample opportunity for fabulous clothes and locations . Inevitably, all roads lead to Moscow, and a showdown with reigning world champion Vasily Borgov . But the real duel is between Beth's freakish talent and her self-destructive tendencies, played out via pills and booze.
There's never really any doubt of the outcome in this glossy, moving, and fabulously enthralling fantasy, in which Beth seems able to turn her addictions on and off almost at will. For the grimmer side of that story, you'll need to flip over to SBS and the excellent four-part series