Books, Movies and Random Thoughts

It has been months since I blogged about a book. This doesn’t mean I haven’t been reading (a complete impossibility) but simply that I haven’t found time to write up Never Let Me Go, A Feast for Crows, The Penelopiad, or any of the other numerous books I have read or re-read in the past few months.

However, I’ve decided to break the drought with Jaclyn Moriarty’s new book, The Betrayal of Bindy Mackenzie.

It’s amazing how Moriarty never repeats herself. This is the third book in the Ashbury High series, and all of them have similar presentation methods (though she has expanded from the letters/postcards of the first book to a variety of first-person media) but they are totally different from each other.

Feeling Sorry for Celia has a slightly surreal aspect, with all the letters from The Association of Teenagers, the Society of People who are Definitely Going to FailHigh School (And Most Probably Life as Well), the Best Friends Club, and so on. I also find it far and away the funniest of her books, particularly the fridge-note exchanges between Elizabeth and her mother (the idea of an “emergency meeting of the poetry club” will be with me for life!) And yet, it still has its serious – and painful – moments.

For me, Finding Cassie Crazy wasn’t laugh-out-loud – and I found Emily’s malapropisms irritiating rather than amusing – but it still had a lot of larger-than-life comic scenes. However, the emotional traumas Cassie goes through made it distinctly darker than Celia.

Bindy Mackenzie is far and away the darkest of the three. I know some people still find it funny, but I found it more like watching a slow-motion train wreck – horrifically compelling, but absolutely nothing to laugh about. I also know that some people find Bindy a distinctly unlikeable character, and I agree that she’s not really someone I would like to meet in real life. But I didn’t actually dislike her. Mainly, I just felt sorry for her – her view of the world and her place in it was so much at odds with reality that I couldn’t help but sympathise with her, even as I was mentally screaming at her not to do things. And it also became very obvious that her skewed personality was largely the product of her father’s treatment of her.

If Cassie showed someone who was in an emotionally vulnerable state (but who also had great emotional strength), Bindy is a picture of someone going through a complete physical and mental breakdown. It was a totally gripping read. I didn’t actually like the fact that it was ultimately a thriller/murder mystery, as that seemed surprisingly conventional, but it didn’t really detract from the powerful presentation of Bindy’s emotional journey. Of the three books, Celia is still easily my favourite, but Bindy was certainly unputdownable.

One thing that fascinates me about Moriarty’s writing is her interest in the strength and importance of friendship – in particular, female friendship. Celia shows the slow development of a mutually supportive and rewarding friendship between Elizabeth and Christina, as well as the gradual death (or, at least, Elizabeth’s outgrowing of) the childhood friendship with Celia – a friendship that had become unbalanced and almost emotionally parasitic. Cassie, on the other hand, shows a three-way friendship that has lasted since childhood, and shows no sign of being outgrown: Lydia, Emily and Cassie have an exceptional level of support, understanding and commitment to each other. Bindy, however, has no female friends at all, and so nobody she can turn to – or who will pro-actively turn to her – when things start to go wrong. She does have a male friend – Ernst – but a possible flaw in the book is that I never got a real sense of where this friendship came from, and how deep it went. Or maybe I just missed this. In any case, this friendship doesn’t seem to offer the same type of emotional support and commitment as those of the earlier books. And unlike Elizabeth (who goes through a period of confusion about her friends) Bindy doesn’t have a strong connection with her mother – Elizabeth’s mother may not have been “nurturing”, but there was an exeptionally strong and open level of mother-daughter communication. More than any of the other characters, Bindy seems to be compeltely alone in the world. Ultimately, though, she does get the help she needs from the other members – boys as well as girls – in her “Friendship and Development” group.

So I guess if there’s one theme that links all of the Ashbury High books, it is the idea that close and supportive friends are a vital part of surviving adolescence.

I’m told I first read The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe at age six: apparently it was my first Big Reading Achievement. As an unsophisticated reader, I guess I was exactly the right demographic for it; and it would have been my very first exposure to the idea of a complete fantasy world, different from our own. I read and re-read it (and the rest of the series) throughout my childhood, and although it’s not a book I have tended to go back to as an adult (unlike, for example, the works of Alan Garner) it will always be special to me.

It would be futile to try and deny the connections between the film of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe with Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy: without the enormous box office success of this, plus the technical expertise developed in New Zealand, Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe would never have been made – or, even if it had, would have had a much lower budget, and a very different “look” to it.

However, I think it does C.S. Lewis’s book – and thus, the recent film – a grave disservice to compare it directly to Tokein, and find it wanting. I’m not actually a fan of Tolken’s writing style, but even I have to acknowledge that Middle Earth is a much richer and more complex world than Narnia. Although they both created fantasy worlds, the two authors were writing with very different intentions, and with very different audiences in mind. C.S. Lewis was writing not just for children, but for unsophisticated children – I think, for example, that The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe would be accessible to a younger child than The Hobbit. The random mix of mythologies can be magical and exciting in its newness (though I think even as a six year old, I found the Father Christmas scene a bit jarring), and the Christian allegory is less heavy handed than in The Magician’s Nephew or The Last Battle. And while the growing sophistication of the child reader – plus the rather dated nature of some of Lewis’s prose – means that the age range of the “unsophisticated reader” may well have shrunk since his day, I think he still has a place as an important writer of fantasy for children. After all, it would be pretty rough if children were to be blocked off from the idea of fantasy worlds until they were old enough to read The Lord of the Rings – or even the Earthsea books, or Elidor, or Howl’s Moving Castle, or The Chronicles of Prydain – all of which, I think, are a little (or a lot) more challenging than The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.

OK, rant over. On to the film.

I really enjoyed it. I thought the children who played Lucy and Edmund were excellent, and Peter and Susan were also fine, although they had a lot less to work with. Mr Tumnus was good, and the White Witch was brilliant. I found the death of Aslan scene quite moving. I was quite happy with the extra scenes they added (although the fox was probably the least successful of the CGI creatures) and overall I thought they really captured the spirit of the book well.

A lot of people have complained about the quality of the CGI, but to be honest, except for the fox, I never found it intrusive. Maybe I’ll start to see flaws on a second or third watching (I find I’m much more aware of them on repeat viewings of Lord of the Rings than I was the first time through).

It can’t be denied that the battle scenes were Lord of the Rings-lite. This was pretty inevitable. The could hardly leave them out in the way Lewis did; and given that it was a battle with mythological creatures, they really didn’t have any option but to ride on Peter Jackson’s coat-tails – though I don’t think they managed to stand on his shoulders and raise it another notch. I was pleased to see that – for once! – it was the good guys who had an air force, although both Michael and Mark complained about the complete lack of tactics shown by both sides: they felt that there should be more than just charging at each other (I thought the plan to draw the White Witch’s people into the gully and then shoot at them from above was a tactic, but obviously I’m mistaken!) It was a little disappointing that the one genuine tactic described in the book – that when Edmund attacks the White Witch he “had the sense to bring his sword smashing down on her wand instead of trying to go for her directly and simply getting made a statue himself for his pains” – wasn’t made explicit in the film. Yes, you saw Emund smashing the wand, but it was less clear that this was a deliberate plan, and specifically different to the approach the others were taking.

So, was the film as rich and complex as Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings films? No, of course not. And does that matter? Well, I don’t think so. Despite the superficial similarities, it was coming from completely different source material, with a completely different audience in mind, and thus presenting some very different challenges to the filmmaker. And I thought Adamson and his cast and crew generally met those challenges very well.

It took me a while to get into The Constant Gardener. I found the handheld camera work distancing rather than engaging, and possibly that was why I couldn’t get really interested in any of the characters. Eventually I got caught up in the story, but not as much as I would have liked. On At the Movies, David and Margaret both admired the “combination of the love story and the political thing”. The two sides of the film are certainly well meshed, but ultimately I didn’t find either of them quite fulfilling.

I’ve only actually read one Le Carre book – The Spy Who Came in From the Cold. It was when I was doing the Pulp Fiction course at uni – it was the last book on the course, and I felt this incredible sense of Le Carre being on a whole different literary level from the other authors. It didn’t inspire me to read his other books – Spy Who Came in From the Cold was a bit too depressing for my taste – but it did give me a level of respect for what he was doing in the genre. The political thriller side of The Constant Gardener film seemed to lack the the depths and subtleties of Spy Who Came in From the Cold (which may or may not have been in the book of Constant Gardener) but at the same time it was too dark to be enjoyable in the same way as, say, the film of The Bourne Identity. So it just didn’t, quite, work for me.

I liked the idea of the love story taking place after her death, as his increasing knowledge of him makes him understand and love her more. But because it took me so long to get engaged with the characters, it didn’t quite work either.

[Warning – really, really long, and with numerous spoilers.]

Well, of course, the big question is Why? The BBC production of Pride and Prejudice is only ten years old: while not perfect, it was in many ways excellent, and for vast numbers of people it’s the definitive film/TV version of Austen’s novel.

I wasn’t actually looking forward to the new film of Pride and Prejudice, as I’d heard a number of things I didn’t like the sound of, and I thought the trailer for it was awful. In fact, not unlike Elizabeth with Darcy, I was determined to dislike it. Well, although I didn’t have the complete turnaround of Elizabeth, I’m forced to admit I enjoyed it far more than I had anticipated.

This production was supposed to be more “realistic” than earlier versions – which I take to mean less “chocolate box” in look. Not a totally new idea: it’s also the approach that was taken with the 1995 Persuasion. Some of the ideas (such as showing the Bennet household as being a bit run-down) were quite nice, though at times I think they took it a bit far. I know the estate includes a farm, but I wouldn’t have thought it would be quite so close to the house. I also couldn’t make up my mind about whether or not I liked the crush of people, and very loud music, of the Meryton Assembly: it felt over the top, but, for all I know, it could have been spot-on accurate. My knowledge of How Things Worked at that time is gleaned almost exclusively from fiction, rather than from reading actual historical descriptions.

The other aspect of “realism” was mud and bad weather. Obviously, part of this is straight from the book, and an important plot point (Jane riding through the rain, and Elizabeth walking through the mud), so is hardly innovative. But I thought having Darcy’s first proposal outside, in a raging storm, was completely unnecessary, added nothing, and, frankly, pretty much spoiled the scene for me.

For all the vaunted “realism” there were numerous occasions of appalling historical insensitivity: as Sandra Hall said in today’s Sydney Morning Herald review, the director is “careless with the customs and conventions that were part of the fabric of Austen’s world”. Generally, this seems to have been done to make things less subtle, and more “accessible” to the 21st Century viewer (or, occasionally, for a cheap laugh), and so meant ignoring the rules of propriety. There was an article by Natasha Walter in The Guardian (reprinted in the Sun Herald of 9 October, but there doesn’t appear to be any online version available) which made the excellent point that:

Once you start to lose the fence of decorum around the characters’ desires, you run the risk of losing the tension of the novels, the tension between outward convention and inner emotion that gives them their energy.

There was, of course, one glaring example of this in the 1995 BBC production: the infamous lake scene. This kind-of, sort-of worked, in that I can believe that Darcy might go swimming in his own lake, on his own grounds, although I find it rather less believable that he would then casually stroll up to the house, given that it is open to visitors. However, it did work to heighten the embarrasment and sexual tension of the meeting with Elizabeth: very unsubtle, but most effective.

In the new film, however, there were far more breaches of decorum, ranging from minor technical inaccuracies (e.g. a footman announcing “Miss Bennet, Miss Bennet and Miss Bennet”, and Miss Bingley commenting on the mud on Elizabeth’s dress but not mentioning that her hair is down) to much more serious changes. In my opinion (remember: my knowledge comes from fiction rather than history books) some of the worst offences were:

• Wickham and Elizabeth sitting under a tree together with, apparently, nobody else for miles around.
• Darcy just walking through the door of the Collins’ house (after dark, and without even ringing the bell) to give Elizabeth his letter.
• Elizabeth getting separated from the Gardiners and the housekeeper at Pemberley (and the Gardiners leaving without her!), and then listening through a door to Georgiana’s playing.
• Lady Catherine arriving at the Bennets’ late at night, when everyone has gone to bed.
• Darcy’s final proposal scene occurring because Elizabeth (unable to sleep) has gone out for an early morning walk Most Improperly Dressed, and bumped into Darcy – also unable to sleep, and also Improperly Dressed. (One also has to ask with this scene where they actually were – still within the Bennet property, or halfway between Longbourn and Netherfield? One or both of them had walked an awfully long way, particularly considering their casual attire!) And it would have been nice if Darcy could have gone home to change before seeing Mr Bennet.

My reactions to these errors varied. In some cases, I felt the change was completely unnecessary (e.g. the Lady Catherine scene and Darcy giving the letter) or could have been easily modified (e.g. in the Wickham scene by showing Kitty and Lydia nearby, but out of earshot). The actual performances in all of these scenes were very good, but I just couldn’t surrender to them because part of my brain was screaming out about how wrong the setting was.

Then there were scenes that were wrong, but there did at least seem to be a point to them. The best example of this is Pemberley. I thought Elizabeth listening at the door was very wrong (though an ongoing theme in the film!), but seeing Darcy and Georgiana when they think they are unobserved was a very effective way of shortcutting the scenes in the book that show the “human” side of Darcy. I also really loved the bit afterwards, when Elizabeth and Darcy are completely unable to say what they are feeling, so they fall back on the standard social niceties. Probably there would have been a way to present this in a more appropriate setting, but at least there was some reason for the change.

And then there was the scene that intellectually I loathed, but emotionally I responded to 100%: Darcy’s final proposal. It was like Austen dialogue (well, some Austen dialogue) in a Bronte setting. It was in every way wrong, it was unnecessary, it was unsubtle … but in spite of all this I was completely sucked in by it. I’m angry because I think the scene would have worked just as well in the correct setting (due to fine performances by both actors), but I would be lying if I said that the change spoiled it for me.

Ignoring anachronisms, and ignoring the fact that they chopped up the Austen dialogue something horrible, I thought most of the alterations made to the plot were reasonable compromises to get the film down to a sensible length. A fair amount of subtlety was lost, but that was pretty much bound to happen. One change I didn’t much like, though, was Elizabeth not telling Jane about Darcy’s proposal, but then almost telling her about how her feelings have changed. And I really didn’t like the whole family overhearing the full conversation between Elizabeth and Lady Catherine.

In terms of characters and performances, I hated Mr Bennet: he was far too old, and he seemed a bit slimy. In the book I think you’re meant to like him, even as you recognise that he isn’t a very good father, but something about Donald Sutherland’s performance just creeped me out. I thought Bingley was a bit too much of a dork, and even thicker than he is in the book (which is quite an achievement, really!), although I loved the longshot scene between him and Darcy just before he proposes to Jane.

Jane, on the other hand, was quite good; and Mary, Kitty and Lydia, though very minor parts, still had their moments. I thought Mrs Bennet was much better than in the 1995 BBC production, and Wickham was great – he was actually good looking (if a bit of an Orlando Bloom wannabe) but in a completely different style from Darcy, and he didn’t seem to have “I am a lying cad” tattooed on his forehead. It was quite believable that Elizabeth would fall for him, and it’s a pity his part was one of those largely sacrificed in the interest of getting through all of the plot. Georgiana was a completely different character from in the book, but given that she had about a minute of screen time, I think it was an acceptable and necessary change.

But, of course, the key roles are Elizabeth and Darcy – if they’re not right, then there’s just no point.

Keira Knightley was better than I’d expected, though she can’t top Jennifer Ehle. Her performance had a lot of the liveliness of Pirates of the Caribbean, though naturally it was much less over the top. But she was just far too pretty for the role. There is absolutely no way you would say Jane was the beauty of the family: at best, she and Elizabeth were equivalent. And I think maybe Keira Knightley was a bit too modern looking. She had a way of scrunching up her nose when she smiled that just didn’t look quite right (though I’m not sure why – people had the same facial muscles 200 years ago, and she only did it when she was with family members and close friends, not in Society). She also giggled rather a lot: sometimes this worked in showing Elizabeth’s personality (and youth!), but at times it jarred a bit. On the other hand, she certainly has “fine eyes”, and I think she moved better in the period dress than, for example, Frances O’Connor in Mansfield Park (who strode around as if she was more accustomed to wearing jeans).

Matthew MacFadyen’s performance was interesting. In At the Movies, David Stratton said he liked the vulnerability MacFadyen gave to Darcy. I can’t disagree that the vulnerability made him an appealing character, but I tend to think maybe it shouldn’t have been so visible in the early scenes – probably not until the first proposal, in fact. And with Keira Knightley being too beautiful for Elizabeth, I think the film really needed someone more physically striking as Darcy. Because what I think was lost was the sense of exclusivity about Darcy. At the start, he’s unpleasant, but he’s also special and out of reach, so ultimately there’s a real sense of how amazing it is that Elizabeth is the one woman to break through his reserve and humanise him. Of all Austen’s heroes, he’s probably the one most like a fairy tale prince. But in this film, you could see the humanity right from the start – he seemed awkward rather than aloof, depressed rather than haughty, and at times almost shy and uncertain rather than standoffish and confident. And because his looks didn’t make him stand out among the other men to the same extent that hers made her stand out among the other women, well, he just didn’t seem quite special enough.

This makes it sound like I didn’t enjoy his performance, but I really did. It’s just … it wasn’t Darcy as I see him. I think I would have absolutely loved the performance if I hadn’t read the book. As it was, I only mostly loved it.

I can’t really say whether I liked this production more or less than the BBC version. I can only say I liked it differently. And – unlike Mansfield Park and the Gwyneth Paltrow Emma – it’s one I probably will be adding to my DVD collection. But it will never replace the book!

P.S. 3 November

Having now re-watched most of the BBC version, I can say that I definitely like it more than the new film. It has a lot more of Austen’s dialogue, very well delivered. The new film is a very enjoyable romantic comedy, but it’s missing many of the fine touches that make the book special.

This book sounded like such a great idea. And I loved the opening (“Each of us has a private Austen”) and the descriptions of each of the character’s Austens. There were also some really funny bits in the book – one of my favourites is:

“You’ve read The Mysteries of Udolpho?” Allegra asked.

“Black veils and Laurentina’s skeleton? You bet. Didn’t you think it sounded good?”

We had not. We’d though it sounded overheated, overdone, old-fashionedly lurid. We’d thought it sounded ridiculous.

Actually it hadn’t occurred to any of us to read it. Some of us hadn’t even realized it was a real book.

…

“The mother in Pride and Prejudice, on the other hand …”

“Don’t give anything away,” Grigg said. “I haven’t read it yet.”

Grigg had never read Pride and Prejudice.

Grigg had never read Pride and Prejudice.

Grigg had read The Mysteries of Udolpho and God knows how much science fiction – there were books all over the cottage – but he’d never found the time or the inclination to read Pride and Prejudice. We really didn’t know what to say.

Overall, though, the book was basically disappointing. I think the main problem was that I just didn’t like any of the characters, and I didn’t actually care what happened to them. In particular, I was all set up to really like Prudie (anyone whose favourite Austen is Persuasion has me on their side right from the start), and was disappointed when she turned out to be a completely unappealing character.

I’ve heard it described as “chick-lit with pretensions”, and also as “not very good chick-lit”. My experience of chick-lit is not vast – I think the only two proper examples of it I have read are I Don’t Know How She Does It and The Other Side of the Story. For me, both of these books had the same problem as The Jane Austen Book Club – I just didn’t want to spend time with the characters. A lot of the emphasis seemed to be on them wanting to have it all, and messing up in their attempts to do so. It may all be very modern, and empowering, and realistic – but honestly, if I want to read a “girl” book, I’d much rather give my time to someone like Georgette Heyer. Her values may be old fashioned, but at least she creates characters I can enjoy reading about.

Even though I didn’t enjoy the book much, when I heard that Karen Joy Fowler was giving a talk at Stanton Library (10 minutes walk from work) last week, I thought I might as well go along. And I actually enjoyed the talk. She had a lot of interesting and amusing anecdotes – and it was good to learn that she was, in fact, a Jane Austen fan from way back.

I particularly enjoyed the story of how she came to write The Jane Austen Book Club. She was in a book shop, and she saw a sign on the wall for the “Jane Austen Book Club”. Thinking it was an advertisement for a book, she thought it was a wonderful idea, and immediately decided to buy it. When she got a bit closer to the sign, she realised it was an ad for an actual book club. And she was quite disappointed to learn that this book she had been looking forward to reading didn’t actually exist. Then, on the way home, she realised this meant she could write it herself.

It was a nice talk, and she seemed like a nice person. I just wish I liked her book more. Because it is a really good idea, but now that she’s written it there’s no chance for someone else to do it better.

It’s odd that although these are two of my favourite Bujold books, I always skip the first few chapters of each of them when I am re-reading. It’s because I know the main character is going to make an absolutely enormous mistake, and I just can’t stand seeing it happen. So I tend to pick up Mirror Dance at Chapter 12, when Mark arrives on Barrayar (after everything that could possibly have gone wrong has done so); and Memory at Chapter 7, when Miles is discharged. I know in both cases there is good stuff in the earlier chapters (not to mention things highly relevant to the plot!) but I just can’t subject myself to the pain of watching Mark and Miles dig their own graves.

Once the mistakes are made, though, and the books move into “recovery” mode, I love them. In fact, both of these are books that I will occasionally get off the shelf just to read one of the “good bits”. (I also do this with A Civil Campaign – which I also can’t re-read the first few chapters of.) They seem to have more depth than the earlier books in the series, though you probably need to have read at least some of the earlier books in order to fully understand these ones.

Mirror Dance is the first Miles book where there is a non-Miles perspective character. And I actually find the Mark sections of the book (after the excruciatingly painful first few chapters) far more interesting than the Miles bits. In fact, I find the Miles sections pretty dull.

I’m not totally convinced that Mark is the same character I first met in Brothers in Arms – he seems much more brisk and efficient there than he does in Mirror Dance. However, that’s more of an issue when I’m re-reading Brothers in Arms – the Mark of Mirror Dance is the same as the one in Civil Campaign. And I guess you can justify the change partly by saying that you only see him from the outside (Miles’ perspective) in Brothers in Arms, and also that he has spend the intervening time hiding out, and without Galen driving him, so it does make sense that he’d seem a bit more adrift than he did in the earlier book.

I think one of my favourite scenes in the book is the one where Mark overhears Cordelia and Aral talking – I particularly love Cordelia’s analysis of Ivan as only playing the fool, and Aral pointing out that Ivan has been like that all his life, and her interpretation would make him “a fiendishly Machiavellian five-year-old”. And the bit earlier in the book where she points out that “Miles thinks he’s a knight-errant. A rational government wouldn’t allow him possession of a pocket-knife, let alone a space fleet.” Cordelia really enriches this book, even though her part is relatively small (though still bigger than in any of the earlier books except Cordelia’s Honor).

Memory is my absolute, all-time favourite Vorkosigan book. The detective story and Miles’ personal growth are really well woven together, so the book is neither too depressing nor too lightweight. Fun minor characters are either introduced for the first time (Martin, Ma Kosti and Zap the Cat), or developed from earlier books (Duv Galeni, and also Illyan – not that he was previously underdeveloped). And it has so many wonderful scenes: Ivan taking over and moving into Vorkosigan House, the trip back to Silvy Vale, Illyan’s illness and Miles’ management of it, the “wrestling with temptation” scene, the Assault on Cockroach Central, and the confession to Gregor. Some of these scenes are fun, some moving, some powerful – all of them really good to read and re-read.

Possession was the first A. S. Byatt I ever read, and it is still far and away my favourite. I love the variety and interactions of the modern characters, the sense of such a completely diverse group of people linked by nothing more than a passion for two long dead poets, and the fact that they have such different ways of relating to them. I find all the characters – even the unlikable ones – enjoyable to read about. I also love the treasure hunt aspect of it – particularly as it gains momentum towards the end.

For all that I love the book, though, I don’t think I’ve ever read the Ash or LaMotte poetry, and I mostly skip the LaMotte prose as well. In fact, this time through I found myself skimming very lightly through the whole Ash/LaMotte correspondence, and I also skipped large segments of Sabine’s journal. On the other hand, I still read the Ellen Ash journal bits with great pleasure.

For me, though, this book also crystallises why it is I chose to study literature rather than history. With history, there is an absolute Truth – events either happened or they did not – and the historian may never know for certain whether what they believe is right. And there are other things that will simply never be known – as the Postscript to Possession says, “There are things which happen and leave no discernible trace, are not spoken or written of”.

This is also reflected earlier in the book, when Roland and Maud go to the Boggle Hole to “take a day off from them, get out of their story, go and look at something for ourselves. There’s no Boggle Hole in Cropper or the Ash Letters”. And then in the next chapter we see that Ash and LaMotte did go to the Boggle Hole – I love the parallel between the two pairs, but at the same time it is incredibly frustrating and sad that Roland and Maud will never know about it.

The same idea comes up in Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia (which, co-incidentally, I saw at about the same time I first read Possession). As in Possession, while the modern characters end up knowing most of the things the audience does about the past, there are some things they are unaware of – or, as in the case of the Fuseli portrait, some things they have a gut feeling about, but no way of proving it (“I know it’s them. … How? It just is.”)

Studying literature isn’t like that, at least for me. You have the text, and you have the reader, and you really don’t need anything else – it’s all about the relationship between the two, which, of course, will be unique for each reader. I guess an exception to this is if you are specifically trying to work out “what the author intended”. But I suspect this is a task sitting somewhere between the problematic and the impossible – and, as with history, leads to the situation where you will never know – or never be able to prove – how close to the truth you are.

But in terms of general appreciation/interpretation of a text, everything you need to know is between the covers of the book. If the author has written or said something elsewhere about it, that’s a bonus; and a greater knowledge of the author’s life, or the historical period they lived in, or anything else of that nature, may shed a different kind of light on the text. But ultimately, any interpretation a reader chooses to make of the book – unless it is actually contradicted by something between the covers of the book itself – is totally valid. It’s not like history, where you may never know if you are right or wrong. If you know something about a text, then it is true – even if the next person to read it knows the complete opposite.

I think Sin City is the most violent movie I have ever seen. How on earth did it have an “MA” rating rather than an “R”? The violence wasn’t redundant – it was an important part of the kind of world the film was presenting – but that didn’t make it less shocking.

In some ways, the main male characters were reminiscent of Raymond Chandler. Marv, in particular, was very much descended from Moose Molloy (by way of The Maxx, with a bit of input from Wolverine), but all three of them had elements of the chivalric, protective approach towards women that is the foundation of Phillip Marlowe’s character. But they also had a sadistic side that just isn’t present in Chandler. Marv didn’t just kill people – he revelled in the slaughter and ultimately performed horrific acts of torture. And Hartigan gave way to a berserker fury when he killed the Yellow Bastard. Dwight didn’t do anything as extreme in the film, but he did casually mention that he was a murderer who had been given a new face.

Chandler said “down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. … He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor – by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it. He must be the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world.” In Sin City, the streets were mean, but the men were not untarnished. In a way, they were men of honour, and they might even have been the best men in their world, but they were certainly not good enough for any world. Not even Hartigan, and certainly not Dwight or Marv.

The men were definitely the centre of the film. The women were all decorative – and mostly incredibly lethal – but they were objectified. The men were doing what they did for, or because of, the women. A somewhat misogynistic world view – but, again, very Chandler.

The visuals in this film were just amazing. On the black and white film, the splashes of colour had a stunning impact. And the script and performances more than matched this. In the excerpts I’d seen on At the Movies, Clive Owen’s lines had seemed stilted and unrealistic, but somehow in the context of the film they worked. Nevertheless, Dwight was the least complex of the three main characters, or, at least, the one you gained least insight into. His part of the film was more plot-driven, which made it less interesting than the other sections – though probably also less disturbing. You got a much better idea of what was driving – and I do mean driving – Hartigan and Marv, so there was a much closer connection with their stories. Also, they both had creepier villains – amazing performances from Nick Stahl and especially Elijah Wood. The women had less to work with in terms of either character or menace, but insofar as it was possible, they all gave strong performances.

One of the reviews I read described it as “style over substance”. I don’t think this is fair. Certainly, without the visual style the film would have had far less impact, but this doesn’t mean that it was without substance, in the way that, say, Kill Bill was. In fact, it probably would have been an easier film to watch if this had been the case. Rather, the visuals combined with the writing to give a powerful and disturbing picture of a world in which everything is corrupt: in which men can have chivalric ideals yet at the same time perform – and revel in – quite horrific levels of violence. The world of Sin City was morally bankrupt. Unfortunately, I’m not totally convinced that the the film wasn’t as well.

J. K. Rowling’s latest was released yesterday at 9:01am in Australia. Unfortunately, at 9:00am I had to be at Sydney Secondary College, to help load a truck with all the NSW Fencing Association equipment we had borrowed to run the Australian Universities Fencing Championships. I then had to go to the Ann Clarke Netball Centre to unload it. So I wasn’t able to pick up my copy of the book until about midday. However, having had an exhausting week at the championships, I decided to skip Fencing Club training, and put my feet up and read that afternoon.

Book number 5 (Order of the Phoenix) had been my least favourite Harry Potter. On re-reading it in preparation for Half-Blood Prince, I found that while I still thought it was crying out for severe editing, the “Harry as rebellious adolescent” was better presented than I had remembered. The problem was, as an angsty, “nobody understands me”, Young Adult kind of story, it didn’t really seem to fit that well into the Potter-verse.

The moody adolescent was gone from Half-Blood Prince, and, as a result, it felt much more like the earlier books. It could probably still have done with some more editing, but it was nowhere near as bloated as Order of the Phoenix or Goblet of Fire. However, it still wasn’t as tightly constructed as some of the earlier ones. I’m not sure if this was an editing issue, or just that there wasn’t as much plot. In particular, it didn’t have that twist at the end that makes you want to re-read it, to find all the clues you missed the first time around. So, while I think she’s heading back in the direction of what I liked about the earlier books in the series, she’s not there yet.

Some general comments, which are FULL OF SPOILERS:

• I thought all the relationship stuff was a bit superficial, but probably inevitable given the ages of the characters. Though I’m wondering how it sits with the original target audience of 9-11 year olds. Of course, the original readers are now older than Harry, but are the current crop of 9-11 year olds supposed to read the first few books, and then wait until they grow up a bit before reading the later ones?
• I’m probably in the minority here, but I was pleased there was a lot less of Hagrid in this book. I was finding the Care of Magical Creatures lessons increasingly painful in the last few books.
• I thought Horace Slughorn was set up as an interesting character, but then nothing much was done with him.
• The revelation that Snape was the Half-Blood Prince was a bit unexpected. There don’t seem to have been any Agatha Christie style clues-that-you-don’t-even-notice scattered throughout the book.
• I got a bit fed up with Harry continually using the Potions book, when it was so obvious all along that Hermione was right about it. And Ron should have taken it a bit more seriously, too.
• I liked the little cameos by Luna Lovegood. I’ll be interested to see what happens with her in the last book.
• I’ll also be interested to see what happens with Percy. My original theory – that his ambition and liking for rules would lead him to Voldemort’s side without him actually realising it, and that he would end up coming good, but probably dying in a sacrificial moment – now seems less likely than it did a couple of books ago. But I’m assuming he’ll have some impact in the final climax.
• I thought Dumbledore’s death scene was much more moving than Sirius’s in Order of the Phoenix (though this may just be that I was getting a bit fed up with Sirius anyway). Dumbledore was the one I had my money on to die in this book, and as the plot developed, and he gave Harry more and more information, it became increasingly likely that he wasn’t going to be around for Book 7.
• My reading of the death scene (which I thought was the only possible reading until I saw some other people’s comments) was that when he says “Severus … please …” to Snape at the end, he is actually asking Snape to kill him, in order to stop Malfoy from doing it (and thus, to save Malfoy from turning to the Dark Side). Presumably he and Snape had already discussed this as a possibility.
• There seemed to be at least one continuity error – Dumbledore says that they haven’t been able to keep any Defence Against the Dark Arts teacher for more than a year since he refused the job to Voldemort. But in Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone I certainly got the impression that Quirrell had been in the job for quite a while.

Howl’s Moving Castle had its Australian premiere on the last night of the Sydney Film Festival. I’d never been to the Festival before, but when I saw the listing I thought I’d probably go along to Howl’s. Then, a week after tickets went on sale, I read an article that said it was the fastest selling film in the whole Festival. I phoned up the next day – it was almost booked out, but I managed to get seats way up in the circle.

Although I’m not a huge Diana Wynne Jones fan, I read Howl’s Moving Castle a few months ago (see my comments on it), in preparation for the film. It didn’t make an overly strong impression on me, so going into the film I found I could only remember the broad outlines of the plot and characters. Even so, it was enough to know that the film was very different from the book – in fact, I’d hesitate to call it a “film version” of the book. I think it existed in a grey area between “based on” and “inspired by” – sort of like the Olivier film of Wuthering Heights. It took characters and events from the book, but added to, excised from and reworked the material to produce something that was fundamentally different at all levels.

Because I’m not passionate about the book, this actually didn’t bother me in the least. Although I recognised that many things were very different, I was quite happy to go along with the flow and enjoy it as a completely new story. When I did notice differences, my reaction was more along the lines of “that’s changed – what an interesting decision” rather than “that’s changed – and it’s completely wrong“. In fact, the only thing that threw me slightly was the changing of the Donne poem. Obviously once it was translated into Japanese it wouldn’t have had any cultural significance, and it didn’t have the same relevance to the plot that I remember it having in the book, but it was still odd to read in the subtitles something that looked like it had gone through a double translation process. I’d be interested to see how it is treated in the dubbed version.

I liked the mechanised Victorianism of the setting (my mental image of the book – rightly or wrongly – was set much more in “once upon a time” land) and I thought the war scenes (which, as far as I recall, were completely not-appearing-in-the-book) were incredibly visually compelling.

I also enjoyed the humour – it was enough to keep you engaged, without actually undermining the serious aspects of the plot, or becoming too Disneyfied (although I have to admit, the dog came close).

The characters of Sophie and Howl seemed (as far as I could remember) to be rather different from the book – I first thought “simplified”, but maybe it was just a significant shift in emphasis. In any case, I found them both interesting, and I cared what happened to them – one of my key criteria for whether or not I enjoy a film. And I think Howl was probably the sexiest animated character I have ever seen!

My initial reaction was that the world was a lot less rich than Spirited Away, but maybe it was just that I found it more culturally accessible. At this point I’m not prepared to say which I prefer of the two films – I think I’d need to see Spirited Away again first.

Coming out of the film, my reaction was that I liked it better than DWJ’s book. However, it has inspired me to re-read the book, and somewhat surprisingly I’m enjoying it much more than I did the first time around.