an end in itself | Atonement

So I cheated. 

I started reading Atonement & got almost to the end but it became late & one of those situations in which you know you'll still be reading to see who makes it by 5am. I skipped through a good chunk of Briony's nursing career, only to slow down once her encounter with Cecilia began & from then, finished it. 

So now I need to go back & re-cap. 

Brilliant though. 

 A friend said recently she found McEwan too wordy, too descriptive. I think for me, that's part of the power of his writing & the allure: how he can create suspense & keep the reader guessing, waiting to see & wanting to know how the resolution will be reached. And even with Atonement, he undercuts the more comfortable ending as it all gets a bit meta & rather tragic.

Procurement || & Dorian Gray

A friend of a friend who is Phdding in Publishing put out a questionnaire the other day. Amongst the range of questions asked was,

Where do you tend to purchase fiction titles?

• I don't
• Local independent bookshops
• Publisher's website
• Amazon
• Large national bookstore outlets
• Supermarkets
• Airports
• Elsewhere online

which worked fine as a compiled list but I fell into that black hole of "Other _______ " as my mainstay in book supplies comes out of the hordes of Edinburgh's charity shops. We're lucky to have them exist in packs up here with the useful addition of a few dedicated charity bookshops - Oxfam, in particular, excels in this field.
So the other day as I took a turn out of the office, I went past Shelter (temptingly two down from Work) & made my way down the hill in search of Oxfam and Atonement. Because it's not just the orphaned dross which ends up on the shelves, the familiar covers of the 'once read, now abandoned' authors. (Heh.) You can actually count on certain recent books to be there. Lo & behold, not one but two copies to choose from. Sorted.

I wanted Atonement specifically as Filmhouse are screening the film again this month (the wider 'burgh public get to benefit from 'The Film of the Book' course) & as I never caught it the last time round, I'm giving myself the next sixteen to complete it & fulfil the Golden Rule. Book first; film second. Why I want to see it: Romola Garai has an early turn as Briony & I love her acting; James McAvoy also features as the hero, likewise and Keira Knightley, well, she's not all bad. Plus, an epic element with landscape of war serving as a backdrop & repercussions of a single decisive life-changing event echoing down the ages. As I write, I still don't know what Briony actually sees between Cecilia & Robbie nor how she reports it so fatefully - that's all still to come; no spoilers, please!

From just looking at the shelves, I'd already spent £18. Line of sight included:

• Ghostwritten - David Mitchell
• Khaled Hosseini - A Thousand Splendid Suns; Kite Runner
• Love in a Time of Cholera - Gabriel García Márquez (I was informed over the summer that I absolutely should read this, causing it to move higher up the ranks; as well as Paul Auster's New York Trilogy. All in good time...)

I managed to make mental notes & step away until the next pay day. But as Atonement left the shop with me so did a newly discovered McGregor title, So Many Ways to Begin :)
 I also picked up one called, The Song Is You by Arthur Phillips. I had to just nip back to my bookshelf as the title itself (although I was remembering along the lines of Whitman) is not memorable. I knew if I did not pick it up then, I'd probably never seek it out again.
The latter interested me and my choice of the latter had me intrigued. Often a book's title has been recommended, memorised, stored up to find sometime later so if I chance across it, I might purchase. This one however had only a cover & a blurb to go by. So what helped it out of the door in my hands? A few things. In the blurb, there's both a cliché and an unconventional aspect,

- a shock of dark red hair sings with a voice that demands his attention.
- Though they do not meet, a strange and unlikely love affair is ignited.

Music also plays a strong part & I like that. It's a vital contributor to the richness of life. It weaves itself in in the smallest of ways and so significantly enhances the whole experience. A book which can tell of its story, High Fidelity as case in point here, has my vote.

A uniquely heart-breaking dark comedy about obsession and loss ?

Well, we shall see... Book Thief back on hold for Christmastime & travels then. (I'm almost tempted to also chuck War & Peace in there as well as I'll be abroad from home for some time then.) As it happened, The Picture of Dorian Gray ended up jumping the queue into my suitcase that day. I also had Distant Star with me as planned but that one requires a whole blog-post unto itself. Mixed opinions lie there.

DG offered a shorter read & a quicker route in as befitted evening trainhours escapism. I did uncover a whole stockpile of Wilde's epigrams within its pages & it felt sometimes as though they were coming in so thick & fast, the characters lacked depth, serving instead as merely witty mouthpieces on occasion.
Yet it was still a good read. Lord Heny Wooton was in particular, very powerfully and darkly drawn and so beyond the realm of conscience, " .. I feel not / This deity in my bosom."

There were other areas too which I appreciated:
- the dual nature of Dorian as he descended to the depths of gutter life whilst still maintaining the public appearance;
- numerous comical exchanges, and impending tragedy;
- interest in Wilde's handling of male friendship-cum-attraction and the social abuse of opium;
- Wilde's infinitely good reflections upon relationships between the sexes and shrewd epigrammatic remarks which did prompt a wry smile.

Never trust a woman who wears mauve, whatever her age may be, or a woman over thirty-five who is fond of pink ribbons. It always means they have a history.

... I can now also watch the film with a clear conscience & a proper understanding too. ;)

The Song Of Lunch

I got around to The Song Of Lunch this evening, some sixteen days after the nation watched it, thanks to wondrous i-player. Ah, it was a sumptuous treat with the fabulous pairing of Rickman & Thompson, slipping easily into the required roles: old flames, out for lunch.

Greg Wise (Producer) commented that,

..we, as the audience, should forget that this is a poem, until a rhyming couplet suddenly jumps out at us - above all, we should be taken on a wonderful journey, surrounded by words: words seamlessly moving from voice-over narration into dialogue, back into narration.

We should wallow in a sea of words: hear them, taste them, smell them.

And so we do. There was some beautiful phrasing & imagery in Reid's poem which prompted me to smile. Makes me partly want to go off & explore the text and yet the dramatisation of the poem, Rickman's voiceover brought the poem to life so beautifully, restoring written word to spoken song. Maybe if we shout loud enough, there'll be a DVD to follow suit, although there are fragments on youtube for now.

A Very M&Bs Moment.

Edinburgh Lyceum Store

Train journey time!

Time to pick up The Book Thief, methinks...

Bring it! Also accompanying me on the journey:
Distant Star (Roberto Bolaño);
Revolutionary Road (Richard Yates);
plus a re-reading of Hardy's Far From The Madding Crowd in potential readiness for a viewing of Tamara Drewe.
We'll see. 

Still undecided in how I'll feel about "a new genre: the contemporary pastoral comedy." 

*Edit: I omitted reference to the middle-lady before as TD: Film being linked first & foremost to stemming forth first from TD: Comic Strip. Posy Simmonds of the Guardian being the original re-worker of Hardy's novel.

"Do your research!"

These two make me want to quit my late-night, lately developed habit of fighting insomnia by junking out on Mills & Boons. 
(July alone managed to cover To Catch A Thief; The Rancher Next Door; More Than A Memory; Marriage: To Claim His Twins; A Father For Her Son; Bedside Manner; The Italian's One-Night Love Child... )

The reworking of Conan Doyle's infamous literary hero into the BBC's Sherlock allows for some excellent escapism. And thanks to Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss being such fans of Conan Doyle's work, the reworking is carried out cleverly and humorously whilst staying loyal to the text. So there's no need to be shouting 'Treachery!' at the tv screen.

AWESOME

(Plus a few stills from Den of Geek ;
... & a ridiculously cute bit of lj fandom art. :D )

If I wanted to, I could probably find some minor aspect to grumble over but I won't because Cumberbatch and Freeman breathe exactly the right kind of life into the characters of Holmes and Watson.

Den of Geek: 

Were you fans of the book before you landed the roles in Sherlock? Did you go back to the books to prepare, or did you avoid that?

Benedict Cumberbatch:  No, very much I've been reading the books. It's the origination, it's the primary source. You should always go back to the books. I don't think what we're doing requires that, in particular, because it's a modern interpretation. But, you have to bring what is unique about his character to a modern context, and to do that you have to understand his original self.

So no sudden shock departure from Holmes as we have known him and for once, a reworking that does the book complete justice.
I'm happy. It's definitely time for an overdue revisit for my ongoing romance with Arthur Conan Doyle and his canon.

CB. | Word.

 

daydreaming...

Thanks to Carl's latest creation, Fitzwilliam Darcy & all those about him are pretty topical right now. 

Which is why when Alison referred me to this, I thought it only fair to share :)

Why I love "Rapture":

Carol Ann Duffy — mother, daughter, sister, friend, lover and now poet laureate to more than 60m of us — is good with words. You could say they hang around her unadorned throat like pearls. She wouldn’t, because she’s as unpretentious as her verse. But those simple lines of hers contain whole universes, and we are talking about love.

~ Extract from this Times article

Silver's Story | Lighthousekeeping

I had a train journey to Royston & back last weekend. Lighthousekeeping accompanied me, as did Their Eyes Were Watching God and both of which I managed to finish.

Lighthousekeeping was as good as it first promised to be.
It made me laugh:

After the Talking Bird, the nice man at the Tavistock Clinic kept asking me why I stole books and birds, though I had only ever stolen one of each.
_________________

'Was there no human being you could have talked to instead?'
'I wasn't talking to the bird. The bird was talking to me.'

There was a long pause. There are some things that shouldn't be said in company. See above.

and it prompted me to delight in her use of language and power of expression:

What should I do about the wild and the tame? The wild heart that wants to be free, and the tame heart that wants to come home. I want to be held. I don't want you to come too close. I want you to scoop me up and bring me home at nights. I don't want to tell you where I am. I want to keep a place among the rocks where no one can find me. I want to be with you.

Plus more on that favourite of themes, with echoes reaching back to Oranges:

... it matched a moment in me that was waiting for someone to call my name. Names are still magic: even Sharon, Karen, Darren and Warren are magic to somebody somewhere. In the fairy stories, naming is knowledge. When I know your name, I call your name, and when I call your name, you'll come to me.

There were other elements of classic Winterson in Lighthousekeeping, which I enjoyed:

the quirky heroine overcoming the odds pitched against her and journeying through life; affirmative first-person narrative; her episodic style, interspersed by myth & tales: Babel Dark's history
as recounted by Pew,Tristan & Isolde making an appearance;
Silver's refrain; story-telling; love-making; a nod to the multiplicity of female identity:

There's always a woman somewhere, child; a princess; a princess, a witch, a stepmother, a mermaid, a fairy godmother, or as one as wicked as she is beautiful, or as beautiful as she is good.
Is that the complete list?
Then there's the woman you love.

Babel Dark's character was somewhat beguiling in its duality. The journals serving as a brilliant example of this, strengthened later by Stevenson's inclusion in the novel along with his text of Jekyll & Hyde.

He kept two journals; the first, a mild and scholarly account of a clergyman's life in Scotland. The second, a wild and torn folder of scattered pages, disordered, unnumbered, punctured where his nib had bitten the paper.

Babel as the minister with its social standing in Salts, a role that grants authority but also serves to hem him in, curtailing his freedom. Acting as a man of faith whilst being confronted by Darwinism. Challenged by his duty to God to the extent that he betrays himself & his real love: I stood firm, I stood firm, I stood firm.
The complexity of his feelings towards Molly. You could just about forgive his infidelity, his bi-annual escape to Bristol as Mr. Lux, were it not for the dark human aspect of his character: his jealousy breaking out in violence, the harsh treatment of his wife where his frustration manifests itself through abuse.

I enjoyed the introduction to Silver and the surreal state of her childhood but I was increasingly charmed by her upon her relocation to Bristol & the lengths to which she went in overcoming library bureaucracy so as to complete Death in Venice.

I liked "The Hut " episode within the novel but this also created a questionable flaw for me, within the novel. There was something in the handling of Silver's romance with the girl from the convent which seemed to disrupt the flow of her story. 

Almost like the novel tripped itself up in its eagerness to pull in a love interest to aid Silver's journey to self-fulfillment & understanding. Something too conventional in how the inclusion of a romance was equated towards the completion of Silver's journey. 

I'm still trying to work through whether Winterson really intended it as thus: the love interest serving as an end in itself, rather than the means to her eventual end. 

I had been rooting for Silver to find that sense of understanding & her path through life and to find it from within herself, not simply due to finding love with someone else.

Winterson uses the metaphor of the open door:

I fell asleep, and dreamed of a door opening.
Doors opening into rooms that opened into doors that opened into rooms. We burst through, panelled, baize, flushed, glazed, steel, reinforced, safe doors, secret doors, double doors, trap doors. The forbidden door that can only be opened with a small silver key.
You are the door in the rock that finally swings free when moonlight shines upon it.. You are the door that opens onto a sea of stars.

- which could just be a metaphor for an awakening through finding a connection through love, sex and conversation - but then again,

Open me. Wide. Narrow. Pass through me, and whatever lies on the other side, could not be reached except by this. This you. This me. This caught moment opening into a lifetime.

Does the girl from the convent resolve one aspect of Silver's search or is she, like Pew, DogJim & Babel Dark, an equal contributor towards Silver's journey's end?
 Because the novel does reach completion with her homecoming - regaining the haven of her lighthouse:

I took out my little silver key and opened the door into our kitchen [..] Finally, not knowing what I did, I had come back ... I got up, opened the drawer.. took out the key and wound the spring. Tick, tick, tick. Better - much better. Time had begun again.
... I had often seen this light. Inland, land-locked, sailing my years, uncertain of my position, the light had been what Pew had promised - marker, guide, comfort and warning.
Then I saw him. Pew in the blue boat.

~ Winterson, Jeanette. Lighthousekeeping. Harper Perennial: London, 2004.

____________

Plot: ****
Fun: ****
Novelty: ****
Overall: ****