February 2017 book and film review

Welcome to this month's media review. I hope you won't mind if it is divided into several fragments- this is because my Apple technology doesn't approve of this blog format: once you've written more than about 500 words it renders it almost impossible to write any more. Here goes.

BOOKS

TRUE HISTORY OF THE KELLY GANG, by Peter Carey
A young lad grows up in the poverty of the Australian countryside of the late 19th century. At 14 a famous bush ranger takes him on as his protege, and it isn't long before the lad is outdoing his master in exploits of lawlessness and derring-do. But from the beginning the state has it in for him and his loved ones, and a terrible resentment of authority builds in the young man's breast.
          When it came out in 2000, Peter Carey's wonderful, quirky book was rapidly hailed as a masterpiece of modern writing. Purporting to be taken from Ned Kelly's own journals, its style is highly idiosyncratic, using the colloquial language of that time. It is something of an acquired taste, but once one gets used to it the book transforms itself into a cruel, beautiful elegy of an Ozzy Robin Hood, a man who fought the law all his brief life, and ultimately lost. Brilliant.

A HOUSE FOR MR. BISWAS, by V.S. Naipaul
On the Caribbean island of Trinidad, a baby is born under a bad star. A local astrologer confidently predicts bad luck will dog him all his life; even his sneeze will be unlucky. He grows up, finds himself in a marriage and has children, and all the while, the astrologer's prediction appears to be unerringly accurate. Nothing works out for Mr Biswas, his jobs, his relationships, even the much-vaunted house he eventually builds. Then one day it all becomes too much, and he has some sort of psychotic break, although my diagnosis might be "acute-on-chronic social anxiety disorder".
          Then he seems to fall on his feet. Always having harboured a love of words, he is taken on by a Port of Spain newspaper and achieves a measure of success. But will it last?
          Naipaul, along with Derek Walcott, is perhaps the finest writer ever to have emerged from the West Indies. His style is immaculate, his story-telling matchless and the whole book is an absolute delight- though don't expect a laugh-a-minute. Having said that it is highly amusing sometimes. Marvellous.

FILMS

THE TURIN HORSE (2011) D- Bella Tarr.
In rural Hungary, a widower and his daughter eke out the meagreist existence on their tiny plot of land. All their capital is represented by their squalid shack, a well, and their horse. Then one day the horse, seriously knackered, refuses to go out and pull the plow. Worse is to come. A band of gypsies camps out on his land, and when he chases them off they shout curses at him. The following day, the well runs dry. What are they to do?
          Shot in only thirty long takes, this film is extraordinary. The action, if you can call it that, takes place as if in slow motion, depicting the endlessly repetitive lives of our protagonists as they labour to make it through each day. The agony of their destitution is often hard to watch, and it all seems to happen so slowly, yet somehow we are mesmerised by the small-scale drama of their struggle to survive. Exceptional cinema.

JACKIE (2016) D- Pablo Larrain. In the weeks following the assassination of her husband, Jackie Kennedy agrees to be interviewed in her lovely, but eerily empty home, by a reporter from the Washington Post. Still numb with shock and grief, she does her best to come up with some useful copy for the guy, if she'll let him print any of it, that is.
           Beautifully written and directed with extreme sensitivity, this film takes us into the heart of one woman's grief- but one who happens to be the most famous woman in the world. We see Natalie Portman (who is sensational, and should have won the Oscar for best actress), wandering about her Hyannisport home, looking at the rooms, walking the paths in the carefully manicured gardens, all the while harking back to that terrible day and what might have been had the bullets missed their target. But they didn't, and now she is alone in her agony. The kind of film that makes us believe in Hollywood again.

Please see next blog for more movies.