Skip to main content

The necessity of being disillusioned



Two films of female awakening one based on a book I recently read: 'I Capture the Castle', one based on a book I have not read: 'Brick Lane'. Both drawing on very different visions of England.

In the former, history plays no apparent part - the whole world is the personal world of its narrator, Cassandra. In the latter, history unfolds as a shaping background, we see the startling, shattering events of 9/11, observing some of their consequences even as the focus remains squarely on the personal dilemmas of Nazneen in relation to her family and her place.

The film of 'I Capture the Castle', enjoyable as it is in its own right, coarsens the book in two ways. The first is that it makes the characters, with the exception of Cassandra herself, less likeable. Events, happenings and sayings are invented to support this, often directly against the flow of the book's unfolding narrative. In the book even the predatory photographer, Leda, comes to be begrudgingly accepted into the space of Cassandra's regard.

Second, and more importantly perhaps, the film cannot resist 'explaining things'. In the book, things happen, erupt, bump along in the mysteriousness of their humanity. Being 17, Cassandra cannot be expected to understand everything. Can we at 70? Stuff happens and the miracle of life, suggests Dodie Smith, the book's author, is that we navigate it in all its complexity, finding joy, suffering pain, coping. The film obtrudes a 'knowing narrative' that tries to create connecting linkages: everything must be neatly packaged for the audience, closing down, rather opening up, their own imaginative resources.

Nazneen's awakening is to discover that, to her surprise, she loves her husband (arranged, older, pompous, full of crushed hope and the trail of false prospects yet fundamentally kind) Yet she cannot return with him to Bangladesh when he finds all meaningful paths closed to him in England. She cannot return for her daughters' sake, nor hers. She has rejected the excitement of the younger man, of divorce and re-marriage after their adultery together (and his radicalisation after 9/11) and has realised that her younger sister, left behind in Bangladesh, has trodden a much more difficult path than her own disappointed romantic hopes had projected onto her, greatly more difficult, in fact, than her own. She turns, the film suggests, to her own resources and possibilities and to the fragmented but real life she has been given.

Both are, at heart, about more than coping with the heart's affections, of finding through 'disillusionment' more hopeful prospects - one at the outset of adulthood, one at the midpoint. Both books were written at a time of crisis - Smith's in the Second World War, Ali's in the birth of the war on terrorism - but both affirm the reality of domestic space in very different settings and the resources of that space to give life if it is lived clearly, without illusion and with small, but tender, hopes.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Buddha meets Christ in embrace

Reading Lama Anagarika Govinda is proving nostalgic on a number of fronts. I recall my first reading of it in my first year at university, bought at Watkins, the famous 'esoteric' bookshop in Cecil Court in London. I sat in my hall of residence room transfixed by a world made familiar; and, it was deepening of a commitment to contemplation (which has been observed fitfully)! I remember returning, at the time, to my school to give a talk to the combined fifth form on Buddhism and using Govinda as the backbone of my delivery (both this book, and his equally wonderful, the Foundations of Tibetan Buddhism). I was voted (I immodestly remember) their best invited speaker of the year. I had even bought a recording of Tibetan music as opener and closer! He reminded me of how important Buddhism was (and is) to my own thinking and comprehension of my experience. The Buddha's First Sermon in the Deer Park was the first religious text I read (of my own volition) at the tender age...
13 comments
Read more

Richard Hauser and the evils of Marx

Richard was a distinguished Austrian sociologist who had contributed to the Wolfenden report that led to the decriminalisation of homosexuality in England, Wales and Scotland in the late 1960's. I was remembering him on the plane today because I saw a reference to his wife, Hephzibah Menuhin, pianist sister of the violinist Yehudi and human rights activist. I met him after responding to an advertisement in the New Society. He lived in a house in Pimlico, a widower, with a clutch of young people, running an ill-defined (for me) social research/action institute, that I visited several times and to which Richard wanted to recruit me. I was never clear as to what my responsibilities might be and resisted co-option. He was, however, extraordinarily charismatic and as a Jew had fled Austria in 1938 not without receiving permanent damage to his hearing, courtesy of Gestapo interrogation. I vividly remember one story he told me that gives you an idea of his character. He was invit...
17 comments
Read more

Luminous Spaces - the poetry of Olav H. Hauge

Don't give me the whole truth, don't give me the sea for my thirst, don't give me the sky when I ask for light, but give me a glint, a dewy wisp, a mote as the birds bear water-drops from their bathing and the wind a grain of salt. It began with a poem, this poem, in Mark Oakley's 'The Splash of Words: Believing in Poetry' - a wonderful series of meditations on particular poems, one each chapter. The poet is the Norwegian, Olav H. Hague (1908-1994). I immediately ordered, 'Luminous Spaces: Selected Poems & Journals' and was enjoying dipping until, at the weekend, recovering from a stomach bug, I decided to read them through and fell wholeheartedly for a new friend. Hague was born on a farm. His formal education was brought short by a combination of restricted means, an inability to conquer mathematics: and, a voracious diet of reading ranging beyond the confines of any confining curriculum. He went to a horticultural college instead an...
1 comment
Read more