Óleg Vladimirovich Penkovsky, regarded by many as one of the most beneficent agents in the history of espionage, was tried and sentenced to death in Moscow in 1963. Having only by a near miracle escaped that fate myself in 1985, I naturally have a close personal interest in the subject of this monograph.’
Now, that’s a great opening to a book review! You’ve just got to read on. It was written by Oleg Gordievsky in September’s Literary Review p. 6.
I used to write a ton of book reviews – mainly for The Canberra Times. I learnt a lot from it and enjoyed it – up to a point. In the time it takes to read, digest, re-read bits of and write a review of a book, one could have written a whole chapter of one’s own writing or a draft of a short story. George Orwell might have been thinking partly of this when he said, ‘Book reviewing is pouring your immortal soul down the drain, a half pint at a time.
I used to review films too and that was a lot quicker. Your average book takes longer to read than the 90 minutes films used to be or the 2 hrs they are now. And, scribbling in the dark, I’d make pretty comprehensive notes so that it didn’t take all that long to write a reasonable review later. And most films are less complex than the kind of books I was attracted to.
Last night I saw Diana. Naomi Watts played her. It was a very kind portrait, a hagiography really. Very kind and sweet all the time, lonely and then desperately in love with a noble guy who saves lives. No mention of all the other lovers before him, and then when she’s on Dodi’s yacht (haven’t we all done stupid, impulsive things on the rebound to get back at an ex?!) they meet on deck in the morning and he says, ‘How did you sleep?’ As if he didn’t know! Ha!
Naomi Watts is much prettier than Diana was, and much shorter. Naomi Watts is a fantastic actor (must have been so frustrating getting tiny bit parts for 15 years while Nicole Kidman got all the big parts when Naomi is by far the better actor) and she got the gestures, expressions, smile, voice and laugh precisely right. But their faces are so different, even though they’re both blue-eyed blondes – and I never got that suspension of disbelief persuading me that I was looking at Diana; I was always aware of looking at Naomi Watts.
That said, it was absorbing and interesting. Someone summed up films as all fitting into categories of: Good person goes bad; OR Bad person goes good; OR Bad person gets worse; OR Good person gets better. Obviously the first two are extremely interesting; the third mildly so and the last unbelievably boring. Diana could be summarized as Good person goes haywire (over lost love, in this case). Yes, it was interesting.
And the love of her life (the Pakistani heart surgeon) quotes her that Rami quotation I mentioned in a previous blog: ‘Beyond all rights and wrongs, there is a field – I will meet you there.’ But in the doctor character’s version it’s translated as ‘garden’.
The weekend before Diana, I saw Stoker, and apart from the gorgeous credit sequences I was bored. Two psychopaths are on screen for almost the whole time. Someone wrestling with his soul is interesting; or someone in conflict with someone else. To me, real drama is soul drama. But with psychopaths there is no struggle, no conflict, no hopeless yearning or deep passion or shocking turnaround. They just get whatever they want by taking it, killing people if they happen to be in the way or if the psychopath feels like it.
Mia of course was really good, but I was still bored. Bad person gets worse – it was in that category. And then it just spiralled downwards into schlock horror, which looks easy and fun to write and act, but not such fun to watch, unless you’re maybe a drunk adolescent.
A film like Polanski’s Repulsion is so much more interesting, depicting a young girl’s deterioration into mental illness (Good person goes mad. Which is bad.) It was fascinating, you should get it out on DVD. Seriously creepy and scary. Not a moment’s schlock horror, it goes much deeper and has an enduring impact.
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