The Water Cure, by Sophie Mackintosh - not so small review thoughts

SPOILERS! If you haven’t read the novel and want to, probably don’t read this…

It’s difficult to know what to say about this one.  At first I didn’t like reading it at all.  It was a deeply alien environment, these women’s minds, and it felt unpleasant – I didn’t want to keep learning about their lives, where their parents hurt and abused them for love and to keep them safe from an outside world that’s contaminated.  I suspected it wasn’t really, or not to the extent they were told; that their parents were really running a mini cult with their girl children as the unwitting members…It’s never quite made plain, what happened in the ‘outside’, beyond the barbed wire ‘border’. It may have been climate change accelerated, and they may have been in an area where there’s less rights for women anyway [a forwards-backwards time line of a situation set-up].

But then the small chapters and spare sentences grew on me.  I wanted to know what was really going on.  It was almost like a thriller, told very slowly and obtusely, with slow footsteps in sand, and lots and lots of salt and semi-drownings.  The revelation that the mother is dead – sanctioned by the father you thought was dead but isn’t, who sent the men to bring the women back ‘to the mainland’, as their lives isolated had been ‘a failure’ – “our lives are our lives” Grace thinks – the angriest woman in the book.  Lia, so often the least-loved [and how fucked up is the ‘choose who you love by lots for the year’ system?], falls for the charms and meat-presence of the men the quickest, so desperate for love: “love enough to make you sick”.

So many truths in this book: Lia watches Llew move and thinks –

There is a fluidity to his movements, despite his size, that tells me he has never had to justify his existence, has never had to fold himself into a hidden thing, and I wonder what that must be like, to know your body is irreproachable.


Instead, Lia knows: ‘The body is the purest sort of alarm. If something feels wrong, it probably is.’ But then, she cuts herself often, to make sure her pain equals that of her sisters, so that they will still love her and see her as one of them.  The things we all do, this thing, or other things.

It’s a book not just about the difference between men and women – they are meat, solid, strong, dangerous; the women had been carefully and deliberately brought up to be vitamin deficient and weaker than need be, to keep them in the ‘utopia’ their parents had been trying to build.  It’s also about the cruelty women do to other women because love can be unsafe, between men and woman, between women.  All those semi drownings, part baptism, part controlled revenge.  The way their emotions were denied or funnelled into physical acts designed to show them how fragile their bodies were.  The more I think about it, the more I feel the parents were monstrous.  King toward Grace – ‘love of family, magnified’. Mmm. 

Lots of other reviewers describe the book as luminous and haunting, and it is that, the language is controlled and beautiful and deadly – it hits you and you feel the attenuated lives they lead, the suffocation of it, the need to break free, but the fear always there.  Which is why the sad scenes near the end, where the male characters are killed feel so inevitable and hurtful:  Gwil, by cruelty and loneliness [lack of a mother?  But the only mother in this book is not a good one, she is fighting an internal war through her children’s bodies and lives]. James, who tells the truth to Grace and expects womanly comfort – he gets revenge for being a man in on keeping them in the dark, he is removed as the beginning of their escape and path to adulthood; and then Llew, who has proved deceitful and opportunistic, is executed by Lia….it’s why those scenes are even sadder.   

Given their upbringing, the women would react this way to the men. A very true to life blending of self-defence and pre-emptive action against a whole group of known aggressors.  What they did made perfect sense, in the story.  Then men had hurt them - just as they had been brought up to expect.  It was why Gwil was treated badly as a little man, too small yet to be of harm, but unloved by the women because he would become One of Them. Sad and needless, his death.

I keep wanting to call them ‘girls’ as I write, because so much about them was kept in a state of false childhood dependency by their parents – all those exercises to make them strong were also a regime to divide and conquer them, keep them down.  Sky wasn’t even allowed to be taught to read; King and Mother saw how quick to respond Lia was getting and there went her younger sister’s future reading chances.

It was needless, is what’s so sad.  The violence.  And the mini cult - where other ‘damaged women’ used to come till one of them drowned; another killed herself...medicine and trauma close in effect.  And then the ending, where the sisters brave the outside world – a bit reminiscent of The Truman Show – another story of someone lied to for life who goes off to see what the real world was like…Or a reverse Picnic at Hanging Rock; the girls had been living a reality totally real to them, but not the same world a lot of others were in. So they go off, after one last baptism to take away fear and that has rebound them together, without the awful parents, off hopefully, ‘without fear’ to the rest of the world. 

And also without money, passports or a real clue what the world they are going to is like…I worry. Almost like they were the fabled children raised in the forest by wolves: it makes you fierce, but can you speak the language of everyone?  Can anyone communicate with you? Will you be able to make a place for yourself outside?  But I speak as an outsider myself, so I’m probably projecting.

There’s so much more that could be said about this book and all the comparisons and links in life now, to come, in the past – I’m sure more will come to me when I think more (which I will be doing) – but I came straight here to try and understand what I initially thought.

Got a horrible feeling this wonderful dystopia will stay with me.  There’s a reason I don’t read dystopian novels – and it’s not just that they are grey in colour, futuristic, usually mechanised and just depressing…this is the first I’ve read with beaches and sunlight and birdsong.  It’s because most of them are horribly plausible, and there’s enough to worry about right here right now, already.  It’s as if this book already happened somewhere.  Or is happening.

Tiny Book Review: Bonjour Tristesse, by Francoise Sagan

Bonjour Tristesse, by Francoise Sagan

Read during Corona lockdown, May 2020. 

SPOILERS! Read with caution if you haven't read the book and want to.

Apparently, this shocked the hell out of everyone when it first came out, in 1954, even though it was France (where everyone is just generally much cooler than England!).  I haven't yet read the why, because I'm still mulling the actual book, and I didn't want social history right this minute, though I'll look it up later.  Personally, I would only be shocked to read this because of its honesty.  I could almost describe it as searing.  

So, this is the set-up: Cecile, the heroine sees a life ahead for herself of dissipation and amoralty, because it sounds easy and fun (I'm paraphrasing).  She and her father have lived doing whatever they want since her mother died some long while ago - they have enough money, and he is permissive with her.  She in turn gets on with her father's mistresses as they come and go because she sees he needs them, like a child with toys.  They don't threaten her world with him.  She especially likes the current one, Elsa.  Then comes Anne, a serious woman, a businesswoman, someone who says things that make you think about how you're living your life, and you suspect she may be right in some of the things she says that don't feel like so much fun.  How dare she make you think?!  But you like her, sort of...But you like your life before she came more...And then she gets engaged to your father. Story continues...

I’m a bit annoyed that I read the novella, then the Introduction, and then came to write this.  I should have come directly here straight after the book, as the Rachel Cusk introduction (Penguin ediation) threw up so many interesting ideas and questions that now my head is full of those rather than my own impressions of the book.  Exactly the same reason I never go round art exhibits with the tape guides on my head.  I want to have my thoughts before I have someone else’s, or I’ll be hard pressed to separate the two unless I disagree violently with the guide. 

Anyway, I loved this.  I enjoyed Cecile’s acceptance of her own nature, her dislike of being made to think.  It was partly her youth – there is, I think, something amoral and selfish in young people, and here it was captured perfectly.  There was also in her something almost neurodivergent – the way she almost turned her love on and off, the way it was just flashes of ‘radiant moments’ for her, the way she was caught up in tales and times, and then later felt nothing about them.  That feels familiar, all of that. 

I didn’t see coming her desire to get rid of her father’s fiancée working so well.  I had no idea she’d end up causing a death by misadventure at the least, after being so Machiavellian.  Her detached amazement at her own manipulative ability and how well it all worked – also familiar, but also sad.  She had more layers than she liked to think she did.  I think she was a bit dismayed at how easily lead people were, especially her father’s ex-mistress, Elsa.   

This was wonderfully French, in terms of how morally sophisticated and/or blase their national stereotype is compared to our nationally stereotypical stuffy English – I can’t offhand think of any English books where a father and his daughter go on a seaside holiday with his mistress, and then his fiancée comes too, and technically it’s just a bit awkward, that’s all. *Loved it.*  Something very down to earth about not making a drama of it all…until there was a bit of a created drams, then there was that sentence where Cecile said that in order for she and her father to be inwardly ‘reposeful’ they needed to be outwardly ‘in ferment’…so I’m overgeneralising like crazy. Also, many years ago, in a very turbulent situation, my dead ex-husband once suggested an arrangement very similar and I cried, heartbroken.  Now, being me as I am now, I would have punched his face.  I’m just not French enough to be cool with being the live in mistress…

The whole question of lack of mothers and motherly nurturing and growing up , and where do you learn your 'morals' from – I didn’t really think of that till I read the Introduction, but it’s applicable comment. Anne was a strange fish too – and the way Cecile only really saw her properly when she’d broken her [seeing through the cool, almost glacial woman to the secretive, lonely child inside], was a growing up experience that Cecile tried to bury almost immediately by sinking back into her past life.  I wonder if her father will end up as Anne prophesied, spent, a bit pathetic?  This was a very enjoyable, thought provoking read.  Could have said far more, but I just want to let it percolate through.  The selfishness of youth, wanting not to grow up, to admit your actions affect others – that may be what I think the story is about; not only how Cecile got to be the way she was.  10/10.  

 

 

Francoise Sagan

 

Tiny Review of YellowBrickRoad (2010)

 

Mmmm, and here I am again, after ...3 years? Won't promise to stay as I appear to be erratic, so we'll play it by ear (that's almost a pun given this film), plus am getting notions of splitting up the blog into separate parts - a book bit, a film bit, a me thinking aloud bit, the writing bits - all separate blogs, since people that read one bit didn't necessarily want to read the other bits...Also means I can mess about with colour and background for each and have fun with that. We'll see.

Anyway, to the teeny tiny point of me being here again.  Just saw YellowBrickRoad and enjoyed a lot.  Made me sit and think.  But I have a huge habit of waffling, so I'll get to the point and review nice and short:


SPOILERS!  Don't read if you haven't seen and don't want to know parts of the plot...

Summary: Another great reason to never go camping, apart from bugs.  Or to set off wearing lots of khaki and old fashioned cameras hoping to be rich from the book you'll write about the history of the walk you're about to take, and what happened to the masses of people who last did it.

Main standout: This film made excellent use of auditory torture by music and sonic strain and stress – poss the best use I’ve seen made of over sound saturation since the original Evil Dead and original Suspiria. This music starts as strange sounds, almost celestial, then sounds mechancial or like wind, then resolving into some maddening 30's/40's type songs that are played on and on, loudly or quietly, stopping and starting, repeating and fading.  Its the backdrop of most of the film which has no other score. The jauntyness of the songs had me thinking of The Shining, of course, and the ballroom/bar scene.  There's a character near the end a touch like the bartender, but not close enough to be a borrow.

Plus, everyone dies, so I should like it (I like films where no one's left standing - its a brave writing choice), but I felt a bit sad some of the characters died – they were actually likeable.  Rare for a horror film.  The one that was most me-like walked off a mountain and died a strangely hilarious death of disappearing abruptly from the screen. 

Hardly any gore, just people going mad and losing their memories and senses of selves, becoming like children, or their Id – in some cases, beginning to feel murderous…possibly because of some sort of magnetic field (the compasses going crazy, and the co-ordinates and other machines not making sense).   It was compelling - I really wanted to know what was happening; plus parts were funny, the way any crisis can be. There was also a slight sense of Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975 one) about it, people wandering off and never coming back, seeming hypnotised by their surroundings; but this was the not pastel or pretty version of that similar idea.

I would have liked more explanation for what was happening, but the strange hallucinatory ending made its own internal sense, as did Liv’s character explaining that they walked north "to see why some other people walked north". Which made it sound stupid, like they deserved what happened, which they didn’t; which moreso made it sad.  You could see their characters falling away from them, their confusion.  (I watched The Visit earlier in the evening, another funny scary film - in some ways the confusion was similar to the grandmother figure, trying hard to be someone else; in YellowBrickRoad the characters couldn't feel like themselves anymore, which left only fear, anger or slyness behind, for some of them.)

Also, come to think of it, it’s the only horror film I remember since Unhinged (the 1982 original), to have a well-constructed monologue right near the end that bookends the film nicely – in this case, the main explorer telling his [now dead but he doesn’t know] wife to not let anyone else walk the road, to let no one else wonder and follow.  Which is pointless, partly because she’s dead and can’t hear him, but also because their own disappearance makes for an urban legend now twice as big as the original…of course more people will walk at some point, to see what happened to them.

And the road?  You never find out where it goes, really. Only one character seemed to actually see it, but once he got to it, it wasn't there anymore, like an oasis in the desert. Is the grass always greener?  Is maybe the film's message, if it has one.

This wasn't run of the mill.  I liked it. 

Thats it for now :-)