Who'll come a-waltzing Matilda with me?

[sovay]

Claude Choules, last known combat veteran of the first world war.

I finished reading Pat Barker's The Ghost Road (1995) yesterday. It is less of a novel than its predecessors, Regeneration (1991) and The Eye in the Door (1993); what it is, it becomes clear only in the last few pages, is a ritual, a sending-on, an exorcism. There was a need for it. I was reading about events still tied by memory to the living world.

They have gone on now.

Comments

[helivoy.livejournal.com]

Sebastien Japrisot's A Very Long Engagement is close kin to the Barker trilogy.

[sovay]

Sebastien Japrisot's A Very Long Engagement is close kin to the Barker trilogy.

I will check it out. Do you recommend the movie also?

[helivoy.livejournal.com]

The book has a determined and willful hero who does not let her polio interfere with her life plus a vivid constellation of supporting characters. It is also a layered mystery that is presented non-linearly.

The film was remarkably faithful to the book and shot in the sepia tones of an old photoalbum. If you like the book, you will like the film, provided you also like Audrey Tautou who plays the main role.

[ron-drummond.livejournal.com]

I haven't read the novel but I love the movie -- it's a masterpiece, in my humble opinion. After seeing it, I wanted to read Pat Barker's trilogy, but I haven't yet, I suppose because I have some aversion to seeing depictions of or reading about the graphic realities of war, which is the only reason why I haven't yet rewatched A Very Long Engagement. (helivoy's comments make me want to read Japrisot's novel too; I'm embarrassed to admit that I had forgotten the film was based on a novel.) And yet it does seem that sometimes we must confront these witnesses to our species' harsher realities, lest we forget them or fail to ever recognize or recall them in the first place. I'm intrigued by your description of The Ghost Road as ritual or exorcism. It reminds me of how I felt about the greatest theater production I've ever experienced, The Winter's Tale at Shakespeare and Company in Lenox last September: it struck me that the play, and that production of it, was a ritual whose purpose and gestural summa and affect was to cure the human breast of the discognitive poison that so utterly darkens its first half.