Behind again...

[alobear]

Wednesday was a trip to the theatre and a version of Hound of the Baskervilles I'm not sure Conan Doyle could ever have predicted. It was in the style of The 39 Steps that I saw earlier in the year, with added fourth wall breaches along the way. Three actors divided the parts between them in an inordinately silly fashion, and one or other of them would occasionally "stop" the performance and address the audience directly. By the interval, I was just thinking it wasn't quite as good as The 39 Steps, but a high speed recap of the entire first half brought the comedy to a new level and sustained my amusement through to the end. Very, very silly, but well done.

Thursday, I finished The Shape-Changer's Wife, which was Sharon Shinn's first novel, and a world away from Samaria or The Twelve Houses series. Only 200 pages long, it's more a fable than anything else, with that remote narrative style that goes hand in hand wtih folk tales. The central mystery was very obvious, and the focus of the first half on everything being rather strange had me wishing I could slap all the characters and make them communicate properly with each other. However, once the mystery had been revealed, things got a lot more interesting, as the focus shifted from the hero trying to figure things out to the hero reacting to what he'd discovered. For me, it's not so much what happens as how the characters react to it that interests me, and the second half of the book was beautifully paced to achieve a poignant and ultimately satisfying conclusion.

Today, I revisited Solaris - I watched it some years ago and remember enjoying it, but I couldn't actually remember anything else about it, so I put it on the DVD rental list and it turned up yesterday. I know it's a film that divides opinion, and I know a lot of people who would be incredibly irritated by it, but I really like it. It requires an uninquisitive approach - if you watch it to find out what's going on, you will be really disappointed. However, if you can accept it as a study of human nature - and grief and guilt in particular - and not something that requires any answers or explanations, then it's wonderful. At one point, someone says, "There are no answers, only choices." That brings me back to wanting the focus to be on people's reactions rather than events in a story - so this is definitely the film for me when I'm in a reflective mood. And on a purely superficial note (see, I'm not always deep and meaningful by any stretch of the imagination), admiring Natascha McElhone's hair for an hour and half is well worth it, too!