Don’t be misled by the title. There’s a lot more oil than blood. An oil driller, Daniel, ruthlessly makes a fortune in the early years of the twentieth century in southern USA, while locking heads with an ambitious young preacher.

I understand the great reviews this film’s getting. It’s excellently made: such beautiful scenes and accomplished film-making. It has the confidence and feel of a truly great epic.

Yet it didn’t connect with me. I didn’t feel much for the characters, except perhaps the preacher, who I wanted to be good. I wanted him to show there’s hope and goodness in the world, but there isn’t in the world of this film. Or maybe a bit, in the form of Daniel’s adopted son and Mary, the girl who befriends him.

7/10

I watched the documentary of the book with Alain De Botton this week and it’s ironic to be blogging about it, because blogging is probably very tied to the status anxiety he talks about. We want success; we want people to think we’re good (or witty or insightful or intelligent or brilliant); we want to be noticed; we want to be remembered; we want attention.

So some of us keep blogs.

If I get over status anxiety it will probably mean not ever, ever, checking my blog stats. And that’s just for a start.

I’m going to read the book, because I’m really impressed. He gets to the malaise of society and of me with insightful and clear analysis, while also being interesting.

The PDF file of the first five chapters of my new novel wasn’t working. I think I’ve fixed it, so if you have been trying and you’ve had no luck, please try again. Or wait around to 2011 or so and it might be published.

Bob Dylan has been so many personas, so many people, that Todd Haynes’ film uses different actors playing different characters to represent him - the black kid who calls himself Woody Guthrie after the musician, Arthur Rimbaud the precocious teen poet, a movie star who’s lost his way, a folk singer who’s sold out (or not), the born again Christian (briefly) and Billy the Kid.

It is a beautiful film, made with such skill. I was mesmerised by the torrent of images, the unexpected twists, the variety of genres employed. It is a film for film-lovers.

It made me wonder what it takes to be as famous, enduring and influential as Bob Dylan. It made me feel so inadequate in how I’ve lived my own life. I don’t want to be him or even like him, but I would like to have his energy and capacity for adventure.

The part I liked best was the single scene representing Dylan’s born-again phase. He gives an impromptu, incoherent talk to the congregation about Jerusalem and faith and God and then sings this wonderful song from an album I don’t have. It looks just like a church in the 80s, and the idea of the legendary singer playing out his days in a small church is fascinating.

The film doesn’t resolve, though. There’s no climax, and I think there should be. The way Magnolia brings its strands together - just slightly - into a glorious chorus and a plague of frogs. Haynes needed something like that to lift this film from being interesting and inspiring to brilliant.

8.5/10

I’ve stared reading Randolph Stow’s The Merry Go Round in the Sea. I can’t remember why I stopped reading it four years ago. I knew then that it was brilliant, but for some reason I didn’t have the energy.

His prose is exquisite; it’s amazing that such a brilliant writer has written about Western Australia, has walked these same streets as me. He evokes childhood with this preciseness of sensation and experience.

I feel sad thinking about Stow. He wrote four or five brilliant novels before he was thirty and then only a handful since. I wonder what happened. Why did he stop? Did he discover there were more important things to do? Or did his muse flee him?

A family legend has it that his grandmother boarded with my great-grandmother for a time. I must find out precise details from my Granny. I feel honoured to have a connection to him.

I remember Silverberg fondly from the days in my teens when I lived SF. He had ideas as good as Asimov but heaps more style and strong characters. I went back to him because it was late at night, I’d been reading a lot of theology and one of his books was sitting unread on my shelf.

In short

Kingdoms of the Wall is a competent SF novel that kept me reading but didn’t astound.

The Plot

Kingdoms of the Wall has an excellent setup: a massive mountain dominates the people who live at its bottom. Each year, the village sends up forty pilgrims to attempt to reach the summit and meet with the gods they believe live there. But only a couple ever return and these are either mad or silent. Yet still four thousand people compete each year for the privilege of being one of the pilgrims. The narrator, Poilar, is courageous and ambitious but not particularly intelligent. He wants to get to the summit and achieve glory without really knowing why.  His best friend wants to discover the meaning of it all.The climb toward the summit is a perfect narrative device. Reading a narrative can be so easily construed as climbing toward a summit. I expected, like the inhabitants of the village that there might be something special at the top…

 6/10

I feel so lucky to have seen so many good films in 2007. I loved living close to a good cinema for the first time in my life. And I am more convinced than ever that cinemas are the place to watch film. There’s something so asocial and boring about a city of people sitting in their own air-conditioned castles watching DVDs on home cinema systems. Give me the ruined grandeur of an old cinema any day. 

1. The Science of Sleep
A true translation of the magic of dreams and a sweet but smart romance.

2. Atonement
A moving and beautiful drama about love, fiction and redemption.

3. Death At A Funeral
The funniest film I’ve seen in years.

4. Pan’s Labyrinth
A dark and violent parable. 

5. Amazing Grace
I was inspired.

6. Noise
Engaging Australian police drama.

7. The Prestige
Elaborate and surprising steampunk thriller.

8. 28 Weeks Later
Scary thriller authentically post-apocalypse.

9. The Lives of Others
It’s rare for a film this long to hold my attention so utterly.

10. Across the Universe
An enchanting vision of a mystical sixties.

The rest of the world got to see Atonement months ago, but its official release in Australia was yesterday, Boxing Day. The Windsor Cinema - just metres from my house - had sneak previews last weekend, and so I got to see it a few days before most of Australia.

Of course, the film didn’t live up to my experience of the novel - but I was still impressed. (There was no chance of it being an equivalent experience, because for me the strength of Ian McEwan’s writing is his description of thought processes and emotions - something that can only be represented externally in a film.)

• The film has the novel’s elegance and intelligence.
• The actor playing the young Briony is perfect. She has a slightly haughty face, yet still likeable; she does precociousness so well.
• Keira Knightley was good as Cecilia but not brilliant. She didn’t have the subtlety I was expecting, the depth behind her words. I often felt like she was talking too quickly. But this might be the effect of the book moving so slowly, giving us each character’s thoughts around each line they deliver.
• The scenes were often excellent, especially the tired troops on the dirty beach at Dunkirk in the midst of the shambolic retreat. The ruined holiday town was perfectly evoked.
• Leon, Cee’s brother, wasn’t good natured enough. The novel’s so clear on his jollyness and generosity.
• I was worried that the war scenes would be extended and become the focus (when they were my least favourite part of the book) - but they weren’t; they were actually shortened.

The ending

The most significant change was the ending, but I thought it was a good change.  Briony actually publishes her version of Atonement, the one with the happy ending, whereas in McEwan’s novel she can’t publish while the Marshalls live for fear of litigation.

Briony’s appearence as an aged woman on the talkshow manages to encapsulate so much sadness, time and wisdom. It’s a compressed version of the epilogue that is nearly as profound as the original. I thought Vanessa Redgrave’s performance as the old Briony was brilliant.

9/10

I’ve revamped my other blog, http://perthanabaptists.wordpress.com . It’s now called ‘An Anabaptist in Perth’. I’ve made a few posts in the last week, given it a new template, pruned the categories and updated the blogroll.

For the forseeable future, I think I’m going to be posting to it more than to this one. I’ve been living in this dreamworld where I read too many novels (not even writing that much) and not thinking enough about all the questions of faith which I need to explore. So I’m going to be reading less fiction in 2008, hopefully writing more, and spending more time on theology and faith. Working in my new job as librarian at the Baptist Theological College will help with this shift.

The Perth Anabaptists site started out as the blog for Perth Anabaptist Fellowship, the house church which was such a big part of my life but disbanded in April 2006. I imagined originally that lots of people would contribute to it, that it’d be a multi-voiced blog reflecting our theological ideas about everyone having a say. That didn’t work out. Rather than start again, I kept on contributing to it occasionally. Now it’s time has come properly.

Spoiler alert 

Atonement manages to work as both a compelling narrative with popular appeal - the sort of novel you can recommend to people who don’t read literary fiction - and as an extended exploration of life and the nature of writing itself.

Compelling narrative 

The compelling narrative comes from a strong plot and masterful control of detail. It is a love story, but a love story told mainly from the perspective of the person who has come between the lovers.

McEwan gives us two very attractive characters in Robbie and Cecilia - both young, intelligent and vibrant people. We want them to love each other, we want them to be happy.

Yet Briony is likeable in her own way too. A precocious and brilliant child who is on an awkward cusp of maturity and immaturity. Her desire to make life more dramatic, to make it black and white, good and evil leads her to decide that the rapist she saw running away from Lola must be Robbie.

Reading it the second time and knowing what was to come, I was tensely aware of all the small details that were piling up, sending events down the path that would lead to Robbie going to jail for the rape and being separated from Cecilia.  What would have happened if he hadn’t added the impulsive postscript about his sexual desire for Cecilia? Or even if he’d sent the right note, the corrected one? Would he still have ended up in that passionate tryst in the library which Briony interrupts?

What if Briony hadn’t read the note? Would she still have thought Robbie a sexual maniac?

What if the twins hadn’t run away and everyone gone to search for them? Would there have been no opportunity for Paul Marshall to rape Lola?

There are what-ifs in any narrative, but McEwan handles them so well, piling them precisely and expertly.

In part two as Robbie trudges through France trying to get home to Cecilia, the narrative drive is simple and strong: his survival, which would have been suspenseful in any case, is made even more so by the knowledge that Cecilia is waiting for him and their love has been so cruelly interrupted by years in jail.

In part three, we follow Briony as she works in the wartime hospital, ‘atoning’ for her crime by forsaking her dreams and trying to help others. The narrative drive comes from the fact that just like her, we don’t know what’s going on, whether Robbie made it, until, at the end of the section and the end of the novel as she wrote it, she visits Cecilia and Robbie is there with her.

An exploration of life and writing 

Everything shifts with the revelation in the epilogue ‘London, 1999′ that the preceding novel has been written by Briony Tallis, and that in ‘real life’, Cecilia and Robbie both died in the war. It breaks my heart. I’ve gone soft; I would rather things ended where they did and I didn’t have to think of the happy ending as a fiction within the fiction.

But it’s a profound epilogue. Full of wisdom about the experience of being old and looking back on life. And full of insight into writing itself.

Briony writes in first person, asking herself whether writing can be atonement, whether by creating happiness for Robbie and Cecilia she has atoned for her crime. The answer is ambiguous. The problem is that the writer is the god of her novel, and so there’s no-one higher to appeal to, no-one to forgive her for what she’s done.

Thus the final scene as the dying Briony witnesses the play that was never staged with all her family around her has a special poignance. It’s realistic about the consolations that are available in life.  Even if there’s no undoing what’s done, there’s still moments like these of joy and love. Not a happy ending, but a happy scene at the end of a profound life.