Resolved
2nd of January and I'm raring to go: I finished a book last night! (And I didn't smoke either!)
It was a peculiar read - Picnic At Hanging Rock by Joan Lindsay - as I knew it had been made into a horror movie but the front cover looked prim and proper, which was intriguing. Set in a boarding school in Victoria, Australia at the turn of the 20th Century, the story begins with four girls and their teacher missing after an outing to the base of the eponymous dangerous monolithic structure. What follows is the consequences for other characters. Although it is nearly conclusive that it is a work of fiction, the writer uses 'real' ideas of newspaper cuttings and other devices to suggest it might have occurred.
The strangest thing of all is that the mystery is never solved, although the Secret of Hanging Rock - Chapter 18 - was published posthumously. The editor and author agreed it was better left off originally, and I'd have to agree. Highlight below for the truth:
The girls and teacher were called up to the summit of Hanging Rock by a supernatural force, where they shed their corsets, discovered a hole in time, turned into lizards and crawled into a crevice which was covered up by a fallen boulder. I'm not making it up! As crazy as it is, reading back through the previous chapters, the clues are all there - metaphors of time, insects and so on. Mystery solved-ish.
4 comments:
I wish I hadn't bothered to read that last bit now as the mystery was much better.
That's kind of how I felt about Jonathan Creek. The first five minutes were good, the rest I could have done without.
As Oli and I both agreed, at least we won't see anything worse on tv this year.
I think that one of the main problems with Jonathan Creek (which by the way I don't think was quite as bad as you and Oliver say) is that Alan Davies charismatic as he is, is now too old to play the 'cute, cheeky chappie' which was always one of the attractions of the original series, at least it was for me.
I suspect you will watch things MUCH worse than that on tv this year.
x
in a very private way
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