Echoes

A Good New Year to one and all.

One month a few years ago, our book group discussed The Good Earth, by Pearl S. Buck. The book tells the story of Wang-Lung and his wife O-Lan in Anhui province, China. Partly due to hard work, and partly to turns of fate, Wang-Lung progresses from struggling peasant to wealthy landowner. Pearl S. Buck grew up in China in the early 20^th century, the daughter of American Christian missionaries there. As I read the book, a couple of echoes, faint and obscure, came to mind, but first I should confess to snobbery.

After the first fifty or so pages, I abandoned my attempt to read the book. It felt to me like Catherine Cookson goes to China. A couple of days later, by complete coincidence, the author was mentioned on the radio as a recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature. I therefore felt duty bound to return to the book. I did finish it and in doing so, encountered two episodes of déjà vu. And don’t tell me I can say that again, I’ve heard that one before.

The first bell that rang was a reminder that I had seen a film of the book. The 1937 movie had the same title, The Good Earth. The vast majority of the Chinese characters were played by Americans of European origin, notably Paul Muni in the leading role as Wang-Lung.

The second memory was a more subtle one. The style of writing was familiar, but at first I could not put my finger on the reason for this. Eventually, it occurred to me: the prose read like the old testament. It would have worked perfectly well with verse numbers inserted. As noted above, Buck was the daughter of Christian missionaries in China and clearly knew her bible.

My dad had a real life episode of déjà vu many years ago, when he was in Belfast for the first time in his life. He was in a pub, the Crown Bar, and he was absolutely sure he had seen it before. He knew what he would see if he looked towards the windows to his left, and what he would see if he looked at the tiled wall to his right. He found it most unnerving. It wasn’t until later that he realised that it was the pub used in a scene in the film Odd Man Out, with James Mason as the wounded and dying IRA man. Actually, more recently, I discovered that they didn’t actually shoot the scene in the Crown. They assembled a faithful reconstruction of the bar’s interior in a studio.

When I was a student, I saw a film called Three Days of the Condor in the pictures. It has Robert Redford as a CIA researcher who is unintentional witness to, and survivor of, the slaughter of his office colleagues. He then has to go on the run from the hired killers and from his CIA colleagues. It wasn’t until I saw it again on the television more than forty years later that I realised that it had pretty much the same plot as The Thirty-Nine Steps, including the initially unwilling love interest.

When watching a movie, you often see echoes of older films. For example, John Carpenter’s The Fog is a brilliant supernatural thriller, but it is clearly heavily influenced by Hitchcock’s The Birds. But these are just echoes. When it comes to whodunnits, you begin to think that there is nothing new under the sun. Have you seen a 1985 film called Jagged Edge, with Jeff Bridges as a man accused of murder, and Glenn Close as his lawyer? Well, it has a very similar central plot device as Agatha Christie’s stage play, Witness for the Prosecution. In a murder trial, a guilty verdict seems inevitable following a damning case made by the prosecution. However, the defence uncovers major flaws in the prosecution case, in Jagged Edge due to suppression of evidence on the part of the prosecuting counsel, and in Witness for the Prosecution, the demolition of the star prosecution witness due to a clear personal interest in the defendant’s conviction. In both cases, it turns out that these twists were engineered by the defendant, who is in fact guilty.

Have you read the magnificent crime novels by Antony Horowitz, Magpie Murders and Moonflower Murders? Or seen the impressive television adaptations with Lesley Manville as the heroine? They are brilliantly imagined and beautifully written whodunnits, each with a book within a book. They both pay considerable tribute to both the Poirot novels of Agatha Christie and the very stylish television series of these, with David Suchet as Poirot. The key to the mystery in the book within a book in Magpie Murders is exactly the same as that in Agatha Christie’s Poirot novel Halloween Party. Both deal with deaths by drowning. Spoiler alert. Why did a certain person get him/herself drenched with water? To cover up the fact that they were soaked already.

So now we come to the rather flimsy justification for inflicting my doggerel on you yet again. I mentioned in a previous blog my cycle of poems, one for each month of the year. Below is the January poem, and it has at least one echo in it. Within it is a slightly paraphrased quote from Robert Burns. As Tom Lehrer said in his song Lobachevsky:

‘Remember why the good Lord made your eyes
So don't shade your eyes
But plagiarize, plagiarize, plagiarize.’

Can you spot the quote? I won’t give the answer here, as you can find it easily on the internet.

Four Lamps

Four lamps and four roads by Midsummer Common.

The cars and the cycles glide by in the mist.

The frost on the road glistens white on Maids Causeway,

With ice on the windows that Winter has kissed.

 

Town houses, tall windows glow down in the twilight.

Mist-muffled bells clang from college and spire.

Above the street doors are the bright yellow fanlights

With promise of solace and comfort and fire.

 

D’you wonder what goes on behind those tall windows?

Do they feast and make love, do they wait by the phone?

Oh turn up your collar, the cold blast is bitter,

Look up at the windows and wish you were home.