Atonement

The Chinese New Year is here, and it's nice to be caught up in the atmosphere of the season. From my kids sending their new-year wishes, to the celebration in school incorporating familiar favourites, to the new-year goodies spilling out of shops and those selfsame shops closing early to allow the employees to return home for their family reunions - this is a warm feeling, an outpouring of goodwill and well-wishes, that is cloying in its sweetness and its nostalgia. And I realise this is also the last Chinese New Year I'd be passing before I fly off, so every moment is more poignant for possibly being the last of its kind. It is good to be home, now.

Spent lots of time catching up with old CHS acquaintances and friends today. Liang See came down to school, and I showed him around to meet the people who were still at the school after all these years. Then, went downtown and met up with KHwee, Ms. Ong and JY over lunch, chatting about school, the future, and US politics. I have said it before, and I will say it again - I will miss this simplicity, this familiar easiness, when I fly away.

Watched Atonement the movie today, and it was grand. The story isn't the easiest one to adapt into a movie; the book uses literary techniques that film is ill-equipped to replicate. The asides that the book's narrator has with the reader, breaking down the fourth wall in a way that is integral and central to how the book functions - this is singularly difficult for a movie to simulate. And the book is definitely more sensual, more tactile, because McEwan has the luxury of lingering over details in the book. The film is much more plot-driven than the book, and necessarily so, I think, which leaves out some of the sumptuousness and sensuality of the book's descriptions.

That being said, keeping in mind the technical restrictions of film, the movie is actually a surprisingly good adaptation. I particularly like how they did the ending - that interview scene was a stroke of genius to render the critical epilogue of the book. And the scenes are uncannily similar to how I imagined it when I read the book. There are beautiful moments - that great panning shot of the detritus and depravity of war gathered on the beach at Dunkirk, the scene with Briony holding the hand of Luc Carnet, and that final interview. There were moments that discomfited me because they emphasised some points in the book so blatantly, which detracts from the subtlety of the original story-telling; for example, it is much less of an unquestionable given in the book that Lola had in fact been attacked by Marshall. But these moments are forgivable - and do not hinder overmuch the movie becoming a moving and faithful piece of art in its own right. The movie seems to me to do the same thing to the book as a harmonising line does to a melody. And need I point out how rare it is for a movie adaptation to add something unique and worthwhile to the experience of reading the original in book form, instead of detracting tragically from the delight the book invokes in the reader?

Anyway, the movie made me relook my favourite scene in the book again. It brought tears to my eyes the first time I read it, and the movie brought back a vivid echo of that feeling. It is the most sensitive love scene I have ever read, made all the more tragic by how it is spun out of thin air, based on mistaken identity and the bewilderment of a soldier, far away from home, facing the incredible prospect of imminent death among strangers. And Luc Cornet reaches out to Briony, thinking her to be a sweetheart from his younger days, crafting for her a vision of tender love in a blameless, easy pastoral world. For a while, Briony indulges the Frenchman's vision, and in taking on the role of the love of his childhood, she is also delivered from the spectre of her own guilt-stained life. For a few precious, fragile moments, she is no longer the child who brutally and self-righteously tore asunder the love between Cee and Robbie; she is someone to be loved and who can love back innocently and without any reservations.

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These two new additions to the family arrived recently, and I thought to make a note of them here. The one on the left is C. S. Lewis' The Four Loves. From the writer that gave the world Narnia comes a book about how to treat other people with compassion. It arrived from Warwick a few weeks back - and imagine my surprise when I saw a passage from its introduction appearing on as the comprehension passage for my kids' test next week! It's amazing how these uncanny connections appear out of nowhere.

The one on the right is a particularly beautiful specimen of Wilde's A House of Pomegranates. This ninety-nine-year-old volume came out of a quaint little corner in London, and joins my copy of Ibsen's Peer Gynt in my modest collection of antique books. I've only ever read Wilde's plays before, but if his short fiction is anything like them, I'm sure I'll enjoy this as well. And with a book like this, I'm torn between bringing it out and showing it off, and keeping it at home to better preserve it in its fragility.

So, two new books that I will be sure to put at the top of my reading list. From across the sea they came (the latter having come twice, actually - but that is another story), and I am really touched that my friends abroad have taken the trouble and sent them all this way. Thank you deeply - these are truly beautiful gifts.