It was only from reading an interview in
a newspaper at the weekend that I heard there was a novel. For some reason I’d
never heard of Henry Farrell’s book. I somehow thought the Bette Davis and Joan
Crawford camp movie classic had arrived fully formed: perfect and indelible in
the psyche of anyone who experiences it.
So I was very pleased to hear there was a
book, and that it was available on Kindle. That seems to me one of the things
that e-books are really for. Reading of something marvelously rare and
wonderful in the New York Times Book Review as you sit up in bed on a Sunday
morning, and then being able to dial up the thing – the actual book – in a
matter of moments. It’s like living in the future.
Anyhow, I’ve spent the past couple of
days inside that gloomy, gothic house in the Hollywood hills, where the
younger, defenceless, beautiful sister lies abed, terribly dependent upon her
ragingly crazy and vengeful sister who swoops about the place completely
pissed, like a baby doll Miss Havisham. Of course Crawford and Davis are
impossible to get out of your mind, and the book is extremely close to the
movie. Whole chunks of Farrell’s crisp, witty, wounding dialogue were seemingly
lifted straight from the page. His novel is one of those succinct and perfectly
formed horror novels that translated almost verbatim to the movies (I’m
thinking also of Ira Levin’s well-nigh perfect ‘Rosemary’s Baby.’) The other
novel it puts me in mind of is Robert Bloch’s ‘Psycho’, which inspired
Hitchcock and is present in the film version only in spirit. But its darkness
and madness are tangible – just as they are here in Farrell’s book.
What makes this worth digging out (or
downloading) are the peripheral characters – all wonderful turns in the movie –
but here with added pathos. Mrs Bates the nosy, film buff neighbour; the doomed
maid; the sweating pianist who auditions for Jane to be her accompanist and
paid companion. They all have horribly vivid moments and each of them seem just
as trapped and helpless as Blanche does, locked and starved in her bedroom.
They’re all at Jane’s mercy in the end.
And the ending has a queer kind of
turnabout. I thought my memory of the film was good, but I’m not sure that the
reversal of the novel quite makes it to the screen. I’ll have to check. It’s
quite a shocking one on the page, though, and makes you view the whole story
quite differently by the time you get to the final page.
Bonkers gothic melodrama with mad old
women pulling out each other’s hair and unleashing torrents of verbal abuse and
practicing elaborate forms of revenge on one another. It’s one of my favourite
genres.
Go and find the novel. And if you haven’t
already done so – go and see the film. And, if you’re lucky enough to glimpse
it, relish the just-as-wonderfully-nasty-and-camp 1990s TV movie remake with
Vanessa and Lynn Redgrave.
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