"If life was an arc of light that began in darkness, ended in darkness, the first part of his life had happened in ordinary glare. Here it was as though he had found a polarized lens that deepened and intensified all seen through it."
Swedish director Lasse Hallstrom’s movies (‘My Life as a
Dog’, ‘What’s Eating Gilbert Grape?’, ‘Chocolat’, etc) can be sickly sweet;
feel-good dramas that could overdose on wistful nostalgia. It’s undisputed that
he makes gorgeously-shot dramas, gleaning out memorable performances from star
actors. But there have been quite a few lows in his career. His adaptation of
Annie E Proulx’s Pulitzer Prize winning The Shipping News (published in 1993)
is one of those. The film version essentially simplified the text,
concentrating more on the sublime, quaint atmosphere and concealed its lack in
depth of characterization by casting well-known actors. Eventually, the movie
seemed like one among the average works, set in a picturesque,
storm-battered coastal town. Reading Annie Proulx’s prose, however, provides
one of a kind experience. Her intoxicating and inventive writing style that
conveys the varying textures of the dazzling environment also serves as a perfect
tool to divulge the tough yet uncannily humorous speech patterns of local
characters.
The Shipping News is largely set in the village of
Killick-Claw, a foggy, abandoned shell of a place in the Newfoundland coast, Canada.
But it opens in New York, chronicling the miserable life of the protagonist
Quoyle. Proulx describes Quoyle like this: “Hive-spangled, gut roaring with gas
and cramp, he survived childhood; at the state university, hand clasped over
his chin, he camouflaged torment with smiles and silence. Stumbled through his
twenties and into his thirties learning to separate his feelings from his life,
counting on nothing.” Quoyle is a plump, terminally shy, and ungainly man in
his 30s, who makes a living as a ‘third-rate’ newspaper man. Well-meaning but ineffectual,
Quoyle finds short-lived happiness after his marriage to Petal. She is an
unfaithful, fretful woman who oft prefers the company of her raucous boyfriends
than Quoyle and their two little daughters, named Bunny and Sunshine. More
gruesome things happen to Quoyle: his cancer and-ridden parents commit suicide;
Petal takes off with her new boyfriend, before selling Bunny and Sunshine to a
pornographer. Nevertheless, a prospect for fresh life develops after Petal gets
killed in a car wreck and subsequently the children are rescued without damage.
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| Author E Annie Proulx |
Aunt Agnis Hamm, Quoyle’s father’s estranged sister, arrives
to alleviate the family’s pain. Aunt also indulges Quoyle with disquieting
stories of their Newfoundland ancestors. Quoyle’s grandfather is described as
‘an incestuous, fit-prone, seal-killing child……had drowned at age 12, having
already sired Quoyle's father’. Furthermore, she vows to help Quoyle and
suggests that they move back to her childhood home in Newfoundland. Her
girlhood house in Killick-Claw stands isolated for decades, held down with
cables to keep it from blowing away. A lot of work needs to be done to make the
old house habitable. While aunt gets the things organized for renovation, Quoyle gains a job at the local newspaper called ‘The
Gammy Bird’. His responsibility is to write ‘shipping news’ column (a record
of ships entering and leaving the port of Killick-Claw). The newsroom is full
of colorful characters: Nutbeem, who steals foreign news from the radio and
specializes in writing sexual-abuse stories; Billy Pretty who writes the Home
News Page and becomes advisor to Quoyle on local matters; Tert
Card, the gruff, belligerent managing editor; and Jack Buggit, owner of Gammy
Bird with a deep love for fishing and sea. Meanwhile, Quoyle’s bratty, emotionally
disturbed daughters forge new friendships to deal with their traumas. The
Shipping News doesn’t have a plot per se. It’s full of mesmerizing vignettes,
drenched in beautiful atmosphere and deeply humane characters.
It definitely takes few chapters to get used
to Annie Proulx’s writing. Her clipped sentences, strange cadences, tough
sinuous patterns can be bit off-putting initially. Nevertheless, I gradually
got invested with the characters and Proulx’s powerful descriptions. The
masterful imagery evoked in passages about weather and sea provides immense
pleasure to the readers (something which easily trumps gorgeous visual frames).
“The ice mass leaned as though to admire its reflection on the waves, leaned
until the southern tower was at the angle of pencil in a writing hand, the
northern tower reared over it like a lover”…………”the waters crosshatched in
complex layers of arctic and tropic, waves foamed with bacteria, yeasts,
diatoma, fungi, algae, bubbles and droplets, the stuff of life, urging growth,
change, coupling”……….”the sullen bay rubbed with thumbs of
fog”……………….”fog against the window like milk”, all such
spectacularly-articulated passages are more than mere decoration; it’s the kind
of prose that possesses power to instantly transports me to the ruggedly
beautiful Newfoundland.
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| Kevin Spacey plays Quoyle & Judi Dench plays Agnis Hamm in Lasse Hallstrom's movie adaptation |
Each chapter in the novel opens with line drawings and short
descriptions about different knots, taken from The
Ashley Book of Knots (by Clifford Warren Ashley; which Ms. Proulx claims she found at a garage sale for twenty-five cents).
The knots are one of the often repeated imagery in the novel, presenting its
ability to bind the essential things. However, our bumbling protagonist Quoyle
pretty much reminds us of intricate, deadlocked coils within the roughly made
knots. Quoyle’s gradual metamorphosis, which constantly renews his human
connection and purpose in life, sort of persists as an act of deftly molding
the bungled spiral coil of rope. Writer Annie Proulx excels in weaving
wonderfully natural or organic episodes, devoid of the typical mawkish feelings.
Many of her characters are confounded by inexpressible grief and desolation. But
early in the novel, Proulx writes, “A spinning coin, still balanced
on its rim, may fall in either direction…. Even now in that moment before the
coin falls, it really seems like everything will be all right.” Hence the
author often injects this outwardly tragic tale with a fine (slightly macabre)
sense of humor and also finds abundance of hope in life’s little triumphs. She
also shows deep empathy for the way common people lead their lives in the face of massive social, ecological, and economic change (a
lament for our relentless ability for self-destruction). Furthermore, the
Newfoundlanders slang, the account of fishermen’s dispirited life, their
high-spirited gathering over dishes of snow crab, cod cheeks, lobster salad and
seal-flipper stew, etc immensely adds to the novel’s charm and emotional depth.
The Shipping News (337 pages) with its dreamy and slightly
daunting prose isn’t definitely a novel that would please everyone. Many might
find it boring, although I vastly loved the author's exquisitely beautiful writing style
which serves as subtle meditation on fragility and endurance of life. It also stands
as a testament to the revised sarcastic saying: don’t judge a book by its
movie.
The E is for enigma -- Independent
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