Cycling Istanbul

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Me & Amir biking in Istanbul, virtually.

Before Amir blew past me on a bike trail in Powder Springs GA, I had nothing personal to write about Istanbul. With this selfie and a fist bump, he literally handed me the personal connection I needed.

As I exerted myself to keep up with Amir, my average speed rose higher than it'd been all summer (hernia, surgery). When he relaxed his cadence, I came up alongside him to request that he not slow down.

Unlike me, Amir's a big guy, outgoing, and I soon learned that he is new to Atlanta, works cyber security for Delta and has been to Istanbul on business this year. When I reached my quota of miles for the day, we snapped a selfie, and then he took off after a pair of riders who'd passed us a minute earlier.

Without Amir, my only connection to Istanbul would be the classic crime novel that begins there, Murder on the Orient Express, and screen adaptations that I've loved. For the BBC's version, actor-director David Suchet added a prologue to the Istanbul chapter that punches up questions of law, punishment, and justice raised by the novel. He adds faith to the mix. Here's a link to What Mr. Suchet Saw: Christ in Christie. 

When I met Amir on October 2, I'd covered 300 of the 557 miles to Istanbul from my previous virtual stop in Kiev.  I gave up some riding time in October to COVID and a trip with my sister to Illinois for a visit with our oldest living relative, Cousin Pat.  I finished the last 16 miles today.  [To see my stops in other places, including San Francisco, Quebec, and Dublin, use the arrows at the top of this post and below.]

Miles YTD 2901 || 2nd World Tour Total 16,436 miles since June 2020 || Next Stop: →

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From Agatha Christie's Hallowe'en Party to A Haunting in Venice

(left) The edition I purchased in Ireland, 1977; the cast of the movie, 2023.

 

This is not a doctoral thesis, just a game I played to keep up my interest in Agatha Christie's 1969 novel Hallowe'en Party, nominal inspiration for A Haunting in Venice, directed by its star actor Kenneth Branagh. I kept a mental inventory of bits from the novel that went into the movie -- which otherwise has nothing to do with the book.

The premise for the book is pretty good, with some promise of atmosphere. During a community Halloween party at the home of Rowena Drake, a small town's most prominent church lady, an awkward girl has been found dead, head submerged in the tub where kids had bobbed for apples minutes before. The teaser is that the girl had boasted loudly about having once seen a murder "years" before, only she hadn't recognized that it was murder at the time. Hercule Poirot, called into the case by his friend Ariadne Oliver, suspects that someone who overheard the girl has killed her to protect their own secret.

But, as Agatha Christie's novels go, Hallowe'en Party seems pretty tired. The murder has already happened when the novel begins, so forget about rich Halloween atmosphere. The dialogue is freighted with red herrings as people speculate about every disturbance of the past few years that the girl might have witnessed -- most of these dismissed out of hand after we've gone through the tedium of reading about them. An inordinate amount of dialogue contains phrases to the effect, nowadays, (young people, parents, legal officials) are too (coddled and immoral, too indulgent, too merciful) and the murderer is probably (one of the insane people -- addicts, probably -- that indulgent policies have allowed to roam among us). The only thing to stand out here is that the town's foreigner -- Olga Seminoff, nursemaid -- gets some respect, not always the case in Dame Agatha's books.

The movie, on the other hand, goes the other direction, more atmosphere than story. Does Venice even celebrate Halloween? A voiceover narrator says that Venice adopted the holiday from American soldiers recently stationed there at the end of World War II. Poirot is staying in Venice, retired from detective work, when his friend Ariadne Oliver invites him to help her "crack" a local seer's seance routine. The movie makers have fun with dark water, visions of the dead, crashing objects, cobwebs and skulls in tunnels, a legend of orphans left to die in the dungeon during the Plague.

I think the movie's creators also had fun picking little bits of Christie's novel to justify their claim to have "adapted" it. Here's what I picked up:

• Big picture: a Halloween party for kids at the home of a socialite named Rowena Drake.  In the novel, she is a widow whose wealthy mother-in-law died suddenly over a year before.  In the movie, she is an opera singer who hasn't sung since her grown daughter drowned in the canal the previous year.
• Ariadne Oliver, mystery novelist, is present. Her supposed love of apples is referenced several times in both stories. She invites Poirot to get involved.
• An intelligent 11-year-old boy named Leopold knows secrets about the adults in the room.
• A nursemaid named Olga Seminoff is under suspicion.
• A pair of teenagers (both of them boys in the novel, a brother and sister in the movie) rig up some ghostly special effects. The ghostly effects include sightings of spirits in mirrors.
• Someone's head is forced underwater in the tub of bobbing apples. 

For me, the best parts of both the movie and the book are those where Poirot goes on a tear, separating false claims and false theories from what must be true.   Branagh's Poirot goes moping through much of the movie, feeling a bit ill, he says, seeing things that he can't possibly be seeing -- so the moments of clarity were welcome.  

The role of the medium was built up to be a larger-than-life character, one that Michelle Yeoh inhabits with no room to spare.  Young Leopold is another scene-stealer. 

Branagh's other two Christies, based on much stronger novels, made sharper, stronger films; but I do enjoy seeing the grand structure he and his writer Michael Green have fabricated from a few clues left by Dame Agatha.

[See my Crime Fiction page for a curated list of my reflections on other Christie books and movies, including a biography of her and a memoir by the actor who portrayed Poirot for decades, David Suchet.]

The Shining onstage with the Atlanta Opera

The story of Stephen King's novel The Shining is familiar even to those who know only a couple of frames from the movie: a small family takes up residence in a big empty resort hotel for the winter, and the father gets cabin fever times 1000. When Atlanta Opera teamed up with the Alliance Theatre to produce the opera based on that story, fans of King and musical theatre alike wondered, what can the composer and librettist give us that we haven't had already?

The composer Paul Moravec told local NPR radio personality Lois Reitzes that music intensifies feelings: scary is more scary, tenderness is more tender. I found that to be true. There's the expected ominous foreboding, but also warmth, a lullabye, and painful husband-wife dialogue. When the story startles us, the music enhances the effect.

With the librettist Mark Campbell, Moravec also compresses huge swaths of Stephen King's novel into memorable moments onstage, using the magic of music to unfold two or more scenes at one time. While hotel employee Dick Hallorann tours the hotel with the mother Wendy and her 11-year-old son Danny, Danny's father Jack Torrance is on the other side of the stage, being confronted by his employer: incidents have come to light that Jack hadn't reported, especially alcohol abuse and his dismissal from a teaching position for hitting a student. While Jack protests that he's okay and everything will be all right, Wendy tries to reassure Danny and herself that everything will be all right.

During this same pair of scenes, we learn two other pieces of consequential information. A flash of light and a musical flourish alert the audience of a special connection between Mr. Hallorann and little Danny, a telepathic communication that Hallorann calls "the shining." If the time comes that Danny needs help, Hallorann promises that he'll hear the call and come as fast as he can. Meanwhile, Jack learns that a previous caretaker went berserk, killed his family and himself. Jack is determined to prove that he is a good provider, a strong protector, a man who doesn't need help. This armor of masculine independence will be a barrier between Jack and Wendy when she sees signs of trouble.

The ghostly inhabitants of the hotel lurk as a chorus that we hear even when we cannot see them, a powerful tool for Moravec and Campbell to show Jack's absorption into their culture of desperate hedonism. The live-action singers are reinforced by eerie animated projections of blurred, glowing versions of themselves. Three men in the group emerge to act like fraternity brothers to initiate Jack into their practices -- chief of which seems to be making "corrections" when a wife or child challenges the head of the family.

Moravec and Campbell integrate dozens of pages of backstory by simply bringing Jack's abusive father in to expand that trio to a quartet of ghosts for an infernal big band number. Does he belong there, who had no connection to the hotel in life? He belongs, if we see the ghosts as manifestations of Jack's own inner demons. The ghosts are real enough to Danny. At one riveting moment, he screams to his mother, "They've got him!" Who? "The people in the hotel!" It's easy to see the hotel as one outpost of a hell that contains more than the whackos who lived there. And we don't need supernatural scaffolding to understand how abuse Jack suffered as a boy left a reservoir of anger that will swamp little Danny when the dam breaks.

Supernatural influence, or the eruption of purely personal evil? The Shining, like a classic that shares many of its features, The Turn of the Screw, is creepy both ways. [That made a good opera, too. See my review of 04/2013]

Because music can imprint a memory through melody, Jack's sincere promise to Danny to love and protect him always rises to prominence from a swirl of music, upping the impact of a fatal decision.

Having now seen the movie, read the book, and heard the opera, I can attest that the single most emotional moment of the story, whatever the form, is as strong here as ever, so strong that I wept during intermission. That's a good thing for an opera.