Evangeline is 29 and pregnant. She thinks about the baby she is about to have, and remembers her own mother who died when she was eight. She is sent to live on a Welsh farm with her grandparents who she had never met; she adapts, and develops a deep affection for them, the farm and the landscape. Eve Green is an observant novel, sensitively written, with close detail that allows the reader to become absorbed in the world of the story. Fletcher writes with a great sense of affection for people and place and, although I was astonished to find the editor had missed the phrase ‘bored of’, there are some deft touches; ‘I felt that our secrets had been pressed together, twisted into the same shape, and that they couldn’t be peeled apart again.’ Memories are interwoven with her childhood perspective of detail from one long, hot summer, when a girl from the village went missing. Fletcher inserts little pieces of supposition, as a child might speculate, and builds up tension around Eve’s childhood narrative. This is a really gentle novel which evokes a strong sense of place and with some lovely turns of phrase to savour.
Accatone! (1961) is the first film by director Piers Paulo Pasolini and re-relased as part of a box set of his work. Accatone! features a pitiless, self-serving, manipulative young pimp living in the slums and rubble of Rome, whose lassitude is infectious. Images of his death recur throughout the film and he seems barely living. The exclamation mark in the title may be there to try and wake him up. Pasolini shot the film on the streets, using the people he found there rather than professional actors. The effect is a slow moving realism which casts the viewer as reluctant voyeur; it is impossible to gain any distance from the unrelenting sadism of hollow machismo. Seeing this film fifty years after it was made, the misogyny in this film is deeply disturbing; women are either Madonna, virgin or whore. Accatone says prostitution is ‘a mother’s situation’ which provides the mixed message that it’s selfless and necessary for survival, yet he and his friends view whores as trash; to...
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