{Welcome back double-blog!}

Two great pieces to start: seemingly unrelated, but then on closer inspection…

IMBD puts it well: ‘A fictional Alfred Hitchcock narrates an explanation of some of the lesser known cinematic techniques he used in his movies, richly illustrated with clips from his entire 50-year career.’

Because of the quality of Alistair McGowan’s impression, it really does seem as if Alf himself is talking to you. But the illusion is even stronger because the commentary seems so authentic, and the examples so well chosen. It feels so easy and right to be shown Hitchcock’s secrets by, er, Hitchcock.

Olga Tokarczuk’s novel (translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones) appealed because of its title – a proverb from Blake’s Marriage of Heaven and Hell – and because of a personal recommendation (I forget whose). {SPOILER} It’s an easy, gripping, read, narrated by an elderly woman living alone in remote countryside. She tells of a series of mysterious deaths, which seem to have been committed by the local wildlife – not the usual suspects but, for example, a herd of deer. Gradually though it becomes clear that the woman herself, traumatised by the deaths of two deer she was particularly close to, has a thing against the local hunting culture, so you begin to wonder… The novel’s climax is a service in a church, put on for local hunters by a pro-hunting priest (a nasty piece of work); this includes a wonderfully appalling sermon (which the author claims was put together verbatim from real-life examples) arguing that God wants people to hunt animals. When a fatal fire destroys the church – and most of the hunters – we are confirmed in our suspicions of how the old woman has not been a passive observer in her narrative, but the opposite: a hidden, clever, vengeful, protagonist.

How they are related

Both film and novel rely for their effects on our uncertainty about the narrator: the film’s uncanny-valley feel comes from the quality of McGowan’s impersonation and the writing, while the novel’s power derives from the reader’s gradual recognition first of something not quite right and ultimately the full truth of how the narrator herself killed each of her victims.

Both are in the realm of the whodunnit, one at a meta-level, encompassing and commenting on multiple narratives, the other a charming and absorbing portrait of a woman – ignored by the male culture around her – taking on the qualities of the hunters she so despises.