The floods in Queensland are still on my mind. Yesterday's paper carried reports from Toowoomba, including a description of a woman in a car 'that was swallowed by the "tsunami" that erupted from East Creek ...The woman climbed onto the roof of the car and grasped the outstretched hand of a bystander, who could not hold her.' She was washed into a storm drain and her body has now been recovered. Sadly, there is no trace of three children who 'were last seen on a corner of downtown Russell Street as the flash flood bore down'.
As a slight distraction, I've been trying to think of films or books or plays that include rain as a major feature. There is, of course, Peter Weir's Last Wave. I also vaguely remember that The Year of Living Dangerously unfolded during monsoonal rains. There was a play I saw in London called, I think, Three Days of Rain. I'm stuck for novels at the moment. I'm sure I'm missing lots of obvious things - any suggestions?
As I recollect water and cyclones play a big role in Alexis Wright's Carpentaria - not quite a major feature but significant. There's the wonderful non-fiction book about the big Galveston hurricane (or c 1900) called Isaac's storm. Novel-like, but not a novel though! Otherwise, struggling, struggling ...
ReplyDeleteThe big battle in The Seven Samurai takes place in the rain. We just saw Year Of Living Dangerously here on TV - really an excellent film, well done Mr Weir.
ReplyDeleteI saw a wonderful play at Sydney Theatre in 2009 by Andrew Bovell: When the Rain Stops Falling. http://sydneytheatre.com.au/2009/whentherainstopsfalling
ReplyDeleteNot exactly rain, but George Turner's The Sea and Summer is set in a future Australia, where rising sea levels have covered all but the tallest buildings.
ReplyDeletethere's the rubbish morgan freeman/christian slater movie called Hard Rain.
ReplyDeleteSinging in the Rain? And how about Miss Sadie Thompson? And I'm guessing Mosquito Coast would have featured a lot of rain. Haven't seen the movie but I reread the book recently
ReplyDeleteWhispering - have you read Carpentaria? Isn't it 1000s of pages long? I am awed.
ReplyDeleteGadjo - Did they dub it?
M-H - That was on when we were in London and got rave reviews but they mentioned it was about pedophilia (I think) and I'm all pedophiled out at the moment. TV dramas and crime fiction seem to reach for that or some long-buried horror from the Bosnian war to resolve almost all plots at the moment.
Steerforth - if only they'd waited to film it now, they could have saved a fortune on special effects and just gone up to Brisbane with a few waterproof cameras (or perhaps it's old and they made it during the 1974 floods).
Worm - Happy New Year, for some reason I'd thought that was a trick title and the film had nothing to do with rain. Have you now transferred all your blogging energies to the Dabbler?
Nurse - what's Miss Sadie Thompson
I remembered too that Bladerunner is conducted almost entirely in steady rain. I reckon a good set of movies, short stories, plays, poems and novels could be written set against the backdrop of the current Queensland floods, maybe with references to the 1974 one as well, for a bit of depth and complexity, if needed.
It rained and it rained and it rained. Piglet told himself that never in all his life, and he was goodness knows how old - three, was it, or four? - never had he seen so much rain. Days and days and days... It was rather exciting. The little dry ditches in which Piglet had nosed about so often had become streams, the little streams across which he had splashed were rivers, and the rivers, between whose steep banks they had played so happily, had sprawled out of its own bed and was taking up so much room everywhere, that Piglet was beginning to wonder if it would be coming into his bed soon.
ReplyDelete'It's a little Anxious,' he said to himself, 'to be a Very Small Animal Entirely Surrounded by Water.' - AA Milne
Brilliant - is that when they go to visit Owl and his house falls down and Pooh does a very brave thing? Lucy claims in another story there is an exchange between Piglet and Pooh where Piglet says the first thing he thinks when he wakes up is 'What will I do today?' and then Pooh says the first thing he thinks is 'What will I have for breakfast?' and Piglet says, 'But aren't you excited about what you're going to do in the day?' and Pooh says, 'But eating is what I'm going to do in the day.' And she also says we should all go to Toy Story 3 and it is exactly like the final chapter of the final book about Christopher Robin and Pooh, which I think is one of the saddest things ever written.
ReplyDeleteNope, zedders, movies are never dubbed here in Romania, hence the cut-glass English/Hollywood/Mickey Mouse accents of most young Romanians.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.imdb.com/title/tt0046076/
ReplyDeleteUgh, I hate the Reverend Davidson already, Nurse.
ReplyDeleteThanks to P Weir, they must now have a slight touch of Sydney about their vowels as well, Gadjo?
D.H. Lawrence: The Virgin and the Gypsy. Flood at the climax.
ReplyDeleteGeorge Eliot: The Mill on the Floss. Ditto.
Mervyn Peake: Gormenghast. Ditto ditto.
Thea Astley: It's Raining in Mango. Not ditto, but there's a flood in there somewhere. Huts float.
Any feature film by David Fincher, eg, Se7en.
Almost every rainy, floody, drowny piece of writing I can think of (not only these, but also Steerforth's death in David Copperfield, the Ancient Mariner's storm "tyrannous and strong," gloomy weather in Wuthering Heights) is British. I'm not sure if that's a reflection of my reading habits, or if British writers have some sort of bent towards water.
The Mill on the Floss, of course. I haven't read the Virgin and the Gypsy or Gormenghast (yes, I know it's great and I'd love it, but still it doesn't call to me enough from the shelf). Thea Astley thus far has defeated me. I feel sure there must be a storm or flood somewhere in Thomas Hardy. What about James Joyce? I suppose you could claim there was a flood in Finnegan's Wake - no-one could really contradict you. I'm going to go and look at some William Faulkner to see if there's any flooding anywhere in his books. I have a faint faint memory there might be in Thomas Wolfe's You Can't Go Home Again, but all I have really is the faintest memory of anything in that book as I read it decades ago. It does rain in America so there must be something in their literature. I bet John Updike, somewhere in his huge output, managed to fashion a short story about an incident of marital infidelity triggered by getting stuck somewhere during an unusually wet weekend
ReplyDeleteThe only Updike I've got on me right now is In The Beauty Of The Lilies, and I haven't read it yet. Ruskin saw Beauty in thunderclouds, but that's British again .... wait: there's storm and flood in Marguerite Young's Miss MacIntosh My Darling. That's American. "[T]he great storm broke and raged against this coast and carried away the house with the golden turrets and towers" and a pack of other things. There must be more. Faint recollection of a flood in Gabriel Garcia Marquez's Autumn of the Patriarch. Jellyfish floating through the trees. There's a beautiful storm in Christina Stead's The People With The Dogs, but it's not a major thing as far as the plot goes.
ReplyDeleteGreat new reading vistas open up thanks to you, Umbagollah - I hadn't even heard of The People with the Dogs, (or maybe I had but very dimly) and Marguerite Young is unknown to me, but the National Library will no doubt give me an opportunity to correct that. I'm off there now.
ReplyDeleteToy Story 3 is horrendous - absolutely tear-jerking, but you curse yourself for being manipulated by a cartoon, and the tragic scene is so quiet that you have to snort and go into contortions and count to 1000 in the theatre to try to muffle the tortured anguish coming out of you. Pooh is just as bad, with your children asking, "Why is your voice going all funny?" in their callous way.
ReplyDeleteI read Anna 'Seven Little Australians' and when it got to the sad bit she was unmoved because she couldn't understand anything I was saying because I was crying too much
ReplyDeleteGood luck with Miss MacIntosh. It's one of those books that was obviously a labour of love or obsession or sheer stubborn bloody-mindedness for the author. It's Ferdinand Cheval's Palais Ideal, but in prose.
ReplyDeleteWith each new comment, Umbagollah, you make me more aware of my own ignorance. I shall have to look up Ferdinand Cheval now. This is a very modern way to get an education.
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