Book Review: We Need to Talk About Kevin by Lionel Schriver

The winner of the Orange Prize for Fiction in 2005, We Need to Talk About Kevin has hit the public interest again recently thanks to the critically acclaimed film adaptation, released last week in the UK.

The book is the story of Eva Khatchadourian, whose fifteen year old son has just shot and killed people at his school and is now in jail for his crimes. She writes letters to her now absent husband, Kevin's father Franklin, which examine in great detail who is at fault for the events that took place on that fateful Thursday.

The entire book is written in letter format which makes for a challenging read but once you become accustomed to the daring style, Eva's own version of events will draw you in. At no point does she say definitively that Kevin is evil. Likewise, she never confesses that she thinks it is all her own fault. She looks instead at how things were for her as if trying to make Franklin understand why her relationship with her son has always been strained.

The book is all written in hindsight as it cuts from modern day comments about her visiting Kevin in jail and what they talked about to her memories of him throughout his life. As a baby he didn't latch and screamed non-stop whenever it was just him and Eva in the room. As a toddler she noted intellect and menace where Franklin saw a naughty child starved for affection. As he gets older, she sees things in him that makes her question his motives. She tries to have a relationship with him but it just never seems to happen.

But Eva is not the poor innocent victim in all this. While some doctors told her she probably had post-natal depression, she felt a detachment from Kevin from the start which never abated. Not a native American herself, Eva often talks about all the things she dislikes about Americans and the country they live in. This gives her an air of superiority which it seems Kevin picked up on. A successful business owner and traveller before Kevin's birth, she seems to resent the time spent at home with him. She also seems frustrated with him, even as a baby, that he is not offering her all she expected to come with parenthood - as though this is not what she signed up for.

We Need To Talk About Kevin never presumes to tell the reader what really caused Kevin to shoot his classmates. It breaks down the relationship between him and his mother into small digestible pieces and mirrors it with the relationship Eva witnessed between Franklin and Kevin. "Mr Plastic", as Kevin calls him, is the model father, always taking Kevin's side, always taking him out on day trips and listening when he speaks. To Eva though, she sees Kevin as fake only when playing the dutiful son with Franklin. With her, he is his real detached and quietly menacing self.

The final section of the book will leave you breathless as Eva recounts that day and what it was like. She recalls with precision the conversation over breakfast, the moment she found at at work that something had happened at her son's school and then details the chain of events that she has now learned happened within the school walls.

Though I fully acknowledge that this book will not be for everyone, I consider it to be fictional perfection. Schriver has taken a theme relevant to people all over the world, especially the US, and made it personal. Instead of saying outright that people are born evil or become evil due to their parents (parents of school shooting victims in the US have filed lawsuits claiming as such), she dares to examine the massive expanse of grey area between these points.

A masterpiece.

5/5 FOBLES

We Need To Talk About Kevin: Book vs film

DVD Review - Water for Elephants

Based on the book by Sara Gruen, Water for Elephants is the story of Jacob Jankowski who as an old man is recounting the tale of when he first joined the circus as a young man, during the Great Depression of 1930s America. Only days away from finishing his degree and becoming a certified vet, Jacob learns that his parents have been killed in a car accident. He leaves home and wanders aimlessly, unsure what to do - until he sees a train approaching and decides to jump on board, only to discover he has just boarded a circus train - the Benzini Brothers Most Spectacular Show on Earth.

Directed by Francis Lawrence (I am Legend), the film stars Hal Holbrook (Wall Street, The Firm) as old Jacob, Robert Pattinson as young Jacob, Reece Witherspoon as Marlena and Christoph Waltz (Inglourious Basterds) as Marlena's husband and Circus boss August.

Marlena is the star attraction and when August decides to keep Jacob on as the circus vet, he doesn't like that his wife is getting close to him. A violent man, with people and the animals, people know better than to cross him.

Jacob falls for Marlena and befriends the old drunk Camel (a man not an animal) and dwarf Walter. But he has very little (if any) chemistry with any of them. It is only when the real star arrives that the actors begin to shine. Rosie the elephant (real name Tai) is stunning and the greatest actress of the film. She seems to bring out the best in the cast and when they are with her, they are brilliant. R-Pattz flirting with Rosie is hilarious and so cute and watching Reece Witherspoon bravely climb the ladder up to sit on her shows just how strong a character Marlena is.

The relationship between Marlena and Jacob does not strike me (or many others as I have now discovered) as a passionate love affair but more a crush (on Jacob's part) and a way out (for Marlena). Marlena was found abandoned as a baby and married more for necessity than love. Now stuck in an abusive relationship, she sees Jacob as a chance to escape. Or that's how it appeared.

In spite of this though, there are brilliant touches of the time, from clothing and hairstyles to the secret bars of the prohibition era and the film is visually so beautiful you feel as though you can almost touch it. This, mixed in with the breath-taking Rosie makes for a perfectly watchable film. Plus, Hal Holbrook telling the story is so engrossing you can't help but stick around and hear what he had to say.

I'm afraid I haven't read the book - so can't compare but please do comment away as to whether the adaptation was any good...

3/5 FOBLES

The Help: Book vs Film

"Go find your life"

I read The Help in two days - thanks in part to our Indian summer, but mostly due to the fact that the book is impossible to put down. The Help is about Miss Eugenia "Skeeter" Phelan, a white twenty-something woman in Jacksonville, Mississippi during the 1960s, and the unlikely friendship she forges with the hired help. Skeeter's family have had a coloured maid her entire life, as have most white families in the area. This is standard and being raised by the maid, Constantine, does not strike Skeeter as strange until she returns from university to discover her maid has quit. She can sense there is more to the story as it is out of character for Constantine to just vanish without so much as a letter of explanation - but her mother insists she just quit and left to go and live with her daughter. It is this event that causes Skeeter to see things in a different light and she is suddenly very aware of the injustice these maids suffer daily. They can raise the child of a white woman, but can't use the same toilet.

Skeeter has never been like the other women in her neighbourhood. She is tall with frizzy hair and has been told her whole life that she is ugly, never gets asked to school dances and even her mother tells her not to wear heels as it'll just make her even taller. Constantine was always telling her she was special and would do something amazing with her life. While Skeeter's friends are all getting married and having babies, she wants to be a writer. So, after she gets a job writing a cleaning column for the local paper, she starts to talk to Aibileen, her friend's maid, for tips. The more she talks to Aibileen, the more she realises she wants to write about her perspective. But this is not just a taboo thing that local people would frown upon if word get out... this is illegal. So it's not going to be as easy as it may seem. Coloured people are being shot and beaten for less.

The book is a straightforward and honest look at a time when societal rules were not challenged. The white people believed that things were fine and didn't want to mess with the status quo. But this is not a preachy overly-sentimental book. It's a look at the relationship between Skeeter, Aibileen and Aibileen's best friend, the brilliant "sass-mouthing" Minny and how their unlikely friendship and quiet courage could spark change on a massive scale.

What the book does brilliantly is focus on the people involved. The "villain" of the story is easily Hilly Holbrook, Skeeter's best friend since they were little. She has the air of perfection about her but is so self-righteous and vile it makes your skin crawl. She has such a power over her friends and everyone in the area that nobody would dare go against her. So when Minny is brought in along with Hilly's mother Missus Walters you just know something spectacular is going to happen. Minny is not one to sit quietly on a grievance.

The book also shows the full horror of the violence with shootings and beatings of the coloured people in the area. When the women are sitting together in secret, telling their stories, you are terrified that they are going to get caught out. It is this fear that kept me going - I had to find out whether or not they all come out of it OK. As is explained in the book, a white man will beat you or shoot you, a white woman will do much worse - they will make it so nobody will ever give you a job, then get you evicted, take everything you have ever worked for until you are nothing but a shell of a person. Then the man will come round and shoot or beat you.

The film was directed and co-written with Tate Taylor, a childhood friend of Author Kathryn Stockett. It has been out in the US for weeks already and has been number one at the box office. This is largely thanks to two things. Firstly, the cast including Emma Stone, Viola Davis, Bryce Dallas Howard, Octavia Spencer, Jessica Chastain, Allison Janney and Sissy Spacek are outstanding. Each have captured the characters perfectly, from Sissy Spacek as the senile Missus Walters to Bryce Dallas Howard as the beautifully evil Hilly. Octavia Spencer as Minny is just as loud and endearing as you would expect, Jessica Chastain is just as vulgar, vulnerable and adorable as Celia Foote and even little Mae Mobley is cute and podgy. I have never seen such flawless casting. I was also delighted to see Cicely Tyson as Constantine. Her line in Fried Green Tomatoes "Won't sit next to a coloured child, but he'll eat eggs - shoot right out of a chicken's ass" is one of my favourites ever uttered in cinema.

Secondly, you can tell immediately that Stockett was involved in the screenplay. Though little bits have evidently been tweaked here and there and some of the chronology has been switched around, the essence of the book remains wholly in tact. There is one change that I didn't understand - which stopped it getting the 5/5 it so greatly deserves - to do with the truth behind Constantine's sudden absence, but other than that it is incredibly accurate. Overall, the adaptation has become a little more PG-friendly - the violence has been toned down but not forgotten and the ending is a little too neat and tidy for my liking.

However, as book to film adaptations go, this may have just made my Top 5 - just as beautifully heartbreaking as the original.

Book and film: 4.5/5 FOBLES

The film is out in the UK on 26th October. Go and see it!!!

On Writing by Stephen King

For any book lover - there is normally a list of authors they will rattle off as their favourites. The kind of author that would make you buy a book without even looking at the blurb - just because they wrote it. 

For me, there is only one - Stephen King is it. 

So when I learned that he had written a non-fiction book - part auto-biographical, part lesson on how to be a writer, I thought I had found my perfect book. And I did. It's so well regarded that even my teacher on a copy-editing course recommended it when learning about editing fiction.

The book is incredibly disjointed as King was the victim of a horrific car accident while writing the book. But in King style - it works. He writes with his own specific flair about his childhood, his family, his struggles, his successes. It's a glimpse rather than an extensive laborious look into his life - but what a glimpse.

And for the aspiring writers out there, he writes about his pet peeves, the common errors and what he has learned over the years with such humour and honesty. You never feel like you are being talked down to. He is trying to pass on the wisdom of his experience, that is all. And what experience it is.

For King fans, it's fantastic to see what gave him the idea for the infamous bathroom scene in Carrie, what Nurse Annie really represented in one of the worst times of his life and how writing can be therapeutic if you let it.

And if you are yet to experience the brilliance of Stephen King, I recommend Carrie, Bag of Bones and Misery to start...

Brilliant.

4/5 FOBLES

Pedro Almodóvar masterpieces - tonight on Film4

Pedro Almodóvar is THE director in Spain that people aspire to be. His films have explored so many taboo subjects with a style that is synonomous with the man himself. He has explored kidnap, prostitution, abuse and many more.

After the success of The Skin I Live In, tonight on Film4 sees a double bill of two of Almodóvar's greatest films to date - firstly at 9pm there is All About My Mother/Todo Sobre Mi Madre (my personal favourite) followed immediately at 11pm with Bad Education/La Mala Educacion.


It is no secret that Almodóvar has a collection of favourite women - his muses so to speak. Among them are the Spanish star Marisa Paredes and Penelope Cruz, both of whom are in All About My Mother. The film has the kind of interwoven plot that would make little sense if someone tried to explain it to you but in Almodóvar's hands it just works. He has a gift for making the abnormal normal. Who else could make Penelope Cruz an HIV positive pregnant nun and make it seem utterly plausible?

Bad Education ("educación" does not just translate to education in the school sense of the word but also means upbringing, manners etc) is more of a male dominated film, inspired by Almodóvar's own religious upbringing. It stars Gael García Bernal (The Motorcycle Diaries) and covers sexual abuse in the regimented Catholic schools of the Franco era, homosexuality and transvestites. Bernal makes a surprisingly gorgeous woman I must say - those cheekbones!


Well done Film 4. Pure class.

The Woman in Black gets a new trailer

Possibly one of the biggest book to film conversions of recent years, as it's also been converted into a hit west end play, The Woman in Black is based on a book written by Susan Hill. It is the tale of Arthur Kipps (Radcliffe), a young lawyer sent to a house in a remote village to settle a dead woman’s estate, only to discover that the villagers are scared to go near the house and believe a curse remains. What is the secret to the woman in black and will Kipps discover it before the curse reaches him too…?

Directed by James Watkins, The Woman in Black sees Daniel Radcliffe in his first major role post Harry Potter and, if the new trailer is anything to go by, looks to be just as scary as it's earlier manifestations.

Have you read the book or seen the play? Do you think the film will be any good? And does anyone else feel really Harry Potter nostalgic with the snippet of him on a train...?

Check out the trailer below and let me know in the comments section what you think.

The film is due to hit UK screens in February 2012.

Source: MSN Movies

DVD review - The Way Back

My latest DVD rental sees a long line of incredible actors break out of a war prison and walk home... not that great you might think until you realise they will have to walk for weeks before reaching civilisation and through uninhabitable lands of snow, wind and desert. Oh and they're low on food and water. The film, inspired supposedly by a true story, stars Colin Farrell, Ed Harris, Jim Sturgess, Mark Strong and Saoirse Ronan and sees them on an epic walk for survival.

Janusz (Sturgess) has just arrived at the Siberian gulag after being falsely accused of being a spy. His wife has been tortured into confessing all and he knows only he can forgive her. So, not long after he arrives he manages to enlist a few people to help him escape and join him on the long walk back.

Cinematically, the film is staggering as they walk through blizzards, forests, lakes, deserts and everything in between. The acting is great, if a little bizarre with all the eastern European accents (except for Ed Harris - who I envisage rather comically just flat-out refusing to do any accent but his own). It's a long arduous film, to reflect their journey as the group gets smaller and smaller.

I imagine this film would have been much more epic on the big screen, as the shots of landscapes are simply breath-taking (akin to those of Lord of the Rings though far more harsh than picturesque).

The real let-down is the final scene which is so overly sentimental it just didn't fit with the rest of the film. Other than that, worth a watch if you like the slightly depressing.

3/5 FOBLES