Heart of darkness

I finally got to see 'The Hours' last night - and, as a result, Michael Cunningham's novel is yet another book I now feel duty-bound to read. Not that I'd be approaching it with anything other than genuine interest - I'm intrigued as to how the spliced and intertwined narratives work in print. The film was fantastic from start to finish, heavy without ever becoming leaden and lumbering, and the acting was uniformly superb (personally, I felt Julianne Moore outshone both Nicole Kidman and Meryl Streep). Prior knowledge of Woolf's 'Mrs Dalloway' was helpful, though, in appreciating the way narrative strands from the novel are played out (in fascinatingly refracted and distorted form) in the two storylines set in America.

On a personal note the film cut straight to the heart of what Woolf's novels, for me, are really all about - underneath the genteel veneer of social niceties of early twentieth century upper-middle-class English polite society, there is a real and potent darkness. Woolf's themes are the classic stuff of art - death, sex, madness. If you stare them all squarely in the face, you become more aware of life. In terms of film-making, it's gratifying to know that even in the current money-obsessed quick-returns-focused climate, major film companies will not always opt to eschew tackling this sort of serious art head-on in favour of patronising, trite and overhyped drivel.