Violet wells's Reviews > The Hours

The film has always put me off reading the book. In particular Nicole Kidman's tawdry depiction of Virginia Woolf as some kind of demented bag lady. Surely the most unflattering cinematic portrait of any famous writer ever. So the first pleasant surprise of this novel was that, far from being some kind of overly simplistic and dismissive view of Woolf as the film veered close to at times, it's actually a glowing tribute to her work and to her as a troubled soul.

However, it doesn't begin on a good note. To go inside Woolf's head as she kills herself came across as nothing more than a literary publicity stunt of misguided hubris. Not once, I'm afraid, did I believe in Cunningham's vision of her final moments of life. And it added nothing to the novel and could easily have been and perhaps should have been excised. Especially because her suicide comes up often in the text. Sometimes, despite what it says in writing manuals, telling is more effective than showing. But what soon began to win me over was Cunningham's fabulous prose. His exciting way of putting things. Of making me see the familiar in a slightly skewed and illuminating way. Essentially The Hours is an inventive improvisation on the themes of Woolf's Mrs Dalloway. It's perhaps a bit top heavy on same sex relationships with the largely unfounded implication that Woolf herself was that way inclined (is it so hard to accept a person might perhaps simply possess no strong sexual impulse instead of always reading repression into inactivity? My feeling about her is she did exactly what she needed to do to write what she did. And to impose any kind of secret wish list on her is not only errant but also condescending. Socially she was a flirt. It was how she both dramatized and defended herself. If she gave Vita the come on it was done, one feels, with a pinch of salt not from unowned depths of her being.)
But overall surprised by how much I loved this. 4.5 stars.