The Hours

I finished The Hours by Michael Cunningham last night, staying up until midnight. I haven't read a book that's touched me so deeply for a long time. It's the way he manages to convey exactly how life is really lived, which is simply getting through each day. Myself, I learned a long time ago not to look to far ahead as you can never predict what's coming up and Cunningham manages to capture the simple dailiness of everyday life.
It's also about the despairs and joys at the heart of life in such a truthful way, that, when a particular insight drove home with such force that long-buried memories began to resurface.
And there are other, simple observations that struck home with startling clarity, as, when Virginia rushes out of the house to travel up to London for the day, to escape, he muses on the particularity of railway stations, how they are both a 'portal and a destination', 'slightly desolate even when crowded'. The description encapsulated for me the reason why I love Temple Meads (in Bristol) so much, and why I'll grab any chance I can to go there. I picked my son up from there the other night - it was, in one respect, bleak and lonely, with travellers hurrying off their train, and others hanging around, rather hopelessly gazing at the departure screens, yet I loved it, felt comforted by being there and felt very much at home.
Laura Brown's deeply ambivalent feelings about her role as a housewife and mother, and her longing to escape, so that she can read her book, also hit home. I remember feeling exactly like that when I was at home with my children - one evening I got in the car and just drove around the city for a coiple of hours just to get away, and I'm sure I'm not the only young mother who's felt like that, and fantasised about just disappeariing. Laura got away for good, and part of me admires her for it, and understands her.
And as for Virginia, well, she did it as well, and Richard, Laura's son. There is, in Cunningham's book, an understanding of the realities of suicide, that sometimes, there can be no other way out, that there is a courage there. I've never been in that desperate situation, but have gained an understanding of what drives people to the limit through reading Cunningham's book.
Like all the best books and films, it leaves you thinking. I wondered if Laura understood Richard's suicide through her own abandonment of him and through reading Virginia Woolf. I thought of Laura, breaking away and reading all Woolf's books, bot just Mrs Dalloway, and perhaps her biograpghy, letters and diaries.
Clarissa is the one who is left behind, the one who has chosen to lead the ordinary life, like most of us. And Cunningham celebrates that equally, without privileging the suicides. In fact, I felt that Clarissa is the true heroine of the book, the one who has chosen to give.

I saw the film when it came out a couple of years ago, and have seen it three times. All three women, Moore, Streep and Kidman, were perfect, and now I've read the book, I can see how successfully they brought the characters to life, illuminating their inner life in a way that perhaps Cunningham couldn't quite manage.

I can't see The Hours as a single artefact any more - book and film are indivisible and form a whole in tandem with each other. I can see myself watching and reading again and again.