It’s not hard to see why novelists are attracted to writing about cults and communes, fictional or fictionalised: their bounded and reclusive worlds nonetheless illuminate the society surrounding them; they are catnip for the charismatics who found them and the seekers who flock to them, providing a ready-made cast of inadequates entrapped in a febrile power dynamic; and their inherent dysfunction customarily provides an satisfyingly entropic, if not outright apocalyptic, narrative. The less harmful among them can tend to the comic, while the more vicious can be downright terrifying. There is virtually always a great deal of sex.
Emma Cline, whose debut novel comes with much buzz (including a hefty advance, publication deals in numerous countries and a pre-emptive swoop for the film rights by Scott Rudin), now joins the ranks of writers from John Updike and Alison Lurie to Chuck Palahniuk and Emily St John Mandel. But her subject is modelled on one of the most infamous and disturbing criminals of the late 20th century, Charles Manson, whose “Family” brutally murdered actor Sharon Tate, her unborn child, and friends of her and her husband, Roman Polanski, in August 1969. On that night, Manson had directed a group of young women to carry out the slaughter and had himself stayed at the commune’s ranch-squat; the following night, he accompanied them to commit another set of murders.
Continue reading...
0 comments:
Post a Comment