I did not know that the English filmmaker Michael Powell, author of the exciting Peeping Tom, released in 1960 (the year of Psychosis ), and many others made jointly with Emeric Pressburger, had written a novel. But there it is, and the truth is that it is admirable. He wrote it after two considerable autobiographical volumes and was published in London in 1975. His characters, all Irish except the protagonist, are waiting for the appropriate occasion to act, as the title Waiting Game suggests. If they have a plan that awaits its realization, the reader is also in tension waiting for the events to unleash, while knowing with pleasure the pieces that are arranged on the board. Powell knew Ireland well and set out to novel about it to offer a real picture of the country. A country that, as a character says, its inhabitants love, but precisely because of this they are not able to repair.
The author obsessively delves into regrets, torture of remembrance, resentment and desire for revenge
The protagonist, Dan O'Connell, Canadian but son of Irish parents, returns to the land of his ancestors to work. The events happen in 1952, just the same as John Ford rolls The Quiet Man . Is it a chance coincidence or did the author deliberately conceive it? I do not know. The point is that in the film also a man, Sean Thornton (played by John Wayne), a broken boxer, returns to Ireland, his homeland. Both Powell and Ford imagine a place to place the action that does not match a real one: in the book scenarios are remodeled and place names are modified, and in the film an unreal town is recreated with the name of Innisfree. From these modifications, however, arises a true Ireland. True, the film is a melancholic party that lacks the drama of the novel. But the love story is similar in events and in character. Dan's feeling when he sees Sue moving away in a boat is similar to Wayne's when he first saw Mary Kate (Maureen O'Hara).
There is a bright world that offers us happy: the grandiose presence of a landscape that has a life of its own "between the sky and the water" and, above all, the use of characters, long walks, climbs and navigations. Man, landscape and vital seasonal changes are one, all in a fist. There is another world that is obsessively remembered and almost chewed in the human brain. Powell is not interested in arbitrating political issues but in the personal antagonism that remains unchanged in the conscience of individuals: the torture of memory, regrets, resentment, the desire for revenge. It is precisely one of these revenges that gives way to the most dramatic events of the end. Gradually, what has to happen happens until a touching and significant end. Our wait has been widely satisfied.
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Author: Michael Powell.
Translation: Antonio Iriarte.
Editorial: Kingdom of Round, 2019.
Format: hardcover (288 pages).
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