04/03/20: Joan Lindsay – Picnic at Hanging Rock (1967)

A masterpiece. On Valentine’s Day, 1900, the girls from an Australian boarding school go on a day trip to the ominous Hanging Rock – a notable geographical feature. It soon becomes clear that there’s an essential wrongness about the place. Clocks stop at midday and, amid the sweltering heat, the girls – in a state of “exquisite languor” – enter a kind of disorientated enchantment. Seemingly bewitched and in a trance, three of them (and one of their teachers) disappear.

They return to the school as early in the narrative as page 36. The remainder of the book deals with the various investigations and the aftermath as the events of 14th February cast a malignant shadow over the lives of many people.

It works on multiple levels. It’s a supernatural thriller but also a historical drama that examines class division, female repression and sexuality, and social control.

Peter Weir’s 1975 film, also highly recommended, is shot in a way that really captures that sense of dazed, ethereal bewitchment. Its utterly haunting image of the girls in their white dresses – walking, somehow mesmerised, towards a fate that is brilliantly never explained – has stayed with me ever since.

In 1987, an additional final chapter of the book was published after the author’s death as a standalone book. Titled The Secret of Hanging Rock, it unwisely “explained” the mystery of the disappearances with reference to possibly supernatural events and the Aboriginal concept of dream-time. But other theories suggest that there is no evidence that Joan Lindsay actually wrote this chapter, which differs so much stylistically from the rest. The purpose of the novel, for this reader, is to set up an uncanny mystery (like all the most terrifying stories, it understands that the less you explain the more scary it becomes), and it would have been a far lesser book if that mystery were simply unravelled at the end. Indeed, Lindsay herself told an interviewer: “Well, it was written as a mystery and it remains a mystery. If you can draw your own conclusions, that's fine, but I don't think that it matters. I wrote that book as a sort of atmosphere of a place, and it was like dropping a stone into the water. I felt that story, if you call it a story – that the thing that happened on St. Valentine's Day went on spreading, out and out and out, in circles.”