Warning: This blog contains mild spoilers relating to A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens and Another Year directed by Mike Leigh.

I recently watched Mike Leigh’s 2010 film Another Year.  It follows four seasons in the life of happily married, middle-aged couple Tom and Gerri Hepple, played by Jim Broadbent and Ruth Sheen respectively.  Spring, summer, autumn, winter sees them tending their allotment in a predictably assorted mixture of British weather conditions and entertaining their predictably assorted mixture of friends and family in their nice suburban semi.

I watched the film, conscious of the fact that Mike Leigh is not necessarily known for being a director of feel-good movies.  Gritty and realistic are two adjectives more traditionally linked to his name than happy and upbeat.  In this same knowledge, I watched Another Year in a state of near-perpetual anxiety.  Tom and Gerri were such a nice couple, with such a nice life, living in such a nice house, that I didn’t want any blot to suddenly appear on their landscape that might possibly spoil it.  The start of autumn was particularly tense; this was the moment that disaster was going to strike if it was going to; this was when the axe was going to fall.  Surely spring and summer had merely set up the idyll, only for autumn and winter to cast it asunder?  This would be the moment that Tom discovered that he had prostate cancer, or Gerri was made redundant from the job she loved.  Or would it?

At the same time that I was watching Another Year, I happened to be reading A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens.  I mean, not at exactly the same time, you understand––I did take a couple of hours off reading the book to devote my attention exclusively to the movie––but at a broadly concurrent period.

In A Tale of Two Cities, at least by the halfway point, there is formed a similarly happy family––Charles Darnay, his wife Lucie Manette, and their infant daughter, baby Lucie.  As with the Hepples in Another Year, I found myself willing that nothing ill would befall them.  Never mind all accepted conventions of novel-writing––peace, conflict, resolution––never mind that Charles Dickens was no more likely than Mike Leigh to reach the end of his story without some kind of disaster happening, I just hoped––admittedly with little expectation––that Charles Darnay and his family would reach the end of the novel having led a pleasant, untroubled life of largely anonymous but blissfully happy mediocrity.  I wanted more than just a happy ending; I wanted happiness unceasing.

But, why this sudden desire for fictional serenity?  Perhaps it is because the real world is full of images of such unrelieved horror––Gaza; Ukraine; USA––I want to sink into a comforting fiction of peace and calm to forget about them.

I don’t read books or watch movies to mirror real life, but to escape from it.

© Fergus Longfellow

Fergus Longfellow is forever on the run from something.