I’m forever struck by an old YouTube video I once saw in which some clever editor had taken the much-beloved Mary Poppins and created a new, truly 21st Century trailer. The result was strange, uncanny. Gone was the whimsical and heart-warming movie we all know and love – umbrellas in flight, an emotionally buttoned-up father driven back into the loving arms of his family, furious spit-spotting down bannisters in the wrapper of a feel-good sing-a-long for all ages – and in its place, dark and twisted, was what would previously have seemed impossible: a horror film. Mary’s gentle lullabies were now the songs of a demonic spirit, luring little children to their windows, and her fanciful magic now the torturous gifts of a punitive, child-hating entity who arrives on the wind one day and steals all joy from the world.
What this brilliant bit of editing demonstrates is just how fragile the boundaries of genre are. Ancillary tropes that we take for granted as emblematic of specific genres are slippery and open to manipulation and reinvention. Put simply: one slight turn of the dial can transform a technicolour dream into a Ken Russell-esque nightmare.
Two genres that have always seemed to me natural bedfellows under the right conditions are thrillers and romances – for a hungry, lustful relationship can so easily turn toxic, and what thriller is complete without the promise (or threat) of a romantic connection made (or broken)?
We're all familiar with the wedding as a backdrop to a rom-com - the final act; the joyful destination after a long, troubled-journey; an event to wash out the old and welcome the new; the fresh start; the happily-ever-after. It is the pinnacle of the rising tension, a restoration of equilibrium, the moment of arrival. Indeed, Hollywood's idea of the wedding has become so ingrained in us that, for the past half-decade, life has grown to imitate art. Weddings have become more lavish affairs, more choreographed, more pressured. And so, fiction has birthed reality.
The union of two families bound by the ultimate expression of an enduring love mark weddings as quintessentially joyful, supposedly harmonious, occasions. But one upending of a familiar trope, and we're in very different territory. The bridal expectation can soon turn to dread, the coming together of the tribes can give rise to friction, long-buried secrets can bubble to the surface, and any last-minute doubts can cast a heavy pall across the entire occasion. Harried brides, nervous groomsmen, fractious families, and emotional guests. In many ways, the wedding is the perfect setting for a thriller.
It was no accident, then, that I chose a wedding as the focal point of my thriller, The Stranger at the Wedding. The book starts with a wedding, and it ends with one, though the two occasions are worlds apart and troubled for very different reasons. In our main event, we meet our mild-mannered, diffident protagonist, Annie, who is about to marry Mark, a surgeon, following a whirlwind romance. As they’re about to cement their love before a throng of well-wishers, Annie spots a face in the crowd she doesn’t recognise: a man, she suspects, who has come to raze to the ground all that she has built with Mark.
Who can say, hand on heart, that we have known every single person at our own weddings? Those we don’t recognise, we trust, were invited by our partners – work colleagues, distant relatives, rekindled friends, perhaps. Weddings have far too many moving parts for any one person to keep on top of every detail; I guess that’s why so many of us turn to wedding planners. Such occasions, fraught with both anxiety, excitement and doubt, allow the unexpected to rear its ugly head. Therein lies the potential for drama, both quiet- and explosive.
In The Stranger at the Wedding, though, it is not the uninvited guest who initially throws the event into crisis, but the groom himself, who turns to Annie, our not-so-blushing bride, and delivers the hammer blow at the end of the opening Act: we need to talk. But this comes as no great surprise to Annie; she had been expecting this. Both parties, it seems, have been concealing, and it is the public spectacle of the wedding itself that has forced them out of hiding.
A writer is a little like a conductor, deciding which bits of the orchestra to dial up, and which to dial down at any given moment. A wedding – this wedding – could have gone one of two ways. I chose to dial up the tension, the element of the unknown, the fear of losing someone close to you. In another world, I could have foregrounded the couples’ love, their complete and utter joy, their journey off into the sunset, and that – much like a re-cut Mary Poppins trailer – would have told a very different story.
The Stranger at The Wedding by A E Gauntlett. (Bloomsbury Publishing) Out Now Annie never believed in true love. Not until she met Mark. It’s a whirlwind romance and Annie has never felt surer about anything in her life. But as she stands at the altar, she spots an unknown face in the crowd. Who is the stranger at the wedding? What really happened to Mark’s first wife? And is Annie really the person she says she is? The stranger at the wedding: whose side are you on?
The author can be found on X @albioneye
No comments:
Post a Comment