失踪的女孩
The mystery of what happened to the girls goes unsolved in the novel, which includes a biographical note about Lindsay’s own Australian boarding school and her childhood in the district where the novel takes place, and an author’s note suggesting that it might be a true story. When director Peter Weir went to discuss the film rights for his 1975 adaptation, he was warned not to ask if something had really happened, but he did anyway. Lindsay said she hoped he wouldn’t ask again. So Weir asked if the question of what occurred was open-ended. Could they have fallen down a hole or been abducted by aliens? She said yes, it could have been any of the above.
Others had the same two oddly linked questions: was it a true story, and what happened to the characters? People searched old local newspapers in vain for mention of missing girls. In 1980, Yvonne Rousseau published The Murders at Hanging Rock, examining all the competing theories, including a parallel universe, UFO abduction, and a gruesome murder committed by two young men, leaving no trace. Australians read the book in school and became obsessed with the mystery.
According to Lindsay’s literary agent, John Taylor, she was impatient with the questions in part because she knew what happened. She had written, in those productive four weeks, a final, twelve-page chapter explaining how it all ended, and she’d turned it in with the book. Her publishers told her to cut it, so she did. But when she was 84, she gave the chapter to Taylor to be published after her death.
In the missing chapter, published as The Secret of Hanging Rock (stop reading if you don’t want to know), the girls hike up the rock and reach a circular plateau, where they begin to feel strange. Their math teacher, Miss McCraw, appears in her underwear, but they don’t recognize her. They take off their corsets and throw them off a cliff, and the corsets hang in the air. Seeing the suspended corsets makes the girls understand that they’re in the presence of a time warp, and they follow the math teacher into it, through a crack in the rock. They enter another dimension and never return.
You can see why the publishers told Lindsay to get rid of the ending. The earthly mystery is what gives the novel its impact. And people took the author’s note about fact and fiction seriously because the novel, with its romantic crushes, maddening injustices, and sweltering heat, is so realistic—because Lindsay was so good at making her characters feel like real people, to which something terrible had happened.
摘自外网
