Voyages Through Time: Rose of Nevada

 

Today I caught up with the movie Rose of Nevada.  I came away with that familiar feeling  with movies of this genre,  that a coherent meaning was obscured  from view. As  a consequence it was difficult to find sympathy for the characters and their relationships in each time frame. Without some kind of signpost we find ourselves using much of our mental and emotional resources just to piece together and grasp a narrative. 

I found myself finally able to accept this technique, but by then my feeling was disinterested detachment from character, and I looked more at the surface techniques, including the extraordinary realism around the storm. It is the kind of movie, such as Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer or Memento, where time slicing is a vital part of the narrative. So, a second viewing becomes more enlightening and the experience becomes richer.

Such  films that fragment time ask us  to do significant intellectual work, but there is usually an emotional anchor that keeps us invested while we solve the puzzle.

 In Memento, it is Leonard's desperate search for meaning; in Oppenheimer, it is Oppenheimer's moral and psychological journey. Even when the chronology is fragmented, the emotional trajectory remains relatively clear.

Rose of Nevada seems less interested in such emotional identification. It works around atmosphere, memory and place. The characters often feel like discrete, disconnected figures in a folk tale or legend rather than fully developed psychological individuals. That may be intentional, but it comes at a cost. We expend  energy simply trying to establish "where" and "when" they are. For me at least, not a lot left over for  empathy.

So, "disinterested detachment" sums up my initial response. Maybe this mirrors the way the film is crafted?  I have learned after viewing (I tend not to read reviews before seeing a movie)  that the movie was shot without sound, and all the sounds – voices as well as all else, were dubbed in afterwards. Oddly distant dialogue, the slightly unreal soundscape, and the fragmented timescales all placed  a layer of distance between me and what was in front of me.

The storm sequence is perhaps the clearest exception to this direction of trvel in the film. Here, narrative uncertainty becomes irrelevant in these isolated action snapshots. The sea, the boat, the weather, the physical peril—these are immediate and comprehensible. Here, the technique adds to  the experience rather than obscuring it. I found these sequences, and the business of catching, gutting and storing the fish,  among the most compelling for exactly that reason.

So yes, a second viewing of Rose of Nevada  is for the best, though I think there is an important distinction with Rose of Nevada compared, say, to a  second viewing of Memento. Here, a second viewing (I haven’t tried it yet) should reveal how meticulously the narrative has been constructed. We expect the  puzzle pieces to click together, because that is the story, and the story lose ambiguity and brings a clarity by its end. With Rose of Nevada, I am not entirely sure that a second viewing would lead to that kind of resolution. Rather, it would just help me to stop worrying about the puzzle and attend to other things: the imagery, the sound design, the symbolism, the sense of Cornwall as a place haunted by its own past. And all that.

So , thinking on awhile, Rose of Nevada  has something in  common with modernist literature than with puzzle-box cinema. For example, reading The Waste Land for a second time – or even umpteen times -  does not necessarily “solve” it; instead, once we are  less anxious about understanding every reference, we begin to notice patterns, echoes and moods. The experience deepens without becoming entirely transparent.

That raises the question of what kind of satisfaction a film owes its audience. I suppose over these years of looking at  traditions around  modernism through art cinema and modernist poetry, we know that ambiguity and uncertainty are watchwords. But for me anyway,  ambiguity works best when there is still something solid to hold onto—character, emotion, theme, image, or story.

So for me,  Rose of Nevada is too ambiguous. It asks  too much of the audience before it has earned an emotional investment. It’s not just me saying  "I didn't understand it."  The film’s  artistic method and  ambitions compete with, rather than support, its human drama.

I will see it again: I am confident my opinion will shift, like those gutted fish on the trawler's deck!

 

Ambling in Clanfield

I spent most of the day today, from early morning until lunchtime taking a wander around the village of Clanfield. I had recently discovered a campervan service, repair and conversion business tucked away at the end of the long track-like road called Mill Lane. A fascinating find. 

One might call it an industrial estate, though unlike any I have ever visited. At the end of the lane, and into the complex, I was met with the extraordinary sight of several beat-up, half-cannibalised cars, all, or mostly, of high-end branding - Mercedes, BMW and the like. And in a large covered area, several Rolls Royces, including the classic 'Silver Cloud', all in various states of repair and disrepair. Cars such as these were built to defy time, yet here they were, reflecting time's passing as old barns or weathered gravestones

My reason to visit was less exotically interesting - I was here to get a repair done on my campervan. The campervan business was across a small wooden bridge over the stream called Broadwell Brook, among other enterprises including upholstery, welding, guttering and the like - a busy place more or less in the middle of nowhere.

I was met by Paul, an engaging guy who filled me with every confidence that the pop-top roof repair on my van was nothing like the terminally problematic issue I had feared. After a quick check on some details, Paul gave me a 3 hour window of opportunity to take a wander back along Mill Lane to  the main village of Clanfield, whilst he did the necessary work.

I enjoyed the 20 minute walk , and sought out the church, as is my wont when coming to any village. And as always with such church visits, St. Stephen's did not disappoint - it offered, as all churches do, the unusual and unique embedded in the familiar styles and layouts of these ancient buildings. 

St. Stephen Statue, Clanfield Church

Immediately engaging was a very eye-catching large figure carved in an angled niche in a corner of the tower. This was St. Stephen, carrying a pile of stones and maybe a book. Walking up to the South door entrance, I was met by a friendly lady who introduced herself as Ros, and she immediately alerted me to a pile of plaster on the entrance floor - the result of water damage finally doing its worst. Not easy to dawdle and enjoy the Romanesque tympanum over that South door! But my chat with Ros convinced me that another visit would be a good idea...there is much to see and enjoy in St. Stephen's. 

I learned from her that she was just tidying up after a group of Zen Buddhists had enjoyed a night's sleep on the church floor - using carefully-arranged kneelers as mattresses. It seems this is not an unusual occurrence for such folk on their spiritual treks along the Thames path and environs. 

My chat with Ros led me to share some local history knowledge, and she told me about a unique character called William Tayler, who hailed from the hamlet of Grafton, close to Clanfield. He went to London and entered into service in a household in Marylebone, London in Victorian times, and kept a diary which is published as The Diary of William Tayler (1837). This journal offers a candid look at the daily routines, gossip and hardships of a 19th century servant. It offers local historians a picture of the contrasting lives of the rural working class poverty in the Clanfield and Grafton area with the structured reality of the rhythms of urban domestic service.

Ros's parting gift to me apart from a gratis copy of an old leaflet describing the highlights of the church, was the recommendation to visit Blake's Kitchen in the village, and enjoy one of their signature cinnamon buns! 

And so I wandered along to Blake's and enjoyed a coffee and bun as recommended. A fine place, with outdoor and indoor space, an on-site post office, and a friendly atmosphere. An excellent way to await the call from Paul, which duly came to let me know that the job was complete on my van. It was time to wander back along Mill Lane, check the job, grab the invoice and say my grateful goodbyes.

Blake's Cinnamon Buns

What to say about this visit? And why, really, have I narrated these details? In simple terms, I guess I might say the walk was a pilgrimage of sorts. This village, which yes, I've driven to through a few times, but which until this day I have never explored, was the birthplace of my father in August 1920. 

He was the 7th child of my grandparents, who went on to produce 3 more offspring. My grandfather was a cowman/farmworker, and by all accounts did not settle for long in each place where he found employment. By serendipity, the campervan business was here in the village, and I was glad to be drawn here for an enforced couple of hours. 

Here I was able to absorb the  contrasts and a sense of a place known by the likes of William Tayler. Here was a place which had not substantially changed in the 100 years between his time in Grafton, and the time of itinerant farmworkers in the early 20th century. And I was able to reflect on how those workers' cottages have now become desirable Cotswolds residences for folk with leisure time to enjoy coffee and genteel socialising. And how Zen Buddhists and the grandson of one such worker are blessed with the time to wander free and comfortable among the pathways his ancestors trod in a whole other world.

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Postscript ( June 9th 2026)

A review of the 1921 Census tells me that in that year:

Edwin ( b. Hatherop, Glos ) worked at Northcourt Farm

The Farm manager was a Mr F Bowden

His co-workers were:

•             Alfred Benfield  b. Grafton
•             George Shayler b. "Oxfordshire"
•             William Temple b. Clanfield
•             William Parrott b. Clanfield

Edwin lived at The Green in Clanfield. No house number/name is recorded.

He lived there with his wife Mary and children:

•                         Edwin Jesse b. 1910 "Oxfordshire"
•                         Pam   b. 1911 Hampton Gay
•                         Rupert b. 1913 Hampton Gay
•                         Alice b. 1914 "Oxfordshire"
•                         Percy b. 1916 Kencot
•                         Hector b. 1919 Bampton
•                         Kenneth b. 1920 Clanfield

... and the story continues.

Restored workers' cottages 2026 , The Green , Clanfield

The Green, Clanfield 2026

Northcourt Farm for Sale 2026: PDF Here (May 2026)

Alone on a Wide Wide Sea

I have just read "Alone on a Wide Wide Sea" by Michael Morpurgo, prompted by the enthusiasm of my Granddaughter. A children’s adventure novel certainly, but beneath that it is really a meditation on exile, memory, loss, survival, and the sea as both destroyer and redeemer.

Morpurgo’s novel draws on the real history of post-war British child migration schemes that sent thousands of children to Australia, often with terrible consequences.

The novel is divided into two linked journeys.

The first half tells the story of Arthur Hobhouse, an orphaned boy separated from his sister Kitty after the Second World War and shipped to Australia as part of a child migration programme. He arrives believing he is being given a new life, but instead finds exploitation and brutality on an isolated farm in the outback. 

Arthur survives through friendship and resilience. Morpurgo drives the narrative forward, describing a series of Arthur's life-events which captivate the imagination, and links us seamlessly to the second half.

The second half shifts to Arthur’s daughter Allie, who undertakes a solo voyage from Australia back to England. I will avoid spoilers, tempted as I am to share some magical moments which permeate this narrative. Suffice it to say that Allie's journey becomes both literal and spiritual: an attempt to reconnect broken family lines across oceans and generations.

What makes the book linger in the mind is not merely the plot, but its atmosphere of immense distances — emotional as much as geographical.

Morpurgo uses images of horizons, empty oceans, birds, stars, and weather. The title itself comes from The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, and the albatross motif consciously echoes that poem, which is a feature of the story. The sea becomes almost metaphysical: indifferent, beautiful, terrifying, and yet somehow healing too.

In this novel, the story of healing is sublimely told.

I reflect on two themes here: the story of the Cospatrick disaster which I researched with colleagues in 2024 for our local history group. And then my recent reflections on the life of H.W. "Bill" Tilman, whose many sailing adventures included the ocean around Cape Horn and the Atlantic, traversed also by Allie and described so dramatically and engagingly.

This story also belongs to the larger emotional history of British emigration — especially the severing of family ties through oceanic distance. The Cospatrick tragedy represented the Victorian age of migration: long sea passages, uncertain futures, and the terrible vulnerability of emigrants once they crossed the horizon. [ More about the Cospatrick is here ]

Here is a clip from a 1991 talk for the Wychwoods Local History Society. It is a moving account of the fate of one individual child at journey's end. 

There are several particularly striking parallels for those post-war journeys undertaken by Arthur in the novel: conditions in the 1870s, of course, were vastly different from those on post-WW2  vessels, but children were still travelling into the unknown with little agency over their fate, the sea functioning simultaneously as pathway and threat, the emotional violence of permanent separation from homeland and kin.

Memory preserved through small personal relics — in this novel, Arthur's talismanic key; in emigrant histories often letters, or keepsakes, discovered through research and enquiry over time.

In both the Cospatrick story and Morpurgo’s novel, one senses how migration was often narrated publicly as opportunity, while privately it could feel like abandonment, rupture, or exile, or worse.

Albeit in simpler language, Morpurgo writes about the the sea almost in the older literary tradition of, say,  Joseph Conrad  rather than modern children’s fiction. The sea is not merely scenery; it forms character and challenges assumptions. And we can see this operating in the stories of Tilman's expeditions, certainly.

Another interesting aspect  is how the novel treats memory across generations. Arthur’s memories are fragmentary and damaged — he barely trusts them himself by the end. Allie effectively becomes the historian of her father’s life, working with her family to trace her family story, piecing together identity through , travel, testimony, and objects. This resembles the work of local history societies in miniature such as ours: recovering broken human narratives from traces left behind.

Morpurgo’s prose is deceptively simple. Sure, we can classify him only as a children’s author, but books like this work because they understand that children’s literature of this quality can carry adult historical themes with skill and panache.