Abruptly it would finish in an obscene, deep-throated chuckle, which had an odd quality of knowingness and familiarity, suggesting an intimate awareness of the stark fear of the man walking through the undergrowth below, and a malicious pleasure at the prospect of some inevitable and terrible doom. The low, hoarse laugh would seem unending. Adapted from Robin Maugham’s short story and with stunning black & white photography, The Servant is a thrilling, ingenious and imtemporal British classic. Then, suddenly, I would jump as if a gun had been fired close to me, as the silence was rent by the piercing din of the kookaburra, screeching and screeching from the branches of a tree above, until the menacing sound changed to a mocking laugh. Barrett’s awe-inspiring efficiency cleverly masks his true intentions, ultimately giving way to a suspicious and insidious control where the roles of master and servant are reversed. For these dense forests belonged to the pale ghostly trees and to the strange creatures that were hidden in them. Yet even here in the stillness of the early evening I had a feeling that as a human being I was an intruder in the forest. Berrima, in fact, was merely a little paddock which had been carved out of the wilderness. The Servant is like a nightmarish version of PG Wodehouse’s Jeeves and Wooster: the benign, discreet and all-knowing servant effectively controlling everything in the life of the feather-headed. “The whole district of Australia where I lived was just a small plot in the immensity of the huge continent whose fringes only had been explored.
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