In today's (London) Sunday Times

        Time to face the music

             Out of Tune
   David Helfgott and the Myth of Shine
         by Margaret Helfgott
       Warner Books 15.99 pp294

   Dan Cairns

   Sibling rivalry and the often gruelling obstacle course of family life
   will be fresh in the minds of many at this time, soon after Christmas:
   a period when renewed proximity can cause unsettled scores to clamour
   for resolution, reinforcing in some the belief that the nest was flown
   with good reason in the first place.

   Differing perceptions of a shared past are at the heart of Margaret
   Helfgott's impassioned, anguished book.  The author's brother is the
   Australian pianist David Helfgott, whose descent into madness provided
   the raw material for the hugely successful 1996 film Shine.  Margaret's
   contention - and her case is a powerful one - is that Shine rides
   roughshod over the facts.  Her chief complaint is that the role played
   by the late Peter Helfgott in his children's upbringing has been grossly
   misrepresented.  The film portrays the collapse of David's health as
   being the direct, inevitable result of his father's psychological and
   physical tyranny.  Yet, if Margaret is to be believed, the family home
   was a place of music and laughter, intellectually vibrant and healthily
   competitive, in which their father was a benign and supportive presence.
   Moreover, the film conveniently ignores David's diagnosis as a sufferer
   from schizo-affective disorder, and the fact that the family has a
   history of mental illness.  Certainly, the film's director Scott Hicks
   and David's second wife Gillian - who on the evidence here is positively
   Chekhovian in her usurpative appetites - could be said to be guilty of
   a selective approach to David's life.  Hicks bombastically describes his
   mission to bring David's story to the screen as a "10-year odyssey", yet
   he fails during this presumably busy-bee decade to talk to any of the
   key people who nurtured David's prodigious gifts or pulled him back
   from the brink of self-destruction:  his three sisters, brother, mother,
   piano teachers, girlfriends, first wife - all remain unspoken to, their
   anxious requests for information about the film rebuffed, their
   telephone calls unanswered.  The only sop is a disclaimer at credits'
   end, so tiny that a projectionist enlisted by the family takes two days
   with a magnifying glass to decipher its grudging qualification.

   Instead, Hicks films what might more accurately be called Gillian's
   Story.  In this, more Hollywood-friendly version, it is Gillian who
   rides to David's rescue, who puts him back on the concert stage in what
   one critic described as a "grotesque circus", and who, his sister
   alleges, reduces his medication to increase his performing edge.

   Shine received its British television premiere last week and was as
   compelling as ever.  It may not be true, of course, but when did that
   ever get in the way of a good story?

Tony Duggan
Staffordshire,
United Kingdom.