The Count of Monte Cristo, Alexander Dumas (E book edition)

The Bonfire of the Vanities, Tom Wolfe (Vintage, 2010[1987])

It’s a commonplace of the Creative Writing tuition industry that being a reader will make you a better writer.

I recently bought an e-reader that was pre-loaded with several dozen books in English. Among them was The Count of Mote Cristo, and it was that which I chose to read to surrender my e-reader virginity. A short time later I was loaned a copy of Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities, and wanting to return it quickly, set into that one too!

The coincidental parallel readings threw up an interesting comparison of these two long novels, so widely spaced apart in time, yet dealing in many ways with similar themes. I can imagine Dumas and Wolfe sitting together in that circular room which Forster proposes in his Aspects of the Novel (Arnold, 1927).

The differences between the novels are obvious. Dumas’ story covers decades, and deals with one man’s quest for revenge upon a group of people who have ill-used him in the first fifth of the thousand page epic. Wolfe’s story covers only a few months, and describes the way one man’s folly is exploited by a group of people around him. Yet where there is difference we instinctively search for similarity. Both stories are firmly rooted in their ‘one man’, and use him to explore his wider society.

Their settings, centuries and continents apart, are the same, the worlds of high society and high finance, in both cases, being contrasted with the worlds of low-life criminality and the judiciary. Paris is the New York of its time, and Wolfe’s character Arthur Ruskin makes the connection: ‘This city is what Paris used to be’ (Wolfe, p590), but the main protagonist, Sherman McCoy has done so five hundred pages earlier: ‘There it was, the Rome, The Paris, the London of the 20^th century.’(Wolfe,p81)

The two cities are in the nature of characters themselves, and their natures are themes of the respective stories. Though the word is not used in either book, celebrity is at the heart of them both. Whether it is to weddings or funerals, the crowds come to gape in The Count; and in Bonfires, again in the mouth of Ruskin, we are reminded that living in New York is about being seen: ‘she can’t sleep nights thinking that ( ) the people ( ) in New York might not know who the hell she is.’ In both books the crowds are drawn to the courtrooms, and in both books critical turning points are reached in those courtrooms. In The Count, both Fernand, and Villefort suffer their decisive defeats in the Courtroom, and the climactic scene of Bonfires takes place there too.

It is not only celebrity and the justice system that is examined in common however. Behind both of these stands the inequality in financial resources that is at the heart of both societies. Both books deal in currency, quoting figures that by the time of my reading are almost equally meaningless in representing value. We understand them, not because of their detail, but because of their contexts. Monte Cristo’s hundred million would not get him onto the Rich List these days, and $150 is about average for a decent restaurant meal nowadays, even out in the provinces where I live! Yet we know that the figures being quoted are always breathtakingly high to the characters quoting them and in both books money, the need for money, as much as the love of it, drives them on.

What I found interesting, among other things, was that Bonfires, on its covers, is pitched as a comedy, something which I did not find in it, until quite near the end, as Judge Kovitsky’s courtroom spirals into riot, and I wasn’t sure that it was intended that way. The Count is certainly no comic creation, as the man who was Dantes, enriched beyond the dreams of his time, plans and executes, the destruction of those who incarcerated and betrayed him.

Here again, in the two so different stories, I found similarities, for as Monte Cristo first sees, and then reacts to the true nature of his avenging persona, so McCoy goes on a personal journey, becoming almost an avenger himself by the novel’s end.

The similarities throw me back onto differences though. Whereas both books have a strong ‘love’ interest, their treatment of women is surprisingly different, with Wolfe’s story seeming, to me at least, to treat its women more contemptuously than Dumas’. The X Rays and Lemon Tarts, even the apparently successful Judy are portrayed as essentially useless; none have the nobility of Valentine, Eugenie, or even Mercedes. Dumas’ presentation of Eugenie must have been daringly positive in his time, as he makes the point that though they book twin beds, during their flight from Paris, she and her female companion are using only one when Andrea bursts in upon them.

The foregrounded relationships between the sexes disappointed me too, especially in The Count, seeming to be between ‘roles’ rather than people, and that between the Count and Haidee I found the most disappointing of all. At least McCoy’s Mrs Ruskin had something about her that he could respond to without her being entirely submissive to him. They remained individuals, though they came to see through each other in the end.

In the matter of race, I found Dumas’ world less inherently racist than Wolfe’s, though both categorise people by their ethnicity. Dumas’ characters’ racism seems to have less self-conscious malice about it, and in Wolfe’s novel it is so insistent and all pervading. Of course, this may represent a heightened distaste for it in the later novelist, rather than a greater prevalence of it in the society he depicts.

Another difference was the parochialism of the stories. Despite the mention of Lake Como, and the 747 Middle Eastern air flights, mention of places outside New York are rare in Wolfe’s book, with the exception of his, to me, surprisingly large, English influences, whereas Dumas’ characters inhabit a wider world. Bearing in mind the comparative modes of transport this is even more surprising. Hardly any of the major characters in Bonfires travel, yet most of them in The Count do.

Does this reflect the cultural differences between two times, or between two cultures, or is that a spurious question? Certainly, it seems to me that the world view of Dumas’ Parisians is somewhat broader than that of Wolfe’s New Yorkers, even among the poor.

What both stories do, in their similar and different ways, is to examine the way that we spend our time, and to draw attention to the fact that, unlike our fortunes, it cannot be built up or replaced. Death, and the certainty of it, is contemplated throughout them both. The Count ends with Monte Cristo sailing away with Haidee, while Morrel is reassured by his beloved Valentine that we must ‘wait and hope’, which might be taken for two words that sum up the burden of the story. Wolfe’s novel ends with a press report, taken from a year after the closing events of the main text. As a Dickensian ending does, the author here ties up a few loose ends by outlining what has become of his major characters. Wait and hope though seems to have morphed into endure, but that might be my reading of the novel.

Comparing the two, being aware of the two, gave me a greater sense of each, of how they handle their themes, and settings, and characters, and stories, which makes me wonder, if being a writer might help you to become a better reader.

The Accidental Tourist by Lawrence Kasdan (dir), Warner Bros.1988.

Remarkable in this adaptation is the opening scene of the film, in which the protagonist Macon Leary, returns home to his wife, to be told over the kitchen table that she wants a divorce. What makes it remarkable is not the fact that it is an entirely created scene, absent from the book. Many films have that. Rather it is the fact that among the extras on the dvd edition is an alternative opening scene; one that almost exactly replicates the book’s opening. What’s more, it’s a scene that works just as well as in the book, and arguably better than the one chosen for the released film.

Here’s a clear case then of an adaptation that chooses to reject a scene, even though it can perfectly well be filmed, and in fact has been! Frustratingly, the director’s short interview on the dvd makes no mention of what prompted this decision. Yet there is no doubt, from what he does say, that he wants us to understand that he considers this to be a faithful adaptation.

There are other elements of comparison worth looking at. Why, for example, near to the end of the film, is the confrontation between Macon and his wife handled so differently? The scene in the book where Macon leaves does not have the speech of justification that the film puts into his mouth, and his wife is not quite so accepting. I can’t help feeling that here the two storytellers, Tyler, and Kasdan are making judgments about what their respective audiences will accept, and in practice that means that Kasdan, being the adaptor, is making them.

What really intrigues me in this story though is not a difference between the two tellings, but the way that both of them push the viewer/reader down the right road when it comes to rooting for the woman whom Macon will finally end up with. It is a curious story concept that we should want, in effect, to cheer on a man who is leaving his wife. Much more common, in our culture, are stories where women leave their husbands. In fact, our default setting might be that the one is a form of desertion, whilst the other is an act of liberation. Yet here, Anne Tyler’s story goes against that grain. How does she do that, and get us to go along with it?

One way is to have the woman leave her husband first. Macon is shown as boring and repressed right from the start, but her asking for a divorce, and him wanting to keep trying puts him, in dramatic terms, in the right, and her in the wrong. Having prejudiced us that way, Tyler only has to keep her ‘unsympathetic’ and we are half way to accepting his later actions.

We have to like Muriel too. In the film Muriel’s appearance is a little more quirky and, I suppose, she is intended to be more attractive. There is a bit of stereotyping here I’m afraid. She is younger, and slimmer, and whereas the film studiously avoids any eroticism, much is made of her long legs and short skirts. These are clichés, and as such disappointing. Tyler’s text has to be a bit more subtle. In the book those legs are described as being ‘like sticks’, not a description guaranteed to arouse, I’d say. Muriel gets her brownie points in the novel, not only from her quirkiness, but from the dog’s reactions to her, and her interactions with it. If the dog likes a character, we know, as readers, that the character is OK! The film doesn’t make so much of this. Perhaps we are not so good at observing the moving image of a dog as we are at interpreting the words in which one is described.

‘Edward grinned up at her and folded his ears back inviting a pat. She bent and stroked his head.’ (The Accidental Tourist, p27) This is a good start for Muriel, and on the next page ‘Edward licked her cheekbone’. Get a stage dog to fold back its ears and half the audience will think it’s scared. Get it to lick your leading lady and half will think Yuk! But an author can tell us, or nudge us towards understanding what it means.

A stark difference between how we understand pictures and words is shown right at the end of the movie. Seeing Macon in his cab, Muriel smiles. It is a relatively long shot, in terms of duration – a cinematic way of saying, take note of this smile! Then we cut to his face, and he is smiling too. Then we cut to the final credits, over black. Those two smiles are the final images of the story in film.

In the book the final paragraph is longer, and more complex, but ends in the same place. Here are its closing words:

‘And there on the curb stood Muriel, surrounded by suitcases and string-handled shopping bags and cardboard cartons overflowing with red velvet. She was frantically waving down taxis – first one ahead, then Macon’s own. Arretez! Macon cried to the driver. The taxi lurched to a halt. A sudden flash of sunlight hit the windshield, and spangles flew across the glass. The spangles were old water spots, or maybe the markings of leaves, but for a moment Macon thought they were something else. They were so bright and festive, for a moment he thought they were confetti.’

No smiles then, but ‘spangles’ that need to be interpreted. In the book, Tyler interprets for us. They make him think of confetti, and she makes us think of weddings, and that tells us that Muriel and Macon will get married, and live happily ever after. Spangles could have been done on film, but how could they have been done to ensure that we gave them the correct significance? And what if those smiles, which we could see and understand perfectly on film, had been used in the text? They wouldn’t have ‘told’ us enough, I suspect. They would have been not quite specific enough. In film Muriel’s smile shows us that she understands what is happening. Macon’s smile confirms it. Had Tyler told us that they ‘smiled’ she would have been raising multiple possibilities, not nailing down an outcome.

In the book we only need Macon’s confirmation. We know what Muriel wants. We have known since she first asked ‘can’t you leave him hone with your wife?’ We know this in the film too, but the book has taken us inside Macon’s head in a way that the film does not. We know his decision, and for him to perceive the spangles as confetti is enough to tell us that all will be OK.

What if we had not been won over to Muriel though? Then the story would be a tragedy. The fool has left his wife, and after he had had the good sense to go back to her! After she had the sense to come back to him! In both versions it is important that we want him to leave her, so that when he does it is ‘our’ happy ending.

Again, moving pictures and printed words present the story differently: the former ‘shows’, and the latter ‘tells’. Words work through our interpretation of them. Moving pictures work through our observation of them.

It is curious to me that it should be at the very beginnings, and at the end, that I notice the greatest changes between the two versions. We set out from and arrive at different places, and that means that we have taken different journeys.

Book: Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad, Penguin Popular Classics 1992 (1902)

Heart of Darkness is a novel set in Africa in the late nineteenth century. Apocalypse Now is a film set in Vietnam during the late twentieth. Yet here is an example of one story being knowingly sprung out of another. The differences are massive, but the references to the earlier work are explicit and intentional. Coppola was not merely taking Conrad’s story and using it for his own purposes, but was insisting that you, the viewer, knew he was doing so.

            Coppola’s film, in the making, was itself almost as much of an epic as the story it tells. Interrupted by a war (the helicopters came back with real bullet holes, and real bloodstains), threatened by out of control budgets, almost losing its star to a heart attack, it has been the subject of a documentary (Heart of Darkness -) almost as exciting, certainly as bizarre. Consequently it is a rich source of speculation and debate. I shall stick to a bare couple of threads that I feel make an interesting comparison between the ways in which books and films might get on with their jobs of entertaining and engaging us.

            The most obvious parallel is, I guess, that both versions are a quest for Kurtz, a rogue trader in the book, a rogue soldier in the film. Both stories are built around the balance between our expectations of Kurtz, created and examined during their journeys, and the realities of him on arrival. In both stories the narrator is forced to reassess himself and his values as a consequence of the encounter. In fact there is a second comparison to be made here between the Redux version of the film, a cut that, to my way of thinking, presents a much fuller and more rounded Kurtz, and therefore demands a much more thoughtful reaction to him, and the original general release of 1979. AN Redux is much more than a re-issue of the earlier film with extra minutes bolted on. As it says on the tin ‘it is a completely re-thought, re-mixed and re-edited interpretation’. 

The other element that I am interested is that of the river-quest. It is the way the river journey is presented, in text and pictures, that interests me and along the way I’ll dip my paddle in a few other comparable journeys.

The boat is a curious concept. Not surprising that early flying machines were air-‘ships’, nor that spacecraft are space-‘ships’, because the boat is a device that enables us to exist in an environment for which we are not equipped. It floats upon a medium in which we cannot survive for long, connecting us with and detaching us from normality at the same time. In the film, following their brush with a tiger, a character tells himself ‘never get off the boat’. The boat is not only the means of reaching a Prospero’s Isle, where all things may be experienced and reflected upon, but can also be a version of it. The boat is what carries us, but it also becomes our proxy world; and on a river, as opposed to the sea or a lake, it carries us in a particular direction.

By way of contrast, in the film Fitzcarraldo, the boat itself is carried overland, but when finally launched reasserts its own authority over the story, and the characters in it! There have been other overland boats. The story of Hugh Glass, the American Mountain man is one, and so is Peter Shankland’s excellent account of the WW1 ‘naval’ campaign on Lake Tanganyika, not quite a parallel to The African Queen.

Bogart and Hepburn’s story though is primarily a river story. The boat carries them, though they pull it from time to time, and the river sets the course of the journey. River journeys fall into two types. Those who go downstream are carried by the current. Those who go up battle against it. In Deliverance the primitive violence of the river is paralleled by that of the local hillbillies. The ‘city-boys’ are carried from one danger to the next, all the way down to their final denouement. In Lord of the Rings, the Fellowship takes to the Great River and is carried south to its fateful meeting with the Orcs above the Falls of Rauros.

The search for Kurtz though, is upstream, and through unknown territory. In penetrating into the hinterland, in both book and film, the narrator is taken deeper into mystery and danger. Coppola neatly parallels some of the passages in the book, and passages is an apposite word here, for it is not only specific locations and incidents upon the river that test the characters in both stories, but sections of the river. Passages within the greater journey have their own identities.

Perhaps the most specific parallel is the attack out of the mist (p64 in the Penguin Classics edition), where the natives shoot ‘sticks’, and where a black man in both cases, dies with a spear through his chest. In the film this signals a distinct move away from the realistic ‘horrors’ of the Vietnam War, towards the nightmarish ones of Kurtz’s world.

There are other more general echoes though: the film’s photographer at Kurtz’s village parallels the Russian manager at the book’s trading station, and it is the same figure in both who tells us first of Kurtz’s writings, and of his voice. In film and book it is he who tells us ‘you don’t talk with that man, you listen to him’. Even the French outpost of the Redux film (absent from the earlier general release) reminds me of one of the abandoned stations Conrad’s boat calls in at.

The narrator/protagonist in both cases is isolated from his compatriots aboard their respective boats, and it is his isolation that gives perspective to his changing view of Kurtz, again, in both cases.  The final location for film and book is similar too, with its hanging bodies and naked warriors, more so in the Redux edition. It is in the earlier version film alone that Kurtz’s village is obliterated at the end. Both though, like the book, use his repeated mantra: ‘The horror. The horror’

A difference between film and novel is in where the story is being told from, in where a story can be told from. The novel begins on a boat in the Thames, and after a seemingly conventional first person introduction, resolves into a story being told, also in the first person, by one of the characters introduced to us by the original narrator. This is not an unheard of technique. H.G. Wells does something similar, for example in The Invisible Man, allowing his eponymous hero to give his own account of events, at length, to another character just before the climax of the otherwise third person narrative. In Conrad’s story, the second narrator dominates until the end, with only brief interjections by the original narrator. Coppola, through voice over in the voice of Willard, his equivalent to Conrad’s Marlowe, mimics this, but cannot talk away the viewpoint of the camera which is always a narrator beyond.

Rivers are a powerful metaphor. A contemporary road-oriented view emphasises their quality as a barrier. They must be crossed; forded, swum or bridged. That emphasises the country on the other side; the what that lies beyond. The decision making process is emphasised too; we ‘cross the Rubicon’, and are committed to our ventures, and adventures. We seize, hold or burn our bridges.

            At first glance the ‘road’ movie may seem a contemporary version, but to my way of thinking roads are less prescriptive than rivers, though they have their ports of call, at way stations and homesteads. They too bring us into, and take us out of situations, but their byways and turnings allow more choice, for both characters and stories.

            Besides, rivers were once the routes of humankind, not their obstacles, and that element of the metaphor is still understood, and retains its potency. From ‘Deliverance’ to ‘Fitzcarraldo’ the river carries us into our uncertain futures. Going down-river we are borne onward to our destinies, The African Queen to battle on the Lake, the Fellowship of the Ring to its breaking above the Falls of Rauros, Aguirre to his solitary denouement on the endlessly flowing waters.  Going up-river we battle against the current, and are taken deeper into the hinterland, eventually into mountains, where we must disembark and face Kurtz, in any of his guises. At either end, a river journey brings us to changes and final confrontations, to the mountains or the sea and their equally powerful associations. 

            But what sort of adaptation is this? Care has been taken to make the connection throughout the story, even to the point of stretching credulity, yet it is not a retelling of the same story. Coppola is making a film about war, not about ivory trading. He is making a film about America in Asia in the late twentieth century, not one about Europe in Africa during the nineteenth. Is it therefore a sort of homage to the earlier work, rather than a re-working of it? Was it Coppola’s intention to borrow the aura of that work, the way gardeners sometimes borrow a view that lies outside their own garden, but which may be seen from within it? Or did Conrad’s Heart of Darkness merely provide a useful template for Apocalypse Now’s similar journey of discovery, and self-discovery?

            It is Kurtz, as much as the river that binds the two tellings together, or should that be three, because, as I mentioned before, the Redux version differs from the earlier release as much in its handling of Kurtz than in any other aspect. The raw footage that has been added, in terms of minutes duration may not centre on Kurtz, but the scenes that include him significantly change our perception of him. In particular we see more of him, and we see him more clearly. We see Willard listening to him. In Conrad’s novel Kurtz dies, and his story is taken back to a fiancé, who makes of her memory of him almost a religious experience. Coppola’s Kurz is given a family, and lays on Willard the task of taking back, and communicating a testimony to Kurtz’s son. He carries too Kurtz’z typescript testimony.

            The endings of book and film diverge here, but how could they not? Conrad’s Kurtz has a personal meaning for his narrator, and that fiancé, but Coppola’s must carry a public statement about the Vietnam war. Conrad was not, I think, making a political point about imperialism in the way Coppola was about America. The endings of the two films diverge too, for in Redux we end with the boat leaving to make the return journey, while the rains pour noisily down to a soundtrack of ‘local’ music. In the earlier film, as the boat leaves, a silent bombardment obliterates Kurtz’s village. These are two quite different statements to make at the end of the ‘same’ story, two different responses to it. In all three cases though, that repeated ‘the horror’ is present.

            Both book and film strive to show us that ‘horror’, and to take us on a journey towards it. In both cases we are shown a Kurtz who has made that journey, and a Willard/Marlowe who has tried to understand him. Is whether or not we, as viewers and readers, can accompany either of them dependent on what we bring to the stories, as much as what we have been told, and shown?

Interesting how, like a very good stage version I’ve seen a couple of times at Theatre By The Lake in Keswick, those two orphans, Want and Ignorance, are left out…. which turns the story more towards the personal redemption of Scrooge, and away fro the wider socio-political focus of Dickens’ story. Maybe I should do an adaptation piece on that!

I’m reading Peter Ackroyd’s biography of Dickens (didn’t his brother have a spot of bother with Agatha Christie? – no, not Dickens’ brother!), and wondering what there is left for Claire Tomlin to say!

My other favourite Christmas story is The Tailor of Gloucester, whose little house in Cathedral Close I made a pilgrimage to earlier this year! There’s a good film version of that too…. but I can’t remember who by, (OK, by whom, then)because I only have it on video and nothing to play those on anymore!

May your Yule logs crackle and spit. A very Merry Christmas to you all… Maybe in 2012 I’ll get a keyboard with a proper M on it!

BHDandMe

So, we’se at a party at Joe & Sharon’s. I know. It musta bin a blue moon. I says ta Joe, Mildred, TMOL, ain’t gotta drink. I says, would ya like ta giver her one? Then I remembers I’se speakin’ English ta ya English, an’ I can see Joe’s thinkin’, you jus’ gimme the woyd Mildred, an’ I’m ya man!

            Like that time I asked him if his sister-in-law, who lives in France, was gonna come across this year. He says, Kowalski, ya can live in hope.

            Ya see, that’s whaddya ya gotta get straight when ya’s talkin’ English to ya English. Ya gotta get clear whadyas meanin’ ta say. Why last week we wuz out with the gals, havin’ a meal, and Mildred got ta take a crème brulee. She wuz tappin’ it with her spoon. I says Mildred, that sure is a hard one, which maya put the idea inta her head, because she ups an’ says, by way a explanation, that’s ‘cos they gives ‘em a blow job, Kowalski.

            I says, Mildred, that sure ought ta do it, an’ wanna the old dames down the far end a the table is sayin’, what’s everybody laughin’ at. But the old dame’s gotta sister, wanna them gals lived her life as a maiden lady an’ never married. She pipes up, Mildred done said sumpin’ rude, dear. She says, I’ll tell ya about it later.

            I’m thinkin’, well, I’m thinking jus’ what yore thinkin’. Yeah, I wuz thinkin’ that too. Hey, I never said nuthin’ about false teeth.

[see more of Kowalski on his page.. better still, buy the book from www.unboundpress.com ]

The Lord of the Rings – Return of the King– Peter Jackson (dir).

Tolkien’s the Lord of the Rings  is a big story, stretching to six larger than average novels organised into three volumes. Peter Jackson’s film adaptation is almost as big, stretching to three longer than average movies. Consequently there is a lot to say about the comparison. I want to look at one incident, part of the Battle of the Pelennor Fields, in the third volume and film, The Return of the King. In particular I want to look at how the two versions handle the engagement of the Rohirrim in the battle. There is a change made here that not only illustrates a shift in emphasis away from one of the leading themes of the book, but reveals a quite different attitude on the part of the storyteller, to what the Rohirrim experience, and how it is to be understood.

            Similarities abound. The Rohirrim have mustered for war, and have been summoned to the aid of Minas Tirith, by the Red Arrow in the book, and by the rather more visual beacon fires sequence in the film. Aragorn has left to walk the Paths of the Dead. Theoden is leading his horsemen, with Eowyn and Merry hiding amongst them. What interests me is what happens differently when they arrive on the battlefield.

            In both cases they charge to break the siege of the city, but in the film Theoden is given a stirring pre-battle speech, expanded from the book’s five lines of verse. A technique frequently used by Jackson is to transplant words taken from the book, placing them in different mouths, at different times, and in different locations. This serves to preserves elements of Tolkien’s story but also, often distorts them. Here Theoden’s speech, drawn from verses and statements made later in the battle, as well as from those uttered at the outset, shows the Rohirrim in a different light to that of the book.

            Tolkien’s Rohirrim charge to Theoden’s exhortation:

                        Arise, arise, Riders of Theoden!

                        Fell deeds awake: fire and slaughter!

                        Spear shall be shaken, shield be splintered,

                        A sword-day, a red day, ere the sun rises!

                        Ride now, ride now! Ride to Gondor!

                                                                        (LotR,p133)

            The charge is joyous. ‘All the host of Rohan burst into song’, Tolkien tells us.

The battle does not go well though, for the chief of the Black Riders who, at the sound of the Rohirrim’s horns has turned away from Gandalf, lone defender of the breached main gate of the city, arrives on the field to confront Theoden. Eowyn and Merry come to the king’s aid, but cannot save him, and are struck down in their turn, though the Black Rider is slain.

            Here is the crucial sequence that interests me, for Eomer receives the kingship from the dying Theoden. Words spoken in the film by Eowyn have been spoken by Merry, and Theoden has not lived to find out that Eowyn has been in the charge. Important to Tolkien, I think, is the passing on of the kingship by Theoden: ‘Hail, King of the Mark!’ he said’. This theme of royal legitimacy is central to the book, but peripheral to the film, and perhaps one of the defining differences between the world views, and worlds, of the author and the film maker.

            Eomer’s assumption of the throne is followed immediately by his discovery of the apparently dead Eowyn. The discovery sends him into despair.

‘He stood a moment as a man who is pierced in the midst of a cry by an arrow through the heart; and then his face went deathly white, and a cold fury rose in him, so that all speech failed him for a while. A fey mood took him.’

            How closely, I wonder, did those words recall for Tolkien specific moments of actual death in battle that he had experienced? Eomer’s fey mood precipitates the next movement in the story, for it leads him to utter the words ‘Death, death, death! Death take us all!’ This becomes his battle call to the Rohirrim. ‘Over the field rang his clear voice calling: Death! Ride, ride to ruin and the world’s ending!’

            The Rohirrim resume the battle, taking this as their battle-cry. Eventually, against overwhelming odds, Eomer plants his standard to make a last stand, and the arrival of the Corsairs of Umbar threatens them with yet more foes. In the bleakest of moments another verse of the ‘lay’ that Tolkien creates is uttered, by the new king, ending with ‘now for ruin and a red nightfall’. Yet the despair of the ‘death ride’ has turned again to ‘the lust of battle’. It is the turning point of the battle too, for the Corsairs are revealed to be Aragorn and his ghost army, come to Minas Tirith, ‘though all the hosts of Mordor lay between us’, as Aragorn predicted.

            The film handles this sequence quite differently, and the differences ripple out, backwards and forwards into the story from the moment of Theoden’s death, and the discovery of Eowyn’s body.

            No longer does this seminal moment trigger the death ride. No longer does it mark the passing on of the kingship. In fact the succession is not overtly referred to in the film. The death ride has already taken place.  Those snatches of verse, and that cry of Eomer’s have already been delivered in the film, by Theoden, and before the initial charge to break the siege of the city. The Rohirrim’s suicidal ‘ride to ruin’, and their battle cry of ‘Death! Death!’ is not the result of what they have experienced in battle, but of their expectations of battle to come. Here is a difference of perception that marks the generation gap and cultural gulf between Tolkien and Jackson. For the one warfare is an experience being reacted to. For the other it is one being speculated about.

            Jackson and his associates, talking on the ‘specials’ to the dvd set of the film, tell how the books were rearranged to make a more chronologically simple telling of the story. Some eight chapters of the book’s volume two were incorporated into the third film. The changes to the battle are not discussed, perhaps because they were considered unimportant, and uncontroversial. Those ripples I mentioned are worth looking at though, for Jackson has to give the Rohirrim’s ‘death ride’ plausibility, and that can no longer be the discovery of Eowyn and the death of Theoden! So he goes back into the story, at least as far as Helm’s Deep, setting seeds of doubt in the minds of the Rohirrim, preparing the viewer for the despair that they will display.  This culminates in the encounter between Theoden and his commanders, in camp where the army is mustering. Aragorn has left, and a sense of gloom pervades, defeatism, one might call it. The fear that they cannot win against the forces of Mordor is expressed, and Theoden’s answer is to say ‘no, we cannot, yet we will fight’. This provides the justification for the ‘death’ ride, yet it also subtly changes our perception of this warrior nation. The film’s horsemen seem reluctant warriors, not the ‘fell people’ that Tolkien envisaged. They have, perhaps, an early twenty first century attitude to warfare, rather than an early twentieth century one.

            There is still the finding of Eowyn to be dealt with, and the film makes this a purely personal grief, with Eomer giving a great cry and sinking to his knees beside her. The rage of Eomer, palpable in the book, is absent from the film. Twice in the book, at that low point of the battle Tolkien tells us that Eomer laughed, once as he speaks the ‘ride to ruin’ verse, and again a sentence later, ‘even as he laughed at despair’. ‘he was still unscathed, and he was young, and he was king’, Tolkien has said, but Jackson’s Eomer seems to lack such unreasoning potency! Is there a perceptual change, from the warrior to the soldier, between the two? And what of the issue of Kingship? The decade in which Jackson’s films were made saw western democracy (largely republican or with constitutionally limited monarchies) fighting back against perceived attack, and he has Sam, at Osgiliath, articulate something like their creed. The war in which Tolkien served shattered the certainties of the autocratic, hereditary empires, and it is to their certainties his novel looks nostalgically back. The ‘ride to ruin’ of the Rohirrim, in its different versions, illuminates the different contexts in which it is told.

Film by Harold Pinter (screenplay) (1971)

You would no more make a film of The Go Between without paying homage to its opening line, than you would one of The Importance of Being Ernest without the handbag! What’s more, because it is such an iconic line – even people who are not familiar with the story are likely to recognise it – we are all waiting for it.

            The film does not make us wait long, giving it in voice over as the two boys, Marcus and Leo, ride in an open coach and horses, towards Brandham Hall.

            ‘The past is a foreign country. They do things differently there.’

            Thus the film gets out of the way what is expected of it, but also adroitly skips a dozen or so pages of the novel that I suspect are not so well known. Hartley’s opening line may have rung down the decades, but his opening chapter is a bit of a turkey, getting out of the way (or in it, if you have to wade through) a great deal of backstory, about Leo’s character and situation, that the film knows it can do without, or dribble in later, or leave us to guess, from what we see, and from what happens subsequently.

            In fact, reading those pages, I’m drawn to think that only a few lines of them are really important, but that the rest gives us a context in which we can believe in those lines: ‘Had it not been for that diary (….) I should not be sitting alone.’ It is the fact that Leo, as a middle aged man, is alone, and that his loneliness is a consequence of the events we are about to read of, that is the burden of this first chapter. This is the context of the telling of the story.

            The film plays down this context, although it does not entirely abandon it. Instead of giving us it at the outset, the film builds the concept, scene by scene in a series of short, unexplained insertions, in which we see the older Leo revisiting places that we recognise from that ‘foreign country’ as we are led through it. It is another way of reaching that final confrontation between Leo and Marian, in which she is enabled to give him her words of wisdom, an answer to his opening position which I quoted above: ‘There’s no spell or curse except an unloving heart’.

            This poignant message, which Leo will carry to Marian’s nephew, shakes the self-protecting veneer of Leo’s adult life. ‘Why then was I moved by what she had said? Why did I half wish that I could see it all as she did?’

            The book pairs the scenes of older Leo, as prologue and epilogue to the events between. The film builds them, piece by piece into the fabric of the story, but in the novel it is clearly Leo’s reflection on how he has reacted to the events of the past that is the point of the story. The question to ask is, does the framing of the novel enhance the poignancy of her final assertion?

            In the film young Leo’s story eclipses the old man’s memory, and his final self revelation seems less important. Perhaps a clue to why this is lies in the portrayal of the characters. Looking back at the film over forty years it seems more dated than does the novel over sixty. This is because the novel evokes, in words, the time it is set in, yet the film, in pictures, in sets, and costumes, evokes the period in which it was made. Here’s a difference between telling and showing. Words must be interpreted. Pictures must be viewed. Even if our interpretations evolve they will still mean what we think they are meant to. What we see remains the same, but it may not mean the same as it once did. Alun Bates as Ted, perhaps despite an intention to accurately reflect the last years of Victoria’s reign, looks like a nineteen seventies folk singer! And because we see Leo as a young boy without having suffered the dreary conditioning of the back-story in that first chapter, it is his story, and that of Ted that we focus on. We do not see it through the older Leo’s eyes, as I think the book intends us to.

            It is not necessary to see this change of emphasis as an attempt to subvert the book. It may simply be Pinter’s way of accomplishing the book’s aims in a different medium. Certainly, what follows in the book that brilliantly simple and startling opening line is a hard read, and had the film tried to follow it the narrative would have come to an abrupt halt. Both book and film were well received, yet in both I have an uneasiness with Marian’s final attitude to what had happened. In some ways it seems like self-deception, rather than some sort of more highly developed grasp on reality, and the ambiguity is there in the older Leo’s response too. The tragedy of Ted is perhaps a little heightened in the film, as it is part of the ongoing story, rather than, as in the book, of the recollection.

            This remains a curiously well matched pair of tellings though. The film made twenty years after the book was written, both set in a period long passed into history at the time of their creation, and both now belonging to a time itself long gone. Comparison with The Shooting Party seems not inappropriate, where the same society is examined, from a similar distance, though the film there was done in the same generation as the writing. It always struck me as important that in her opening lines, Isobel Colegate pushed her story into a past that disconnected it from us, as does Hartley’s first line. Perhaps that has to guide my closing observation: that the novel and the film, in The Go Between, were different generations’ views of the ‘foreign country’, and of what was most interesting in it, and of how we might relate to it.

Novel: No Bed For Bacon, by Caryl Brahms & S.J.Simon (1941)

There is no suggestion on either the book, or the dvd of the film that the one is an adaptation of the other, but on seeing the film for the first time I was instantly reminded of the book.

            Without delving into how a film might come to remind me of a book, without being an adaptation, it is worth looking at this pairing, for the similarities and differences that the two stories present us with. I’ll begin with a similarity, for both have, in what might be called their second scenes, Will Shakespeare himself, scribbling his name, with various spellings, and crossing it out again. Stoppard’s script is online at http://www.imsdb.com/scripts/Shakespeare-in-Love.html

The book has a remarkably similar scene:

            ‘In a cold dark little room over against the back of the Theatre, Sir Francis Bacon was talking eloquently. Opposite him a melancholy figure sat tracing its signature on a pad.

                                    Shaksper

                                    Shakspere

                                     Shekspar

            He always practised tracing his signature when he was bored. He was always hoping that one of these days he would come to a firm decision upon which of them he liked the best. He looked at them. He considered. He shook his head.’ – (Brahms & Simon, Hogarth,1988.p13)

Finding such similarity so early in the film perhaps leads one to look for it later on, and to assume that an adaptation has been made. Academics had already pointed out the variations in Shakespeare’s spelling of his name though, so it is perhaps not to be wondered at that comics might make a joke of it. In fact much of the Shakespeare myth, not least that of who he actually was, and whether he did in fact write the plays that bear his variously spelt name, has passed into popular culture. As I write (2011) another feature film (Anonymous) examining the identity of the playwright has been released.

            The two stories that I am looking at are building then, on a common cultural theme. What they do with that theme is different, but with striking similarities. Stoppard’s script is tied more firmly to Shakespeare, who is not even eponymous in Brahms & Simon’s tale. In fact it is Bacon, and his bed, that top their bill. Queen Elizabeth is common to both stories, but acts almost as a deus ex-machina in the film, whereas she is a central character in the novel.

            The shift of focus is instructive, reminding us that a story, or rather the set of propositions that set us off on a story, can be used for many things. There may be more than one way to skin a cat, but there are also more than cats to be skinned. A number of propositions is common to film and book. Theatre manager, Henslowe, is in debt, and his theatre in jeopardy. Shakespeare is yet to become famous. An upper class lass wants to be an actor. Queen Elizabeth is the arbiter of taste.

            The diverse stories built on these foundations take us in slightly different directions. Brahms and Simon have a more overtly comic story to tell, and fix Shakespeare to his comic plays, especially Twelfth night. They are also more interested in the history of the period, with Essex’s rebellion and Bacon’s pursuit of Elizabeth’s old bed. Stoppard centres the film on Shakespeare, and on the development of Romeo and Juliet. The shift from a comic to a tragic theme suiting the more personal story that the film tells: of Shakespeare’s love affair with the disguised girl. In the film she masquerades as Thomas Kent. In the book, as master Pyck. The murder of Kit Marlowe  is woven into the fabric of the film, and tied to Shakespeare’s illegitimate love affair with her, but is absent from the book. Whatever her name, this is the strongest and most persistent of the story threads to run through both offerings. Again we find precedents for the idea in Shakespeare’s work, and nowhere more so than in Twelfth Night, which though referenced in the book, is not in the film.

            Telling similar stories in different media is not adaptation, but comparisons of the two, as well as providing a source of surprise, can also give us insights into the specific ways in which those different carry out their storytelling.  

            Both stories have Queen Elizabeth’s puddle, and the book uses it as a running gag, with Raleigh sacrificing his magnificent cloak. The film makes a short aside of it, a reference that is not developed, but one that the writer is confident we will understand. Both forms demand at least a cursory knowledge of history, and of Shakespeare, and the deeper that knowledge, the more references will be noticed, and the funnier they will be. It is the way that the background, of Elizabethan London, is dealt with that emphasises the difference between the forms of storytelling.

            The film can use its sets and locations as just that; can show the main protagonists in a foreground behind which the turmoil of the Elizabethan city carries on. The book, with its single thread of words unravelling across the page, must turn aside, however intermittently, from the foreground to create the background. Here is a difference worth understanding about both forms. Films can show us many things at once, and we must be observant enough to spot them as they pass. Books can tell us only one thing at a time, and it is the ordering of those sequences that gives the power to the telling.

            No Bed For Bacon had been the subject of a musical adaptation by Ned Sherrin, and made a short feature in the Daily Mail in the summer of 1993, in which Sir Andrew Lloyd Webber was quoted as describing it as ‘really awful’. My paperback copy of the book lists, on the back cover, Sir Andrew as a fan of Brahms & Simon – but does not mention a film adaptation! There is no hint on the dvd that the producers of the film knew about the earlier story, and that in itself means that the film is not an adaptation. An adaptation is an overt re-working of a previous creation, knowingly undertaken, and openly offered as such. It need not follow the original closely, as we have seen with ‘Went the Day Well’, nor need it have the same agendas, as we saw with ‘First Blood’, but it must pay due acknowledgment to its source. That Shakespeare in Love does not do this means that it would not be seen as an adaptation, even if it were derived from the novel, but as something else.

            This is not a sly way of accusing anyone of plagiarism, people arrive at the same place by many routes, co-incidental and otherwise. A story may have been suggested by another story, yet not have been a conscious adaptation of it. The point about adaptation is the self-consciousness of the attempt. An adaptation stands up to be compared. It is a new telling of something previously told. That is what enables us to look at the changes, if there are any, and to consider what they tell us about the respective storytellers, and the contexts of their stories. Where tellings are merely reminiscent, one of the other, the comparisons we make must rest on entirely different criteria. Both tellers, in such a case, must be presumed to be starting from scratch. With an adaptation the adapter is always aware of, and has an attitude towards the original, and must make decisions in relation to it in the creation of his story.

            This alone, I suspect, inclines our default setting to the belief that adaptations are somehow inferior, rather than merely different. In fact, and I hope several of the adaptations I have looked at in this series will bear this out, this is not inherently true. Adaptations might enrich and deepen the stories they re-tell, whereas ‘non-adaptations’ that seem strikingly similar can only be regarded as being richer, or deeper, but without any causal relation.

Film by Brian de Palma (dir), 1990.

The dates above show that this was a relatively quick adaptation, one perhaps that sought to catch a zeitgeist. That would perhaps imply an intention to be faithful, or at least to look at the same scenes through contemporaneous if different eyes.

            By the time I got around to considering this adaptation I’d got somewhat over confident in my novel to film pairings. I’d begun to predict how it might have been done. In this case I guessed that Tom Wolfe’s almost obsessive English references might be dispensed with, and I was not far out. Certainly the character of Peter Fallows had been transmuted from the pathetic English drunk to the boorish American one, convincingly played by Bruce Willis.

            The character had also been elevated to the role of narrator and guide, both opening and closing the film, in addition to providing some voice-overs in between, as well as his own scenes. This skews the focus of the film, shifting our attention away from the protagonist, Sherman McCoy, and from the almost as important (in the novel) Assistant DA, Kramer. The city too has been downgraded, not quite to the status of anyplace at anytime, but certainly without the specificity of the Bronx versus Park Avenue/Wall Street that Wolfe gives it: so much for zeitgeist.

            The film is more character driven than the book, a subtle shift, which sees the characters driving the action, rather than being driven by their situations. Yet the book goes deeper into the characters, especially the minor ones, which leads me to the realisation that books, unlike films, do not have to pander to the celebrity of their actors. It may muddy the waters of a story to have more rather than fewer interesting characters (look at the numbers in Life and Fate), but it does not lead to problems with billing, contracts, and so on. Likewise with subplots, parallel plots, and comparative storylines, all of which tend to enrich novels, but diffuse the narrative thrust of movies.

            The most significant change wrought by the adaptation here though is in the person of Judge Kovitsky. Here is a white character blacked-up by the casting of Morgan Freeman in this role. This casting decision kicks away a major prop of the novel. No longer is McCoy being tried in a white man’s court, planted like an island in a sea of blacks and Puerto-Ricans. This situation is crucial to the narrative drive of the book. It is what the story is about, and specifically, it is the collapse of that white hegemony that it is about. The film ducks this issue except on the shallowest of levels, and the casting of Morgan Freeman is the most adroit move of that ducking.

            Consider the ending of the courtroom scene, when the case against McCoy collapses. In the book it leads to riot; in the film to Freeman’s statesmanlike quelling of the mob, and his command to them to go home and live decently. Nowhere in the book is this remotely suggested. Instead, Kovitsky, recognising his (white) powerlessness, says, referring to himself, ‘Their only friend, their only fucking friend’, before turning to flee.

            That is not all. The film ending allows McCoy to get off ‘Scot free’, unchanged by his experiences in any obvious way. The book sees him spoiling for a (suicidal) fight, telling Kovitsky ‘I’ll go with you’, as he considers confronting the mob. The book, in fact, may be largely about the changes to McCoy, which the film is most certainly not.

            Wolfe has prepared us for the change, and he has done so by showing McCoy’s ordeal in a much more scary light than the film does. In the scene where McCoy and Maria are lost in the Bronx (which goes on for much longer than in the film), and in those where he is processed by the courts, the detail is more threatening, more violent, more dehumanising, and more at odds with his white middle class existence. There is no silly slapstick with the shotgun. Nowhere is the change greater than in the scene where he is incarcerated before being arraigned. The protracted scene of menace and terror in the book is reduced, in the film, to a single headshot of him behind bars, with black faces close behind him.

            The issue that the film-makers are ducking here is Wolfe’s presentation of the world of the Bronx as being an alien one. His story is about a white man learning to live, and fight back, in the metaphoric jungle of the Bronx. It is with grazed knuckles that McCoy appears in court for the trial, and with something like joy that he responds to the riot at the end. His life, and his view of life have changed, and the change is about him losing his white middle class ‘liberal’ attitudes. That this is Wolfe’s intention seems clear from his introductory essay, which tells us why, and how, and against what literary and social background, he wrote the novel. Novels can be about thought, and be thought about. They can raise issues and examine them, and show us characters going through changes that we might not all approve of. Films, I suspect, cannot, or at least not in the same way.

            The racial awareness of the book is a mainspring of the story. Not only the black-white divide, but divisions within the broadly white community are addressed: Jewish, Irish, Polish and WASP identities are described and dissected, and narrated. Catholic and Protestant divisions are considered. Much of this is either removed, or toned down in the film. Most toned down is the visceral sense of threat that McCoy feels, and the equally visceral anger that prompts that feeling. When Reverend Bacon talks about steam in the book we are aware of it building up, and feel the heat, but in the film it seems a comic statement, and is entirely absent from that final courtroom scene, in which Freeman pours oil on waters that are barely rippling, let alone boiling.

            Books and films are both forms of entertainment, but where books provide opportunities for us to reflect upon what they have told us as we read through, films hold reflection at bay until after they are over. This is why, perhaps, that they seem to have simpler stories to show.

Film directed by Sam Mendes (Dreamworks, 2009)

I bought the ‘Now A Major Movie’ paperback edition of Richard Yates’ novel, along with the dvd of the film, intending to write a piece about them if I found anything interesting in the comparison. That was back in 2009. I read the book first, but the film had to wait for a couple of years. It was simply that I found the book so evocative of the pain of a disintegrating relationship that I didn’t want to have to watch it all over again (evoked memory is always more powerful, I suspect, than evoked imagination).

            When I came back to the film, I looked at the book again, and found that the adaptation, though faithful, still threw up some interesting comparisons, most obvious of which was that the endings were exactly similar.

            The film’s last shot is of Mr Givings turning down his hearing aid, as Mrs Givings drones on about the new couple on Revolutionary Road. The last paragraph of the book is: ‘But from there on Howard Givings heard only a welcome, thunderous sea of silence. He had turned off his hearing aid.’

            This rather picks out Revolutionary Road from other adaptations I have looked at, for it is the endings of films and novels that often seem to diverge, as if the changes made to earlier parts have driven the two progressively further apart. Chocolat, First Blood, The Shooting Party, The Man Who Could Work Miracles, The Cider House Rules, and Miss Pettigrew Lives for A Day, all either changed, or framed differently, their endings. As a student of the short story form, with which I think the movie has key elements in common (and that means its endings are disproportionately important), this seems to be significant. Changing the ending of a story changes its message. Sometimes this change is cosmetic, a change of emphasis or focus, as in The Man Who Could Work Miracles, but often it is fundamental, as in First Blood. In Revolutionary Road we have an ending that is exactly similar, which implies that book and film are united in their closing message.

            In fact, as I watched the film for the first time, two years after reading the book, I was struck by the way the scenes recalled to me scenes from the book. It was quite late in the film before I reached a scene that did not. This effect alone strikes me as worthy of comment, for the book was written nearly fifty years before the film was made, and a common feature of many adaptations I have considered was that changes seemed to be, to some extent, with the benefit of hindsight. Stories had to be changed to make them comprehensible to their later audiences. Context was the engine for change, yet here was a story, set in the fifties, published in the sixties, and filmed in the noughties of the next century, that on the face of it seems unchanged. Does that tell us something about the enduring rigidity of our view of that time?

            Of course, I am reading, and watching from a culturally different perspective. I am not an American. The America of the fifties that I ‘know’ is a creation of TV, Comic-book, and Movie. I am not comparing art with reality, but holding my looking glass up to earlier versions of the same icons.

            Having watched the movie, I turned back to the book, and the scenes that the movie had not recalled to me made themselves known. At 114 minutes Revolutionary Road is not a long movie. At 463 pages it is not a short novel. Changes have been made, and as is often the case they have been in the nature of deletions. Revolutionary Road is one of those stories that has been stripped down to its essentials in the adaptation: a story made more like a short story than like a novel? Yet the changes made, perhaps because they are deletions rather than distortions, have not led to that progressive widening of a gap between film and the novel.

            The changes begin at the beginning, and what is left in the film of the first chapter is the shot of the curtain falling at the end of the disastrous amateur production that April Wheeler has starred in. There are pages of text about this play in the book; about the theatre group and its members; about the context in which it was established, and the back story of April herself. The film dispenses with all this, opting instead to keep the corrosive scenes from chapter two in which Frank and April argue, in the dressing room after the show, and on the dark journey home along the eponymous road. This reminds me that, contrary to the old saw that CW teachers hammer out repeatedly, stories have to be told, whereas films are shown. We do not need to be given all the detail of the novel in the film, because the film shows us the two characters in action. We can only imagine the characters from their presentation in words, and so must have also the words that give us a context in which to imagine. What Richard Yates tells us, about the background to his characters and their situation does not need to be added. What is shown of the characters as they actually are, at the moment of our watching makes much of what Yates need to tell superfluous.

            Perhaps this is why the film begins the story with Frank and April meeting, opening on a sequence of city views that turn into the party at which they talk, and dance. It is from this that we cut to Frank watching the curtain come down on the play. In the book their meeting is dealt with in flashback, and fills out what we already know. In the film their conversation prepares us for what we will see next: Frank watching his wife on stage.

            The film does not dispense with flashback. We flash back, as in the novel, to them buying the house on Revolutionary Road , which is when we meet Mrs Givings, the real estate agent whose son, John, applies a madman’s nose for the truth to the Wheeler’s façade of married life in both versions. Scenes though are re-arranged, some being brought forward, others put back. The argument over abortion, and April’s sleeping alone comes earlier in the book, being part of their backstory, but is allowed to develop out of the present events of the film. Whole chunks are excised. Shep Campbell still gets to make love to April, but our knowledge that he wants to is based on a few simmering looks, rather than on the pages of exposition it receives in the book. The story of Frank’s father is removed, but a ghostly presence of it lingers in Frank’s conversation with Pollock at the restaurant.

            Simplification, streamlining I have heard it called elsewhere, and re-ordering of events keep the film’s story moving forward, so that it is more like an open sentence than a closed one. We build on what we know, understanding what follows because of what has gone before, rather than, as in more thriller based stories, adding to what we don’t know until we reach an all encompassing revelation.

            Some of the exchanges remain word for word, action for action, and this is a story where the interior lives of the characters, their emotional responses to each other, have to be portrayed non-verbally. Talking about the adaptation, Blade Runner, Ridley Scott, on the dvd ‘specials’, points out that you can’t replicate, on film, the thoughts of a man as he acts, or reacts, whereas the novelist can give you paragraphs of interior life if he wishes. In Revolutionary Road two fine actors do give us those interior lives, but we have to find our own words for what they appear to be going through.

            A specific thread from the film, that of Frank’s encounter with Maureen, gives us a good example of how the adaptation works. Keeping his wonderful parting words, the veritable ‘thank you ma’am’ of ‘Listen: you were swell. Take care now’ the film cuts out a lot of detail from the book. It misses the point that, in the book, Yates tells us that ‘he knew he had never been more grateful to anyone in his life’. We  may take this at face value, or as being ironic, but the film cannot overtly offer us that choice. The way we have taken it must influence the way we see his parting statement, as being perhaps naive, or cynical. We don’t get to know that Maureen is worrying about whether or not ‘to run over and grab it and stuff it behind the cushions’, it being her underwear, nor do we find out anything about her flat, her flatmate, her previous relationships and so on. Yates spends quite some time telling us what Maureen looks like, and even why, but Mendes merely shows her to us.

            The basic story remains the same in both: a young couple, who are viewed by their neighbours and friends as being special, struggle with the growing knowledge that they are not. The differences in their attitudes to this developing awareness strains their relationship to breaking point. In the novel the back-story to this process is examined more fully, whereas in the film it is largely compressed into the events of present time. The outcome is the same, which is perhaps why the ending is the same. 

            At however many tens of thousands of dollars a minute it costs to make a movie, time is not being wasted on telling us anything we do not need to know, or have already found out, guessed, or been told elsewhere. Words, by contrast, may appear cheap, to be thrown in enormous quantities at our stories. A question raised here, is could the writer have dispensed with all the information that the film appears to have successfully excised?

            The answer is, perhaps, that he could not. The information missing in the film, is what, in the book, gives context to key elements of the story. In the film that context is given by the non-verbal soundtrack, and by the visuals. Language demands interpretation; film observation. If stories in language work by setting up key lines to be interpreted in a specific way, as a consequence of what has gone before, then stories in film set us up to do the same as a result of what we have observed (perhaps unconsciously), in the background detail to what is being fore-grounded.

            An alternative explanation for why film and book adhere so closely here might be thought to be that they deal with human relationships and the emotions they generate, which have not changed, we like to think, since time immemorial. That half century gap though, between the writing and the filming is long enough to make the expression of those emotions in those different times sufficiently different to need the sort of explanation through change that we have seen in other adaptations. Perhaps the time gap between the setting and the writing here trumps the longer gap until the adaptation, and the perspective of writer and filmmaker, on the iconic world being portrayed, is closer than we might expect. Perhaps iconic places and periods are less susceptible to changed perceptions than purely historical ones.