Does anything provide a more curious sensation of intrigue coupled with mild discombobulation than the news of a favourite novel being adapted for the screen? You can hardly wait to find out who’s directing and who’s cast. Yet you tremble with trepidation every time you read some nugget of showbiz gossip from the set, unconsciously repeating the imperative “Don’t screw it up!”
Never Let Me Go is a case in point. I’d been in a state of nervous anticipation about the film, ever since reading that Keira Knightley was set to star. Now having seen it, I must admit that Knightley was all right, but the film itself was rather boring. The narrator of Never Let Me Go obsessively rehashes the mundane incidents of the past and the second-hand gossip that circulated amongst her friends to make sense of her life. Maybe this sort of thing doesn’t make for the most thrilling of films. Strangely though, the adaptation jettisons the most filmic aspect of the novel, the slowly revealed “twist”. For me, it doesn’t really work as a film in its own right. You would need to read the book to understand the relationship between Kathy and Ruth, as the film doesn’t allow for a proper exploration of their characters.
Perhaps the television serial is the better outlet for the literary adaptation? Saying that, the recent Channel 4 effort with William Boyd’s Any Human Heart left me cold. Despite each of the four episodes lasting as long as a feature film the story was rushed, the characters hollow and the dialogue stilted and unnatural – and this was adapted by Boyd himself!
Of course there are plenty of adaptations that do work, often period pieces with a straightforward narrative structure. Yet sometimes the best results come when the adaptor boldly disregards the source material and makes something entirely new out of the story. I must admit, it seems to me that one’s judgement of the success of a literary adaptation is clouded by how much you cared for the original novel in the first place.
My dream adaptation project would be to write a teleplay of Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy. This was famously filmed in 1951 as A Place in the Sun starring Montgomery Clift, Elizabeth Taylor and Shelley Winters. Although the film is acknowledged as a classic, even its most ardent fans must admit that it radically departs from the novel. I would want to dramatise Clyde’s youth, which A Place in the Sun entirely skips. The film romanticises the relationship between Clyde (George Eastman in the film) and Elizabeth Taylor’s character (Sondra in the book, Angela(!) in the film), creating a conventional love story at the expense of the satirical aspect of the novel. In summary, I would like to show it as the state-of-the-nation piece I think it is. Boardwalk Empire, the new series on HBO, covers roughly the same period though, so I guess has just beaten me to it – perhaps I could borrow their sets?
Share your thoughts on literary adaptations in the comments. Is there a particular novel that you would like to see on screen? Or, like me, do you intend to write that epic, twenty-part Bafta award-winning serial yourself one of these days?
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