Category Archives: book vs adaptation

Book vs Adaptation: These Foolish Things / The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel

Posted on by

The book

these foolish thingsAlthough current editions are all re-named to reflect the recent movie title, Deborah Moggach’s 2004 novel was published as THESE FOOLISH THINGS. It introduces us to Dr Ravi Kapoor who is of Indian heritage but considers himself English. He is married to an English woman and her widowed father, Norman, is living with the Kapoors because he keeps getting kicked out of nursing homes due to his behaviour (he’s basically a slovenly, lecherous old man with a foul mouth). At the hospital where he works Kapoor comes across Muriel, an elderly woman who fell in her council flat and was not found for two days. This causes a media outcry which turns into something else when it becomes clear Muriel is a fairly nasty bigot. Mostly due to his desperation at wanting to be rid of his disgusting father-in-law Kapoor and his cousin Sonny, who still lives in India, eventually decide to open a retirement home in Bangalore which they will run specifically for elderly English people who no longer want to live in England or who can’t afford to. Kapoor uses Norman’s obsession with sex to entice him to make the move and other elderly folk move for their own reason. Unexpectedly Muriel moves too though her reasons are not made clear until well into the novel.

The book is a very readable exploration of the difficulties associated with ageing in modern societies. For the most part the issues are dealt with in a light, fairly undemanding way but it’s not all frothy stuff. While Norman’s never-ending obsession with his impotence is a bit tiresome and tawdry his underlying fear that he doesn’t matter any more because he can’t be a real man is very realistic. Most of the characters are afraid in some way and their worries are well depicted and very credible. Evelyn is a widow with two adult children, one of whom poorly invested her husband’s retirement savings which is what forces her to move to India. Her strained relationship with the children, depicted from both her point of view and theirs, is a highlight of the book. At least in the Anglo Saxon culture there are not a lot of accepted norms for how these particular kind of relationships should play out in the modern context and everyone scrabbling around trying to work it out seemed pretty credible to me.

I must admit though to feeling uncomfortable at some of Moggach’s depictions of Indian culture. I understand that she was deliberately showing the country through the eyes of a bunch of old, white and sometimes racist people but there was nothing provided to counterbalance their view. The fact that the book was bulging with stereotypes (all Indian products being inferior to their English counterparts, people working in call centres and so on) was bad enough but it was the scenes which I think I was meant to find endearing that were most off-putting to me. For example one of the female characters (I think it’s Evelyn) at one point quite lovingly compares the hair of a local girl to the coat of a Labrador she once owned. Squirm..

As an exploration of the inner lives of a set of people the book is, overall, successful. There wouldn’t be too many readers who would fail to identify with one or other character, even if it is one of the children of the ageing characters, and there are definitely thoughts to be provoked with regard to the issues of ageing well in our modern world. The book’s exotic setting was less successfully depicted as it really did not seem to  even attempt to offer an alternative to every stereotype that has ever existed about India.

The adaptation

TheBestExoticMarigoldHotel50872f2011′s THE BEST EXOTIC MARIGOLD HOTEL, with its cast of superb English actors, is only very loosely based on Maggoch’s book. It is basically the story of an Indian hotel which its owner, who inherited the property from his father, markets to the English elderly as an alternative retirement option. After the briefest of setups, generally explaining why each person decides to go to India, the film then depicts what happens to each person once they arrive in the country. Some thrive in the new environment and some, one in particular, don’t.

The Kapoors don’t feature at all here and there are only three characters directly based on characters in the book, with others being a mixture of mashups and completely new characters. In fact the children of these old stalwarts don’t feature at all. The biggest departure from the book though is really that the characters are all very muted when compared to those in the book. For example in the book Norman is truly repugnant, in the movie he barely registers as occasionally offensive. Muriel’s overt racism is also heavily toned down.

That said though it’s hard not to like the movie on its own terms. With some of England’s best actors including Judi Dench, Maggie Smith, Bill Nighy and Tom Wilkinson, you can’t really go too wrong and the ensemble cast does work really well here in allowing the individual stories to play out. It’s not exactly ground-breaking and most of it is fairly predictable but it is…pleasantly entertaining if not exactly thought-provoking. With the exception of Graham’s story (he’s the character played by Tom Wilkinson), which I found far more contrived and not really credible at all, the stories all offer something interesting about the process of learning new things at any age and the excellent cast does well with what is a fairly ordinary script. The film did not make me as uneasy as the book did in the way it treated India and Indians though there is still some level of discomfort at the way Indian characters are only truly successful if they’re serving a Brit or being assisted by one and there are still more clichés and stereotypes than I think we really need to be seeing in the 21st century.

The winner?

This is difficult as neither the book nor the film are either outstanding or truly awful. They’re both…OK. In the end though I think I’d have to award this bout to the film, mostly because of the excellent cast who light up the screen even though none of them are terribly stretched by their roles or the script,

If you’re coming to the book because you’ve loved the film I’d be wary as the book isn’t nearly as engaging or funny as the film and the stories are quite different. The book has a harsher, probably more realistic sensibility but is also a lot more patronising in its depiction of Anglo-Indian relations.

 

Creative Commons Licence
This work by http://reactionstoreading.com is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Book vs Adaptation: BAD DEBTS

Posted on by

The book

I found Edward Dollary age 47, defrocked accountant, big spender and dishonest person living in a house rented in the name of Carol Pick. It was in a new brick veneer suburb built on cow pasture east of the city, one of those strangely silent developments where the average age is 12 and you can feel the pressure of the mortgages on your skin.

So begins the first of Peter Temple’s four novels featuring Melbourne-based character Jack Irish. A former criminal lawyer Jack now makes money in several ways including semi-professional gambling and debt collecting. As this book opens one of Jack’s former clients is desperate to get in touch with Jack after learning something new about the hit and run accident for which he was sent to prison. Unfortunately Jack is out of reach until it’s too late for his former client and, realising the case was one he barely remembered from the period immediately following his wife’s death, Jack feels obliged to investigate. He uncovers some very nasty political shenanigans as a result.

Jack Irish is a complex character, He has a staunchly working class background and those roots are still evident in his current world. Even as a full-time lawyer Jack was no high-flying corporate type, though he can mix easily enough in that world if he has to. But he seems more at home with the footy fans at his local pub or the ageing cabinet maker who he has turned to for woodworking lessons. His life fell apart after his wife was killed by one of his clients and he numbed the resulting pain with alcohol but when we meet him Jack is on the way back from whatever depths he fell to. Unlike many of his fellow fictional detectives Jack is not a loner, having a somewhat eclectic collection of friends and acquaintances who share some aspect of his unconventional life. His ex business partner, current gambling cronies, fellow footy fans and old contacts all form a loose circle around him and add real depth to both his life and the book.

For me the two sentences quoted above give a strong sense of what makes Temple’s crime fiction worth reading. The conciseness, the imagery and the things left unsaid often leave me re-reading passages just to savour the words and the way in which they’ve been strung together. There’s also a hint there of the very Australian-ness of these books, something which I still find impressive from someone who didn’t arrive here until he was an adult. Temple’s Australia, where blokes love footy and horse racing and their mates (though they’re more comfortable displaying the first two of those) is easily recognisable. The pervasive nature of low-level political corruption is, sadly, eerily realistic too.

The adaptation

The first two of Temple’s four-book series have been made into television movies and the first of these, BAD DEBTS, aired first in Australia on free-to-air television on 14 October (BLACK TIDE aired a week later and rumours are strong that the remaining two stories will be filmed next year). Starring Guy Pearce in the lead role and featuring a truly splendid supporting cast the adaptation falls into the faithful category; not departing significantly from its strong source material in terms of storyline or character development.

Guy Pearce might not have immediately sprung to mind when imagining the Jack Irish Temple has created for his readers, but he puts in such a good performance it only took me about six minutes to forget any lingering images floating around in my head and to believe that Pearce is Jack. He captures the humour, the awkwardness around women, the lingering guilt and sorrow over his wife’s death and the intelligence that make up Temple’s creation and he does it in a very understated way. He is very ably supported by a cast so star-studded it would probably be quicker to list great Australian actors who didn’t appear. Among the many excellent performances my personal favourites are from Roy Billing as Harry Strang, the leader of Jack’s loose gambling cartel, and Shane Jacobsen as an old-school cop (it’s a tiny role but Jacobsen steals the scenes).

The winner?

The thing I love most about the Jack Irish books is the writing so in one respect the book has to be the winner for me. While the adaptation included as much of Temple’s sardonic dialogue and brief but beautiful descriptions as it could, its very nature as a visual medium meant other elements had to take precedence over superbly crafted sentences. But I was pleased, and somewhat relieved, to find the adaptation a fitting tribute to its source material and thoroughly enjoyable in its own right and I can’t imagine any fan of the books feeling let down by the excellent adaptation. Given that even Peter Temple is happy with it (the link takes you to a local radio interview Temple gave prior to the movie’s airing) I’d say this round of Book vs Adaptation is a draw and would highly recommend that you read the book then watch the movie (at least in Australia it’s available on DVD and via the iTunes store).

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Book vs Adaptation is an irregular series of posts stemming from the fact that sometimes I’m too tired to read and so turn to DVDs and downloads. If there’s an adaptation you think I should look out for do let me know. All my posts in this series are available on their own page.

Creative Commons Licence
This work by http://reactionstoreading.com is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Book vs Adaptation: Murder on the Orient Express

Posted on by

For me MURDER ON THE ORIENT EXPRESS and its several adaptations offer a fine example of the spectrum of approaches that adaptors take when choosing to tell a story that has already been told. On one end of that spectrum is the faithful recreation of all a book’s main plot and character elements and on the other end is something which takes only a couple of elements from the source material – a key character or a setting – but takes the story in new directions, sometimes almost unrecognisable from that source..

The book

Vying for status as Christie’s best known novel, MURDER ON THE ORIENT EXPRESS was released in 1934 to fairly wide acclaim. It’s a kind of mobile country house mystery really, telling the relatively simple tale of a luxury train journey across Europe during which a man is killed during the night. The suspect pool consists of a single train carriage’s staff and passengers. Working out whodunnit falls to Hercule Poirot and his first real clue is that the murdered man was not who he claimed to be. In a series of interviews and observations Poirot builds up a solid case against a culprit which I can remember astonished me when I first read the book many years ago. While the denouement might might be considered obvious these days I think that really is only because the intriguing plot has had many imitators over the years. And in addition to its clever plot the book explores the very notion of justice, a concept that is, or should be, at the heart of all crime fiction.

The adaptations

One For many the 1974 adaptation of the book, with Albert Finney as Hercule Poirot and an all-star ensemble cast, is the definitive adaptation of this story and indeed Agatha Christie’s novels in general, achieving both popular acclaim and critical success in the form of an Academy Award win for Lauren Bacall (as Mrs Hubbard) and another 5 nominations in other categories. While it must leave out some material due to length considerations it is almost slavishly faithful to its source material in terms of significant plot developments, characters and dialogue (though a few names and minor details are altered for reasons that I’ve never quite understood).But if you have read the book when you see the train and its passengers for the first time they are almost familiar.

For me though there’s one giant gap in this faithfulness in the form of the depiction of Poirot. I’m not sure if the fault lies with Finney or Sidney Lumet (the film’s much-feted Director) but the Belgian detective comes across here with a near-slapstick sensibility – more akin to an Inspector Clueseau-style caricature than anything resembling Christie’s original creation. Even his moustaches are all wrong. I’ve no problem with someone making a Pink Panther version of the story but in such an instance I’d expect to see a whole comedic movie not a lone comic character amidst a dramatic cast as was the case here. Personally I think the rest of the cast all overact a bit too but I suppose that’s what happens when everyone’s a star in their own right.

Two: One of the familiar ways to add a twist to an adaptation is to set an old story in a modern setting. Enter a 2001 made-for-TV movie called AGATHA CHRISTIE’S MURDER ON THE ORIENT EXPRESS starring Alfred Molina as Poirot. This version opens with Poirot at the end of a denouement for an unrelated case in an Istanbul nightclub owned by a his love-interest (a beautiful;l jewel thief) who he then proceeds to moon over from afar for the rest of the film. If that hasn’t made all the Christie afficionados groan in horror I’m sure the rest of the story would do.

I am actually quite partial to modernisations but it is not nearly as easy as it might appear to do the job well. It’s not, as the makers of this debacle seemed to assume, enough to change the date on a calendar in the background and shove a few bits of modern technology into the characters’ hands (especially not when your budget is so low that an ab roller constitutes cutting edge new millennium technology). When modernising a classic a lot of thought must be given to how to make allowances for things that would have been perfectly understandable in the original setting but do not translate to the modern environment. It is perfectly understandable for example that people on a train stuck in remote Yugoslavia in the middle of a blizzard in the 1930′s would not be able to contact the authorities but that scenario is far less credible when a train is stopped by six papier-mache ‘rocks’ and a few sticks of firewood on a balmy evening in 2001. Lots of original details appear to have been changed for no reason, though perhaps reducing the suspect pool from its original (and numerically significant 12 people) had something to do with budgetary constraints.

Three: The long-running Agatha Christie’s Poirot TV series featuring David Suchet as Poirot waited until season 12 to tackle MURDER ON THE ORIENT EXPRESS. Although set at the correct time period, starring the man almost universally acknowledged as the definitive Poirot and incorporating the main plot points of the original this version of the story does depart significantly from the source material in a way that is controversial amongst Christie’s fans.

The opening itself is quite different from the book’s as Poirot’s evidence against a soldier leads to the man’s suicide and Poirot then witnesses a woman’s stoning on the streets of Istanbul before making his way to the train. From there the original plot is loosely followed but the focus in this version is less on the mechanics of who dropped the hanky and other vital clues and more on the reasons for people’s behaviour. Probably the most controversial aspect of this adaptation is that Poirot is shown struggling emotionally, even turning to his Catholicism to help him decide what action to take once he has determined who the murderer is.

The winner?

I’m not convinced that any of the adaptations of Christie’s classic tale are better than her book but, for me, the last one comes closest. It is certainly my favourite of the three films though there is a difference between something being a good film and it being a good adaptation. But Christie liked to play with new techniques of storytelling and she did adapt her style over her many years of writing to keep up with the trends that audiences were interested in. These days crime fiction audiences are interested in why a thing was done as well as in who done it. This adaptation delves into why the crime was committed and also how a person with such a strong tradition of following the law as Poirot has might come to grips with what is a pretty major ripping up of his rule book. I can’t help but think if Christie were writing today she’d have adapted her style to the modern interest in the inner lives of characters and a more emotion-driven form of storytelling.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Book vs Adaptation is an irregular series of posts stemming from the fact that sometimes I’m too tired to read and so turn to DVDs and downloads (all legal I assure you, I am far too terrified of prison to turn to channel bittorrent). If there’s an adaptation you think I should look out for do let me know. All my posts in this series are available on their own page.

Creative Commons Licence

This work by http://reactionstoreading.com is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Book vs Adaptation: A Place of Execution

Posted on by

The book

Val McDermid’s A PLACE OF EXECUTION was the author’s first standalone novel after books in several series. A book of distinct parts it sets its scene with a foreword by by one of its key characters, author Catherine Heathcote, who 35 years after the event, has written a book about the landmark case of the disappearance of 13 year-old Alison Carter from her Peak District home in 1963. The first and longest part of the book then unfolds as a sort of flashback, showing us what happened from the point of view of George Bennett, the Detective Inspector who was in charge of the case and who had been extensively interviewed by Heathcote in preparation for her book. He revealed that police were called to the insular village of Scardale, where most people belong to one of only three families, one cold winter’s evening when Ruth Hawkin reported her daughter had not returned home after going out to walk her dog after school. Ruth, widowed from her first husband from whom Alison got her surname, is married to Philip Hawkin who is considered an incomer to the village having only lived there a year. But he is also the Squire, having recently inherited Scardale Manor and all the land that the villagers live and work on. At first everyone is keen to believe that Alison has deliberately left of her own accord and will soon return or that some minor accident has befallen her but when her dog is discovered tethered to a tree and muzzled with bandages to prevent him barking it becomes clear that something more sinister has occurred. After some false starts and trouble engaging the taciturn locals the police do pin down the person they believe responsible for the girl’s disappearance. And though they never discover Alison’s body Bennett believes there is enough physical and circumstantial evidence to mount a prosecution for murder. The last quarter of the book takes place 35 years later as Bennett is cajoled by his son to participate in the writing of Catherine Heathcote’s book.

A PLACE OF EXECUTION has all the hallmarks of a great read. Its characters are nuanced and engaging, its setting highly evocative and its story totally compelling. Each time I thought I’d worked out what the next twist would be McDermid managed to spin things in an unexpected way, keeping me guessing and also offering evidence why she is the writer and I the reader because every time her way was better than my half-baked one.

George Bennett is young for his rank having been fast-tracked through the force after studying law at University. This fact is the subject of scorn by some of his colleagues and this derision is, in turn, is one of the things that motivates him to devote himself to the case. But he also cares deeply, especially as he grows to know the people affected by Alison’s disappearance, and he wants desperately to give them justice at the very least if he cannot return Alison to them. Early on in the investigation he learns that his own wife is expecting their first child and this seems to make the case a more than usually personal one for George. His offsider is Tommy Clough, is an old-school copper who initially distrusts his educated boss but the two form a good bond over their shared despair at being unable to locate the missing girl and their reactions as they uncover the motive for the crime and the probable culprit. Scardale too is a character of sorts – its cloying presence very cleverly evoked by McDermid using deft description of the physical and social isolation of the place and fantastic minor characters, especially the matriarch of the village Ma Lomas. It is from her that most of the villagers take their behavioural cues, waiting to be fully honest with police until she indicates they are to be trusted.

In telling a small, intimate story the book manages to explore wider social issues of the time too. The very nature of what constitutes justice and who is responsible for bringing it about is considered in a thought-provoking way. The timing too is important as Alison Carters disappearance takes place at the same time and close to the spot where the first disappearances in what became known as the Moors murders have taken place. There’s a real sense in the book of the beginnings of the loss of social innocence, some of which is only revealed in retrospect when some of the key players reflect on how the events impacted them while being interviewed by Catherine.

In short there’s very little not to like about this thoughtful book that deals with the horrendous subject of the disappearance and possible murder of a child with sensitivity while still providing a thoroughly gripping read.

The adaptation

The novel was adapted for a 3-part TV series called PLACE OF EXECUTION that first aired in the UK in 2008. It starred Lee Ingleby and Philip Jackson as George Bennett (young and old respectively) and Juliet Stephenson as Catherine Heathcote. Although it tells the same basic story about the disappearance of Alison Carter it does so in a very different way. Here the whole story is set clearly in the present day as Catherine is making a TV documentary about what has become a landmark case. There are multiple flashbacks to the original case but I didn’t as a viewer get transported back to Scardale in 1963 in the same way as I did with the book’s single, long flashback. Apart from the constant juxtaposition the approach made me aware almost from the outset that something was critically wrong with the way the original case had played out whereas the first real indication of this fact for readers of the book is that there’s still a quarter of it to go when the original murder trial is concluded. The adaptation is less suspenseful because of this.

The relative roles of the characters in the adaptation are almost reversed. Catherine takes much more of a central role and is more fleshed-out, having a teenage daughter of her own with whom she struggles to communicate and a mother with whom she also has a strained relationship. George on the other hand is less of a dominant character, remaining unmarried and having no children though a more stellar police career than his literary counterpart. So rather than being George’s story of his involvement with a case that shaped his life and career this is more a story about the modern-day journalist’s investigation into the case.

While I didn’t think too much of the adaptation’s screenplay, which McDermid herself had a hand in, I thought the acting was solidly decent, and it’s not hard to see why Stevenson won an award for her role at the 2009 Crime Thriller Awards. The casting for Geroge was good, although I’m never entirely happy when two people play a single role, but Ingleby in particular seemed to get the essence of the character.

The winner?

An adaptation has a delicate balance to achieve. On the one hand it should not be so fanatically faithful to its source material that its existence seems pointless but it should also trust its source material enough not to feel the need to alter it beyond recognition, especially where those alterations are for the sake of dumbing down or commercialising the original ideas. For me this adaptation really does seem to do quite a bit of the latter, perhaps in a quest to simplify the complex story for the shortened time frame available for storytelling but with the result that it feels like a very superficial tale, as though its audience would be incapable of grasping any nuance at all. Although the flashback scenes have all the right visual cues – clothes, hair-styles, endless cigarette-smoking etc – there’s actually far less of a sense of the time and place than provided by the book; a remarkable thing when you consider that the one thing adaptations should excel at is visualisation.

In focusing so much on the present day the story is far less about Alison Carter, her disappearance, and its impact on those who were left behind. It’s far more about the modern media’s penchant for finding a story’s gutter angle and inserting themselves into stories instead of observing and reporting on them. All this leaves far less time to get to know Alison, the young George Bennett or the village and its inhabitants. Ma Lomas – an almost physical presence in three quarters of the book – barely registers here and her replacement by a vapid researcher engaged in a rivalry with Catherine is banal.

So for me the book is the clear winner by a decent margin on this occasion. It is engrossing, surprising and intelligent while I found the adaptation indistinguishable from a dozen other tales and shallow in its focus.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Book vs Adaptation is an irregular series of posts stemming from the fact that sometimes I’m too tired to read and so turn to DVDs and downloads (all legal I assure you, I am far too terrified of prison to turn to channel bittorrent). If there’s an adaptation you think I should look out for do let me know. All my posts in this series are available on their own page.

The book 4.5/5, 15 hours 13 minutes, audio edition (narrated by Paddy Glynn) released 2009, originally published 1998, I bought it
The adaptation 3/5. 2.5 hours, aired first 2008, I bought it on DVD from the UK

Creative Commons Licence
This work by http://reactionstoreading.com is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Book vs Adaptation: The Field of Blood

Posted on by

The book

Published in 2005 and set in 1981 Denise Mina’s THE FIELD OF BLOOD introduces 18-year old Paddy Meehan; gopher at a Glasgow newspaper with a yearning to be a journalist. This stems from her lifelong interest in the real-life case of a man whose name she shares who was wrongly convicted of murder. As the book opens the story of a missing toddler has been front page news for several days until the body is found and two young boys, children really at 10 and 11 years old, are questioned over their involvement. One of the boys is a cousin of Paddy’s fiancé – a fact she lets slip to someone at the newspaper who urges Paddy to use her inside knowledge for a story. Paddy doesn’t, knowing how much it would hurt her family, but the story runs anyway and as she is shunned (literally) Paddy starts to question the official version of events, believing that the two boys must have had adult help.

The book is mostly good, at times utterly brilliant and, once or twice, a bit naff but overall makes for very good reading. Paddy Meehan is a more interesting character than any 18 year-old has a right to be but Mina has made her believable for her age with a mixture of insecurities, naivety and sometimes misguided stubbornness. Her yearning for a life other than what she was born to and her fear of achieving that dream and so leaving behind all that she is familiar with is compelling.

Another highlight of the book is its depiction of Paddy’s family and extended community. They are working class and devoutly Catholic with a raft of strict moral rules to guide them and we see how this restricts someone like Paddy who has ambitions beyond those a woman like her is meant to aspire to (a husband who doesn’t beat her and a bunch of children). At times they can be truly cruel such as when everyone stops speaking to Paddy due to their belief she sold their story to the newspaper but we also see the upside of living within such a strong community. For example when Paddy visits a colleague who has been taken to hospital she is shocked at his lack of visitors and gifts: in her world people would be lined up to visit and all manner of foodstuffs and other goodies would have been supplied to assure the patient they were being thought of. I liked the way Mina did not make it easy or even inevitable for her protagonist to walk away from the world she knew.

I must admit to being entirely disinterested in the few small interludes that are the story of the other Paddy Meehan. I think I understand the reason they were incorporated – to help show what it was that motivated the book’s heroine to become a journalist of the campaigning kind – but I got that point early on, before the half-dozen or so disjointed snippets from the life of the (not unreasonably) bitter wrongly convicted man took me away from the story that I was engaged with.

But for me this is a minor fault of a book which otherwise was compelling, even if the mystery supposedly at its centre often took a back seat. The real story is that of Paddy and her world – its good and bad points, its prejudices, its hardships and even its lighter moments. For me it’s a book about all the shades of grey between black and white, right and wrong. I loved it.

The adaptation

Two episodes of a TV show called THE FIELD OF BLOOD aired on UK television in 2011. Starring Jayd Johnson as Paddy, David Morrissey as the newspaper’s editor and a host of terrific actors in a strong ensemble cast.

It does suffer from one of the things I’ve come to expect of adaptations which is that people, especially young women, cannot be as unattractive or dumpy on screen as they are described in books. So although she is constantly dieting and repeatedly teased for her weight like her literary counterpart the Paddy Meehan of the adaptation could barely register as anything but svelte by most definitions. That aside though the casting of Johnson is a good one as she captures the essence of Paddy’s character, particularly her age and internal conflicts, well. The rest of the cast are equally good with stalwart David Morrissey being a standout as the jaundiced editor, a role which seemed to me to have been beefed up for the adaptation (perhaps taking advantage of the securing of Morrissey for the role).

Normally it is annoying when things are left out of adaptations but I thought the fact that the filmed version contained no interludes of ‘the real Paddy Meehan’s story a bonus. The incorporation of a 30 second conversation about the man proved that it was entirely possible to demonstrate Paddy’s motivations for becoming a journalist without needing the bizarrely disjointed snippets that were included in the novel.

Another bonus of the visual medium was the greater ease with which the time and place could be conveyed. The smoke-filled newsroom filled with typewriters and men, the clothing and the cars all screamed 80′s in a way that words can’t quite achieve (especially if you weren’t there and can’t conjure up your own images).

The film lacks most of the nuances of the book (time restraints demand this really) and almost entirely ignores the broader political themes Mina was exploring (the setting was switched to 1982 for example and I can only assume this was to avoid some specific political issues such as the links between the Catholic community in Glasgow and the hunger-striking prisoners in Northern Ireland). But it does have a jolly good stab at conveying the world that Paddy inhabited and the myriad of obstacles she faces including her own family’s fears about her ambition to leave their world and the prejudices against Catholics and women that she rubs up against in the wider world.

Adaptations have to change some things from their source material whether due to time constraints or the vagaries of different mediums. But this one stays true to the essence of Mina’s book and, probably due to her having a writing credit for the screenplay, retains some of her best lines (including Dr Pete’s dig at those sneaky bastards the meek who will inherit the earth – it was my favourite line of the book and I loved the fact it made it to the adaptation).

The winner?

For me this one’s a tie. As a reader of course I’m always going to fall on the side of read the book first but I think the film is a good one which stands on its own merits and if you happen to have seen it first I think you could still enjoy the book. And if you have read the book you would be hard-pressed to be disappointed by the film and would likely enjoy seeing early 80′s Glasgow brought to life.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Book vs Adaptation is an irregular series of posts stemming from the fact that sometimes I’m too tired to read and so turn to DVDs and downloads (all legal I assure you, I am far too terrified of prison to turn to channel bittorrent). If there’s an adaptation you think I should look out for do let me know.

The book 4.5/5, 367 pages, published 2005, I borrowed it from the library
The adaptation 4/5. 2 hours, aired first 2011, I bought it on DVD from the UK

Creative Commons Licence
This work by http://reactionstoreading.com is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.